16 Things The English Language Can't Do
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- Опубликовано: 1 июн 2024
- 🚫🇬🇧 Think English has it all? Think again! There are a lot of things that English just can't do. I took a close look at the English language to find out just what English can't do. Here are 16 cool features missing from the English language.
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🙈 CORRECTIONS:
"Cantará" (He/She/It will sing) should be "Cantaré" (I will sing)
⏱ TIMESTAMPS:
0:00 - English Has Holes
0:18 - #1: Missing Words
1:30 - #2: Clusivity
2:22 - #3: Tone + Pitch Accent
4:08 - #4: Reduplication
5:28 - #5: Echo Responses
6:40 - #6: Polite "You"
7:45 - #7: Question Particles
8:35 - #8: Copula vs. Locative "Be"
9:31 - #9: Null Subjects
10:34 - #10: Evidentials
11:37 - #11: Time-Independence
12:32 - #12: Hyper-Specific Tenses
12:50 - #13: Absolute Directions
13:38 - #14: Synthetic Future Tense
14:37 - #15: Distributive Numbers
15:23 - #16: Whistled Words
📜 SOURCES & ATTRIBUTIONS:
Thai Lesson 1 - How to say Hello
• Thai Lesson 1 - How to...
Why you can't hear Japanese pitch accent by @mattvsjapan
• Why you can't hear Jap...
Kids are the Worst Liars
• Kids are the Worst Liars
Evidentiality in Grammar
www.jcu.edu.au/__data/assets/...
Whistled language of the island of La Gomera (Canary Islands), the Silbo Gomero
• Whistled language of t...
These Greek Villagers Whistle to Chat
• These Greek Villagers ...
Even the things English CAN do can be ridiculously hard 👉🏼 ruclips.net/video/DrlX-L4o2KM/видео.html
13:53 Cantará significa ‘she/he/it will sing’.
In German you can answer negative-Yes/No-question with "Doch" . "You wouldn't want to take the bust?" "Doch" = "Yes, I do want to take the bus."
It also works to counter negative statements.
"The world doesn't circulate around the sun." "Doch" = "Yes it does circulate around the sun."
great job! that looks like it took a lot of research. in 13:50 cantará means he or she will sing. for the first person singular the word is cantaré
There's not a thing you can't communicate in English. Indeed we don't have a word for "I will go to school now", but we don't need a word to communicate this. If you want to find stupid things about the English language you may look at stupid things like sexes. There's no sensible reason to have "he", "she", "him", or "her". What sex a person has is completely irrelevant when speaking about a person. Many languages bend words backward to describe relationships between subject, object, and time, despite the fact the meaning follows from the words themselves. Thus, learning to write correctly takes a lot longer. If a language takes more than half an hour to learn it's evidence of how stupid people are who made it. Language has only one sensible meaning - to make oneself understood, yet all known languages are constructed like it was motivated to exclude people. Languages, as they are made, contradict their only sensible meaning.
@@RUclips_Stole_My_Handle_Too You really should go home, languages aren't for you
I like the Icelandic word "gluggaveður" (window weather). It means the weather looks nice when we are inside the house, but not when we are outside!
had some gluggaveður today!
While not widely used, some of us Norwegians use "innevær" - "indoor weather"
Thank you for sharing. In English we always just have to say „it’s beautiful out there, so long as we don’t have to go anywhere“
wow this is a genius word! window weather is so common in New Zealand lol
I really like that 🙂
That's the way I feel about snow.
I wish we had a word like that in English.
About the yes/no answers to negative questions: if I remember correctly, German has a solution to the ambiguity too. The answers to a negative question in German are doch (yes) and nein (no), as opposed to the usual ja (yes) and nein (no). So if someone asks you "Have you not found that book?" and you answer with doch, it means "yes, I have found it", zero ambiguity. Doch is a specific word to answer "yes" to negative questions.
You remembered correctly. 😊 French has this too (si and non), as well as Dutch (jawel and nee).
"Doch" is a way to unambiguously answer "No" to the negation in a negatively asked question. Wahrscheinlich sind Sie keine Deutsche.
Swedish has this too.
"Ja" = Yes and "Nej" = No, under normal circumstances; but if you ask "Hittade du aldrig boken?" ('Did you never find the book?'), then you have to reply with "Jo" (= Yes, in response to a question with negation).
"Jo, jag hittade den!".
@@alwaysuseless I think you're saying the same thing, actually.
@@micheltenvoorde I am saying the opposite. The original post equates Doch with Yes, but, *in Standard English,* Yes to a negative question confirms the negation. Doch disagrees with the negative formulation. What Yes or No means in colloquial English depends on what the people in the exchange agree on, if they agree.
This video can primarily be summarised as: "Sometimes we need multiple words to say the same thing as another language's single word, tone or pitch"
That was really interesting, but most of these weren't things "English can't do" but rather things that English does differently than other languages
Would also say that they're also things that English doesn't need either as the English language is fairly blunt and to the point of both their words/sentences meanings even if it does take more words. On the other hand other languages are far more vague or more easy to mess up words, especially when Pitch and tone become a factor that completely changes a words meaning...I mean ya English has a few words that sound exactly the same but have different meanings based off either the spelling (when writing it down) or by the context of the sentence itself, take Blue and Blew for example:
-Blue is the color blue and we know it's regarding the color when we write it down due to the spelling however when saying it aloud we know what the meaning is in a sentence when you consider how it's being used, primarily as a noun or an adjective to another noun to describe color.
-Blew is a verb that is generally the past tense of blow and like Blue you know it's meaning in writing based off the spelling while speaking you once again gotta consider the context of the sentence to know which of the two words (Blue/Blew) is being used. In this case a sentence where blew is used as a noun and is talking about blowing on hot fuel or some sort of demolitionist caused an explosion in the past would be a situation blew is used.
So imo the reason English doesn't do any of these 16 (and god knows how many others) things has more to do with a difference in train of thought more so than that it can't be done...granted trying to force this stuff into English now imo would also just overly complicate things and make the language harder to learn by non speakers/children learning their first language. Biggest issue would be with words that change based off tone and sound due to the fact trying to say them after years/decades of speaking English can be quite difficult as your voice/tongue isn't used to some of the ways you make such sounds/tones (rolling Rs in Italian come to mind from my Italian (college) and Spanish (Highschool) classes lol).
Hell even the whole politeness aspect covered in this video does exist, just not to the extent other languages go for as we usually limit it to words like: Mister or Miss/Misses when talking to an someone you don't know well, are in a public/more formal setting, are a student talking to a teacher (this aspect can also use Professor, Instructor, or even Doctor if said teacher has a Doctorate...generally though Mr, Mrs, or Ms is the ones the teachers generally ask students to use though) and of course Doctor can also be used by anyone with a Doctorate even by non students, with that said MD is generally reserved solely for Medical Doctors that have scholarships in Medicine/Health related fields and other Doctors can not use said term for themselves as they have no knowledge in the field. Then as far as family go you got pretty much all the usual ones like Mom, Dad, grandmother (grandma), grandfather (grandpop), Aunt, and Uncle while family members of the same generation (siblings and students) generally just call each other by name in English (well US English at least) as we're more informal in that regard (we don't add things like first name followed by Nii/Nee/etc like Japan does for example...closest we get to it is just saying this is my older/younger brother/sister named ____ to someone when introducing them for the first time and that's the last time the term is generally used as the relationship between us is understood at that point...and at least in the US the older/younger siblings don't really follow any hierarchy anymore so it's more just to indicate their age and nothing more).
Also going to throw in that while there are many words that may be to describe a feeling/event that happens in just 1 word for another language said words are fairly long half the time and can be both written down and said faster in English as while English may use many words in a sentence many of the words are also fairly short 3 to 8 letter words max and only need 3 to 5 words for an entire sentence half the time as the bare minimum you need for a sentence in English is a noun (that does the action, and like in other languages sometimes the noun doesn't need to be written either as it's understood based off context of previous sentences/statements when talking/writing), verb, and object (example: Marty brings books. 2nd example when talking to someone): Bringing books. (person points at Marty in said scenario while talking to someone else...granted kinda rude/very informal and most people would just use Marty or He in such a scenario...could also refer to We if the speaker was holding books as well. In the end though it's simpler/more direct to just use the extra few words to avoid any confusion though (for example rather than the previous two sentences I'd probably go with: "Marty is bringing books over." instead tbh)).
