If you speak another language other than English, what are some interesting differences with English in its vocabulary?
I love languages, and one of the great things about learning other languages - or even just learning about them - is how it expands your mental horizons. One of the first things you notice is that many words don't correspond 1:1 with each other in distinct languages. Sometimes, what you think of as one concept gets partitioned out into one, two, three, four distinct word forms in another language. Other times it's the opposite, and distinctions are lost. What are some interesting vocabulary/lexicon differences between English and another language you're familiar with? I'll give some examples:
- Russian motion verbs are a lot more complex than English ones. There are two distinct words for "to walk", idti and xodit'. The former is used for walking in one direction, the latter for walking in multiple or unspecified directions. The former is also used for single actions while the latter is for habitual action. Russian makes this distinction in every common verb for motion. It also makes a distinction between going by foot and going by a means of transportation, like a car, a bicycle, or a train. In English, you could say "I walked to the store" to specify you went by foot, but you could also say "I went to the store" and the mode of transportation is unspecified. In Russian, there is no single verb "go" that doesn't imply either by foot or not by foot. You have to use either idti/xodit' "go by foot" or exat'/ezdit' "go by some means of transportation". (As I understand it, I'm not a native speaker of Russian, just studied it a bit.)
- Terms of kinship are a big topic. Wikipedia lists six distinct basic forms of kinship terminology, and that's just scratching the surface. Some languages distinguish between the maternal and paternal side of the family, others do not. Some do not distinguish cousins and siblings. Some make distinctions between elder and younger family members with distinct words. Unfortunately, I don't speak any languages that are markedly different from English. But even in my native Norwegian, which is closely related to English, there are some differences, such as:
- First cousin is a distinct stem (søskenbarn, lit. sibling-child, i.e. the child of your parent's sibling) from second cousins (tremenning). There are also distinct words for cousin (no gender specified) and female (kusine) and male (fetter) cousins.
- Maternal and paternal grandparents are distinguished.
- I struggled to understand what the hell a "cousin once removed" was until I realized it's a kind of family relation that has no name in Norwegian.
- Or it could just be a single word. For instance, English has one word, "suspicious", meaning both an attitude towards another person's behavior (suspicious of) and that behavior itself (behaving in a suspicious manner). In Norwegian, those are two distinct words: mistenksom (suspicious of) and mistenkelig (behaving suspiciously).
I've only studied a couple of languages seriously. But I also have an interested in constructed languages as a hobby, so I've dabbled in a lot of languages, looking to pilfer ideas for my own projects. I really think it's expanded my view of the world, by showing that categories that seem obvious, really aren't. That's a lesson I've tried to transfer to other areas of life.
I also think it leads into philosophy, because it's really a question of how to divide up semantic space. If we imagine the theoretical space of all things that could ever be spoken about, how do we divide up that space into distinct words? Which categories do we choose to represent as meaningful, and which ones are relegated to being a sub-aspect of another category, only distinguishable by context? I imagine that in a culture with large family units, it makes more sense not to distinguish "brother" from "male cousin", than a culture in which nuclear families are the norm, for instance.
Do you have any cool examples of how vocabulary works differently in other languages, whether it be a single word or a large class of words? Or examples of times when encountering a different way of describing the world by learning another language led to insights in other areas of life?
One very small very simple thing in Irish that has no English equivalent is the word 'arú'. It works like this:
"Arú inné" == arú {yesterday} == the day before yesterday
"Arú amárach" == arú {tomorrow} == the day after tomorrow
It's a really small thing but I always found 'the day before yesterday'/'the day after tomorrow' to be such cumbersome phrases for very everyday concepts.
Oooh, that's a good one. I like a smart modifier like that.
English had ere meaning "before in time", which was used in the compound ereyesterday for the day before yesterday. But that's considered archaic now. You could also say "they've had far too much to drink, they're going to pass out ere midnight" but again, archaic.
There was also overmorrow for the day after tomorrow, which has also fallen out of use. Which is a shame because I think overmorrow is a particularly good word.
