I’m moving my posts from Reddit to Lemmy before delete them.
This post is from 2021-03-09.
Funny enough, the Japanese doesn’t have the word “the” per say. It most depends on context and how you translate it. Example: ねこは赤です -> literal translation: Cat red Now time to add some English words to make it sound ✨better✨ “The cat is red”
“Cat red” makes Japanese sounds way more vague than it really is, you’re just not bothering to attempt to transliterate the grammar structures because it’s too hard for English speakers to understand without a half-hour lecture.
It’s “Cat (topic marker) red (basic copula)”, which obviously carries a lot more information than just “cat red” to a person who intuitively understands what those weird grammar markers signify
Japanese not having articles is just as weird as PIE languages not having things like topic markers.
If you’re interested, please do crosspost this (and any other linguistics memes you have) over to /c/linguistics_humor@sh.itjust.works
I speak bengali and we don’t have the word “the” nor do we have any gendered nouns, verbs, or even pronouns. So much easier and straight forward and no pronoun politics necessary.
We do have a respect hierarchy though like japanese, so we have 3 version of the language lol.
So it’s kinda different from general Indo-European. In that regard, Bengali looks like Turkish, no articles no gendered anything.
Three version of the language? You mean the alphabet or?
Nope I mean of the language itself has three different version for most words.
So for example, for the word “you”, when you are speaking to someone who is a close friend or sometimes a child, or someone of much lower social standing, you would say “tui”. If you are talking to a friend (not close), someone of similar age that you know well but aren’t super close, speaking to someone noticeably much younger than you, or to an elder who you are very comfortable with, you would say “tumi”. When speaking to someone you don’t know who is visibly not much younger than you, or when speaking to most elders, you would say “apni”.
If you don’t want to assume age and you aren’t speaking to a child, it’s best to default to “apni” as that is the most respectful form of the language.
So there are three versions of the language with it’s own set of words based on the level of formality in the social interaction that is taking place.
Latin: German has 4 cases? That’s cute.
Years ago I studied Malayalam while living in India (Malayalam is the language of Kerala state on the southernmost tip of the country). When I learned the grammar I was surprised to see that it had nominative, dative and accusative cases just like German, which was convenient since I’d studied German in high school. Turns out the grammar had actually been sort of imposed on Malayalam centuries ago by a wandering German monk.
Hermann Gundert. I was a bit off: he was a missionary rather than a monk, and it was a century and a half ago rather than “centuries ago”. His book on Malayalam grammar was called Malayalabhaasha Vyakaranam. My Malayalam tutor at the time told me that Gundert learned the language in one week, which seems a bit unlikely.
Meanwhile: plural in Japan (kind of).
Also Russian
