Russian:
Yeah, but what comes after gets messy
All languages are like that. If you don’t do something one way, you have to do it another. Basically if you sacrifice complexity in grammar, you have to make up for it in other ways through things like case, word-order, tone and register, etc. It’s a popular myth that languages can be more or less complex than one another.
Russian doesn’t have articles at all, but it sure isn’t simple.
But it’s also simpler in many ways. For example, it doesn’t use the verb “to be”. So, for example, instead of saying “I’m a boy”, you would say “I boy”.
Yes, that one aspect of the language is simpler, but the six grammatical cases, three genders, two aspects, and unpredictable stress make up for it.
My boyfriend is very good at picking up languages, so he’s been pretty good at picking up Russian too. But yea, he mentioned the unpredictable stress thing being a bitch and that’s something I never noticed.
Three genders!? Sign me up!
The grammar can be complicated, but with Russian I find the pronunciation can be particularly difficult. There’s a lot of vowel I, e, and y sounds that are subtly different. И, й, э, ы, е all sound kinda similar, with ы not having a direct equivalent in English (it’s like an “eeyeh” pronounced with the frontal palette which is weird because English doesn’t have a lot of frontal letters).
The consonant clusters are also tough because there’s so many of them and connecting vowels are absent. A classic example of this is Здравствуйте (Zdrasvuitse) with the Zdr pronounced with a rolling r as well.
I’m sure if I’m trying to say things I’ve got a heavy gringo accent.
Portuguese: append “s”. O, os; a, as;
i mean technically we have the and thə
Excuse me friend, but one of your e’s appears to be drunk.
i’m pretty sure about 12-15% of the English language is… smashed to the tits…
More like 70-80%
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ə: I’m not as think as you drunk I am, ossifer!
Japanese: wtf are you talking about?
Finnish: No, seriously, what are they talking about?
Chinese too
I’m still learning but what about wa (わ)? It’s used to signify the subject of a sentence I think.
I thought that’s the is/am/are (I forgot the term for these)
Wa just signifies the subject (The translation would be “as for …”)
The word you’re looking for is “copula”, and it’s actually 「です」(desu)
or だ or some other ones, but yes.
It’s actually 「は」, and… kind of. It marks the topic, which is sort of the thing the conversation is generally about, which typically is the subject of each sentence, but not necessarily. It’s kinda hard to explain it well since it doesn’t really map cleanly onto any grammatical feature in english.
Well the “ha” (は) pronounced “wa” is basically like a pointer to the word before it. Like smb. comments “THIS” after it.
The “wa” (わ) character on the other hand is used as a letter in a word. It won’t usually stand alone in a sentence (which is a bit weird since the japanese usually don’t use spaces so you just have to guess/know)
The は is also used in words so have fun knowing when it is a particle and when not.
I am just a beginner on japanese.
Yeah, don’t confuse people if you don’t know anything about a language.
That’s like saying ‘I was so confused what an atre is, until I realized it’s not the atre but theatre!’
は and が are something you can call ‘subject markers’, just like を is an object marker. They come after words to describe their position in a sentence. The same way you have Kasus/Fälle in German.
Slavic languages: whats an article?
Latin: Quæ?
Alright, are you calling English sane?
There are parts of English that are simple and there are parts that are complex. Same as any language! The cool thing about linguistics is learning about the neat features of some languages. For example, Chinese doesn’t use articles!
Neither does Russian, Ukrainian, and I’m guessing, many other Slav languages.
Are articels useful at all?
What’s the advantage of having a female /male table?
Gendered articles probably not but having “a” vs “the” removes the need for additional cases (eg. I/me/my). Latin and Russian don’t have articles but they have more cases which have different suffixes that have to be applied to all nouns. Usually simplifying one part of language makes another part more complex. English has a very simple case structure but the word order is much more strict
Gendered articles, like all things relating to grammatical gender, can be useful to reduce ambiguity and therefore increase information density/redundancy. They’re basically the Roman languages’ way of retaining the usefulness of Latin cases without actual grammatical cases.
“Ami” and “amie” are homophones in French (with some accents you might see /ami/ vs /ami:/, but in casual speech you’d likely miss it anyway). However “un ami” is different from “une amie”.
So in French you’d say “hier je suis sorti avec une amie” which, to convey the same level of detail in English, requires a translation like “yesterday I went out with a female friend”.
That’s very reasonable. We need gender articles for humans. why for things?
Because sometimes the same word can mean different things.
German has „Der See“ and „die See“ (the lake and the sea) Or even more extreme: „Band“ can describe a music group, a book or a tape.
You just reduce the need for context
“Die See” is only an exception. It’s origins are in the Platt languages bordering belgium and the netherlands iirc.
Don’t we talk about the usefulness of gender articles? There are some outliers. Adding gender articles increases the vocabularies by a factor of two but at what cost and what’s the real advantage? You can simply invent a new word for one of the “Bands” to reduce ambiguity in order to decrease the complexity of the language. I think you can compare it to irregular verbs. Those are just there for historic reasons, they don’t really serve a real purpose. Du/Sie is another example. It may be useful in some cases to maintain distance. Moreover we should get rid of the corner case “royal we” asap! Etc. The sooner we start the better.
