What's strange about *your* language?

jigilojoe

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

AlloAllo

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Sep 16, 2011
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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

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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 :p not even talking to you english guys with a single one..
 

Spectral Dragon

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Jun 14, 2011
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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

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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 :p
 
Jun 11, 2008
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Th3Ch33s3Cak3 said:
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 :p.
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

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GrungyMunchy said:
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

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Jan 21, 2011
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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.
 

Buzz Killington_v1legacy

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Kathinka said:
oh, also we have seven causes. take that, inferior germans with your four :p not even talking to you english guys with a single one..
English still retains three cases--subjective, objective, and genitive/possessive--but we only bother to mark them on the personal pronouns (he/him/his, she/her/hers, etc.). Everything else is handled with word order and prepositions, with a vestigial genitive case marker ('s) for nouns. English has gotten pretty far away from its inflectional roots and become much more of an isolating/analytic language.

Also, for everyone who's mentioned the silent letters in English: part of the problem there is that English orthography (the writing system, in other words) got more or less frozen in place while the pronunciation of the language was still changing. Take a word like knight, for instance, with its silent k and gh--those consonants used to be pronounced in Middle English. (It sounded something like "kuhneekht".)
 

Uber Evil

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SpadeJester said:
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?
Seriously? What is that sentence? I want to know!
 

Knight Captain Kerr

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Glademaster said:
Th3Ch33s3Cak3 said:
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 :p.
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.
I had poor Irish teachng in primary so now i'm doing ordinary for the leaving.
Craic is the Irish word for fun and enjoyment well it is more than just that but its meaning is hard to translate into english. Anyway I often say to somebody "Any craic?" and if I ever move to a different country I would be worried a lot of people would think i'm a big druggie.
 

Gavmando

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Australians invented tripthongs because we're lazy.
A tripthong is where you elongate the vowel sound to make it longer for no reason. It's because we speak from the back of our mouth's. Unlike the American accent where they speak from the front of the mouth. Which is why people find the accent annoying as it has a very penetrating sound. It's not their fault, it's just how they speak. That's why it's hard for an American actor to do a good Australian accent. They have to learn a whole new way to speak.

The reason it's lazy is because when you speak from the back of the mouth, you dont use your lips as much. You just move your throat around. Essentially, everybody else speaks, we make a noise and try to shape it as it comes out.
 

DanDanikov

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Some people say English is a really difficult language to learn, others that it's really easy. I suspect this is because English is quite possible the hardest to learn from a rules perspective, which is how many languages are taught academically. Most languages are easier to pick up practically; English merely encourages more people to take the practical approach due to its inherent supposed complexity. That's my theory, anyway.
 

fulano

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Iron Mal said:
Well for English I can say that one of the fascinating things about English is how it evolved over time from us taking bits and pieces from other languages and assimilating them into our own (English actually contains words taken straight from other languages too, including Arabic and various European languages), in short, English is quite literally a 'bastard language'.

Not only that but English is widely reputed to be amongst one of the hardest languages to learn to speak due to the wide amount of idiotmatic language we posess as well as the fact that English is one of the least consistant languages around (there are numerous exceptions to grammatical and puncuation related rules in English as well as several words that sound the same but can have completely different meanings).

Sure, it might not be exotic like Cantonese Chinese but you'd be suprised by the amount of intricacy and history behind English.
by speak you mean pronounce, right? Because english is quite easy if you speak a language like spanish, portiguese, italian, french, or other more complex ones (those that have more rules).

If I tried to speak Spanish the way I speak English I'd be called a dumbass.

Examples...

English: I want to cross the street.

Direct Spanish Translation: Yo Querer Cruzar (el/la) calle == WTF?

Correct Spanish translation: Yo (<--optional) Quiero (<--conjugated form of 'querer') cruzar (first person of 'cruzar' therefore it stays the same) la calle (yes, guys, the street is a girl).

What makes English beautiful to me is that as a "bastard language" it works just fine b/c it is highly compressed; verbs are a breeze and things don't have a "sex," and that saves you a bunch of dealing with suffixes; the grammar is fairly straight forward compared to a bunch of other languages; and more importantly: a bunch of people speak it, which makes it even easier to learn.
 

Iron Mal

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SckizoBoy said:
No, it's still widely spoken, and is the second most prevalent of the Sino-languages (70 million speakers, last time I checked) and still the most common Chinese language spoken outside China/Taiwan (Mandarin's slowly catching up thanks to migration patterns).
I did not know that and thank you for correcting me (learn something new every day).

Still, regarding the rest, you make a fair point, especially regarding the difficulty in learning new languages at all. The difficulty encountered is merely a different sort. With Cantonese it's primarily to do with phonology, while English, its grammatical exceptions and contractions as you mention (as well as numerous other features).
I've tried learning quite a few languages in the past (including French, Spanish, Latin, Japanese and even a small bit of Klingon for a few giggles) and haven't had a whole lot of success with any of them.

As a result I'm very familiar with how difficult it can be to try and learn how to speak and write in other languages, so I wholeheartedly agree with your elaboration on my point there, even for languages that some off-handedly consider to be 'easy' it can be a very daunting task just to learn basic phrases like 'hello' and 'where is the bathroom, please?' (and in the case of Klingon it'll give you a murderous sore throat).