And yes...if you were curious after how much detail i went into the subject I am an English major which would more or less be the main reason I'd write so much about it (Bachelors only though...saw no real point to go further tbh as the degree i got didn't really do anything I wanted from it (help enhance my writing even further...rather than actual grammar/editorial courses most classes were the same 'read and review' style course which, imo, is a waste of time to teach the major or at least it's a waste if all but 1 or 2 classes were focused on that style of teaching (my degree at my school only had the initial Eng 101/125 (think it was 125, could be wrong...was a number like it though) and then 2 400 level English courses that focused on the editorial process (caveat with the English program being you can only take 1 of them though, which was dumb imo)). While many people may laugh at such a degree (though ya i do agree with what the focus on read and review style classes and one Critical theory in writing class, which basically came down to the same thing, the degree didn't help me much at all outside of giving me a useless piece of paper to flap around on my resume tbh) i do think, if it was handled right (a focus on all classes being on enhancing your writing/skills and knowledge in writing/hell remembering shit you forgot as you do it by nature half the time) it would be a worthwhile degree to have as a good understanding of the English language is just as important as degrees like Math, Medicine, etc as it'd allow you to more easily put into words what you want to describe and be able to understand things from even subjects you've never studies just by having a solid enough grip on the language to understand a words meaning by the context of the sentence/paragraph as a whole (someone good enough in English will likely be able to pick up and describe any medical or physics vocab fairly easily and then from there be able to write a good manual for jobs in said industry or edit a Mathematician/Physicist's writings to be more easily understood by the masses). Throw in the fact it also makes it easier to pick up on inconsistencies in writings/statements and it could be a good degree to go along with degrees in fields like Law and Order/Criminal Investigation focused fields as it'd be easier to pick up on lies/misstatements...granted you don't particularly need a document for either of those imo, just a solid grip on the language (which will mainly come down to: did your initial teachers teach you well and did your later teachers make sure you had a solid foundation or not...from what I've seen of many people out there this is a field that teachers have failed many students in though as I'd rate most people's English comprehension ability to be around a 5/10 in most cases (from people i met or have seen talk on TV/comment boards/etc)...hell even I would probably place myself no higher than a 8/10, maybe 9, cause i have never got over my issue of runoff sentences...as easily seen by my wall of text above lol...probably not using parenthesis as well as I should be either as I generally add more of them inside parenthesis as different as different yet slightly related thoughts pop up).
In the end I'd say English is a language that decided to simplify the actual vocabulary down to a few choice set of words/tenses as possible and then separate words/pronouns/etc into separate words in a sentence to make the meaning far more direct and blunt than other languages...after all the context is completely different if you say "Let's play with a ball." compared to saying "Let's play with that ball" as the first sentence indicates any ball can be played with while the second indicates a specific ball only would be played with. Hell a master of a language could even twist a phrase completely from it's intentional message in multiple ways.
Exactly right.
Or, perhaps the video should be retitled: “Things English Can’t Do… Which I Will Now Give Examples of Doing Them in English.”
(Executive summary: “Anything any language can say, all languages can say.”)
Yes, exactly. But these kinds of simplistic statements get more attention.
@@guizot2010 : And so we’ve determined one more thing that can be done in English: Clickbait. ;-)
exactly. Most of these we do daily where i live in the US.
8:07 I would say there's a semantic difference between "Does Ellie have dark hair?" and "Ellie has dark hair?" The first means you don't know (and had no expectation of) the answer before and are simply looking for information. The second means that for some reason you expected that Ellie didn't have dark hair, are surprised to learn that she does, and are looking for confirmation. It's usually a rhetorical question just to express your surprise.
Alternatively, a sentence tag like “…, hey?” or “…, yeah?” or the stereotypical Canadian “eh?” can turn statements into questions, if only to invite response or start conversation.
It's interesting, In English you could say for example "Ellie has dark hair?", "Does Ellie have dark hair?" "Ellie doesn't have dark hair?" and "Doesn't Ellie have dark hair?", Which are all effectively asking the same question: Whether Ellie has dark hair or not, But which each have different implications from eachother.
Even changing the tone, for the words dark hair to go upwards significantly will imply a question.
Just add an affirmative or negative question. "Ellie has dark hair, yes?" "Ellie has dark hair, no?"
Or maybe "Ellie doesn't have dark hair, right?"
@@rateeightx something my choir teacher in high school explained was how different emphases in a sentence also changes the implications.
HOW did he do that
How did HE that
and
How did he do THAT
All imply something slightly different. There’s probably a better sentence for this example, but some sentences can have upwards to a dozen different meanings depending on how you emphasize words. I think most people know this, but it’s fun to think about
English actually has a formal 'you'. The word 'you' itself is the formal word and also the plural form. The singular and casual way of saying 'you' in English is 'thou'. Although the usage of the word somehow died in English and now we only use 'you'.
US Southern English has a plural ‘you’ as well, although it can be ambiguous as well: ‘y’all’.
Which is why you can seem rude to Non-natives Cuz it can be used to sound rude. And it never seems obvious that it's plural to begin with, so it feels simpler. I don't know, it's just me. If anything, "you" sounds casual to me. I can never make my head associate it with formality when most of the language barely has any.
@@khutchinsoncpa1 What are the word conjugation thingies called by the way? The ones where words can have different forms of the same word to express tenses and context?
@@khutchinsoncpa1 Other Englishes use 'youse' and I don't really buy into the whole what is and isn't good or correct English.
what about thy? i know is really old and not used anymore but isnt it a formal way of you?
As Ukrainian and Russian speaker I can say that there're things which have better and shorter explanation in English. Language really depends on cultural and historical aspects. There're lots of things you don't have a direct translation for
English uses tone for meaning a lot. We commonly use tone to change 'yes' into meaning 'no'. Ironic, eh?
I notice that the English instructions in a multi-language manual for some product are almost always by far the shortest.
That could be because English is one of the most information dense languages per syllable. It's also one of the slowest spoken languages, but that doesn't matter in text. If you can fit more information per word then englisg could be crammed into the first couple pages of the book and have room for the rest.
French and Spanish are excellent examples on the other end of the spectrum, many more syllables but spoken much faster.
Good rule of thumb is that French takes a third longer and German half as much again to express things when compared to English.
The other notable thing about English is the enormous number and variety of loanwords. A good example is the emotional expression vocabulary referred to at the start of the video. If English needs the word it simply appropriates it. A good example of precisely that is schadenfreude.
I don't know if English is unusual in this regard but I get the impression it is. A possible explanation is the convoluted basic structure of English: a Germanic starting point with a large amount of French, Latin and Greek shoehorned in there. With that origin and structure what's so hard about inserting a little Malay or Japanese or Russian or Maori vocabulary into there?
Good to hear from you. I would consider what you’re describing intonation rather than tone (in the “tonal language” sense). In that respect, every language uses intonation, tone of voice, even a half-raised eyebrow to varying degrees to convey nuance.
@@storylearning intonation is just another word for pitch and tone so I don’t understand how they are similar words but don’t reach same understanding.
@@davidpnewton to my Russian-speaking ass's absolute surprise, apparently they already did that! I learned recently that in Britain, "bolshy" is an insult. ..."Bolshy," like "bolshevik"--
7:32 the thing about the polite 'you' is that the whole point of the English shift is that we shifted from addressing only certain people with the polite 'you' to addressing everybody with the polite 'you'. So you are being courteous by saying 'you' regardless of who you say it to. It's the opposite of rudeness. The shift was to being polite to everybody. If you really want to still address your girlfriend as "thou" I'm sure she would find it a little odd but flattering that you seek to be so personal with her. That's why the personal 'thou/thee' in English lingered longer in religious language. It graduated from being the way you address every person you're close to, to only the way you address God, the one you are closest to of all.
The end of "polite you" or "rude you" just means that we English speakers are chill and don't give two f&*ks about formalities. We say what we mean or want without the bs of things like "politeness" or "honorifics". If you need to talk to someone else, just say "you" and be done and get the problem solved.
Maybe these overly reserved, understatement addicted Brits might like a "polite" you. But in America, such a thing would be useless, either because it stops you from getting to the point, or because it's an isolater that marks you as unfriendly.
The only thing English did wrong was get rid of the plural form, but a little of "y'all" more than fixes that problem.
