Name Some Languages That Are the Least Like English?
- Thread starter FalTorPan
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^ Yes, but the difficulty of Celtic languages is generally compounded by their spelling, which to me looks like it's designed to screw over English speakers 
Tell me more about this unique ability. My own native language is physically incapable of absorbing words from others, so we've had to resign ourselves to digging up old ones from the manuscript of Hadewych of Antwerp whenever we wanted to name new concepts.
I'm very interested in how this thing works.
Tell me more about this unique ability. My own native language is physically incapable of absorbing words from others, so we've had to resign ourselves to digging up old ones from the manuscript of Hadewych of Antwerp whenever we wanted to name new concepts.
I'm very interested in how this thing works.
Well what you have to do is be invaded repeatedly over a thousand year period by, and this is the crucial bit, invaders with languages which are linguistically distinct from each other. Then you have to submit to the rule of the invaders for a sufficient period for their language to be absorbed by the native population's language. Then you have to re-establish your own language as top language. After this your language will absorb any damn thing you can throw at it.
In a sense, it is - not because of millennia of conquest history (everybody has that) but more because this conquest history extends to recent days. Competitors have done their absorbing in the preceding thousands of years, meaning less need for it in recent times: hence vocabularies that have remained fairly stable until the very recent rush of globalization-related input. It would seem that Latin in its heyday was much slower in absorbing the words that described the wonders of the expanding world.
Of course, absorbing a word into English is also marginally easier than absorbing it to a language that actually has grammatical structure. One doesn't have to invent a gender for the neo-word, as in many Romantic languages, or fifteen different cases in which to bend the word, as in my native Finnish. But that's a fairly trivial chore, and not the reason for English being a bit unusual as far as magpies go.
Many European languages have formed as gradual blendings of local languages and the lingua franca of the day; most of the western survivors now owe basically everything to Latin influences. English largely formed as a 50:50 mixture of "native", Germanic stuff and "invader" French, to the degree that some words still exist in pairs, like sheep/mutton.
Timo Saloniemi
How very dare you! Take that back. English has grammatical structure.
...Several, in fact. And you can never guess which is going to be used next.
Call them "structure" face to face with a German, though, and you will be laughed out of the court. Or would be if Germans had a sense of humor.
Timo Saloniemi
I can't wait to hear what you have to say about French.
It is true that there are similataries between English and German. They say Hallo we say Hello. They Guten tag we Good day. They say Guten Morgen we say Good morning.
The difference is the fact that they talk in a weird order and they have odd ability of adding words together to make one big word instead of leaving them alone and ending up with a sentance.
Well, I understood the sarcasm here, even if nobody else did.
I think it's clear that the absorption of new words from other languages isn't a unique characteristic of English.
One example should be enough to dispel this notion. The Japanese word for "German" is "Doitsu"--obviously, Japanese absorbed the German word for German, "Deutsch," at some point.
The people at AskOxford are much more guarded in their claims: they say simply that English is "very ready to accommodate foreign words," and that "it seems quite probable that English has more words than most comparable world languages."
Speaking from my own experience, I've noticed that English seems to have more synonyms for any given word than the three other languages with which I'm most familiar: French, German, and Latin. When it comes to adjectives, in particular, English-speakers tend to adopt or adapt foreign words and use them to mean something slightly different from other adjectives.
For example: the simple Old-English word "deep" has a number of synonyms that mean "very deep" or "very, very deep": unfathomed and unfathomable (from Old English), bottomless (from Old English), unsounded (from French), unplumbed (from French), profound (from Latin), abyssal (from Latin), and chasmal (from Greek via Latin).
Interestingly, given the fact that English originated on an island, most of these synonyms have nautical connotations: "deep" itself is even used as a noun ("the deep") to mean "the ocean". Since the Dutch have historically been seafarers as well, I would be curious to hear from Zero Hour if Dutch has a similar assortment of synonyms for "deep".
As to why English would absorb foreign words more readily than other languages, I couldn't say. Perhaps it just has a certain je ne sais quoi.
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In spoken Dutch, there's only diep. If I were to fetch the Groot Woordenboek der Nederlandsche Taal, I'm sure I could find more than a few synonyms--it has 430.000 entries, compared to about 300.000 in the OED.
What strikes me as odd about English (from my admittedly limited frame of reference) is not it's capacity for absorbing words--my own language does that quite regularly--, but its tendency to keep the old ones around.
For example, if you were to speak to ten random Dutch people in the street and ask them about the original Dutch words for baby and privacy, I'm sure you'd get no more than a blank stare from about eight of them. Those two words are relatively recent imports.