However, as a departure from my question, these would be reasons why the languages are fascinating rather than necessarily strange. Because, as a spoken language, everything you say in English can be easily written down (with the possible exception of some onomatopoeic exclamations/expressions) whereas so much of spoken Cantonese literally cannot be written down. Granted, this may be due to the vagaries of written Chinese, being non-alphabetised or having syllable symbols (e.g. kana for Japanese), but it's still an aspect that one may identify as lunatic(!)
This does make me wonder then how Cantonese has been carried and kept alive through the various generations when it for the most part must be transered and taught from person to person through the way of word of mouth (a method that in most cases would logically result in radical changes and adaptations being made to the language to match the technology and social climate of today).

Even with the standardisation and regulation that having a smaller number of words (most of which can be, and often are, written down) brings it's also interesting to note that there are many people out there who believe that the 'dumbing down' of the English language is happening as we speak and that any changes to the way English is utilised as a language will be a threat to the future of civilised communication (despite the fact that it's changes like the ones they fear that have given us the version of English we recognise today).
 

Wolfhound3060

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Another strange thing about English is the size of it's vocabulary. The Oxford English Dictionary has about 615,000 entries and about 200,000 words are in common use. That's more than German (184,000) or French (100,000). English is one of the only languages that has, or needs, a Thesaurus.

And yet we have so many words that have multiple meaning and are spelled the same. To quote one of my favorite English textbooks, "Any language where the unassuming word fly signifies an annoying insect, a means of travel, and a critical part of a gentleman's apparel is clearly asking to be mangled."
 

Ghengis John

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mellemhund said:
Ghengis John said:
What's weird about english? Too many contextual uses of words. Eat lead. I'll lead. Try interpreting the meaning of "They read." on it's own without any context.
Haha - i get this with kindle text-to-speech all the time!

In my native tongue - danish - we have a habit of not pronouncing words the same way we write them. Like making a 'g' silent if it comes before an 'e' in the last syllable. But if you ever read a book on danish grammar, it wouldn't tell you.
Thank you for that info! I'll probably have to read a few danish names from history differently now.
 

The Thinker

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aashell13 said:
your mother's parents would be your maternal grandparents, and your father's parents would be your paternal grandparents. Nobody uses this much though, and I'm not sure why.
It's mostly too unimportant.

Renegade-pizza said:
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.
"Extended" and "nuclear" family.

Nickolai77 said:
I'm English, and personally i find it weird and strange how other European languages like French and German assign genders to nouns. Seriously, how can desks, chairs, radiators etc be masculine and feminine? What's the point? Why not just settle on one word that means "the"?
I wonder about this too.
Queen Michael said:
The Swedish word for "chocolate bar", chokladkaka, is by an amazing coincidence also our word for "doing the twist on a sinking ship in springtime while you're wondering if that spot you've got on your back is something malignant." It's weird.
What.
Randomologist said:
I made it up, in its entirety.
Wibble!
The.

SpadeJester said:
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?
Fluffernutters.

OT: It's kind of weird how, in English, we have the letter "c", which makes the sound of either a "k" or an "s", the letter "q", which could easily be replaced by "kw", and the letter "x", which could be replaced by "ks". So, really, three useless letters. Meanwhile, we have three sounds (the "sh", "th", and "ch" sounds) unrelated to the two letters each that makeup their symbols. I'm saying that these bothersome logical flaws could easily be fixed, simplifying the English language.

P.S. I am aware, Queen Michael, that you were joking. Well... I'm 95% sure you were.
P.P.S. The word "weird" is weird. It breaks the "I before E" rule.
 

the_dancy_vagrant

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Dyme said:
uzo said:
Dyme said:
I will help the English people out and point out what is actually strange about your language.

I read Game Of Thrones, and read the word gaoler.
I thought "What? Goal? Does this have anything to do with goals?"

Turns out you pronounce it jailer. Which makes sooo much more sense.
The strangest part about English is how you pronounce and write your shit.

Let's pretend you are learning English and you know how to pronounce "owl" and you know how to pronounce "cowl".
You find the word "bowl".
What do you think? How would you pronounce it?
You spelt it wrong - the word is 'gaol'. The strange thing is in your first sentence you spelt it correctly, but then mixed it up in the next sentence.

As a side note, are you dyslexic? I remember hearing something somewhere that English is the language with the largest number of dyslexics - and scientists are starting to think it's the peculiar structure of English spelling that causes it. Dyslexics are a constant percentage in all demographics - so why else would we see more in English, yet it is almost unheard of in, for example, Japanese?
Yea, I know that I spelt it wrong. It was just the closest word I knew in terms of looks. And I wouldn't ever have dreamt (or dreamed?) of pronouncing gaoler jailer. I would have pronounced it like goaler.
I am not dyslexic, but I really can see why there would be more dyslexics in English. In German ~every word is pronounced the same way it is written.
English: fighting consistency from day 1.

I present to you a (nonsense) sentence string that will give anyone learning English a hard time:

'I had a rough cough. I barely made it through. Say, is that a bough of oak over there? Those sell for pretty good dough.'