Languages with exotic and interesting features

[vonPeterhof]

Tuvan uses repetition on its pronouns. It's a strange feature you even see in the name of their national anthem, "Men Tyva Men" (I'm Tuvan). If you were to say, "I am well", you'd say "men eki tur men". It's like the pronouns form a container for the sentence.

This is interesting because most other modern Turkic languages display essentially the same underlying structure, except that the personal pronoun at the end gets phonetically assimilated into the preceding word (to varying degrees depending on the language: men o'zbekman, men qazaqpyn, ben türküm, etc.) and is generally perceived more like a grammatical suffix than a pronoun. From the perspective of those other Turkic languages the interesting feature in Tuvan isn't the repetition of the personal pronoun, but the fact that it resists assimilation into the main word, without even submitting to vowel harmony.

[Henkkles]

Basque is interesting but ergativity is not interesting, there's like a thousand ergative languages in the world.

No. What's interesting is the Basque vocative clitics. When speaking familiarly to someone, you have to add a vocative marker that codes whether your hearer is a male or a female, -k for male and -n for female. So if I say something in third person like "Jack saw him yesterday" I still have to add a morpheme that codes 2sg.fem/masc, as in "Jack saw-n him yesterday" if I'm speaking to a woman.

Further reading: https://www.ehu.eus/ehg/sarasola/liburu ... arre26.pdf

[Dragon27]

This is interesting because most other modern Turkic languages display essentially the same underlying structure, except that the personal pronoun at the end gets phonetically assimilated into the preceding word

Interesting. Исхаков, Пальмбах "Грамматика тувинского языка. Фонетика и морфология." (Tuvan language grammar. Phonetics and morphology.) devotes one section to the discussion of the predicate pronouns (§241). Main takeaways:
Most Turkic languages have predicate personal pronouns that have evolved into affixes and used as a copula or in conjugation of the verb forms that are historically derived from participles. Although the 3-rd person pronoun is often replaced with the forms of the verb dur/tur/tor etc. (depending on the language), or just omitted (in modern Tatar, btw, the copula is barely used anymore). In Tuvan, unlike other Turkic languages, these predicate pronouns have preserved their phonetic shape (both as a copula, and after historical participles). 3-rd person pronoun, though, is rarely used as a predicate pronoun and is often replaced with words "human", "thing" and other similar generic words like that (sometimes these words are combined with the 1-st/2-nd personal pronouns, like in "Ажылдаар кижи мен"). There's also predicate affixes -ыл/ил, -ул/үл, -л that are used in questions, which are derived from the 3-rd person pronoun "ол".

[galaxyrocker]

Have y'all seen the Old Irish verbal system? It's phonological system? It's a huge load of fun. Definitely features that aren't normal, some of which survive into Irish today (grammaticalised initial mutations, inflected pronouns, parts of the verbal system). It was quite weird, in a lot of ways. And definitely 'interesting', doubly so for being IE

[Sae]

Tuvan uses repetition on its pronouns. It's a strange feature you even see in the name of their national anthem, "Men Tyva Men" (I'm Tuvan). If you were to say, "I am well", you'd say "men eki tur men". It's like the pronouns form a container for the sentence.

This is interesting because most other modern Turkic languages display essentially the same underlying structure, except that the personal pronoun at the end gets phonetically assimilated into the preceding word (to varying degrees depending on the language: men o'zbekman, men qazaqpyn, ben türküm, etc.) and is generally perceived more like a grammatical suffix than a pronoun. From the perspective of those other Turkic languages the interesting feature in Tuvan isn't the repetition of the personal pronoun, but the fact that it resists assimilation into the main word, without even submitting to vowel harmony.

Ah, I did not know that about the other Turkic languages. Then yeah, it is interesting from that perspective too. So I guess it makes me wonder if some languages shifted because of that vowel harmony, which is also interesting because Tuvan doesn't resist vowel harmony in order places, at least from what I have learned so far.

[Querneus]

Tuvan uses repetition on its pronouns. It's a strange feature you even see in the name of their national anthem, "Men Tyva Men" (I'm Tuvan). If you were to say, "I am well", you'd say "men eki tur men". It's like the pronouns form a container for the sentence.

This is interesting because most other modern Turkic languages display essentially the same underlying structure, except that the personal pronoun at the end gets phonetically assimilated into the preceding word (to varying degrees depending on the language: men o'zbekman, men qazaqpyn, ben türküm, etc.) and is generally perceived more like a grammatical suffix than a pronoun. From the perspective of those other Turkic languages the interesting feature in Tuvan isn't the repetition of the personal pronoun, but the fact that it resists assimilation into the main word, without even submitting to vowel harmony.

I've heard there are Caribbean Spanish speakers whose unmarked negation similarly has a repeated "no": no lo hice a tiempo no, no los vi no, and such. I imagine that Turkic pronoun repetition may come from something like that...

[Henkkles]

Have y'all seen the Old Irish verbal system? It's phonological system? It's a huge load of fun. Definitely features that aren't normal, some of which survive into Irish today (grammaticalised initial mutations, inflected pronouns, parts of the verbal system). It was quite weird, in a lot of ways. And definitely 'interesting', doubly so for being IE

Among my language aficionado friends we say that Old Irish has a martian substratum.

[IronMike]

Hell, the Slavic languages with their damned crazy kinship terms (yes I know other languages have it, e.g. Lakota) is "exotic and interesting" enough for me. Don't even start with those f&#$* motion verbs in Russian. Enough.

[mick33]

Hell, the Slavic languages with their damned crazy kinship terms (yes I know other languages have it, e.g. Lakota) is "exotic and interesting" enough for me. Don't even start with those f&#$* motion verbs in Russian. Enough.

What? The verbs of motion as well as perfective and imperfective aspect are the things that make Polish worth learning. Now I often wonder how we can even speak without these wonderful features in English