Languages with exotic and interesting features

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Querneus
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Re: Languages with exotic and interesting features

Postby Querneus » Thu Apr 08, 2021 12:27 am

outcast wrote:But Sino-Tibetan Mandarin Chinese has 比 (bi3) in basic comparisons, and also 和。。。相比 (比起来), akin to "compared to". The Koreanic family too has words equivalent to "than": 보다 (hboda) , and also 에 비해 (compared to) . I think Hindi has से ? Anyways, in the two other completely separate language families I have familiarity with, there are structures basically identical in their use to "than", or "que" / "als" etc. So I would doubt I just was just lucky enough to pick the exceptions outside Indo-European to this feature. I wonder what is the more "default" way to mark the entity that is the comparison's reference point then in most languages? Suffixes? Special verbal conjugation? Strict word order?

It depends on how you define things, according to what is considered interesting. Here, the weirdness of the European "than" is that the word doesn't have much of a metaphor in terms of location (as a metaphor) or a verb involving exceeding something in some way. It's explained in the "chapter" linked to from the map: Comparative Constructions. (The categories are also defined by meaning, so a noun marked with a case of location (in-X, from-X...) would still count as a location metaphor.)

So, this is opposed to than-words that refer to a location metaphor, typically prepositions/postpositions such as "from" (Arabic من min, Hindi से se) or "in/to" (Classical Chinese 於 yú), and opposed to than-words that refer to verbs meaning 'exceeding X' or 'more compared to X' (Mandarin 比 bǐ, Cantonese 過 gwok3), or as a further possibility, a "conjoined" construction involving a joined short clause ("She is tall and you're short", "She is tall and you're not", "Her, you, she is tall", etc., all meaning She is taller than you).

According to that one WALS map I linked to, languages tend to have, as their default than-word, a word or construction using a location metaphor. French "de" would count as one incidentally, since the word also means "from" (je viens de la France), but "que" is the default word in this language, which aside from this use has only very grammatical uses...
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Re: Languages with exotic and interesting features

Postby golyplot » Sat Apr 10, 2021 6:33 pm

tungemål wrote:The Japanese don't even conjugate verbs in persons and they still omit the pronoun, so you have to "guess" who did something.


They can leave out a lot more than that. I recall seeing a Japanese lesson that translated as "A) What happened to your glasses? B) I'm wearing contacts today!". However, the literal translation of the Japanese was something like "A) Glasses? B) Today, contacts!"
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Re: Languages with exotic and interesting features

Postby tungemål » Sun Apr 11, 2021 1:36 pm

Many interesting replies in this thread.

But no-one studied an exotic language like native american ones (except maybe IronMike), a Papua New Guinea language or an australian aboriginal language? In those you can find some really strange features. For instance number systems based on 27 (Papua New Guinea).
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Re: Languages with exotic and interesting features

Postby Stephendaedalus » Fri Jul 22, 2022 10:32 am

Object conjugation. Meaning the object, rather than just the verb, is conjugated depending on which personal pronoun is used as subject. This exists is erzya, a finno-ugric language, possibly in hungarian. I bet my *ss this is a very unusual linguistical feature.

Querneus wrote:
outcast wrote:But Sino-Tibetan Mandarin Chinese has 比 (bi3) in basic comparisons, and also 和。。。相比 (比起来), akin to "compared to". The Koreanic family too has words equivalent to "than": 보다 (hboda) , and also 에 비해 (compared to) . I think Hindi has से ? Anyways, in the two other completely separate language families I have familiarity with, there are structures basically identical in their use to "than", or "que" / "als" etc. So I would doubt I just was just lucky enough to pick the exceptions outside Indo-European to this feature. I wonder what is the more "default" way to mark the entity that is the comparison's reference point then in most languages? Suffixes? Special verbal conjugation? Strict word order?

It depends on how you define things, according to what is considered interesting. Here, the weirdness of the European "than" is that the word doesn't have much of a metaphor in terms of location (as a metaphor) or a verb involving exceeding something in some way. It's explained in the "chapter" linked to from the map: Comparative Constructions. (The categories are also defined by meaning, so a noun marked with a case of location (in-X, from-X...) would still count as a location metaphor.)

So, this is opposed to than-words that refer to a location metaphor, typically prepositions/postpositions such as "from" (Arabic من min, Hindi से se) or "in/to" (Classical Chinese 於 yú), and opposed to than-words that refer to verbs meaning 'exceeding X' or 'more compared to X' (Mandarin 比 bǐ, Cantonese 過 gwok3), or as a further possibility, a "conjoined" construction involving a joined short clause ("She is tall and you're short", "She is tall and you're not", "Her, you, she is tall", etc., all meaning She is taller than you).

