Language Fun

[rimly]

i dont speak any other languages but something ive noticed about english, you can basically tell how fancy a word is by whether it sounds german or french

like everyday basic words are germanic. house, dog, eat, drink, help. but then formal fancy versions are french, like residence, canine, consume, assistance

this goes back to the norman conquest in 1066 when french-speaking elites took over england. so for like 300 years you had common people speaking anglo-saxon and the ruling class speaking french. and you can still see it in the language now. the people raising livestock used germanic words (cow, pig, sheep) but when rich people were eating the meat it became french (beef, pork, mutton)

same thing happens with like "buy" vs "purchase" or "start" vs "commence", the germanic word is the normal one and the french word sounds fancier or more official

i think about this way too much probably but its kind of wild that you can trace class divisions from a thousand years ago just by listening to which synonym someone picks

 

[Goolix]

i dont speak any other languages but something ive noticed about english, you can basically tell how fancy a word is by whether it sounds german or french

like everyday basic words are germanic. house, dog, eat, drink, help. but then formal fancy versions are french, like residence, canine, consume, assistance

this goes back to the norman conquest in 1066 when french-speaking elites took over england. so for like 300 years you had common people speaking anglo-saxon and the ruling class speaking french. and you can still see it in the language now. the people raising livestock used germanic words (cow, pig, sheep) but when rich people were eating the meat it became french (beef, pork, mutton)

same thing happens with like "buy" vs "purchase" or "start" vs "commence", the germanic word is the normal one and the french word sounds fancier or more official

i think about this way too much probably but its kind of wild that you can trace class divisions from a thousand years ago just by listening to which synonym someone picks

Something similar happens in Japanese! Words of Chinese origin are considered to be more elevated than native Japanese words because they were borrowed hundreds of years ago when China was the source of literacy and culture.

 

[rimly]

Something similar happens in Japanese! Words of Chinese origin are considered to be more elevated than native Japanese words because they were borrowed hundreds of years ago when China was the source of literacy and culture.

ohh! thats so cool! i had no idea about that, i wonder if you can go back through a bunch of different languages and basically be able to tell who they were most in contact with based on their language commonalities. also, considering nowadays how everything is all connected, i wonder if we're going to see more linguistic drift in english too

 

[Dragonfree]

I speak native Icelandic, fluent English as a second language, and studied Danish for five years, German for three, and Japanese for one (in the Icelandic school system, English and Danish are standard, and you can choose between French, German and Spanish as a third language; the Japanese was an elective). Knowing Icelandic makes written Faroese more or less comprehensible (it reads sort of like Icelandic written by an extremely eccentric drunk guy who's forgotten a lot of words and just makes up new compounds to replace them on the fly), and knowing Icelandic and Danish makes the other Scandinavian languages (Swedish and Norwegian) also about 90% as understandable as Danish in writing (less so when spoken).

Iceland is small and Icelandic is only spoken by some 400,000 people in the world, so the market is very small and there's a dearth of good translators, unfortunately. Especially with kids' media I've frequently noticed a kind of half-assedness to the Icelandic version. In the third Harry Potter book, when we learn about Animagi early in the book it uses one word, and then during the big reveal at the climax where Ron says "He's an Animagus!", it used an entirely different word and I didn't understand what he was saying. Meanwhile, Icelandic kids love Disney comics, but while the really prominent characters are consistent, less frequently-seen characters have repeatedly gotten randomly renamed because the translators clearly don't keep notes. The Icelandic dub of Frozen, the Disney movie, managed to translate the lyrics of the songs in such a cringeworthy way that when they put on the musical they just threw out the movie's lyrics and retranslated the whole thing.

The thing about loanwords from certain languages sounding fancier is kind of fun. Iceland was under Danish rule for a long time, and in like the eighteenth century, the ruling class was Danish and anyone educated would have studied in Denmark, and if you read historical documents from the courts and such at the time, the language of the elites is peppered with Danish loanwords that were just fancy and sophisticated at the time. But the eventual Icelandic independence movement was really successful at making the Icelandic language a point of patriotic pride and pushing for the language of the commoners as the true, proper Icelandic, and today that kind of Icelandic riddled with Danish just sounds ridiculous - nobody would ever talk that way and your average Icelander can barely even understand those sorts of texts, whereas we can do pretty well with texts written in the thirteenth century.

Today, people are more worried about English - a lot of people are reading and consuming English more than Icelandic in their day-to-day life, and there's beginning to be a bit of an underclass of foreigners who don't speak Icelandic working a lot of service jobs and so on, while Icelanders tend to just switch to English if anyone foreign is present which doesn't make it super easy for them to learn the language.

 

[Starlight Aurate]

I'm only fluent in English, but I can hold basic conversations in German and Mandarin Chinese as well. I've lost a LOT of Chinese; I use to read it fairly decently and could get around China all right, but now I just have the basics of speaking/listening; I constantly have to look up characters when I want to write something down.

Oddly enough, my workplace is packed to the gills with native French speakers, so I've been wondering if I should try learning that....

and even if there are people out there who still moan, bitch and whine about the existence of the singular "they" in English despite the fact that it has been in use before the singular "you" first became a thing – and you certainly don't see them lamenting the loss of "thou" and fiercely advocating that "you" should be reserved for plural use only.

Wait, was the "thou" vs. "you" about singular vs. plural forms? I had always thought it was informal vs. formal--that "thou" was informal and "you" was formal, and only "you" has stayed.

