Ha! All three of the big East Asian languages also don’t have articles. (It’s also why we drop them all the time when learning to speak English.)
Latin is also the cat
Norwegian:
-en, -a, -et
Persian(Farsi) also doesn’t have a word for “The”. We just say the word. There’s also no gender prefixes. The whole language is gender neutral.
Our ancestors were really up to something thousands of years ago.
In English, there is an implied difference between “the girl downstairs was playing violin” (‘the girl’ implying expected knowledge - “oh, her”) versus “a girl downstairs was playing violin” (‘a girl’ - random, likely unknown).
More broadly “a thing” - one of many, “the thing” - a specific one.
How would that translate to Farsi?
Don’t know about Farsi, but in Russian you would have to declare your knowledge and specificity of the subject. You can transmit some of that information by changing word emphasis, but it’s not very clear.
As for your sentences I would translate them as:
- The girl downstairs was playing violin → Девушка [girl] внизу [downstairs] играла [was playing] на скрипке [violin].
- A girl downstairs was playing violin - Внизу [downstairs] девушка [girl] играла [was playing] на скрипке [violin].
The first one puts more emphasis on the “girl”. The second one puts more emphasis on “downstairs”, almost suggesting that the identity of the girl doesn’t matter, kinda “some girl who happened to be downstairs”. But it is not as explicit as a definite/indefinite article for sure.
If you want to make it certain that the identity of the girl doesn’t matter, you could use an adjective to that extent: Внизу [downstairs] какая-то девушка [some girl] играла [was playing] на скрипке [violin].
If you want to make it certain that both you and the person you’re talking to know about the girl, you can use a determiner: Та девушка [that girl] внизу [downstairs] играла [was playing] на скрипке [violin].
I guess the is implied, count is explicit. A thing becomes one thing and the thing becomes thing.
Is the number one used like “a” then? Like a direct translation of the 2 phrases would be “Girl downstairs is playing the violin.” and “one girl downstairs is playing the violin.” As opposed to English using the/a respectively?
And it kinda has me thinking what all of that extra fat really does for a language. I never feel confused about meaning when speaking Persian, so the the/he/she/it/they/them really can’t be doing that much heavy lifting if you can just completely ignore it and have a perfectly functioning language without it.
Let’s add dialects to the mess:
While not written in “book” German*, colloquial German may feature des, dat, det or dit instead of das, shorten der to dr or elide parts (like the French l’, except it may be attached to the previous word): Das ist das Problem mit der deutschen Sprache -> Des isch’s Problem mit dr deutscha Sproach
(“That is the problem with the German language.” Bonus: notice how the demonstrative pronoun “that” is also
das? Just in case you were hoping it was restricted to “the”…)* Hochdeutsch or Standarddeutsch (“High German” or “Standard German”), originally a written form slowly evolved over centuries to be most widely understood and has since been formalised. Informally, the term is also used for a spoken counterpart properly called Bühnendeutsch (“Stage German”), which isn’t always quite as “pure”, hence my distinction.
I bloody love my language.
English acting like it’s not a fucked up language where “the big, red, round, wrapped box” is fine but “the wrapped, round, red, big box” is wrong.
Yeah… English is a frankenstein language…
Also the adjective order is fucked…
Oh, we know it’s fucked up. I still can’t spell recieve and receipt and I have to look up pretty much every single new word I learn to find out how it’s pronounced.
Oh man this is me with “exercise” and “exorcise.”
In Anglophone school, We were taught as children “I before e, except after c.” This works most of the time, but “reign” breaks the rule. It is not even word orgin as both recieve and reign come from French.
I thought through it and I’d wager a stiff draught that it ought not be so rough, though as I’m taught, it’s nothing to cough at that a sturdy, taut bough would snap under the weight of its idiosyncrasies.
I haven’t had a proper crush in over a decade, but I think that sentence just might make it. That is beautiful, and thank you for sharing it.
🫶😘
I still can’t spell recieve and receipt
Hey, you got one of them right!