There's a somewhat famous rant by a man named Thomas Elwood about how much he hated the thou-you shift.
Though it should be noted, it was more a matter of thou being a single person, and you being talking to a group. And it's quite a trip how deeply it seems to have offended him (granted, exaggerating for effect is a thing)
I agree with most of this, but the last statement strikes me as utterly implausible if you mean it to be taken literally. The familiar pronoun maintained currency in religious contexts because the King James Bible of the early 17th century retained currency, long after its language was rendered archaic. It enjoyed a largely unchallenged run as the definitive version of the English-language Bible from the 17th century through to at least the mid-20th, and is surely still the single most popular rendition. Thus its (by all accounts utterly delightful) phrasing is still considered "definitive", complete with its thees, thous and verb conjugation.
@@Sammie_Sorrelly I'm not sure I follow your reasoning. The KJV was superseded by other translations already by the mid 1800s, with the Darby Bible, Webster's Revision, the Revised version, and the American Standard Version etc etc and well over a dozen new catholic translations. All of which maintained the use of the personal "thee/thou" in spite it long having fallen out of use in everyday speech. It would put way too much emphasis on the KJV to say that it is responsible single-handedly for the personal-thou being retained in religious contexts. The personal-thou was retained in religious contexts whether a church or denomination was using the KJV or not.
@@bethyngalw The KJV was and still is regarded very highly as a poetic literary artifact.
The German word "umfahren" can mean "to drive around" or "to run over", depending on whether you stress "fah" or "um".
literally translated to Dutch this is 'omrijden'. You can say that for running someone over, but we more say 'omver rijden'. But 'omrijden' is still used. 'omrijden' is used a lot to say "drive around" when your normal route was blocked and you have to take another street so you have to drive more kilometers. (literally drive around it). I don't know if all of above I said is actually correct, but that's just how it's used here.
I really love this one as well:
Der gefangene Floh. (the trapped flee)
Der Gefangene floh. (the prisoner fled)
@@hitokage904 Though you don't really stress them differently. 😀
@@hitokage904 and then there is:
Der Gefangene Floh. (the prisoner with the name Floh)
I've always explained the ser/estar difference as "identity vs. state" - it's similarly simple to "permanent vs. temporary" but covers more of the nuances
Interestingly (well, it's interesting to me, anyway) is that Spanish has a third verb for "to be" used for dummy-subject situations. The verb is haber and it's almost exclusively conjugated to third-person. It's used to ask, for example, is there more coffee (hay mas cafe?).
@@ajs11201 As a native Spanish speaker it was hard for me to understand _Spanish has a third form for "to be"_ , as "hay" comes from "haber" ("to have"), and I never though of "there is/are" as a third meaning for "to be". Interesting!
It is not true, though, that the verb "haber" is almost exclusively conjugated to third person, as it is the aux. verb for perfect tense forms, but that's a different, too long topic 😉
Edit: formatting.
@@ajs11201 if you’re going to say that then French has 2 forms of ‘to be’ as il ‘il y a’ from about.
Clear this isn’t a conjugated form of a verb as opposed to a set construct
That's a bit philosophic because even identity can change 🤔
@@1enaic
It's usually described as permanent vs temporary to simplify the concept to us native English speakers. Another mystifying use case for us English natives is the sentence "he is dead," which uses estar.... as if someone's death could be temporary.
No. English does *not* need all this additional complexity. I am not a native speaker, but I always admired how versatile yet relatively simple English language is. It is relatively easy to learn (the most difficult part of is probably the Tenses, but half of them are not really used that much in daily scenarios, and the other half of them you can learn over time). I especially love the straightforward way of creating new words in English - you just connect them, simple as that, nothing else required! You can't really do that in Russian, for example, which is actually my mother tongue, you have to add some other descriptive words to it, and it's kinda disappointing.
And about versatility - English is perfect for anything: Technical and scientific terms, programming, poetry, writing, daily matters, romance and even swearing! All of that in one single language!
Curious, do you find English to be a decent language medium for Russian translation?
As a modern Greek and classical Latin speaker I’ve always found English to be extremely versatile in terms of translation, but curious to how this notion may apply to Slavic languages.
@@bigbo1764 could you elaborate, please?
@@outcast4087 I’m looking to translates Crime and Punishment into Latin, but I don’t know Russian as of now. I know some good English translations of Crime in Punishment, but I’m curious as to how much of the original story would be lost after having been translated twice.
My question is effectively, do you find English able to capture most of the nuances of Russian, or does it struggle to convey a lot of concepts that Russian can convey?
@@bigbo1764 I'm not a linguist, so I can't say for sure. But I believe that, if the translation was done by a competent professional, who understands what they are translating, the result should be as close to the original as it could get.
@@bigbo1764 no, all RU-ENG translators suck . they only give you aproximal meanings , not less not more and the reason for it is that no one actually gives a f... about exact meanings of words . there are prolly some expensive apps but all the same these don't gurantee you anything
I am a 21 year old German native speaker, I lived most of my life in Germany and I don't think I have ever heard anyone use the word "Waldeinsamkeit".
i am not a native german speaker, but have lived there for 8 years and my german is pretty good. i have also never heard that word before, but the beauty of german is that you can pretty much make up new words by combining other words and people usually know what you mean. not what this video is about, but i think pretty much all german speakers would understand what that word means when they hear it.
I'm a 25-year-old native speaker of German, and I, too, have never encountered this word before
Swiss german, neither did I
@@lachlan00c depends. Yes we might have a guess what you wish to convey but it could lead to confusion...
It is an constructed word. In this analogy we must have in Dutch "Woudeenzaamheid". But I never encountered this word too
Omg how did you not talk about possessives?! Swedish has a reflexive and non-reflexive possessive. For example, "John and Jack were sitting together. John took his book and left." Whose book did John take? In Swedish you would be able to tell which version of his was used.
Slavic languages have this feature as well.
@@tomaszgarbino2774 Иван взял свою/его книгу.
On the other hand... you don't have to remember another word or conjugation for adjectives.
Honestly, I don't think it really matters that much if languages are high or low context. They all have the ability to be explicit if needed.
@@tams805 ?
You can specify this in English too, "John took _his own_ book...", It's simply not necessary, I suppose when it'd be implied by context.
Regarding #1
I am EXTREMELY skeptical when someone says that another language has a more expressive vocabulary on a subject than English. English's vocabulary is ridiculously diverse and massive. Sure, another language may have individual words we don't, but that goes both ways.
THIS.
That's true. And in my opinion less is better at times. I like the ambiguity of relationship status in English pronouns. Going around parading social and emotional status towards someone isn't really my style (My language is like this).
As diverse as it is, it still lack structure. My problems with it, is how hard it is to grasp grammar. I mostly write it like I’m writing in Spanish, but some professors don’t like when I use all the punctuations to mark the tone of what I want to say.
For me the grammar is just needlessly difficult, like the random prepositions @_@. Though simplicity and efficiency is quite a desirable trait in professional environments imo. It'd be nice if we could make an universal language which has English's simplicity with grammar and pronunciation of a simpler language for universal business procedures, then we can each keep our own mother tongue and play around 👅
@@cake6377 Esparanto was created for exactly the purpose you describe.
In fact, some of us think that number 6 is really a good feature of English. No hassles with all kinds of "you". Many Indian languages have 2 or sometimes more "you" words. English 'you' is simple, straightforward and is all that is necessary for all occasions. Very neat.
4:27, Fun fact: in vietnamese, duplicate the adjective will imply slightly lesser intensity of the word. For example: mặn = salty, mặn mặn = a bit salty, cao = tall, cao cao = I'm not sure but it's pretty tall.
13:49 Small correction. In Spanish "I will sing" is Cantaré
Cantará means he/she/it/you (formal) will sing
That’s what I thought and I was so confused
Is harsh to correct a poliglot, but yes you are correct...
@@fvazquez64 English sentences do not begin with verbs. Questions do. The subject goes first. It's harsh.
Does Olly claim to be fluent in Spanish?
@@OAlem thanks for the lesson..
I am native czech speaker and what I most missing in english is Emotionally Colored Words. E.g. Domek -> Domeček is Small house -> Little nice cozy house. Or Slunce -> Sluníčko aka Sun -> nice happy Sun. Really not happy with the translations, but ... that is the problem, I don't see the equivalent in english language.