Using eer or over many times feels like the accurate but seldom used Buffalo sentence, in that it may be right, but is also impractical.
Obviously I can't speak to the intricacies of the Dutch language. I've also seen/heard enough weird stuff about Germans and their language to believe it.
So basically, it means "one further from" in that context. That's interesting.
Ah cool, quite similarly in Czech we have pozítří (the day after tomorrow) and předevčírem (the day before yesterday) which are basically just after-tomorrow and before-yesterday (po == after, zítra == tomorrow, před == before, včera == yesterday). Very handy thing that English is missing.
Yeah, English is so unwieldy when it comes to this. Those are such common terms to not have words for. In Hebrew we have מחרתיים (tomorrow x 2) and שלשום (today x 3 as in the third day before today, counting today as 1, representing the day before yesterday).
That reminds me of something @Adys told me a few weeks ago. He is currently learning Russian, and explained that they have a bit of the opposite problem in a similar sense. Apparently they don't have a word for "afternoon" so they say "today, in the second half of the day" instead, which is quite the mouthful. :P
Yeah you can say "Today [in the] day" (сегодня днем) [ru:lit:today day] but "afternoon", AIUI is usually "после полудня" [ru:lit:after half-day]. I'm sure Russians don't think of it this way though, any more than I think "aujourd'hui" [fr:today] being "at today's day".
The constructs @Fiachra mentions though, "the day before yesterday" and "the day after tomorrow", are very common. English is the black sheep. (RU: позавчера/послезавтра, UA: позавчора/післязавтра, FR: avant-hier/après-demain, EL: προχθές/μεθαύριο, SE: förrgår/övermorgon).
In fact… I don't know of a single language other than English that doesn't have proper names for those. I'm sure a few more exist but which? How do Asian languages fare there?
Edit: And @mat makes a good point - they did use to exist in English! I wonder why they fell out of use. I use them a LOT in all the other languages I speak, how come I never use them in English? Do I schedule things differently when I speak English? Maybe I'll start bringing overmorrow back in my own speech.
This wasn't obvious to me as someone who grew up knowing only one language, but prepositions are kinda arbitrary. For example, in English we say
But in German, we say
Usually the German vor is employed similarly to the English before, but in this case it's meant as in the English of or maybe from. While there are often 1-to-1 translations between German and English words, that decidedly is not true for prepositions. Prepositions only partly map on to each other across languages.
Another interesting thing about english and german is the phonetic shift. There's a few patterns that betray german-derived words in english, even if they aren't the same meaning or same pronunciation anymore. E.g. Holz (wood - the material that is, not the forest) vs holt - I feel holt is very old-fashioned now, but the ancestry is pretty obvious. Throw in another similar word: bolt vs. Bolzen (german likes -en endings), with the same meaning. There's a lot more of these patterns that hold up across swaths of words.
Not really sure I have a ton to say about them in particular besides noting they exist... but many languages have gendered nouns. As in, all nouns come with a gender - in French we say "le soleil, la lumière", "the sun, the light" with "sun" being masculine and "light" being feminine.
German has this feature also (and a third "neutral" gender), but in addition to this madness, the article is modified depending on the case (i.e., whether the noun is the subject, object, direct object, or possessive). In total, there are 16 possible cases to consider when using a definite article. Contrast that with English, which has only one: the.
I've heard Finnish is worse.
I am only learning Finnish so someone might correct me, but the Finnish case system is actually quite regular and doesnt have too many exceptions. A cool but quite simple to understand part of the cases are positional cases. 6 of the noun cases are positional cases which are basically the equivalent of a preposition + noun in english -- to something/in something/from something is done by adding -lle/-lla/-lta (of course it gets more complex and there is also --n/-ssa/-sta). Learning German was much harder for me, but I never liked it so that might also just be me. Trying to remember the genders of nouns was so hard and it has so many irregular verbs.
English has kept gendered nouns in languages it borrowed from in a few rare cases. Terms for jobs is one place - English keeps the gendered suffixes -or and -ess from French and uses -or for masculine forms and -ess for feminine forms of jobs like "actress" and "waitress". On the other hand, we didn't do the same with Latin suffixes in words like "aviator" - -tor is for either masculine or feminine, and Trix are for kids.