Furthermore, I'm pretty sure that if you were to tell the above people the original Dutch words (because they do exist) three out of ten people would be unsure of their meaning.
baby and privacy are still pronounced exactly the way they are in English, they don't fit well in the Dutch system of pronunciation (which is not a big deal), nor do they conjugate particularly easily.
The English words were shorter, so we forgot the originals. In little more than fifty years. And this seems to happen a lot; I've mentioned it before, but Dutch texts written in the past centuries tend to become opaque to me much faster than English ones. In no small part this is due to the fact that they use a vocabulary that is significantly different from what I'm used to.
Perhaps the English way is more normal, perhaps other languages work more like Dutch does; I can't say, as I don't have more than a passing familiarity with languages other than Dutch or English.
That's very interesting. To me, English texts seem to be fairly easy to read until you get back to the mid-18th century, after which I start to encounter the problem you describe. Edward Gibbon and David Hume wrote in what is essentially modern English, though their sentence structure would be considered rather complex today.
If what you say is correct, then English accumulates words, like some kind of linguistic coral reef, whereas other languages, like Dutch, just replace them.
BTW--according to AskOxford, the Second Edition of the OED, published in twenty volumes in 1989, has more than 615,000 entries--not 300,000.
Languages change - some faster than others. The more the people speaking a language come into contact with speakers of other languages, the more likely it is that those languages/dialects will change faster than they otherwise would. Cultural changes (technology, for example) will also speed up the process.
However, all languages are flexible and do accommodate changes. People will find a way to express what they need to express.
That said, the number of words in the English language can be explained by considering the history of English speakers - Anglo-Saxon roots, Latin in education and church, the French invasion... and in the more modern times, English imperialism, the rise of the United States (which itself was and is being formed by people from many countries (cultures&languages)).
Nowadays the English language continues to expand as a lingua franca for people around the world (taught in schools, people see American movies and listen to music in English, the language of business and academic publications, and so on).
However, all languages are flexible and do accommodate changes. People will find a way to express what they need to express.
That said, the number of words in the English language can be explained by considering the history of English speakers - Anglo-Saxon roots, Latin in education and church, the French invasion... and in the more modern times, English imperialism, the rise of the United States (which itself was and is being formed by people from many countries (cultures&languages)).
Nowadays the English language continues to expand as a lingua franca for people around the world (taught in schools, people see American movies and listen to music in English, the language of business and academic publications, and so on).
Gaelic.
Look it up.
I say Welsh trumps Gaelic. At least Gaelic has vowels.
But Welsh grammar--at the basic level I've studied, anyway--isn't all that different from English. I've studied three languages, Welsh, Japanese and Spanish, and of them Japanese definitely wins the title of "most different".
Marian
Gaelic is quite a bit like English, compared to say, Nahuatl.
Of the three languages besides English I have some familiarity with I'd say Hebrew (modern) and Turkish are different enough.
Turkish is very much different with most pronouns and possession being part of a suffix to the noun/verb. As with Hebrew there's no present tense for "to be" -- something I prefer in any language. As a consequence it's possible to say what would be an entire sentence in Turkish with a single word: iskotchya'den meaning "I'm from Scotland." What makes it difficult for a newcomer to the language is the concept of "vowel harmony": the vowels used in the verb/noun suffix change depending on the last vowel of the preceding noun/verb-stem and there are six or seven cases with four possible vowel endings. Turkish underwent significant modernisation under Ataturk's rule in the early 20th century, including replacing the Arabic alphabet with a modified Roman one (as a consequence of this and other reforms something like 80% of the population cannot read publications more than 50 years old). I don't understand all the grammatical rules, but there are very few exceptions to them and a bit of flexibility. Often the adjective precedes the noun, but not always; sometimes use of a separate pronoun or plural is used where the suffix doesn't clarify this or emphasise it enough. Objects will also generally precede verbs, or queries. Then of course you have the fact that it's not a Latinate or Germanic language with very few imported words from English (there appear to be some from Arabic or Persian; possibly vice-versa), so you really need to build a vocabulary from nothing and there's often no clue what a word means even with context.
Istanbul is a terrific city and one of those places where you'll encounter tons of people who don't speak a lick of English -- notably taxi drivers and traders/shopkeepers -- so I've improved my Turkish a lot between the two visits I've made by simple necessity and have played interpreter for my family and friends which is always fun.
Somewhere I read there are similarities between Turkish, Finnish and Japanese, but since I don't know the latter two languages I don't know how true that is -- anyone?