It sounds unnatural to me as a native speaker, but I don’t know that it’s “wrong”. Even the Germanic languages as a family don’t consistently have the same order for words like that, which is neat.
I know it’s not wrong, but it would definitely give one away as a non-native speaker and come across very awkwardly.
It’s only wrong in how it makes your soul feel. Gramatically, it’s okay.
Oh, no, it’s wrong grammatically too, they just don’t teach this unless you study linguistics. Most of all languages with fixed word order and some others have a natural order of adjectives. Tom Scott has a great vid about it.
Yes, Russian has an adjective order too. “A big old blue car” would be «большая старая синяя машина», saying «синяя большая старая машина» implies that “big old car” is a specific term.
I don’t get it, is Russian the worst here? I understand Finnish and Polish are pretty difficult in terms of these things as well (?).
There is no word for ‘The’ in Russian
Is it done in Russian by prefixes or suffixes or something else, or do they just not have that form for nouns?
There’s no prefix, so when “the” is used for emphasis it’s completely lost in translation. “The Great Gatsby” is just “Великий Гэтсби”. Though that little ий hides the same complexity as german as it implies male and that this is used in a sentence just to name something. If Gatsby was female it’d be “Великая Гэтсби”, and if it was something ungendered, like a place somewhere, itd be “Великое Гэтсби”. And on that part about placement in the sentence, it could be something like [an achievement of] Великого(male) / Великой(female) Gatsby, like when talking about belongings or actions of someone; Or [I gave something to] Великому/Великой, and a few orhers. As you can see there are duplocates and ambiguities. Add present/past/future tenses to the mix and it becomes a complete mess.
So it’s done by suffixes. Okay cool, thank you for explaining! 🙏
I understand all of these languages.
but I also never have sex.
life is full of trade-offs.
How do I unlearn languages?
I know Hungarian, English, and a very little Japanese. I feel really lonely.
You speak Hun-glish? I knew a little old lady way back in the day that spoke Hun-glish. As a medic, it took several conversations before I could even begin to understand her spoken symptoms.
You need to reach like 6 or 7 language before you can experience fifo overflow
6 or 7
ahajjahajajakaka
6 or 7
🤮🤮🤮🤮🤮🤮🤮🤮🤮🤮🤮🤮🤮🤮🤮🤮🤮🤮
Yeah but I have you tagged as manosphere, so that is probably a you problem.
oh and how do you label yourself then?
I have them tagged as judgmental lmao
Me? Thanks.
I can’t keep track of who is who without notes
Where are all these labels coming from? I don’t even see an option to tag individual users across the platform with labels.
Edit: Typed that all out, then hit the settings button, and what do you know, it’s right there.
Wait till you hear about Chinese measure words. Check out that table.
“The 100 most common…”
w.t.f.
thanks for the link though, the pīnyīn overview page on that site is pretty nice
I prefer dealing with complicated but ultimately rule-based stuff like は/が over the utter nonsense that is grammatical gender (and I’m German).
Edit: and because I see heated discussion about it elsewhere: grammatical gender is a very convenient thing to have (not to learn) and I wouldn’t abolish it (just wouldn’t want to learn it).
What’s convenient about it? I genuinely see no benefits, as a native speaker of a gendered language.
Take this example:
“Bob took his hat out of the bag and dropped it.” What did he drop?
“Bob nahm seinen Hut aus der Tasche und ließ sie fallen.” “Bob took his male hat out of the female bag and dropped her.” Ah, he dropped the bag!
There’s better examples, I’m sure, but having gendered pronouns makes references clearer than everything just being “it”. It’s a way to structure sentences that may not be vital to understanding (because obviously there are languages that work perfectly fine without it) but makes it easier. Like capitalising nouns or clear rules for where to put commas can make reading easier.
That only works if they have different genders. Which is often not the case in most gendered languages.
“Bob sacó su manzana de la caja y la dejó caer.”