Yeah, that drove me up the walls when trying to learn French. My native language does have gendered nouns but they're completely different! For instance, Sun is feminine and Light is masculine so I kept misgendering everything. And the French are not known for their patience with people bastardizing their language.
In Norwegian, a noun's gender can vary depending on what part of the country you're in. In particular, it's a lot more likely to be female in Northern Norway, and a lot more likely to be male in Bergen (our second-largest city; an old Hansastadt with a quite distinct dialect). (And we don't use articles for nouns, instead changing the suffix depending on its gender.)
A few examples:
English/Northern Norway/Bergen
the bottle/flaska/flasken
the bucket/bøtta/bøtten
the cat/katta/katten
the mouse/musa/musen
Unlike the French, we generally don't care if you get it wrong, though.
Another thought: in German it usually doesn't matter if you get the gender of a word wrong (other than sounding like a non-native speaker, but personally my accent gives that away anyhow). That said, the emphasis here is on usually. Depending on the circumstances, getting the gender of a wrong could be a bit of a gaffe (don't call someone's wife der [masc.] Frau, for instance). But sometimes it changes the entire meaning of the sentence!
As an example, consider that die Leiter (feminine) refers to the ladder while der Leiter (masculine) refers to the leader. If you say [1]
you are requesting that someone place a ladder against a wall. But if you instead say
you're implying that you're about to shoot someone.
[1] Example from Quora: https://qr.ae/pv3Ohd
When I write in English, I feel that I'm trying to be precise and specific. English has a lot of specific words that efficiently communicate very specialized things. You can ascribe that to an overwhelming cultural tendency that is expressed in philosophy, science, and religion. English is great for all of those things, and also literature. Due to the larger vocabulary, it is easier to avoid word repetition, and at every turn something minuscule, but valuable, can be added, cornering the subject little by little until you can finally capture it. Educated English speakers are fond of manuals of style, and many have strong beliefs about how things should be written. That makes for beautiful and efficient texts that are a joy to read, but such an obsession with correctness may sound neurotic at times.
As a Portuguese speaker, it is both odd and interesting appreciating a language without grammatical gender. On the one hand, it is advantageous to be able to adopt inclusive language so easily. On the other, the use of gendered language in romance languages is not as much of an issue since it carries different social meanings. Unfortunately, we have been blindly importing North American concerns into our culture, trying to "solve" problems that were never ours in the first place.
English phonetics is a lot less regular than in romance languages, and by that, I mean that the same written patterns can be pronounced very differently depending on the origin of the word. In Brazilian Portuguese, most sounds are stressed and follow a more predictable shape.
Because it is the product of so many influences, English does not feel very cohesive, it is a language of exceptions that probably requires more memorization than most (because following patterns is less guaranteed to render correct English).
Aesthetically, I feel that Portuguese is largely misunderstood by Americans. Their intuitions from Spanish lead them to believe Portuguese is an ugly and oddly nasal counterpart. Like Spanish, English is not very nasal. Unless it is French, I suspect nasal sounds unsettle English speakers' ears.
Spanish is spoken vividly and with passion. There are lots of airflow and strong punctuation. Portuguese is kinda melancholic as if the words were meant to circle back into our lungs, and even our expressions of joy are marred by notes of introspection. There is a deep longing in Portugal's culture that is expressed in their former colonies. It is another kind of beauty. Sadly the idea that Portuguese is just "weird Spanish" prevents people from appreciating the unique features of our language. I mean, do you really think this is ugly?
I like that in Swedish (and I think German too) you can construct new words by concatenation. E.g
hundmätarpinnewould meandog measuring stick.Also the words
error,faultandfailureall map to the one wordfelin Swedish.Would a hundmätarpinne be a measuring stick for measuring dogs, or a measuring stick meant to be used by dogs?
I'm kinda joking, but I am curious to know whether it would be ambiguous and you'd figure that out from context, or if you would construct those two things differently.
