One of my favourites to think about is “How are you?”. Taken literally that question makes no sense. “How are you?” “Well one day my parents had sex and I sort of grew from there…”
Not really, German here:
“Ich bin zuhaus(e)” -> “I’m home”
“Ich bin in der Bäckerei”, “Ich bin bei der Post”, “Ich bin bei den Großeltern” -> “I’m at the bakery”, I’m at the post office", “I’m at my grandparents place I’m at my grandparents” (or “I’m with my grandparents”)
In Hungarian it’s the same with “home” in particular. You say “I’m home.”. In Hungarian, I too say the exact same thing: “Otthon vagyok” (I’m home).
Your other two example works the same, you won’t say in Hungarian “I’m school” (Iskola vagyok (it means I am literally a school)). But you say “IskoláBAN vagyok” (I’m at school) or “PostÁN vagyok” (I’m at the post office. Notice the suffix in this case is completely different, but that’s another story of Hungarian)
okay, so this means the word ‘home’ is actually special accross languages 😆.
and not neccessairly the home as homeland like haza in hungarian ('cause that’s not even a noun (tho it is somewhat equivalent with home)), home like… your home.
Yes it does. I think it’s that way because it’s in locative case even though it doesn’t make the word itself look any different. English sort of has cases and doesn’t.
It works similarly in Latin. You don’t say ad domum. You only say domum.
What do you think of the Irish language? lol. Ouisce is ishkah is water, and that’s probably the only word that is spelled closest to how it’s pronounced. I’m just glad the bus lane is labeled “Lana bus”. I figured that one out just before stepping off the curb.
The problem is that Gaeilge (Gaelic) is the national language and it would simply cost twice the amount to paint Bus Lane underneath Lána Bus and the Irish government is cheap af just like most governments. And lazy.
Similar irregularities exist in Standard German (e.g. “Ich steige Stefansplatz aus”, “I get off [at] Stefansplatz”, when say driving the bus), and there’s a whole sociolect that regularises it to also say “I’m going school”. And, no, the “that noun is an adjective now” explanation doesn’t really work in German.
Understanding those kinds of (usually informal) uses is trivial if you know the language, it’s using them like a native that’s difficult. Forget studying grammar they need to be learned by osmosis. Grammars linguists produce, even highly detailed ones, have a very hard time capturing the possibilities, what’s acceptable when playing around with the language.
Absolutely. I’m an ESL teacher in Korea, and getting my students to use prepositions properly is a significant portion of my job. The difference between something like “He is coming to you.” and “He is coming for you.” isn’t obvious at all if you think about it, but there are definitely proper and improper use cases for them.
I remember a Vietnamese co-worker commenting that sometimes people say “Here you go” and sometimes they say “Here you are” when handing her things and wondered if there was a difference. I explained it was just two ways to say the same thing.
There’s a song with the lyric “If you need us we’ll be backyard in our new tree fort” and it fucks with me that it sounds as okay as it does. Reckon it makes a little more sense when the place-word includes a relative direction, like in “upstairs” or “courtside”.
I have heard some gems in the wild though, like “Ima go run bathroom”.
I only realized that the more I studied other languages, making me reflect on English.
Like, English doesn’t have a future tense. It seems like a pretty basic thing, but in English you say “I’m going to X”. Why do you use the verb ‘to go’ there? Why is that the way English creates a future tense? If you’re headed to the store now: I’m going to the store. If it’s happening later: I’m going to go to the store. WTF is this bullshit? “going to go”? Just stop and think for a second about “going” and “go” in that phrase.
And the verb “to do”, why is that part of questions in English? Statement: You have a dog. Question: Do you have a dog? What does “to do” have to do with any of that? Why is “doing” the verb that somehow is used to turn a statement into a question?
And then there’s “to use”. Using is to take, hold, deploy, consume… so why is it sometimes part of the past tense. Sure, you can say “I walked to school”, but if you want to talk about habits or routines: “I used to walk to school”. Why is “to use” even involved there at all?
That’s not even accounting for spelling and pronunciation which is just ridiculous in English.
We have a letter ‘k’ that reliably makes a certain sound, and a letter ‘s’ that reliably makes another sound. But, a huge variety of words use “c” which can make a ‘k’ sound like cat, or an ‘s’ sound like city. The letter ‘c’ has no sound of its own, it’s just a randomizer machine for one of the other useful sounds. The letter ‘g’ has one sound that no other letter makes, in words like “grip” and “great”. There’s another letter “j” that makes a different sound, like in “jet” and the name “Jim”. But, for some reason, sometimes the “g” makes a “j” sound, so “Jim” and “gym” have the same sound but completely different spellings, leading to bullshit like the confusion over how to pronounce “gif”.
English has roughly 20 vowel sounds, depending on the accent, but the vowel letters are ‘a’, ‘e’, ‘i’, ‘o’, ‘u’, and sometimes ‘y’. So, you’d think that at least those 5/6 are sorted and the other 20 come from combinations, right? Nope. In British English, for some reason “can” and “can’t” get a different vowel sound for the ‘a’, despite “can’t” being a contraction for “can not”, which literally contains “can”. The letter “u” can sound different between “put” and “putt”, even though you’re just tacking a ‘t’ to the end of that combination of letters. If you tack an ‘s’ on the end it doesn’t change, but if you tack an ‘e’ on the end… whoa, an entirely new sound different from both “put” and “putt”.