No, using pitch to encode literal meaning has the effect that you can use pitch for fewer other things, like sarcasm or rhetorical questions. That's also why native speakers of pitch-based languages have a harder time to get our way of expressing deviations from literal to actual meaning.
Fun fact: in spoken colloquial Polish you can skip even the "czy" particle and as long as you keep the correct sentence intonation, that will be still a valid question :-) Some other languages do it as well.
I don't thinks it's only colloquial language. In fact, we barely use "czy" nowadays :) Also, the intonation is important when it comes to questions.
You can say formally:
"Spotka się z nim Pani później?" ("Miss, are you going to meet with him later?")
But without right intonation it will sound like:
"Spotka się z nim Pani później." ("You will meet him later, miss.")
Intonation here changes a lot!
This is interesting. But also I think Olly was grasping at straws a little with saying English doesn’t do this cause the exact same thing about intonation actually does apply. (At least it is the case in Scotland where I’m from, can’t speak for these English weirdos that forced their strange language on us hahahah)
Doesn't Spanish form questions this way too? Hence why Spanish questions start with ¿ -- so you know immediately that it's a question.
@@rosiefay7283 yes, and portuguese too
Same in czech
Example:
Marie má hnědé vlasy
Marie má hnědé vlasy?
A thing that English is really lacking in for me personally is diminuitives. As an Afrikaans person, it is much easier to mention the diminuitive of something than to try and do it in English. Russian is also really good and rich with this, whereas English has it for some words (doggie, kitty, etc.) but then becomes limited when you try and apply it to other words or names.
Cățeluș, pisicuță, ursuleț, mașinuța, căsuță, peștișor, iepuraș, crenguța, fetița,
that recently hit me about english when speaking to a brit about animal names
i told him that the names of some animals sound cute in romanian, and he said that may be my own opinion
i then tried to explain to him that the names for the animals are diminutives thanks to their word composition, but i couldn't think up many examples in english
I'm sorry English also have that but only for words with french origin like the word cigar which is the big one, while cigarette for the small one. Also kitchen and kitchenette.
@@justrandomthings709 English has historical diminutives, but they are no longer productive. Russian, for example, has multiple forms of the diminutive. So if you are a native speaker of such a language, you may miss something in English.
In Japanese you just shorten the word and slap -chan into it and you're good to go XD
That's from what I can tell.
In Italian the stressed syllable can change the meaning. For instance Prìncipi (1st syllable stressed) is "princes". Princìpi (2nd syllable stressed) is "principles". àncora is "anchor", while ancòra is "still". We also have closed and open vowels that we write the same but change the meaning. "Pèsca" (open E) is a peach, while "pésca" (closed E) is fishing.
5:18
Grammar is largely descriptive, so unless you're speaking in an explicitly formal setting, there's nothing wrong with using reduplication, because it can be a very helpful tool for conveying nuance
7:55
actually, English used to have the formal and informal You as well. Thee/thou, though completely obsolete nowadays are... wait for it... the INFORMAL version, whereas You was actually the FORMAL version.
Yep, and in fact reduplication for emphasis exists in formal English as Epizeuxis: "Why me? Why me? Why me?"
"That person is fake, fake, fake!" "Listen! Listen!" And some regional Englishes have informal "y'all"s and "youse".
Still, it’s not the same. You can use reduplication in English, but it doesn’t really have a meaning. You can use it in other languages to really change the meaning. In English you're just emphasizing it.
@@bowser1166
on the contrary, "like" and "LIKE like" means 2 different things.
Granted, it doesn't change the denotative meaning, but it can change the connotative meaning significantly, which is more than just emphasizing it
One MASSIVE thing missing from English is the ability to make a "mini" version of nouns. In Afrikaans adding "-tjie" (pronounced "kie") to any noun describes a small version of it. "man" (man) becomes "mannetjie" (little man). It is often used to spice up language (calling an equal "mannetjie" is essentially an insult), and also romanticizes words, or makes them more personal: Think "granny", "sweetie", "cutie". It's a super fun ability to have and enriches the meaning of words. There are some feelings you just can't express in English without this (I know other languages like Spanish do the same thing.)
The term for that is diminutive. It existieren in a lot of european Ianguages; Spanish -ito/a or German -chen. I was expecting that to be in the Video.
Ette. Lite. Mini. Lette. Suffixes. English can do this.
You mean like a manlette?
@@JonJCairns other common ones -y: kitty, hubby, mommy or -sie/-sy: footsie, Betsy or -o: kiddo, wacko or -ie: doggie, laddie, Maggie, Charlie...
@@SevenJetC And how do you say a small park, a small beach, a small street, or little rain or anything small? In spanish we say parque, parquecito; playa, playita; calle, callecita; lluvia, lluviecita, etc, etc.
I kind of regard the dropping of the “polite you”* 6:40 as a triumph of English. You don’t have to gauge or navigate the level of politeness between you and the other person, you can just get on with saying whatever you want.
_EDIT:_ As Barney Laurance rightly and helpfully points out, in fact, the familiar "thou" dropped out almost entirely from use. At the same time, the polite connotations of "you" fell away and "you" became the all-purpose (and only) second-person pronoun.
Exactly. One of the few things I feel confident saying English seems to do better than most other languages (at least that I've heard of). If your language shapes your framework for reality as profoundly as the aboriginal language sharpening your ability with cardinal directions would seem to suggest it does, then we absolutely do not need artificial, hierarchical separations between people being literally encoded in the language. One and only one "you" is the way to go.
@@alynames7171 Perfectly put!
We didn't drop the polite "you" - we dropped the familiar "thou".
@@superfluidity Technically correct.
@@alynames7171 Best kind of correct.
In dutch, when you deny something with yes/no question, you confirm or deny the first part of the sentence usually. It is a response to the sentence, and not the question
10:06 Isn't that somehow funny that despite of we have a lot of snow in wintertime, in Finnish there's no verb for "to snow" in neutral way. We have to say "sataa lunta" (it's raining snow) or "lunta sataa" (snow is raining). But we have some other words like "tuiskuttaa" (it's snowing while there's strong wind) and "pyryttää" (it's snowing heavily while windy). The neutral verb for "it's snowing" is just unexistent.
Very interesting video ! Only at 13:52, there's a little mistake: "cantará" means "he (or she) will sing". If you want to say "I will sing", the correct form is "cantaré".
I was expecting the German "doch" at point 5, haha. I kinda love how confused people who are learning German are, when they realize that for yes-no questions, we have 3 words in German. And I'd say that "doch" is much more common than saying 'no' to a negated question as well.
"It's not raining, is it?"
German: "Doch."
It's not exclusively German. The French language makes a difference between "oui" and "si" that works the same way.
"Doch" ist einfach das beste Wort der deutschen Sprache.
@@songbird7450 Doch ist doch nicht das beste Wort.
English actually used to have a four word system with yes, no and yea, nay. With yes and no being the positive and negative versions of german "doch" or french "si" (I believe).
@@berndbrotify Doch! :D
well technically pena ajena can just be translated to "second hand embarrassment"
another thing, as a japanese student, i can personally say that japanese is NOT simple with it's honorifics and polite language elements, because japanese has a little thing called keigo, which is split into 3 categories, teineigo, sonkeigo and kenjougo. all of which are something i will translate to "polite language". this polite language in japanese changes so much about how you speak and interact with people that it might as well be its own language.
...and that's not even including「タメ口」,「丁重語」and 「美化語」, which should also be included. But since he (presumably, otherwise he would have known about this and not limited himself to only include a handful of honorific suffixes that literally everyone knows if they've spent an hour on youtube) hasn't studied the language, he isn't aware of how insanely complex it actually can be...or who has to speak what to who and when, meaning「マニュアル敬語」should technically be lumped as well in here as it differs from normal「尊敬語」...
Doesn't "pena ajena" just mean "cringe"?
In Swedish we have a special word for a positive answer to a question like "You can come, can't you?". Both answering "ja" (=yes) and "nej"(=no) will be confusing, as you mention in your video. But the Swedish word "jo", means in this case "yes, I can come". "Jo" is very useful, and you will not misunderstand the answer.
Tak for explaining that!! I’ve been wondering when I watch Swedish things whether jo was ja but in a different dialect, now I know!
jo is also used in some part of Poland but it can mean virtually anything (and yes it's a germanism)
På norsk har vi jo det samme som betyr også det samme som svensk 😁
I think that's bad example of question. If I answer yes it means I can come. The more apropiate question would sound like "You don't like it?"