According to that one WALS map I linked to, languages tend to have, as their default than-word, a word or construction using a location metaphor. French "de" would count as one incidentally, since the word also means "from" (je viens de la France), but "que" is the default word in this language, which aside from this use has only very grammatical uses...


I had this novel idea that linguistic features could be classified insofar as they correspond/translate to either "from", or "after", or variably to both. See japanese, where から kind of means "from" and "after", is a constituent of だから (so, therefore), and can used to form "Because...".

"明日テストがあるから、今夜勉強つもりだ。"
(Ashita tesuto ga aru kara, konya benkyou tsumori da.)
"Since I have a test tomorrow, I plan to study tonight."
Last edited by Stephendaedalus on Fri Jul 22, 2022 9:35 pm, edited 1 time in total.
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Re: Languages with exotic and interesting features

Postby Cenwalh » Fri Jul 22, 2022 1:14 pm

Stephendaedalus wrote:Object conjugation. Meaning the verb, rather than just the subject, is conjugated depending on which personal pronoun is used. This exists is erzya, a finno-ugric language, possibly in hungarian. I bet my *ss this is a very unusual linguistical feature.

I didn't quite understand this, but having looked it up, I found this explanation, and it certainly seems an interesting feature.
ERZYA E-LEARNING COURSE, GRAMMATICAL DESCRIPTION - Sirkka Saarinen wrote:Mordvin has an objective (definite) conjugation. Its suffixes indicate the person and the number of both the subject and the object. There are, however, not 6x6=36 different suffixes, because the suffixes for plural objects show lot of homonymy and some forms are pragmatically impossible (e.g. forms where both the subject and the
object would be the same person). E.g. пала-н (kiss-1SG) 'I kiss', пала-т (kiss-2SG) 'you kiss' but пала-тян (kiss-1SG>2SG) 'I kiss you', пала-сак (kiss-2SG>3SG) 'you kiss him/her'.
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Re: Languages with exotic and interesting features

Postby Deinonysus » Fri Jul 22, 2022 6:19 pm

Stephendaedalus wrote:Object conjugation. Meaning the verb, rather than just the subject, is conjugated depending on which personal pronoun is used. This exists is erzya, a finno-ugric language, possibly in hungarian. I bet my *ss this is a very unusual linguistical feature.

If I understand correctly, what you are referring to is polypersonal agreement. I don't know if it counts as exotic, because not only is it found in Arabic (hundreds of millions of speakers, official UN language) and Swahili (about a hundred million speakers, arguably the most popular language from Africa), but some consider it to be a property of French; since the inflected pronouns can't exist on their own and must be attached to a verb in a specific order, you could consider them to be a part of a verb, for instance "jeleluiaidonné," meaning "I gave it to him." Check out this interesting reddit thread: Is French moving towards polysynthesis?

It's also addressed in this interesting paper: Grammaticalization of polysynthesis with special reference to Spoken French by Peter Arkadieve

It's hard to find features that are truly exotic because there is so much linguistic diversity among the most spoken language. Tenselessness? Mandarin Chinese, about a billion speakers. Ergativity? Hindustani, about 3/4 of a billion speakers.

My favorite linguistic feature, which I have to begrudgingly call exotic (due to a low level of international interest) despite it being used by over 20 million native speakers in a G20 country (maybe twice that many including non-native speakers as well), would be click consonants, which are found in the Zunda languages (Zulu, Xhosa, and Northern and Southern Ndebele) as well as many smaller indigenous languages of Southwestern Africa. Although with Duolingo's Zulu course coming out soon, maybe they'll become more popular.
Last edited by Deinonysus on Fri Jul 22, 2022 10:45 pm, edited 1 time in total.
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Re: Languages with exotic and interesting features

Postby Querneus » Fri Jul 22, 2022 6:47 pm

Does Arabic really have polypersonal agreement though? I don't see how Arabic, written or spoken, is all that different from say, English or Italian... I'm aware some linguists define "polypersonal agreement" as long as the subject and object affixes/pronouns are basically affixes forming "one word", even though the "object agreement" doesn't normally appear when the object noun phrase is there (as in Arabic, English and Italian), but I've always found that a bit unhelpful and uninteresting... Like they argue saʔal-et-o (ask.PAST-3fem->3masc) 'she asked him' is one word, and that that's enough to call it "polypersonal agreement", even though the -u '3masc' won't appear when the noun phrase is there: saʔal-et el-muħaami 'she asked the (male) lawyer'.

