What's strange about *your* language?

[erbkaiser]

Something about my motherlanguage (Dutch) not yet mentioned that strikes me as quite odd is how we swear with diseases -- something I don't know any other language does.

Really weird if you think about it -- in traffic for example it's quite common to hear someone wish typhoid fever or cholera or someone else, but at least it's unique. Most other languages seem to only curse with sex and excrement.

 

[DrunkPickle]

Ever used the idiom, "Speak of the devil..."? Well, a Polish version of the saying roughly translates to "Speak of the wolf". Also, fun fact: the letter "e" in English, is pronounced the same as "i" in the Polish alphabet.

 

[kommando367]

The english language is weird because we have completely useless silent letters.

 

[aksel]

Well, Faroese is a sort of weird language. It is basically a mix of every language surrounding us: A lot of Icelandic (or Old-Norse), Danish, Swedish, Norwegian, German (mainly due to Denmark), a bit of Celtic and English.

We have genders assigned to all nouns. All nouns also have different endings, based on which time the sentence is in, like past, present and future, but we have 5 different times, and no future. We also have 4 different "falls", which determine which form of a noun we are to use. with several different types of endings and spellings. They are determined with what can be translated to "Who goes there?" (hvørfall), "Whom did you see?" (hønnfall), "Whom are you looking for?" (hvørjumfall) and "Who are you here to represent?" (hvørsfall). The last one is weird because we use a word, nonexistent in the English language, so I had to make something up that meant the same thing.

Added to that, we also have two additional variations of noun endings, called strong and weak nouns. I'm not going to go into that, because honestly, I don't understand it at all. I don't even think there is a rule of grammar to support it. Instead, we use a two different nouns as templates, strong and weak respectively.
Because our language is fairly new in written form, some rules of grammar have yet to be determined, and in the information age, it is very hard not to just adopt other words.

Faroese is also one of the only languages in the world that uses the letter "ð" (capital: Ð), the others being Icelandic and I think Old English. We also use ø, ó, í, ú, ý and three "put-together letters", ei, ey, oy, pronounced just as they are written. I don't see the purpose of putting them together, but whatever.
We have all of those extra letters, yet we don't use c, q, x or z. I have no idea why.

I could go into a lot more, but honestly, I'm drunk and have to finish an essay on gun control in the U.S.

 

[Randomologist]

I made it up, in its entirety.
Wibble!

OT:

The Irish language has so many exceptions for the verbs, there's no real point in having the rules there in the first place.

Welsh is another Gaelic language with an awkward grammar system, as in Irish. Many words in it are indeed very old, but a lot of the more modern ones are just lifted straight from English. Aluminium > Aliwminiwm.

 

[The-Epicly-Named-Man]

I don't really know. I speak Irish but I don't really see anything weird about the language, or any language in general. Modern Irish (the one I speak) is a bastardised version of old Irish, with most of the words that have come in the past century are just English words that use Irish phonetics, though, to be fair, most of the words in the English language are just the same except with German and French.

Edit: We also gave the world the word whiskey. It comes from the Irish "uisce beatha (water of life)", which some Normans who landed in Wexford mispronounced as "wishkey". That in turn was anglicised and is now the weirdest word on the planet.

 

[Robert Ewing]

The English language. Because we have so many words that mean different things.

The their, there and they're - your, you're phenomenon seems to remain at a constant level.

And we have useless letters. For example, Gnome. WHAT IS THE G FOR? I DON'T EVEN.

 

[SpadeJester]

Russian, the language in which you can write a sentence full of swears and it won't be swearing.

Is that strange enough for you?

 

[GundamSentinel]

For Dutch it's the ridiculous number of vowels (some 26) and stupid lists of exceptions. Every rule in the Dutch language has a long list of exceptions. Why make the rule in the first place? To make matters worse, the Dutch language society comes up with new and improved rules (read: more complicated and ruining the language) every couple of years. That's one of the reasons why I never read Dutch literature anymore (the other reason being that it's dreadfully dull). Hell, I even prefer writing in English nowadays.

And of course, let's not forget the weird R and G in Dutch.

 

[roostuf]

Afrikaans, god how i miss my accent. :,(

 

[M-E-D The Poet]

In Afrikaans you have to say "nie"(not) twice in a sentence or some other doubled negative.
For e.g.: (This is basically directly translated): You do not have to do that not. Putting the second negative can be ***** sometimes, since literally only 2 countries officially speak Afrikaans and I go to an English school.

This may not exactly be strange, but Afrikaans actually has two words for family. "Familie": Your entire group that shares a common ancestor and "Gesin": i.e. Mom, dad and siblings. I'm actually surprised that English doesn't also have two words for it.

this

And the fact that written/sung afrikaans and spoken afrikaans are two very different things

For example you might find the artist dans dans lisa singing " Gisteraand is die wereld vergaan en ek was daar" which roughly translates to : Yesterday the world was destroyed and I was there"
but if someone 'd say it they'd say " Gisteraand verging de world en ek was daar "

It's not a real example it's just one I thought up real quick whilst listening to the song haha

But anyway to clarify : written afrikaans is akin to dutch with english grammar, spoken afrikaans is akin to old dutch with english words mixed in spoken in a manner similar to french

edit : oh and our pronounciation from time to time too : God= the dutch sch-j-o-t

 

[esperandote]

Spanish, among many other things, the way we abbreviate United states of america "EE. UU." wtf?