It's ambiguous, so you'll want to include the necessary context.
Many Asian languages and cultures (Japanese, Chinese, and Korean, to name a few) have a notion of using honorifics, which are words used with (or instead of) people's names, and which denote their familial relation. In English, we have a tiny set of these: "Aunt" and "Uncle". If someone named Susan is your parent's sister, it is totally normal to call them "Aunt Susan". Similarly for "Uncle Joe". We can also consider "Grandma" and "Grandpa" part of this set. Further, it wouldn't be unusual to use these words in place of their names. For example: "We're going to Grandma's house for dinner." Here, it's an honorific (as opposed to in the sentence "I went to my Grandma's house for dinner.")
In Asian cultures, more familial relations have honorifics. In particular, there are words for "older brother" and "older sister". It is also considered impolite or improper to neglect to use the appropriate honorific when addressing someone, especially if it is clear that you should know their familial and age relation to you. In the example above: It would be impolite for a child to simply address their aunt as "Susan". It must be "Aunt Susan" or "Aunt". Children are raised to use an honorific with their older siblings, e.g. "Big-Sister Mei", and they often are used even with cousins, which are, of course, not actually brothers or sisters in one's immediate family.
It's also very common to use these other words in place of names, contrasting with English-speaking cultures, which would not do this. In English, we don't say things like "I asked Brother to help me with my homework.", but this kind of construction would be normal in Asia.
Also: it's normal to address someone with such an honorific even if they are not part of your actual family or extended family. If you are at a party or gathering, and someone introduces someone to you who is from a generation before you (about 20 years or more older than you), it would be normal for you to use the "Aunt" or "Uncle" honorific with that person (in some cultures). With the "Big-Brother" and "Big-Sister" honorifics, it's even okay to use them with complete strangers (who are slightly older than you) under most circumstances.
My native language is Turkish. I can't say I particularly like the language in general. I think it's inflexible and it's woefully out of date in some areas, but one thing I love about it is that it's gender neutral.
One downside of this is that it makes it hard for me to grasp other languages that are not gender neutral. I tried to study French and German in the past but some of their archaic rules were just too much. I know this isn't the case but it almost felt like they were constructed in a way to keep others away from learning it.
If I can offer you some advice …
Understanding a language like French doesn’t require you to grok whether a noun is masculine or feminine. This is something I would not expect a non native to grasp over any short period of time as there is something incredibly instinctive to it — it’s not like Russian where there’s rules that tell you whether a word is one or the other.
So, learn it and just ignore the genders. They will come to you over time as you hear it and speak it. Just learn how to recognise them grammatically (le/la, Il/elle, word endings etc)
Apologies for the late reply
I did get the same advice from native speakers before and to be fair, you're right.
I should've been more nuanced in my reply because these rules were certainly not the only factor in dissuading me from studying more. They were a major factor but they weren't the only factor.
I'd like to think I have a good command of the English language and despite me feeling that way, I still learn new things about it every now and then. Language is a living thing. The idea of trying to learn a new language that's as vast as English, if not more, seems like a daunting task to me. It's just that having those type of rules that I can't easily make sense of doesn't help the situation nor my will to learn more about them.
Hebrew is somewhat unique to other languages in the way words (especially verbs) are formed. It's very mathematical in that you have lists of pre-existing patterns which represent the tenses and fitting a root (three-letter combination) into the pattern is how you create verb conjugation.
e.g.
fitting the root א,ה,ב (a, h, v) which represents love makes it אוהב (ohev) - he loves
התאהב (hit'ahev) - he fell in love with someone
התכתב (hit'katev) - he was writing (corresponding) with someone
So you can always guess at the meaning of the word if you recognize the root, or grasp at the meaning of the action if your recognize the pattern without knowing the root. It makes for an easily and rapidly evolving slang as some English words are being broken to their "root" and new words are made.
התקמפל (hit'kampel) - is a modern term for "having been compiled" (as in code compilation) which was created by turning the word compile into a root - k, m, p, l (ק,מ,פ,ל).
Oh, also it's written right-to-left.