@@willmurphy4073 Og Dansk.
Regarding the whole "to be" vs. "ser" and "estar" distinction, I like how my home country language solves it. Maltese has no present tense "to be" at all. To go with that, also no indefinite articles. So "I am a man" comes out as "Jien ragel", literally "I man". Me Tarzan, you Jane.
BTW, I am just starting to learn Maltese, at the tender age of 63, because I was born in the US and my parents wouldn't teach me the language. Fascinating language with an amazing history, but not easy.
Doesn't that seriously hinder the ability to express nuances though? Just curious.
Black Americans drop the verb “to be”, similarly.
It's a semitic language feature, in Arabic we have the same feature, and I think Hebrew has it too
@@allaab9385 Hebrew has "to be" in future and past tense, but not in present tense. The famous line in the Bible where G-d is asked His name, is actually translated "I will be what I will be", not "I am that I am".
In Polish language all the "czy" questions sound strange. They're usually used by small kids (bc they're so simple) or in more formal speech
A small kid would repeatedly ask "Czy lubisz psy? Czy mogę pograć? Czy Ellie ma ciemne włosy?"
A grown up in a more casual setting would diversify the questions and add a little bit of context "Lubisz psy? Dasz mi pograć? Czy czasem Ellie nie miała czarnych włosów?"
In a more formal setting people tend to return to "czy" questions but with polite forms of speech "Czy lubi Pani psy? Czy mogłabym pograć? Czy Pani Ellie nie ma czarnych włosów?"
In Polish constantly repeating words is not as acceptable as in English. Our grammar enables us to avoid it much easier but with great power comes great responsibility. In Polish the constant repeatition sounds awkward
Which is only ok when a small kid do it or in a formal setting. When you talk to your colleagues this stiffness is a feature, not a bug
There is an exception though. Numerous repetitions of "kurwa" clearly convey increasing distress or anger, depending on the intonation :P
You would say: Ma Ella czarne włosy?
You wouldn’t say: Czy Ella ma czarne włosy?
@@reimaks Expected "Czy ma Ella czarne włosy?".
Im french but live in the US, at first i found it really hard to talk to everyone with “you”! The “vouvoiement” (saying “vous” instead of “tu”) is something we do “naturally” to people we want to show respect to (teachers, olders, bosses, or people we just met in general) it felt really weird -to me, at first to talk to my teachers with the same pronoun as my friends! 😅
If it helps, "you" is the equivalent to "vous". It used to be the second person plural in English and then became the second person singular to demonstrate respect (English got that habit from the French). "Thou" is the equivalent to "tu", but obviously is no longer used.
So, by saying "you", you are just using the formal version for everyone!
When I speak French I never know whether to use tu or vous, I usually default to tu and hope my foreign accent explains away any social faux pas I might make :)
@Real Aiglon I actually used Vous more in Switzerland becomes things felt quite formal there, although that might be just my impression. I had the feeling tu is becoming more common in the French speaking world tho...
@@chendaforest its a strategy! :-)) I think I would recommend to do the opposite tho! Better to use vous and let the person tell you you can use tu, than use tu right away and risk of offending the person youre talking to! …French can sometimes (ok, often!) have a huge and easily bruised ego! 😅
@Real Aiglon should have read this answer before posting mine! Lol but i totally agree!!
When I was learning Spanish, the first thing that surprised me was the differentiation between the copulative and the locative of the verb "to be". In Spanish they are two different verbs, ser and estar.
I would love to see you talk about the way Italians use their hands to talk, similarly to the whistle bit at the end.
That would be funny! I would love to see that too!
As an Italian from Sardinia, i can tell you that's not something that we do THAT often, i mean yeah we do it sometime but we don't exactly abuse of it in a conversation
@@omniscent_sleepy_boy idk, in Naples we use hands a lot
Im not Italian, im S.A, but i also talk with my hands. When i was young i just thought ir was normal until a friend said to me that they have a habit of watching my hands when i talk. But very quickly said that its very fascinating to watch me
For professional teachers (and also actors), there is an entire branch of knowledge they must learn, how to use hands to reinforce teaching. It is quite detailed and complex.
There is a risk when using hand gestures naively, i.e. without formal preparation; because some hand gestures have a different meaning in different societies. The most striking example is when an anglophone person make the "You rock" gesture in Italy, unknowingly taking a serious risk...
I'm from Texas.
For a question like: "Have you not found that book?"
I would give a complete answer: "Yes, I found the book" or "No, I didn't find it."
I would consider a one-word response impolite because it's ambiguous in English.
If you want to dig into deficiencies of English, consider the word "you". That word leaves a lot of room for improvement.
For example, in Texas we say "you all" for "you plural" but some people in the eastern states don't like that.
Sir. As a Texan, I'm disappointed.
We say yall.
You might could be right.
I would usually respond to "Haven't you found that book?" With "Yes, I didn't find that book" if I haven't found it as I tend to interpret the question asking if I did not find it, not if I found it.
@@joncliffmckinley5868 Y'all, surely?
@@johnmiller0000 punctuation hardly required for comprehension
Note that Latin also lets you add the enclitic "-ne" at the end of a word to make a yes or no question. You can use "Nonne" if you want to imply that the answer is expected to be yes, or "num" if the answer is expected to be no. Latin doesn't really have words for "yes" or "no" though. You could say "sic" or "ita" ("thus" or "so") or "non" ("not"), but generally you would repeat part of the question as the answer.
I've known people in English to use reduplication in agreement and disagreement, such as "Yes-yes... Hear-hear... and no-no."
I was taught that the English pronoun "you" was the polite version and that "thou" was the impolite version. They then eventually got rid of "thou" as it was deemed too impolite. It makes more sense as English people are notoriously polite, doesn't it?
That's true. "Thou" is related to the informal German "Du". "You" on the other hand is related to the courtly German "Ihr", which is out of use today except for some dialects.
"Your royal highness" = "Eure königliche Hoheit"
@@randomdude2026 It was interesting to me that "Ihr" was still very common ~150 years ago; in Karl May's Winnetou, all the characters address each other with Ihr instead of Sie. I read that book so much that it became a habit to use Ihr, even in my "modern" conversations...
@Ole Petter Borgen: I think you were taught incorrectly. Look at the usage of the Quakers, who re-adopted "thou" and its case forms because they were the "friends" and addressed each other without taking account of class or hierarchy for the sake of recognizing their equality before God, not because they did not care about politeness. And then, as others have commented, we address God as "Thou" because we are aspire to be closest and most intimate with Him. Informal, yes. Impolite, no.
You're confusing the distinction of "formal" vs "informal" and "polite" vs. "impolite." There was nothing intrinsically "impolite" about "thou."
@@guizot2010 It's only impolite if you misuse the informal form with someone you ought to treat politely, right?
#2 - My wife and I (from New York) were visiting friends in Florida. We went out to dinner with them and their daughter and her fiancée. They started talking about their upcoming wedding plans, a very lavish "destination type" wedding at the Bellagio hotel in Las Vegas, but with a small guestlist (less than 50 people). They went on and on about the event and we humored them. It took a half hour before we realized that we WERE invited. They even said, "why would we be telling you all this if you weren't"? An inclusive/exclusive "we" could have saved us a lot of time.
My biggest frustration speaking english as my second language is that there is simply no word for the day before yesterday or the day after tomorrow
This is very informative. Thank you for the info on differences. Love it.
6:05 - English has this too, inherited from the Celtic languages. It means you don't need to be redundant. Alternatively, English has question tags like "right", which expect a particular response. The burden is on who asks the question, not on who answers.
> Alternatively, English has question tags like "right", which expect a particular response.
Really? I don't see any way to express the first question without changing the word order:
* Is this a dog? (I don’t know if it is a dog.)
* This is a dog, right? (I think it is a dog.)
@@-cirad- Intonation would suffice. "This is a dog?" The idea that English doesn't have tonal elements is twaddle.
@@populuxe1 This usually expresses doubt or disbelief.
4:08 -- English does use some reduplication: "Many, many people don't like Brussels sprouts." "It was very, very cold that day." "Your new puppy is really, really cute."
But without the comma, it wouldn't work. :)
different and new grammar constructs is what makes language learning so fun
Question particles are used in different regional versions of English too. I have experienced this in Canada ("It's nice out, ey?") and Sri Lanka ("It's nice out, no?"). So it seems these particles are so useful they have been adopted in multiple places even in English.
