Stuff missing from English

As I understand it, there is no word “the” in Russian and Hungarian has no pronouns.

Do foreign language speakers notice anything missing in the English language?

English does not assign genders to its nouns like many other languages do.

English lacks a lot of inflection in general. Therefore, meaning is almost completely determined by syntax, or word order, as opposed to the forms of the various words involved.

As far as vocabulary goes, English lacks some words that other languages have, but if we decide we need a word, we’ve never been shy about stealing. :wink:

Well, we do find it strange that you have a word “the” when we’ve been handling life without it perfectly fine. The noun-gender deal is another thing that’s slightly peculiar, but since the lack of genders is a blessing when learning a new language we usually overlook that.

Basically, you don’t change your words around as much as we do, adding suffixes, prefixes, changing vowels and sounds and so on. As a non-native English speaker, I’d like to thank the Gods of English for that.

y’all

English lacks gender, of course. Less noticeable (but still very significant) is the fewer versions of verbs regarding number. Specifically, English usually has the same form for singlular regardless of whether it is I, you or he, and for plural regardless of whether it is we, y’all or they.

PS: As Derleth pointed out, if we need something and don’t have it, we’ll make it up or steal it. Among the most popular is daniel801’s y’all (plural you). Among the most detested are youse (plural you) and ain’t (am not).

Or more properly, “Ye”.

:stuck_out_tongue:

English has a neuter pronoun, it. But you can’t use “it” to refer to human beings of indeterminate gender. We have “they” for an indeterminate plural pronoun. “They” is quickly losing its plural-only status though, especially in spoken conversation:

“A guy came up to me, and they punched me in the mouth.”

That isn’t standard english, but it is becoming more and more acceptable.

Don’t forget about noun classifiers, such as those used in Swahili, Vietnamese, Japanese, etc. English has been doing quite well without those.

You’re right about Russian, but Hungarian does have pronouns, for the most part just like in English. Now, it’s possessive pronouns are a bit unusual (verb endings instead of a separate word).

UnuMondo

“Ye” is the correct second person pronoun in the nominative case for old/middle English.

One of my pet hates is people using “Ye” as “The” as in “Ye Olde Inn”. but the first letter isn’t “y” it’s a “Þ” which is an old english form of ‘th’.

I don’t know if English is really crying out for it, but Hebrew has an untranslatable word that makes a definite noun specific. (The noun —> this noun.)

Lemur866: they

It’s a very widespread and long-standing construction (cited back in the OED to the 1400s) but for some reason prescriptive grammarians persist in claiming it’s wrong, despite its use in the works of prestigious authors such as Jane Austen and Lewis Carroll.

My little bit: Sometimes you’ll see someone making fun of some primitive tribe that can only count to three. But we still have that in English in some cases. E.g., once, twice, thrice, and then …? Well, four times works but it’s not a word.

I have read that English is very poor on differentiating different meanings of “love”. E.g., brotherly love, romantic love, etc. Greek is supposed to have a large number of words for the different types of love.

Oh yes, agape and eros, storge and philos. I believe agape is friendly love and eros is obviously romantic love, but I can’t remember what storge and philos were.

“It is possessive pronouns are a bit unusual.”

Que?

We have recently(-ish) lost the destinction between formal and informal forms of “you” (i.e. ‘tu’ and ‘usted’ in Spanish). When my dad was taught to conjugate French verbs he was taught these as “you” and “thou”.

I wish we had a good contraction for “am I not,” as in, “I’m good looking in this, am I not?”

You can’t say “Aren’t I?”, “Amn’t I?” or “Ain’t I?” without sounding like a moron.

I’d just “aren’t I”

or, I’d re-word it to “I look good in this, don’t I?”
Also, regarding “they” used as the singular, I know that usage is pretty common but its still always sounded wrong to me.

Or you can just not give a damn about what other people think, and use the correct “ain’t I”. The problem with “ain’t” isn’t that it’s inherently wrong; it’s that it’s so often misused. Your example of “I’m looking good, ain’t I?” is perfectly correct, but “Ain’t you looking good?” is not.