Now Swahili, that does have polypersonal agreement even when the object noun phrase is there. Maybe different terminology should exist for these two patterns.

Spanish, Latin American Spanish in particular, also has polypersonal agreement, but for the indirect object. :lol: In the more formal language and particularly in Spain, you can say doy gracias a mi madre 'I thank my mother', but when speaking in Latin America in particular you generally say le doy gracias a Dios, with le agreeing with mi madre. And it can agree for number, le(s) doy gracias a mis padres 'I thank my parents', obligatorily so if the noun phrase goes before the verb, a mis padres les doy gracias.

I wonder what other examples of indirect object polypersonal agreement are there out there (I guess spoken French does this sometimes, but I mean further out there). I've never looked into this, but in more superficial discussions, linguists usually just give examples of direct object polypersonal agreement...
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Re: Languages with exotic and interesting features

Postby Deinonysus » Fri Jul 22, 2022 8:48 pm

Querneus wrote:Does Arabic really have polypersonal agreement though? I don't see how Arabic, written or spoken, is all that different from say, English or Italian... I'm aware some linguists define "polypersonal agreement" as long as the subject and object affixes/pronouns are basically affixes forming "one word", even though the "object agreement" doesn't normally appear when the object noun phrase is there (as in Arabic, English and Italian), but I've always found that a bit unhelpful and uninteresting... Like they argue saʔal-et-o (ask.PAST-3fem->3masc) 'she asked him' is one word, and that that's enough to call it "polypersonal agreement", even though the -u '3masc' won't appear when the noun phrase is there: saʔal-et el-muħaami 'she asked the (male) lawyer'.

Now Swahili, that does have polypersonal agreement even when the object noun phrase is there. Maybe different terminology should exist for these two patterns.

Spanish, Latin American Spanish in particular, also has polypersonal agreement, but for the indirect object. :lol: In the more formal language and particularly in Spain, you can say doy gracias a mi madre 'I thank my mother', but when speaking in Latin America in particular you generally say le doy gracias a Dios, with le agreeing with mi madre. And it can agree for number, le(s) doy gracias a mis padres 'I thank my parents', obligatorily so if the noun phrase goes before the verb, a mis padres les doy gracias.

I wonder what other examples of indirect object polypersonal agreement are there out there (I guess spoken French does this sometimes, but I mean further out there). I've never looked into this, but in more superficial discussions, linguists usually just give examples of direct object polypersonal agreement...

Well, I think what you're talking about is mandatory vs. optional polypersonal agreement, where a language with mandatory polypersonal agreement (including polysynthetic languages) will have an object marked on the verb even if it implicit from the sentence. With Arabic object suffixes, even if they aren't mandatory, they're clearly part of the verb; they can't be used separately and must appear on a certain part of the verb, whereas for English, "me" or "him" are separate words that can appear alone and don't need to be an a particalar spot compared to the verb (eg, I don't like him; now him I like).

You have a distinction like this in Biblical Hebrew, where you can have a direct object as a suffix like in Arabic (which must appear attached to a verb), or you can have an inflecting particle that is a separate word and can appear in any order.

I don't think it's very unusual for languages with polypersonal agreement to mark indirect objects. There are a couple of examples in the Wiki article I linked.
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Re: Languages with exotic and interesting features

Postby Stephendaedalus » Fri Jul 22, 2022 10:57 pm

Cenwalh wrote:
Stephendaedalus wrote:Object conjugation. Meaning the verb, rather than just the subject, is conjugated depending on which personal pronoun is used. This exists is erzya, a finno-ugric language, possibly in hungarian. I bet my *ss this is a very unusual linguistical feature.

I didn't quite understand this, but having looked it up, I found this explanation, and it certainly seems an interesting feature.
ERZYA E-LEARNING COURSE, GRAMMATICAL DESCRIPTION - Sirkka Saarinen wrote:Mordvin has an objective (definite) conjugation. Its suffixes indicate the person and the number of both the subject and the object. There are, however, not 6x6=36 different suffixes, because the suffixes for plural objects show lot of homonymy and some forms are pragmatically impossible (e.g. forms where both the subject and the
object would be the same person). E.g. пала-н (kiss-1SG) 'I kiss', пала-т (kiss-2SG) 'you kiss' but пала-тян (kiss-1SG>2SG) 'I kiss you', пала-сак (kiss-2SG>3SG) 'you kiss him/her'.

Yes, this is what I meant. I edited my post major to rectify the massive clerical error. I meant:
"Object conjugation. Meaning a (non-proper noun) object, rather than just the verb, is conjugated depending on which personal pronoun is used as subject.