I was actually going to argue something similar. However, the examples you gave are actually rhetorical question markers rather than just interrogative markers (at least in my corner of the world). Another way to say them would be "Isn't it nice out?" for these you wouldn't really be looking for an answer and people are generally expected to agree with them or just say nothing as it is a statement of fact or even just a filler word to show you are thinking about the statement.
However, in my corner of the English world we do have a question marker that both functions as an interrogative and rhetorical. It's "Right?"
"It's nice out, right?" would prompt a response most of the time. Though in sometimes it is rhetorical. "Why are you leaving?" "It's nice out right? I am going to the park."
Even this ambiguity is less definitive than the type of question marker mentioned in the video though. Some languages have definite question particles that when tacked onto a sentence leave no ambiguity as to whether or not a question is being truly asked.
There's this fun thing in Tagalog when asking stuffs like "is he/she not going out?" and that is answering yes or no both means he or she is not going out.
Example:
-Question-
"Hindi ba siya kakain?" (Is he/she not going to eat?)
-Affirmation-
"Oo" (Yes/Affirmative) - Oo here is used to affirm that the person will not eat.
-Confirmation-
"Hindi" (Yes he/she will not) - Hindi is the tagalog word for no but using it in this case doesn't mean that the person will eat but rather it will confirm that the person won't be eating. This is because it should originally be "Hindi siya kakain" (He/she will not eat) but the "siya kakain" (he/she will eat) is dropped. You can use hindi to say he/she will eat but you need to add the statement that he/she will eat at the end like "Hindi, kakain siya" (No, he/she is going to eat).
You can get a more clear yes or no answer to the question "is he/she not going to eat?" by removing the negation to become like "is he/she going to eat?" otherwise this question will make both yes and no as yes he/she will not eat.
Tagalog also features reduplication and using it in numbers is fun.
"isa" is one, "isa-isa" means one at a time, by one
"dalawa" is two, "dalwa-dalwa" means two at a time, by two
I forgot what you call this numbers but Tagalog has this affix -an or -han which when affixed on a number, it will indicate how many times a certain thing is done.
"isa" (one), "isahan" (once, by one)
"dalawa" (two), "dalawahan" (twice, by two)
"tatlo" (three), "tatluhan" (thrice, by three)
"apat" (four), "apatan" (by four)
Tagalog also has a question particle which is "ba".
"Bababa ba" (Are we going down?)
"Bababa" (We'll go down.)
"Kakain ka na ba" (Are you (already) going to eat?)
"Kakain na" (I'm (already) going to eat)
Feel free to correct me if I got something wrong, I'm not a linguist but I like to learn so don't hesitate to correct me as long as it is civil.
Actually in Tagalog we don't say dalwa-dalwa, we say dala-dalawa. And in addition to reduplication, we reduplicate words to also convey the repeating process of something. It's like we repeat the words because it's repeating in action like the word;
Araw= day/sun, araw-araw= everyday
Gabi= night, gabi-gabi= every night
Ulit= to repeat, Paulit-ulit= to repeat multiple times
Ang galing. In Hiligaynon, we also say "duwâ-duwâ" or "darwa-darwa" instead of dala-dalawa or tig-dalawa.
@@justrandomthings709 Oh, The dalwa-dalwa might be regional since we say it here in our province.
The "rude English" with its only one second-person pronoun is actually an interesting phenomenon. When we learn English at school (as a foreign language), we perceive it as a simplification towards rudeness: my mum addresses me "you", I address my teacher "you" → English has only an analogue of Spanish "tú" for both formal and informal second-person pronoun. And only much later I found out that "you" is in fact an English version of Spanish "usted".
I agree with most points here, sometimes it's hard to describe exactly what I mean when I know there is a word for it in German.
But on the other hand, I really appreciate the simplicity of the English language. It makes it easier to learn than most other languages.
I love that there is no formal and informal 'you', because that one certainly makes things awkward sometimes in the German language.
I also like that nouns don't have a gender, many many languages have gendered nouns and it makes them almost impossible to master if you didn't grow up speaking them.
big props for the knowledge of te reo maori! was very cool to hear
Indonesian/Malay solution for distributive numbers (14:37) is reduplication (4:08)
satu: one
satu-satu: one at a time
sendiri: one person
sendiri-sendiri: one person at a time
I've been using Pimsleur to learn Hindi, and have even made friends with someone on discord who I can learn with daily, it's great fun and I've made a lot of progress in 3 - 4 weeks.
One bit of advice when learning languages that are completely foreign to English, do not try to literally translate everything your brain will melt lol
love your videos and i can see your channel getting much larger over this and next year :D
Good advice. Just assign meaning to the words; in my experience it's best to also see the word, and even write it. Love Pimsleur, but there have been a few times (particularly right at the start) where listening wasn't enough.
I'm not gonna lie, I can't recommend this as a beginner. Perhaps closer towards intermediate levels but unless you can formulate your own sentences, it'll be very hard to understand the politeness, meaning, and general rules that apply in the language. I can just about formulate my own sentences in Japanese and now in the process of using a Japanese dictionary to learn new vocabulary but often adjectives I need to search with English definition and, ask my teacher for further explanation.
Still though i don't recommend it, this will undoubtedly be different for everyone else. Just like you, this has worked for you. 🙂
@@jakehayward1993
Hey, jake さん by the way, i help people learn Japanese at my channel .. 😄 i hope i can be of some help. I'll be more than happy to do so😊. Do lemmi know
Wow, you're learning hindi😄? Hows it going?
very good, I am speaking daily with an Indian person online, which has also been helping with my pronunciation, making progress, couple more months and I should be able to have full conversations and not just generic, I can now formulate my own sentences, time to start moving onto the script
On the list of English homophones, I noticed desert and dessert which I do pronounce differently and I think many others would too.
DEsert
vs
desSERT
An English pitch accent if you would.
Moreover, in English we actually do do this with some words that are either nouns or verbs.
E.g. Present
Verb: I preSENT to you a gift
Noun: I gift you a PREsent
Another example would be 'produce'.
Verb: I proDUCE good work.
Noun: A cow's PROduce is milk.
Olly, years ago I visited several reservations in America, and one the tribes had an evidential marker, "po." It basically meant, "Based on what I saw/heard/experienced, this is what I believe to be true at this time." So if you and I were both in the kitchen and somebody called me on the phone to ask where you were, I'd say, "Olly is in the kitchen." If I left the kitchen to head outside to get the mail and the carrier inquired abut your whereabouts, I would say, "Olly is in the kitchen-po." Does this ring a bell? Love your vids. I am subscribing right now!
I love the English language so much just the way it is. It's has a simplicity and a kind of straight forwardness to it. Yet, it's still so rich as a language. Of course It's not perfect, but it does do good.
I’ve missed an English word to translate the Norwegian word “vemodig”. It’s a word expressing both grief, but also the love or gratefulness. Like when you’re thinking of someone that has passed. You feel both the sorrow and the joy from who they were. I guess bittersweet is the English word being the closest, but not quite
@Dogelore Fundamentalist Then I’m guessing we probably got it from German
I like that in Spanish we don't need to change anything for asking, you just change the intonation. And when we're writing we add an initial question mark too ¿?
Great video! And that t-shirt is fantastic!
1:20 - I didn't even know of "Waldeinsamkeit". Maybe it's because I've always lived in the city.
But I do know of "Mutterseelenallein", which is more broad and could be used in a similar context. It's a way of expressing loneliness in it's superlative.
The Mexican Spanish expression "pena ajena" also exists in German. The same feeling can be described with the word "Fremdscham" (n.).
"Woods solitude inspiration" could be a way to say it in English. After all how do we know from the German that the person doesn't hate the woods for some reason, and find themselves depressed, not inspired at all?
Mother soul loneliness (oh woe, my children are gone) sounds more negative than the woods variety, which strikes me as being a positive solitude.
It's a cheat really - it's technical jargon that doesn't really have an application outside of discussing the German Romantic movement of the late 1700s/early 1800s.
"Waldeinsamkeit" is a word that was invented by a poet for a single poem, but every German speaker understands what it means because of the way words work in the German language.
"Fremdschämen" on the other hand is a very common word used for the sentiment that is described by the two-word Spanish expression cited in this chart.