Turkish is very much different with most pronouns and possession being part of a suffix to the noun/verb. As with Hebrew there's no present tense for "to be" -- something I prefer in any language. As a consequence it's possible to say what would be an entire sentence in Turkish with a single word: iskotchya'den meaning "I'm from Scotland." What makes it difficult for a newcomer to the language is the concept of "vowel harmony": the vowels used in the verb/noun suffix change depending on the last vowel of the preceding noun/verb-stem and there are six or seven cases with four possible vowel endings. Turkish underwent significant modernisation under Ataturk's rule in the early 20th century, including replacing the Arabic alphabet with a modified Roman one (as a consequence of this and other reforms something like 80% of the population cannot read publications more than 50 years old). I don't understand all the grammatical rules, but there are very few exceptions to them and a bit of flexibility. Often the adjective precedes the noun, but not always; sometimes use of a separate pronoun or plural is used where the suffix doesn't clarify this or emphasise it enough. Objects will also generally precede verbs, or queries. Then of course you have the fact that it's not a Latinate or Germanic language with very few imported words from English (there appear to be some from Arabic or Persian; possibly vice-versa), so you really need to build a vocabulary from nothing and there's often no clue what a word means even with context.
Istanbul is a terrific city and one of those places where you'll encounter tons of people who don't speak a lick of English -- notably taxi drivers and traders/shopkeepers -- so I've improved my Turkish a lot between the two visits I've made by simple necessity and have played interpreter for my family and friends which is always fun.
Somewhere I read there are similarities between Turkish, Finnish and Japanese, but since I don't know the latter two languages I don't know how true that is -- anyone?
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I can only speak for the latter pair of languages, and I don't really speak any Japanese. It's just that the two languages do form an interesting pair, the commonalities thus being known to many people in both groups even when they only really know one of the languages. What's odder is that these two languages aren't really related in any way (while Finnish and Turkish in turn might very well be) - it's all just a huge coincidence.
In both Finnish and Japanese (as in Turkish, see above), suffixes integrated to the body of the word are the standard way to create grammatical cases and to refine the meaning of the word; in English, one would use separate suffixes such as "to" or "from" instead, or add separate words to indicate that something is being done "only gradually" or "not very seriously" or "by the third person plural". This leads to very long words, in general consisting of two- or three-letter (that is, two- or three-phoneme) syllables that follow each other in a dull rhythm where accent is on every second syllable, and vowels and consonants alternate evenly.
Both languages are also spelled the way they are spoken, with every letter always pronounced the same way. In Japanese, the phonetic alphabet consists of syllables optimized for the language, while in Finnish, it consists of standard Latin letters, but the difference is rather minimal and Japanese (at least in the Kata sense) is easy to translitterate to Finnish and vice versa. Both languages also make use of a clear difference between single and double vowels: when an English speaker would write "hit" and "heat" to indicate that the latter word has its middle vowel some 1.7 times the length of the former, a Finn or a Japanese would instinctively write "hit" and "hiit" and assume that the latter vowel should be exactly twice as long as the former. Double consonants also exist: Miko and Mikko, or Kari and Karri, are two completely different male proper names in Finnish, but a foreigner would have immense difficulty telling the two apart. In English, one might spell one's name "Teri" or "Terry" while the pronunciation would remain the same; Finns for their part have difficulty comprehending this.
Also, "harsh" consonants and "open" vowels are characteristic of both languages, and one can imitate or mock the other language rather nicely just by changing the pitch (a comically squeaking high Finnish pitch sounds like Japanese, while a comically growling low Japanese pitch sounds like Finnish).
Two fun coincidences in the use of suffixes: both languages use the ending "-ko" for turning a statement into a question, and both languages use the ending "-n" for indicating the possessive form. Further coincidence is the use of an "Ee!" sound to indicate "No" (spelled "Ei" in Finnish, "Iie" in Japanese translitteration), while pretty much every language with Indo-European roots uses a word that features the sound "N!" (Ne! Nyet! Nej!) prominently.
Nouns in both languages lack article and gender. Both languages also lack the word for "to have", using the form "for me it exists" instead of "I have". And on a general note, both languages have a special grammatic structure for indicating politeness and deference (special polite pronouns etc.), perhaps easily understood in the intricately layered Japanese culture but less natural in the simple agrarian Finnish one.
In theory, one might argue (and many have) that the two languages share deep Siberian roots. In practice, the current commonalities are actually absent from the supposed "in-between" Siberian languages, and in any case the role of Ainu roots in modern Japanese is debatable and debated.
In recent times, Japanese has become quite popular in Finland, due to an inrush of manga and Hayao Miyazaki movies... The reverse isn't true.
Timo Saloniemi
