I took Spanish for three years in middle/high school. It was actually just Spanish I & II with I split over two years. Consequently I lost interest in the third year when it got much harder and only just barely passed.
What made me go WTF was when I learned how Spanish uses double negatives. So when literally translated a Spanish sentence could be, “I don’t have no money”. When I pointed out to my Spanish teacher the illogicality of this she said, “That’s just how they say it in Spanish”. Being a Math major and knowing full well since 7[sup]th[/sup] grade that -2 × -3 = +6 I found this incomprehensibly difficult to accept. If you say, “I don’t have no money” you are actually saying, “I have money” dammit*!!!*
In retrospect I’ve learned how all languages are never translated literally for reasons like this. And how even in English if you say, “I don’t have no money” there isn’t anyone who would ever interpret the double negative as a positive. But, we don’t use double negatives in English, so most everyone will interpret that you’re an under-educated rube…
English spelling and pronunciation are so unrelated that it amounts to having to learn two separate languages, but I still haven’t given up. I do avoid some phonemes which I can’t pronounce and which monolingual morons* consider it’s ok to make fun of (apparently I pronounce “jail” exactly like “Yale”… so I say “prison”).
It’s never someone who actually tried to learn a second language, with better or worse success. English, Hispanic or Batutuphone, if you insult a foreigner because of his accent I’ll file you under M for Moron. Hail Ants, we had to tell one of our ESL teachers to please not use double negatives because “if we use them, we get failed”. “Oh, but in Kansas we speak like that!” “Well, apparently the people who write our tests aren’t from Kansas. No double negatives.”
Lots of challenges with Mandarin Chinese, but the most appropriate to this thread is that the real spoken language and the formal language that is taught have branched quite a lot. Also there are many terms that are appropriate for written Chinese but rarely spoken.
So even if you’ve studied, with a Chinese teacher, such simple expressions as “What are you doing?” and “Otherwise…”, you may not understand when people actually say these things because they will use the colloquial forms which are completely different, and rarely IME taught anywhere.
You know what else isn’t needed? Plural marking. English even does without it some of the time: One deer or five deer, it’s the same word. Just get rid of the concept entirely, like Japanese does, and the language will be simpler for it.
Except that isn’t true, is it? Japanese can talk generically of cars or train conductors without making irrelevant reference to their number, but that means it’s just that much more involved when you want to specify that there were, indeed, multiple cars parked there, not just the one.
It’s a general rule, really: Changing grammar doesn’t change complexity, just shifts it around. This assumes natural languages, of course, all of which are “impure” by any standard and all of which evolved by popular usage over millennia. (Corollary: If you think a given natural language is pure and logical, you either have a half-baked conlang or a grossly incomplete knowledge of the language.) Only toy languages have complexity you can simply remove.
I.e. 70 / 80 / 90 = “septante / octante / nonante”. I seem to remember reading or hearing (can give no cite – sorry) that this was true of France as well, up to the Revolution of 1789. The Revolutionaries decided – for reasons which presumably made sense to them – to re-name the numbers concerned; and it stuck.
As regards the thread’s general heading: the most superb instance of this which I know, comes in Rebecca West’s magnum opus Black Lamb and Grey Falcon, about the author’s late-1930s travels in what was then Yugoslavia. Mention is made of a town in Bosnia called Donji Vakuf. The second word in the name is borrowed from Turkish – the Turks having spent centuries in charge of the area – a Turkish word meaning “foundation”. The author remarks (am quoting from memory – can’t just now find the book): “Discovering that the plural of ‘vakuf’ is ‘evkaf’, filled me with a very strong determination never to try to learn Turkish.”
In Irish, you have to use a different tense, and in many cases a different word entirely, if you are counting people rather than things. Also dogs, but only if they are pet dogs; wild dogs are things.
In fact, if you want to tease someone about how close they are to their donkey, or their parakeets, you can say they have “duine” donkey, or “beirt” parakeets . . .
Personal observation. You know, the stuff humble opinions are made of. I’d like to see some research that dispels that notion. Speakers of other languages regularly correct me, which is something I never hear done in English discourse. English speakers won’t even do an immigrant the favor or correcting his faulty English, It seems to be something that is not done, in our culture.
In German it’s actually quite recent, until 10 years ago or so they were much more likely to just look at you like you farted in the middle of a wedding but if you tried to pry out “what did I do wrong?” they’d just backpedal like they were being attacked. I blame it on us immigrants from Southern Parts asking “please correct me, how am I going to improve if you don’t?” because yes, for us it’s a normal thing to do. I have been part of some of these conversations myself. FTR, the Indians were happy to correct the English of their Spanish supervisors (they do correct each other as well).
My Brazilian coworker who just moved here from Italy was extremely proud that his children could correct his Spanish after just a couple of weeks here.