I must protest to some of your conclusions of other languages being more user friendly. Many of those advantages create new disadvantages.
Polite you: In German, we also differentiate between "Du" (YOU) and "Sie" (polite form of YOU). The tricky thing is, if you are addressing a group of people and you are very familiar with some but on polite terms with others, things get complicated, as German has no mixed form. So you can either be overly (awkwardly) polite to your friends or rude to the rest.
Synthetic Future Tense: The difficult thing in languages with inflectional future tense is, you have to learn how to build this, as there are many exceptions. Whereas the synthetic one in German for example is pretty easy. Just learn one new word and you are fine.
Yeah, English has a thing many other languages lack, simplicity. It's relative, but compared to other languages, it's a model of elegance and efficiency.
It's rather easy to learn. The inconvenience, if we can call it that, is that if it's your native language, you are in a world of disagreeable surprises if you try to learn any other.
Great point
Never thought of it like this before
Of course I don't think I'd Siezen someone unless they were old enough to remember the war or some sort of dignitary. Like the English Thee/Thou it just sounds old-fashioned.
@@simplus1980 I mean English is simple grammatically (I don't think the grammar is particularly easier than other languages like Japanese, but having a more common alphabet is a plus) but it is a nightmare for spelling and pronunciation only comparable to the god forsaken French (for obvious reasons)
the problem I find with German is all the gender cases that don't make sense. For instance : Das Madchen. Why is "the girl" neuter?
For the yes, no thing. In the midwest, when asked a question in the negative we have the responses "yeah, no" and "no, yeah". Think of the first word as either affirming or denying the question as asked, and the second word answering the question in the positive phrasing.
Never heard of whistled language until today. Learnt summat new. Thanks
Great video! I love hearing about all the different ways you can express yourself in other languages, but I think it would be interesting to hear about some things that English does that other languages don't.
The dummy subject is hardly peculiar to English. German: es regnet - Dutch: het regent - French: il pleut - Welsh: mae hi'n bwrw glau.
Many of these missing aspects of the English language were covered in a similar video by Tom Scott some time back.
Norwegian: det regner
Nativlang also covered most of these in similar video. It was the first thing that came to mind when I was looking at the chapter names for this video. Good news though is that next week or the week after there might be a video released by Olly that will be on the things English can do that a lot languages can't.
Het regent hier altijd verdomme
Russian: шёл дождь. (Literally: the rain was going).
This was so educational!
#7 in portuguese you turn an afirmative sentence to an interrogative one just by inflexion, no words added. Raisie the end of a sentence and you’re done. When writing just change the pontuation.
English only using "You" is actually MORE polite than other languages. English used to have the impolite/familiar "Thou" alongside the polite/formal "You. We dropped the impolite/informal "Thou" and only use the polite version!
Man, I love all of your videos, but I have to say the ones I like the most are these that you come up with curiosities about different languages, just like this and that one, for example, that you did about the sounds. I don't know if that's the kind of content most people want to see, but I for sure love it! Abraços!
I think the hardest part about learning a language for me was the grammar differences. Currently trying with great difficulty to learn Irish Gaelic.
There are other interesting language features that are missing from English. Let me focus on Czech for example (which I can speak well) but they exist in other languages, too:
1. Perfective and imperfective verbs
dělal = did once
dělával = did repeatedly
Every Czech verb can be thus made perfective or imperfective in its past tense.
2. Diminutives (and "adoratives" - for a want of a better word!)
pes = dog
psík = small dog
psíček = little dog
pejsek = small cute dog
pejsánek = lovable small dog
psisko = unplesant dog
There are also other words for a dog, but they are derived from a different root such as "štěně" (puppy), "štěňátko" (small, cute puppy), etc.
3:53 English kinda has that with the word "contractor", depending on which syllable you stress it doesn't mean the same thing.
In Cebuano, one of the uses of a double word is when to change it into with a less important meaning. For example, the word balay means house but when we use balay-balay, it means a temporary shelter or even a toy house.
So it's almost like a house, but only so-so 😀
3:25 English does have that. If the stress is on the first syllable in _content,_ then it means the CONtents of something, and if the stress is on the second syllable, it means someone is conTENT, satisfied. Correct me, if I'm wrong.
About the negative questions. In Hungarian if someone asks "Won't you come?", you can answer with "But." and it means "Yes, I'll come.".
Stress and tones are different things. Stress is about which syllable gets stressed, while tone is about different ways to tune the same syllable. Check for example the 'Tone (linguistics)' page on Wikipedia: it contains the example of the 4 different Mandarin tones on a specific syllable. This shows that tone and stress are separate things
@@matteosposato9448 Oh, yes, I confused the two.
Another thing that other languages let you do is to reorder words to provide emphasis. In English, you can say "Bob hit Fred." But if you say, "Fred hit Bob" it means something completely different. You can say "Fred was hit by Bob," but that changes the impact of the sentence.
In Greek and Latin, you use nominative and accusative forms of "Bob" and "Fred" (respectively) to differentiate them. So you can completely reorder the words in the sentence - even putting the verb first if you want - to emphasize the word you want.
Very fascinating video with a lot of parallels to some others I’ve seen on this topic! One comment though: I believe the fact that we use “you” in English is actually due to over-politeness because “you” used to be like the French “vous” (2nd person plural) and “thou” was like “tu” (2nd person singular and informal). This also explains why it’s “you are” and not “you is” even when you’re speaking to one person. So really we’re being extra polite by speaking in the plural to everyone :)
Interesting, I was thinking about that, and trying to make a bit of experimentation, imagining that "thou" could be "vous" and "you" to be "tu", to make a parallelism, but looks like actually is the other way XD
@@CrysolasChymera2117 I think it seems strange to us when we find out that “thou” was the informal and “you” was the formal, because we think of “thou” as “fancy language” - Biblical or Shakespearean, take your pick.
Thou and thee are still sometimes used in Yorkshire and the West Country, but I think not as much as they used to be. Saying "Art though"however, sounds paradoxically so formal.
6:40 English does have a formal and informal you. The informal version is thou, and you is the formal version. The King James Bible uses thou in an effort to connect to the reader more.
The Echo Response section is something I've been thinking about for years. It doesn't make any literal sense to ask a question in the negative but the reply answers as if the question was asked in the positive.
So now I away echo, as you put it, so that it's clear what I mean.
I can't disagree more about making the distinction between people to sound more polite. That is why English is so awesome. There is no distinction, everyone is on the same level. I speak French and I absolutely hating having to use "vous". You should always use it with people you don't know which is annoying. When you meet with someone that you feel a good vibe is going on but you both use "vous" it often feel really awkward and kills the vibe and you have to ask if that's okay to use "tu" instead. I personally use "vous" as a way of keeping distance with someone that I don't like or feel no respect for. I know it's the complete opposite of what it's intended for, but to me "vous" creates an invisible but very real barrier. When I'm enjoying someone's company I like to feel closer and friendly no matter the age of the person. Also unlike japanese and other languages like that, there is no distinction for age. As a result, "tu" is always used for children up to the age of 16. Some people feel this is disrespectful towards children as they deserve to be addressed the same as everyone else but saying "vous" to a child just sounds incredible out of place so here you go.
I also disagree with intonations and pitch because they are the reason why it's so damn hard to learn languages like Chinese. Our ears are not trained to hear the subtle differences. We understand just fine the meaning of words from their context and that's enough.
I hope these things never change in English because having to differentiate how you speak to your manager or to your friends really is not what it's all cracked up to be. After living 5 years in England, having to go back to a country that does really is a bummer and hard to adapt to. I absolutely hate it.
3:10 Watch me do the same thing in English. There's CON-test (as in competition) and con-TEST (as in to disagree). And I can swap a letter and make it a different word too. Like the "s" with "n" to make CON-tent (as in content creator) and conTENT (as in I'm satisfied with this example).
Yes, but the word changes its grammatical category in each case (N to V, N to Adj) so when you're talking, thanks to the pretty strict word order of English, it is a lot less likely someone will misunderstand you just because your intonation isn't perfect.
Somebody correct me if I'm wrong but I think that your example is not about tone, it rather is about stress
I was thinking recently, while English doesn’t use tones/pitch in the same sense as other languages, there are some words where emphasis can completely change the meaning, like “CONtent” vs “conTENT.” It’s another little intricacy of English.