I’m glad the world is slowly converging on one language that allows everyone to communicate with everyone else, but it sucks that the language that came out on top is English.
Let’s start with the fact that Danish is practically two languages in one - the written language and the spoken language. There is very little connection between the two. You cannot look at a word’s spelling and know how it is pronounced, and often it is not pronounced how you would think it is pronounced by looking at the spelling.
The grammar is simple, but it’s so full of irregularities that you basically need to memorise a wide array of words and phrases.
The spoken language has more vowel sounds than the alphabet has vowels, even when Danish has added three extra (æ, ø and å). Each vowel can therefore be pronounced in different ways depending on the word. No, there is no system to tell you which sound is the correct one, you just have to know and memorize it.
Add to this the fact that the pronounciation is quite complicated and basically impossible for foreigners to learn without having a heavy or at least moderate accent.
The spoken language has more vowel sounds than the alphabet has vowels, even when Danish has added three extra (æ, ø and å).
That’s one thing I think English at least did right. Other languages added extra letters and/or diacritics to try to capture all the variations on vowel sounds. But, in most languages there are far more vowel sounds than there are vowels. So, don’t make things unnecessarily complicated by adding extra letters. The one language that seems to do it basically right is Spanish, where there are only about 5 vowel sounds and they use the accent character not to show that a letter is pronounced differently, but just to cue you in on which syllable is accented when it might not be the one you expect. (With a few minor annoying variations, like el and él).
English at least has “going to” and “will” for future. In Estonian you just use present simple and the only way to know you’re talking about the future is if you hint it with some time related word.
You just say “I go to the supermarket” and it’s ambiguous. You say “I go to the supermarket tomorrow” and you know it’s talking about the future.
Do you know if that’s unique to Estonian, or also true of Finnish? AFAIK, Finnish (and Estonian) are a weird language branch in that most of Europe is Indo-European. Even distinct languages like Italian and German are more related to each-other than Finnish.
I just want to point out that English’s future tense does exist, but it’s just non-distinct in many cases because, well, as you’ve said, English is fucked.
“We’re eating steak.”
You need context to determine whether this statement is talking about the present or the future. So much of the language is implied contextually that you can just drop off words and assume the listener will understand.
“What are we eating?” vs. “What are we eating tonight?”
It’s so funny because whereas a lot of other languages have rules with defined exceptions here and there, speaking English is more of a theoretical approach.
It feels like English just happened one day and we’re all trying to figure out why.
It’s so funny because whereas a lot of other languages have rules with defined exceptions here and there, speaking English is more of a theoretical approach.
I feel like this also makes it useful in that you can butcher the hell out of it, and still communicate somewhat effectively. I don’t feel that’s the case in some other languages, or maybe I’m willing to put up with my colleague’s broken English far more than they’re willing to put up with my broken German/Spanish/etc.
Yeah, it’s definitely convenient in most cases, I would say. Though it can also be inconvenient when messaging, because sometimes said need to add context can read very unnaturally in an otherwise grammatically correct sentence.
I think English allows you more different ways of doing things than most other languages. The future tense being “going to X” and one of the past tenses being “used to X” means that new English learners don’t need to spend as much time studying yet another verb tense.
OTOH, the spelling and pronunciation is such a massive hurdle compared to a simple language like Spanish.
My uneducated guess is that England had so many colonies throughout history that a lot of languages affected English and we have this Frankenstein of a language
That’s part of it, but I think a bigger part is all the countries that colonized the British Isles. English has elements of Germanic languages like German, Dutch, Old Norse, etc. It has elements of Latin languages from Latin itself to French. The British Empire definitely resulted in words being brought back from the various colonies, but the English they spoke then was fairly similar to what we know today. It was already this weird, bastardized Germanic / French language.
Future Simple / Simple Future: Will + [base form] – I’ll eat that later; or Going + [infinitive] – I’m going to eat that later.
Future Continuous: Will be + [present participle] – I’ll be eating that later.
Future Perfect: Will have + [past participle] – I’ll have eaten that later.
Future Perfect Continuous: Will have been + [present participle] – I’ll have been eating that later.
There’s also using the present continuous to talk about the future – I’m eating that tomorrow.
Also, the simple present – I eat that tomorrow.
English is flexible, but it’s also weird. There are a lot of distinctions that matter to native English speakers but that are really hard to put into rules. Like “will” vs. “going to”. They have slightly different meanings, but good luck coming up with an easy to understand rule about when to use each version.
What does “going to” have to do with it? Do they need to spiritually travel to the motivation center of the brain before you go to the store? I’m just saying, if you say “going to go” over “will”, you’re gonna get tongue cramps, and for all intents and purposes, they mean the same thing. This is language that we’re talking about. All words are made up, so just try to keep up and you will be fine.
The annoying thing is that “I’ll go to work tomorrow” and “I’m going to go to work tomorrow” have subtly different meanings to English speakers, but good luck trying to come up with a rule to explain the difference to someone learning the language.
You know, that’s a good example, you have a good point. In some contexts they are slightly different. I’ll take a wack at describing the difference though: “I’ll go to work tomorrow” sounds like making a decision out loud, in the moment, while “I’m going to go to work tomorrow” just sounds like communicating intentions, regardless of when the decision was made or whether they were the ones to make it. In this context “I’m going to go” can substitute “I’ll go”, but the reverse might sound weird. So I concede but only a little
Add comment