 

[jigilojoe]

I know this isn't the question, but: English is strange 'cause everyone else thinks it's theirs.

 

[AlloAllo]

Italian. Those fucking verbs.

Six grammatical moods with usually five tenses each.
Assholes.

Oh, and a cute thing- dialects! Those were actual languages 'til half a century ago, so they are very different from standard Italian and VERY different from region to region.
Example: Chair. In Italian it's "Sedia". In my region's dialect it's "carega". In Sicilian dialect, that's "seggia".

Actually, there can be different dialects in the same region. For example: Boy, in Italian, it's "ragazzo". In Venice, they'd say "puteo". In the same region, there are also "tosat" and "bocia" (this one from the mountains).

Eh. That's kind of funny...

 

[Kathinka]

czech is messed up in so far that we throw together several words into a lot less words, modifying ending and beginning of the words to get the information in that usually is stored in seperate words in other languages. "we are crossing the street now", a six-word-english sentence, is done in two words in czech. "prechazime ulici"

oh, also we have seven causes. take that, inferior germans with your four not even talking to you english guys with a single one..

 

[Spectral Dragon]

Woah, seems there are a lot of swedes here.
(Visst ÄR vi bra?)
Anyway, "hyperneuroaukustiska diafragmakontravibrationer" can be translated as "hiccups".
"I åa ä de en ö, å på öa ä de en å" means "in the river, there is an island, and in that island is a river" in swedish. Logical, no?

 

[AWAR]

Greek here. Massive vocabulary, punctuation and syntax all over the place, no one knows perfect spelling.. On the plus side it makes other languages seem easy

 

[Glademaster_v1legacy]

The Irish language has so many exceptions for the verbs, there's no real point in having the rules there in the first place.

It's also impossible to have a normal conversation without mentioning God. 'Dia duit' means 'hello'. But a literal tranlation is 'God be with you'. Not only that, but if someone says 'Dia duit' you can't reply with 'dia duit'. You have to reply with 'Dia is Muire duit(God and Mary be with you)'. And if somone says 'Dia is Muire duit', you have to reply 'Dia is Muire is Pardraig duit(God,Mary,Patrick). And if somone says 'Dia is Muire is Pardraig duit' you have to reply, 'Dia is Muire is Pardraig is Niamh duit(God,Mary,Patrick,Niamh)' . And if someone says 'Dia is Muire is Pardraig is Niamh duit', you have to reply 'Dia is Muire is Padraig is Niamh is Peadar duit(God,Mary,Patrick,Niamh,Peter)' Thankfully, there's nothing after that .

In fairness that is the same for a lot of languages as I am fairly sure Goodbye is God by ye or God be with you or something along those lines.

OT: Irish isn't actually too bad for learning stuff like verbs in my opinion until you go past the basics. Once you start to do the genitive cases, plurals, proper syntax, past and present participles then it goes out the fucking window. Although to be honest I think a lot of these problems come from bad teaching at the foundation of the language in primary school and certain patterns not being made clear and assumed to be known in primary school level.

 

[Iron Mal]

Wait, are you serious? English uses nowhere near as many different words as the majority of latin languages. A verb in English has 4 or 5 different variations to aknowledge time and person, in my language it has 67. Seriously, English is one of the easiest languages I've ever encountered.

What language do you speak exactly?

I would have to say that it's a very convoluted language that was formed requiring 67 variations on any given word just to specify the subject and tense (I'm fairly certain that there aren't even a grand total of 67 tenses and subjects combined so I have a hunch you're exaggerating there).

The great difficulty that surrounds learning English is how the rules and trends surrounding it's use are very lax and open for adaptation and interpritation. There may not be as many specific words to learn as other languages but learning how to actually use them correctly and fluently can be considerably more difficult because we sometimes just seem to have completely random and made up rules sometimes (I before E except after C or if it rhymes with 'bee', who the hell actually came up with that and why?).

From the perspective of how many words you have to learn then no, English isn't very hard, but if we're talking about how difficult it is for the language to be applied in a regular, day-to-day conversation then the sheer number of irregularities makes it a very confusing language for many (that's why it's widely regarded as one of the most difficult languages to learn).

 

[snagli]

Who understand the Dutch language? The Dutch, and the Belgians, and even they can't cope with our "g" that sounds like someone clearing his/her throat 3 times a sentence.

Obviously, there are words that are so different in English you can't see any common ground (like pineapple - in Dutch it's ananas.), but I don't think people have trouble with translation. People have trouble with pronouncing the bloody words.