That is about the stress though, not about tones. Having different words only based on which syllable is stressed happens in Italian and Spanish too.. but I feel tones are just on another level of intricacy
The fact that English *doesn't* have all these obscure words that only describe highly specific things (save for a few examples), intonations, pitch settings and other rules one could argue makes it significantly more efficient than other languages; that said the biggest problem with modern spoken and written English right now is the sharp surge in imaginary pronouns.
I know i’m a year late, but I understand what you mean with a lot of neo pronouns. However, singular they is something i find pretty useful linguistically. Its quicker than saying he or she, and is more general. It like using you instead of a hypothetical gendered you. I can say they when i know i’m talking about a single person, but dont know who. I mean i’m not trying to convert anyone into using it, but I already use it without thinking, so just sharing how i use that specific word.
Also, on a slight tangent, i use repetition in specific contexts. In order from least cold to most cold, i say kinda cold, cold, pretty cold, very cold. However, if i’m saying something was very cold and was colder than the listener would normally think, i say cold cold. I’m a native speaker, i know its not proper english, but use it sometimes. Also, i think i only use it when saying cold. I don’t say hot hot, tasty tasty, or weird weird, so thats interesting.
@@tobirivera-garcia1692 agreed, the singular "they" is perfectly acceptable grammatical shorthand. It's just when bored 20 somethings on tiktok attempt to differentiate themselves with these made up labels mostly for attention is when it becomes a problem.
@@tobirivera-garcia1692 true, we drink a drink but never food a food.
@@OpEditorial But we do smell a smell!
At least in the states, we have the phrase "secondhand embarrassment" to describe "pena ajena". As for echo responses, we have "Yeah, no" to reinforce no and "No, yeah" to reinforce yes.
About the "negating yes" you could have mentioned the "oui/si" in French. I find it awesome that we don't understand someone replying with "oui" to a negative answer/statement but we actually do when "si" is used as an answer.
Even though these 2 words mean the same thing (an affirmative answer), using one for the other can be very misleading
Like : -Are you not coming tonight?
-Oui. --> No one understands what you're saying.
-Are you not coming tonight?
-Si.
The person you're talking with perfectly understands that you are actually coming tonight 🤯
Oui and Si are both "yes"?
@@har5814 yeah, they both mean yes but in different situations, if you use one for the other, it would be very confusing (but oui is used massively you just use "si" when answering negative question)
14:26 a small corection: "chiedo" and "chiederò" mean "I ask" and "I will ask", but "chiesto" just means "asked", "I asked" would be "ho chiesto".
If you want to use a first singular person past verb that is just one word, you could use "chiedevo", which means "I ask" but as in a routine/thing that happened multiple times.
Or you could use "chiesi" which means "I asked" in the past but not repeatedly
@@ndreew oh yeah the remote past tense can work
When someone says "I have no words to describe something"
It's not the language that's failing, it's their grasp of it.
there's quantitative and qualitative words that can make an incredible number of combinations. Just because you've failed to put it into words isn't the languages fault.
And even more ways you can articulate them for effect.
Much more impactful than a single word that's a mash up of stuff.
On #14, in portuguese we also have a future form, but we use the auxiliary verb more too "cantarei"- "vou cantar". We can also use "irei cantar" These forms of the auxiliary verb are from the verb "ir"- go
Futuro composto
Língua portuguesa só tem um verbo auxiliar: verbo Ter.
6:35 Japanese has a clear statement for yes and no but in a different way.
Rule 1. expecting the speaker is stating always right.
So the response would be 'Hai/agree' or 'Iie/disagree' to what the speaker states.
Rule 2. The answerer expresses a different perspective to make a decision after comprehending what he stated.
はい means "You are right. (I am not going)"
いいえ means "That's not true. (I am about to do)"
To make this simple, change your question to "Is it okay not to go?"
[Edit] in general, the response and body are different sentences in Japanese.
yes... japanese technically giving affirmation or negation to the statement itself. If lets say the statement is "is it going to rain?", the positive(hai) means"yes, it is going to rain", while the negation(iie) means "no, it is not going to rain".
but if you ask the question "is it not going to rain?", the positive(hai) answer means "yes, it is not going to rain" while the negation(iie) means "no, it is not (not) going to rain" or equivalent to "no, it is going to rain"
Not quite, はい and いいえ have basically the same implications as in English. What you're describing is the difference between そです and うそ
@@vladv5126 Where did you learn Japanese?
@@blackjack8957 I didn't but I literally texted this question to my Japanese friend and this is what she told me. So take that with a grain of salt.
@@vladv5126 Be aware of your professing Japanese friend or something lost-in-translation. And the difference between capital i and l.
I think the 6th one is great that you don't have a word for polite "you". I don't want to call a boss or an elder with polite "you"(actually it isn't only for politeness, it's also used if someone's authority is more than you but they use non-polite "you"). That everyone is just "you" is great.
Actually, it's the other way around - it's the familiar form English [now] lacks. We _used_ to have both - formal "you" and familiar "thou".
@@frankhooper7871 that's interesting. Is it for this reason that we say "you are" instead of "you is"?
I like how he addresses my language at 12:31. Even for me as a native speaker, I often do not realize how nuanced these tenses are. This is probably because people don't write what they say down. People will almost always communicate verbally because the script is kinda hard to read. It is quite fun to say these verbs and ponder about the meaning though.
There might in fact be a tonal aspect to it. Two words may look the same but have different meanings and thus are pronounced differently. Like from the example niainaga could mean she used to sing or she usually sings depending on the intonation. It can get quite wild with some words having several intonational differences to mean very different things. The usual example they give is the word iria.
Great video Olly.
I disagree with the question one because you can repeat a sentence and change its tone to make it a question. “Kristy has dark hair.” can be a statement but when you raise the pitch of the word “hair” it becomes a question, like you’re repeating the statement as a question for conformation. Yes, it does sound messy, but it’s technical.
I agree here. You can also emphasize certain words to ask different questions.
"Kristy has dark hair?"
-Asking whether Kristy has dark hair.
"Kristy has *dark* hair?"
-Not sure whether Kristy's hair is dark.
"*Kristy* has dark hair?"
-Unsure if Kristy was the one with dark hair.
"Kristy *has* dark hair?"
-Not sure if Kristy's hair is currently dark
"Kristy has dark *hair*?"
-??? IDK when one would use this in normal conversation. This implies to me that the speaker didn't know Kristy has hair at all. Maybe they thought Kristy was bald. Or a non human.
Anyways, I just wrote this out to show your point that English doesn't always need to rearrange a statement to ask a question.
@@weirdbunmi Exactly!! It’s all about tone.
And then you can find some English used in Singapore where an English word became doubled: can can.
I'd love to see a video about English-based creole languages.
Interesting idea!
It’s basically just a form of Chinglish. I have a friend who says things like “Let me see see” (讓我看看）
No you wouldn't.
I second that, creoles are fascinating!
I remember being taught echo responses in English class. For homework, we were given a bunch of yes or no questions (many ambiguous like your examples) and were told to always answer using complete sentences. "Yes" and "no" aren't complete sentences, so you must echo the statement made in the question either affirmatively or negatively. I was always told that single-word responses are grammatically incorrect.
I remember something like that too…
Grammatically incorrect perhaps, but in response to a non ambiguous question, yes or no is an entirely acceptable answer.
The thing is, "you" in English was the politer version of the pair of "you" and "thou", where "thou" is informal.
"You" is a very fun word because it *used* to be a formal form of the verb. IIRC, "thee" and "thou" were the informal depending on which part of the sentence they showed up in.
I think we should bring "thou" back. Not least because it's a very easy way to insult someone. :D
@@seraiharper5553 I try to use thou/thee as an insult
1:36 It would be great if you made a video about Mayan languages. I have the impression that people think they're dead languages, but we still speak them and they have some interesting features, such as the "inclusive/exclusive we".
Japanese has the "question" particle, like Mandarin, too. It's "ka". "Ka" literally means "question mark" and you can add it to the end of any sentence to turn it into a question. Better yet, if it's one of those questions where the answer is obvious, you can still say it with a "statement" intonation. Of course, they do have proper ways to ask questions, too, but "ka" sure is handy.
But you know, we can do the same thing in English, or at least some of us can. Just add "eh?" That's how we like to do it in Canada. :) I believe the Brits do it, too, to some extent, so I'm surprised you didn't mention this, Olly.