 

[Goolix]

ohh! thats so cool! i had no idea about that, i wonder if you can go back through a bunch of different languages and basically be able to tell who they were most in contact with based on their language commonalities. also, considering nowadays how everything is all connected, i wonder if we're going to see more linguistic drift in english too

Absolutely, language contact is a really big field in linguistics! For example, Hindi and Tamil are not related to each other at all, but both have retroflex consonants as a result of the two languages being near each other.

Wait, was the "thou" vs. "you" about singular vs. plural forms? I had always thought it was informal vs. formal--that "thou" was informal and "you" was formal, and only "you" has stayed.

Thou was singular and you was plural. In many European languages, the plural second person acquired a secondary meaning of formality. This is called the T-V distinction, and exists in French, Russian, German. Some languages used to have it but don’t anymore - I think in Swedish it is considered old fashioned to use “ni” (second person plural) as a formal pronoun. English lost this distinction as well, but because “thou” fell out of favor.

 

[canisaries]

There are a lot of Swedish loanwords in Finnish due to the long shared history of the two countries, but I think some of the Swedish-sounding ones are more broadly Germanic. I remember being told this was due to commerce coming from the south, but I couldn't fact-check this properly. There are also some Russian loans, though these are more prevalent in Eastern dialects for reasons that become obvious with a map.

Thou was singular and you was plural. In many European languages, the plural second person acquired a secondary meaning of formality. This is called the T-V distinction, and exists in French, Russian, German. Some languages used to have it but don’t anymore - I think in Swedish it is considered old fashioned to use “ni” (second person plural) as a formal pronoun. English lost this distinction as well, but because “thou” fell out of favor.

Finnish also has this, and I think it's being considered pretty old-fashioned. Since the older folk still lived during that time, though, it's considered polite to use "te" (plural "you") instead of "sinä" or probably more realistically the casual "sä"/"sää"/"sie". "Sinä" is considered "written Finnish" instead of "spoken Finnish" like the other ones. Which casual pronoun is chosen depends on the dialect.

Regarding Finnish pronouns, though, there's something else that's interesting. Some may know that Finnish doesn't have gendered pronouns (he/she, or gendered plurals that I think Romance languages have), instead having one gender-neutral word "hän". However, this is actually usually not the one used in modern casual speech, at least nowhere I've been. Instead, the word "se" is used, formally meaning "it" but having no demeaning connotation in casual speech. (I recall being told that the word was originally used to refer to people as well in ancient Finnish, but again, couldn't fact-check this properly. English-speakers have it good when it comes to information online about their language!)

However, since "hän" is more "proper" Finnish, it's still used in contexts where you need to have an air of respect - when referring to people notably older than you, when referring to people at work in presence of higher-ups, when giving eulogies, and kind of surpisingly, when referring to a baby. I asked my dad and he said that it's horribly impolite to refer to someone's baby as "se". Even your own, apparently! And having this conversation also revealed to me that apparently my dad still refers to me as "hän" when he speaks of me in third person, or so he claims. Apparently because I'm still his baby. I'm 27, by the way.

You can also humorously refer to an animal with "hän". I remember some instances of this happening with our late dog. It's funny, too, because in the partitive case (used when the entity the pronoun refers to is subject to an action that is or was ongoing), "hän" becomes "häntä", which also means "tail". Cute!

I may have mentioned this on the Discord, but I'll reiterate: the lack of gendered pronouns in Finnish causes some clunkiness in some translations. When an English-language mystery solving show has a character refer to another character with "he" or "she" and the gender information is important, the Finnish subs need to say "that man" or "that woman" when I doubt anyone would really mention if they're a man or a woman in that scenario. I have also heard that in translating James Joyce's Ulysses, the gendered information was so important that a new pronoun ("hen") had to be invented just for that book to refer to women.

 

[Venia Silente]

For those of you who speak multiple languages, what's something you wish English had that's in your language?

• Exclusionary "we" aka "we-but-not-you" (our indigenous languages here have it, although not Español itself). It's great for dissing and social sorting.
• A time tense or some other form of grammatical indicator for "now but not now now" aka "now-ish", "near now". Mexican Español and some other derived languages diminutivize adverbial components for that, eg.: "ahora" (now) → "ahorita" (now-ette, now-ish, whatever); it's quite useful for colloqualisms and for distinguishing whether a statement is imperative or subjunctive. I'm sure English can come up with some nifty trick for this one.
• I'm actually not sure if English has this one already, but pronouns or conjugations for collective reflexivity, eg.: "regalársenos" = "regalar" (to gift) + "se" (reflexive + 3rd person plural) + "nos" (ourselves, to us) more or less meaning "a third person group giving a gift to each of the us of a group" (rather than to us as a collective). Yes, Español is hard mode :p

Or if you prefer in reverse, what's something you wish your language had that it does not?

Facking regular numeral formation please, is it THAT hard??? Then again I hear most if not all languages struggle wit that one. Like, in Español our ordinals have irregular forms and different suffixes or affixes depending on number and group ("uno" → "prim·ero", "dos" → "segu·ndo", 133 → "centé·simo trigé·simo terc·ero") instead of something simple like what it could be if English had, let's say, "one" → "onest", "two" → "twost", "three" → "threest" etc. Ditto for fractions (DEAR ARCEUS FRACTIONS)

I really wish English had a simple verb 'to be able to.' In Spanish we have poder, in Russian moch', and Japanese has dekiru and verb forms like 'areru'. But in English, we have the clunky 'to be able to.' Like, compare this:

"Podré." "I will be able to."

It's so inelegant!

Really agree. I think in this regard I'd totally understand if English just up and steals the Español or Russian infinitive to adjust things, to be honest.