Bob took his female apple out of his female box and let it (female) fall
Also from my experience growing and going to school in a gender language (not Spanish btw), grammar classes are way more intense and thorough than for something like English. Most people don’t really have grammar classes in English speaking countries, while I studied it until the last year of high school…
More complex grammar certainly makes it more difficult to learn, even for native speakers.
Yes, that doesn’t negate the fact that genderedness serves a purpose. It’s not simply there to annoy language learners.
Wow, nice, danke.
But I honestly don’t think the effort/price is worth it. You can make unambiguous references if required.
That’s the thing, it’s only an effort if you’re actively learning the language. Natives think about the gender of nouns only in certain, rare edge-cases that are ill-defined, like loanwords or “artificial” words (Nutella is gender-fluid). It would make more sense to just define those edge-cases than to try to get rid of gendered nouns.
Gwa.
(There are whole books written about the usages, but this is far from the worst thing to get wrong if you’re new to Japanese so don’t worry).
I think this is the first time I’ve seen this meme format with more than two panels.
I’ts great work)(whoever actually came up with it!)
Dude, I’m trying to learn German and those goddamn articles are so infuriating. I wonder how difficult it would be for there to be a linguistic reform to make it simpler
I am German and can emphasize. You can do it, but don’t try to be perfect.
In my lifetime we had 2 reforms I think (1 small one big) but that didn’t make it better to be honest…
Then you end up with less flexibility and more fixed word order. English used to have cases though they’ve almost entirely collapsed at this point. German is fine as it is. Learn some grammar and it will become second nature.
i’m doing my part. fuck grammar rules. der/die/das -> de
Quite the statement for an English comment. English spelling is nonsensical and in desperate need of a major reform. RobWords even made the case for using runes again as it would probably fix a lot of issues already. The language simply isn’t made for Latin letters.
But I don’t want to make this a sole whataboutism comment. Each language poses it’s own challenges. I will say that changing how roughly 100 million speak is easier said than done and would destroy a lot of culture. It would be much easier to force everyone to speak a different language entirely.
Personally I don’t think it should or could be done at all. Unlike a spelling reform that English needs desperately and German had plenty of recently. There is nothing wrong with a language being complicated but there’s plenty wrong with arbitrary spelling if you ask me.
My native language isn’t English in case you were assuming that. I mention it because my native language has gone through a reform for the reasons of simplification. English may be shit, but it was much much easier to learn than the hell I am going through with German. Even Japanese, which I touched for a few years wasn’t nearly as bad. The point of languages it to be simple and efficient, and they should evolve to that goal eventually.
The point of languages it to be simple and efficient, and they should evolve to that goal eventually.
That’s one hell of an assumption to bring to the table. There is no point to language, no end goal towards which they must, or even should evolve. They’re a natural creation of humans to facilitate communication, but coming from human beings, they’re naturally quite irregular and odd, at times.
I mean, I get it that German isn’t a cakewalk to pick up, but you’re also complaining about the unreasonable complexity in one of the less morphologically complex European languages. Take a gander at Polish, Icelandic, Basque, or Finnish, and German will probably seem quite charming and quaint with its handful of cases and corresponding forms of the articles.
They’re a natural creation of humans to facilitate communication
If a language is easy to learn and easy to use, more people will speak it. The languages that don’t adapt die with the people who still insist on using it. There is an evolution and there is a goal, as you said, to communicate. A simpler language is bound to be chosen over one that adds obstacles to communication.
In the same way evolution is mostly driven by an animal’s ability to pass off its genes, language is mostly driven by it’s ability to be used and learned.
Now I’m thinking about Esperanto, maybe that is not completely true, idk
here is an evolution and there is a goal, as you said, to communicate
I would argue that this is just humans attributing intent to a natural process that has none, and is the same sort of erroneous conception as when people say that history has some grand end goal it’s working towards. I believe this is amply demonstrated in the lack of success found by Esperanto and similar conlangs that were deliberately constructed in order to be easy to learn for a wide range of people as a neutral lingua franca. If what you claim about the purpose and goal of language were true, these conlangs should have seen widespread adoption and be the most widely spoken languages today, rather than their current status as quirky ideas that are mostly of no interest to people who aren’t complete nerds for studying languages.