I remember a study that gendered articles slightly increase understandibility among native speakers.
they can create tablets
I’m still smiling at this.
If the teacup fits.
sure, how complex is: their, there, they’re. sure, they sound the same but there is no reason they’re difficult to use in their intended purpose.
English grammar is alright as far as languages are concerned. There is some bs but nothing exceptional.
Pronounciation in the English language on the other hand is absolute insanity. If there are any rules besides grouped up exceptions then let me know.
And reusing the same word to mean a plethora of completely unrelated things lol.
EG:
Jam = a fruit preserve, to play music, stopped traffic, a door that’s held open, to cram something into something else
Set = a collection of something, to change an option on a device, when something gelatinous becomes more solid, when the sun goes down, a stage or movie background, a list of songs at a concert, to put something down, and about 50 other things
Run = to move quickly, to enter a contest (ie run for President), to have something turned on (is that computer running, running a tap), to be a certain length (this films run time is 90 minutes), to be behind (this bus is running late), to be in charge of something (I’m running this place), a hand in poker, to be liquid (this egg is runny), a tear in a pair of tights
The real kicker is phrasal verbs. You can have alright conversational English without needing most of these “advanced” grammatical features, which is a big part of why English has a reputation of being easier to learn in school than other European languages like German or Dutch.
It’s when you’re faced with a vocabulary list like “get up”, “get on”/“get off”, “get in”/“get out”, “get through”, “get on”/“get along”, “get by”, “get across”, “get away with”, “get back”, and a myriad of other which in your native language each get a dedicated verb that you realize that English is not simpler, the complexity is just further up the road.
Also fun fact, if your native language is French, you can cheat and never use most of those, while accidentally using a much more formal/elevated register, because English has a habit of stealing French words when it wants to sound fancy.
“Get in” = enter (entrer), “Get through” = traverse (traverser), “Get by” = survive (survivre), “get across” ~ communicate (communiquer), “get back” = return (retourner).This is not unique to English.
German also does this. I think a good 20% of all verbs are just variations of “ziehen” (to pull).
Umziehen - to change clothes, to move to a new home
aufziehen - to tease or ridicule someone, to wind up a clockwork, to raise kids
abziehen - to leave, to scam someone, to pull something off something else
herziehen - to gossip about someone
Anziehen - to attract something, to put on clothes
Yeah there are some of these for ziehen. You might be on to something. But for many generic verbs there are many variants with vastly different meanings. Like Machen - to make, or tun - to do, gehen - to go.
A lot of the problem is that we use Middle English spellings for a lot of words, but the pronunciation continued to change after the spellings were standardized.
I wonder how much of that is due to french and how much from german/saxon dialects. French love mute consonants and wildly different vowel sounds.
It’s all of the above and then some. A good read on the subject is John McWhorter’s “Our Magnificent Bastard Tongue.” It’s intended for a non-technical/popular audience and doesn’t get too deep into the weeds so you don’t need a degree in linguistics to follow it.
If there are any rules
As far as I know the only rule is, that I (German) pronounce it always wrong.
I have the same rule for Gaelic.
I guess you haven’t seen polish then.
Oh I have, it’s not sane either.
Its the language equivalent to a brick…
I love it
Oh, trust me, we are 😭
Finnish has no articles
Neither do any of Slavic languages except Bulgarian they are special
I was being a bit facetious since what Finnish does have is cases, and tons and tons of them
I would imagine trying to memorise the dozens of ways every noun can be modified would be a fucking nightmare for a non native speaker
Nor Estonian or Icelandic ha
Are we forgetting he, she they, they’re, their… ?
These are only definite articles, not pronouns.
this, that
French had a golden oportunity for changing this during french revolution. A unecessary complex language is not reasonable
Just remember they decided to count by multiplying 20
Oiseau, quoique, aujourd’hui: try guessing the correct pronunciation of these words
Wasoh, kwak, a jour-d-oui? Writing pronunciation is difficult
wazo, kwa-keu, o-jour-dwi (alternatively doui is correct if you meant the french pronunciation of oui.)
alternatively doui is correct if you meant the french pronunciation of oui.
Yeah I did, I think I did pretty well there. I guess those 3 years of french in school actually did something
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Then you will like the fact that Old English grammar was as complicated as German grammar but it got stripped down for various historical reasons.
Hindi has no articles ! 😅
Does Russian? I feel like it does the same thing through genetive cases tho
“The” but sometimes it’s pronounced “thee” just for fun ir vowels or whatever.
The ol mnemonic my German professor taught me about remembering the German articles:
Rese
Nese
Merman
Sister SisterI took several years of German in highschool and in college and this doesn’t make any sense to me. Explain please?
Last letter of definite article endings deR diE daS diE etc.
Not op but I have a hunch,
The mnemonic is to remember the differences,
DeR - Rese
deN - Nese
DeM deM - MerMan
deS deS - Sister Sister.
If you look at the image, you get, for example:
deR diE daS diE
The third and fourth like don’t match up as nicely, but I think it’s specifically the endings for each
It’s a way to remember the case endings.