I wonder if longer German numbers made you regret that choice, though. For example, the number 123456 is one hundred twenty three thousand four hundred fifty six in English (sequence 1-2-3-4-5-6) while in German it’s einhundertdreiundzwanzigtausendvierhundertsechsundfünf*zig* (sequence 1-3-2-4-6-5). I consider that mental jumping back and forth a PITA when reading out numbers of more than two digits and that’s in my native language.
When I was studying German in high school, there happened to be an exchange student from Germany attending our school at the time. He would often visit our class to give us a native speaker’s insights, talk about German culture, serve as a conversation partner, et cetera.
One day someone asked him, “Don’t you wish that German didn’t have all those genders? Wouldn’t that make it much easier?” Now keep in mind, this guy was quite fluent in English, so he had to be very well aware of how a language could get along without grammatical gender.
But his answer was, “No. Without genders, I wouldn’t know how to talk.” Even having experienced a genderless language, his perception was that grammatical gender was quite normal and necessary when speaking German. Based on at least that one bit of anecdotal evidence, you can’t just remove gender and expect native speakers to like it.
The Swiss, in their infinite wisdom, have stuck with the much simpler older system and count septante, huitante, nonante and then onwards to cent. And apparently they get mocked for this in France. Life just isn’t fair sometimes.
If they had just a bit more sense, though, they would drop the gender and all the irregular verbs as well, but apparently that’s just crazy talk.
I have long been amused by Jerome K. Jerome’s books, and this quote seems apt:
I read an article, once, that opined that Chinese children learned arithmetic more quickly than English-speaking children because the Chinese numeric nomenclature was completely logical, while English required more effort to deal with the vocabulary, slowing the math learning down. Not a journal article and they could have been talking completely out of their hat. Don’t remember any of the Chinese they listed.
:eek::eek::eek:
I know someone who tried to learn Cambodian from in-laws in a small immigrant community in the US. Eventually she gave up on getting more than middling bad at speaking it because she was older and quite gray-haired, and they could not get around the social rule that you do not correct your elders.
Yes, I know both of those facts, but wouldn’t it make more sense to establish that gender is more of a Indo-European “thing” not common in other families first?
And my point about Sami was that they make up less than 0.1% of the population of Sweden, so it’s odd that that much territory would be covered. Even in the area marked, I think the majority of the population is still Swedish. The light blue in Norway makes more sense, although even there they are less than 1%.
I can’t pin down an exact WTF moment for my Spanish learning experience but I did decide to switch from a major in an BA program which required 2 years of foreign language to a major in an BS program which only required one year (which I had by the skin of my teeth). It required that I take more math classes but I was glad to do that instead.
This is a pretty common form of dishonesty on language maps as a solution to the problem that otherwise, they can’t map as many languages. Edit: Most Indo-European language maps are ridiculously ahistorical in order to include the Anatolian languages.
Gender is more of an Indo-European thing. Many languages have different, more-or-less arbitrary classes of nouns. Sattua mentioned Swahili with 14. “Gender” is generally used for the IE languages, which tend to have two or three genders. noun class(-ifier) vs. gender
I’d disagree that English doesn’t have gender. Both men and women get upset when you refer to them as “it.” I’d argue we have three in the singular: inanimate (“it,” the old neuter), masculine animate (“he”), feminine animate (“she”), and soon none in the plural. (We used to distinguish “waitresses” from “waiters,” but that’s old-fashioned now.) It’s just that when gender matches biology, it’s 100% predictable. Occasionally, ships and cats are feminine (odd, because “ship” was neuter in Old English and “boat” was masculine), but not usually.
In fact, I think that’s part of the problem for language learners. If we truly had no gender, we’d just understand that as an extra bit of (to us) unnecessary information to learn about foreign-language nouns. As it stands, though, we get angry at the “lack of logic.”
I took five years of French, earning straight A’s. Learned a bunch of different ways to form the past tense, (in French, passe’ compose’) no problem. Then in the fifth year, our teacher said we were going to start reading French novels.
That’s when I found out about passe’ simple. See, in French literature, they’ve got a whole new way of putting things in the past tense, which isn’t what I’d spent four years learning and has, as far as I can tell, no rules. You just have to memorize each verb’s passe’ simple form by brute force. I did it, somehow.
But I didn’t take French in college, as I’d planned to.
That’s more of a matter of politeness, not a matter of linguistics. I mean, someone who would say “I haven’t took no money” would almost certainly be thought of as some kind of bumpkin or from the ghetto, and probably also considered to be functionally illiterate.
But why correct them in normal conversation? They’re not going to change, and you come across like the biggest pedantic asshole ever. And that’s not limited to Americans; having some French asshole tell you that you asked where the bathroom is wrong is infuriating, and made me want to just go piss in the corner of his restaurant out of spite, instead of finding the bathroom I’d asked him for.