But the point of a language is not to spread to the most people, it is for the peoples using it being able to use it in a way that makes it possible to communicate with their own in a way that makes sense within the local population, its culture and history.
Different languages have a different learning curve based on what language you grew up with. What is hard for you might be a cakewalk for someone coming from a different language, especially if you are coming from a different family of languages.
Even Japanese, which I touched for a few years wasn’t nearly as bad.
I think this is a ‘to each his own’ sort of situation. I like the idea of kanji but am terrible at memorizing them. I’ll take German grammar over kanji any day. If you specifically mean grammar, Japanese does have its own challenges as well.
The point of languages it to be simple and efficient
According to whom? The point of language is to communicate information. There are high-context and low-context ways to do this. There are direct and indirect ways to do this, all of which encode certain cultural meaning. If you studied Japanese, think about all the indirectness, honorifics, etc. that aren’t there to be simple, they’re there for cultural and societal reasons, even if mostly just historical in some cases.
My native language isn’t English in case you were assuming that.
I wasn’t assuming that, don’t worry. That’s why I phrased my message like that.
I guess I agree to disagree here. Language is an expression of culture and heritage too. I would never speak German differently now just because of a reform. Neither would 99% of German speakers I assume. Yet we freely integrate English words into our language because it feels natural. These English words often come and go anyway so I’m not actually concerned the German language will become deluded from Internet lingo or anything.
Would love to hear more about why English isn’t made for Latin letters
I don’t know about Latin letters more generally, but at least the issue with the default Latin alphabet, there just aren’t enough letters to represent the sounds used in English phonetically. The English language has between 14-25 vowels, depending on dialect and accent, and a further 24 consonants. When the Latin alphabet only has 26 letters, you’re naturally going to run into situations where one letter has to represent multiple sounds. With that said, I don’t see any reason, aside from the sheer cultural inertia of hundreds of years not doing so, why English couldn’t address the issue with diacritics on different letters to achieve the necessary number of unique letters to represent all of the sounds found in English.
Gendered nouns in German are just as stupid and arbitrary as spelling in English. Why is a pencil masculine? Why is beer neutral but coffee masculine? Why is school feminine?
It’s that way because languages grow naturally and are part of a culture. Although if you have breakfast with people from different parts of Germany or even just different households, you may find yourself arguing about the nouns of a popular nougat cream brand. It’s quite controversial for some reason.
Whatever the case, the same can’t be said about spelling, however. Writing is often reformed in many languages many times and it generally works. A language changes the way we think as much as the way we think shapes how we speak. You can’t really reform how people speak from the top. It either happens or it doesn’t.
you’d have to have case endings for all the nouns instead.
Also English: This, That, Those, These
Those are pronouns. The meme is about (definite) articles.
pronouns
insert anti-pronoun joke here
I don’t know about Russian but at least Croatian which is also a Slavic language confuses the hell out of me (and I’m German)
Cases are what kill you in Slavic languages. Articles are a breeze though 😉
Russian has 6 cases. two more than german.
the added ones are instrumental and prepositional.
Technically it’s the other way around - the ones German lost in comparison to Russian were the Instrumental and Prepositional (Locative).
This is from the original 8 (or 9) cases in their ancestor, Proto-Indo-European: Nominative, Accusative, Instrumental, Dative, Ablative, Genitive, Locative, Vocative, (Allative).
Croatian has 7 cases (padeža), it lost ablative and allative while russian additionally lost vocative.
Which seems like insignificant difference.It’s always interesting seeing which of the daughter languages lose which cases.
Tocharian lost all of the cases but three (Nominative, accusative, and genitive), but then added five more of its own creation! For Tocharian B, these are the perlative, comitative, and (a new) allative, ablative, and locative!
Oooh, that’s really specific place
and at least those new ones used fixed suffixes
confuses the hell out of me (and I’m German)
And rightfully so. I’m also German, I learned Sorbian (slavic minority in Lusatia), and I can very much feel your pain.