Deinonysus wrote:If I understand correctly, what you are referring to is polypersonal agreement. I don't know if it counts as exotic, because not only is it found in Arabic (hundreds of millions of speakers, official UN language) and Swahili (about a hundred million speakers, arguably the most popular language from Africa), but some consider it to be a property of French; since the inflected pronouns can't exist on their own and must be attached to a verb in a specific order, you could consider them to be a part of a verb, for instance "jeleluiaidonné," meaning "I gave it to him." Check out this interesting reddit thread: Is French moving towards polysynthesis?...


Yes, thank you, I think polypersonal agreement corresponds to what I was talking about. (Note that I made a blunder that I now edited.) Although, majoring in french myself, I don't see from the reddit thread how the object is ever getting conjugated depending on 1st/2nd/3rd person. And what is all this business about a SVO language such as french sometimes being a SOV language? I don't understand why all languages need to be classified as "SVO" or "SOV", rather than just "SV" or "OV", in which case this whole debacle could be avoided? Elseway, all SVO languages I know can sometimes be SOV. Even if finnish is a SVO language, the word order is frequently swapped for either harmony or stress. In main clauses there's "Miehen hän näki", literally "The man she saw", which unequivocally stresses that she is the topic, and seeing the man is the comment. In subordinate clauses any order is valid and conveys the same meaning, but the OSV word order is far more harmonious(*), that is, "Miehen nähtyään, hän lähti", literally "The man after she saw, she left.", in correct english " "After having seen the man, she left.". And finally, subordinate clauses in finnish sometimes are so unseemly that in several cases we prefer to nest them as participles, (For example, "Miehen nähnyt nainen lähti", "The woman who saw the man left"). Perhaps you might find examples in english, french etc., too, where the default word order is swapped for the sake of harmony or stress. As to an explicitly marked language like japanese, maybe there isn't much need to swap the word order; but rather, changing the order of the words can convey a wholly different meaning, such as the word でも, which depending on its location, can mean "but", "also", or "even if".

The word order, when expressing the relationship between a direct and indirect object in french seems more important with the 1st and 2nd person than with the 3rd person, especially with the dative which is very different for a 1st/2nd person indirect object than for a 3rd person indirect object. Such as "Je te l'ai montré", or "Je le lui ai montré." ?

Finnish also has a common structure which is equivalent to the one in the post by a ms_tanuki: "Les Français, eux, ils savent qu'elles sont nécessaires, les réformes", ("The french, them, they know.") "Ranskalaiset ne tietävät.", (simply, "The french know.") or "Koira se haukkui." ("The dog barked.") to reduce ambiguity in several ways.

(*) Note: prosody!
Last edited by Stephendaedalus on Sat Jul 30, 2022 10:05 pm, edited 1 time in total.
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Re: Languages with exotic and interesting features

Postby Sae » Mon Jul 25, 2022 9:20 am

I've found both Tuvan and Vietnamese have interesting features.

Tuvan almost has no genders, not even in its pronouns, we only get gender when you're saying if somebody is a man or a woman or a boy or a girl or a son or a daughter, but this seems to be the limit.

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.

And Tuvan has vowel harmony, meaning if there's a rule where you add a suffix to the word (as an example) the vowel may change depending on the vowel that precedes it so that they harmonize. And I think the language it self lends itself well to sounding poetic, which makes sense given one of the things Tuva is most famous for is its music.

With Vietnamese there's a lot of interesting parts. First I'll cover pronouns, because they're very different to what I'm used to. Whilst they do have the standard first & second person pronouns "I/you", but they aren't often used because they're impersonal. So pronouns then identify the relationship and gender of the person in the conversation, which means who the pronoun refers to is context sensitive so the pronoun "anh" can mean both "you" and "I", but who it refers to depends on who is the older male. Third person is identified by adding "ấy", so "anh ấy" = "he (older)". What's also endearing here is that these pronouns tend to derive from family terms, for example, 'anh' also refers to an old brother.

Vietnamese is also monosyllabic and word form doesn't change nor are prefixes or suffixes a thing and meaning can be altered based on how you chain the sentence together, like with the above adding "ấy" to a pronoun makes it third person. But they also communicate ideas they don't have words for by chaining to words together, which in effect create a new word, which can be pretty interesting when you look at their choice for words. I learned one I quite liked over the weekend, which is "tốt bụng", which means "kind", but its literal translation is "good stomach" and this is because people are more relaxed and easy going and amenable to kindness when they are well fed.

And I guess another choice for Vietnamese is their use of classifier words, which at first I thought would be redundant, but have since realised why they're important. But when I started if I saw the word for 'apple' I'd need a classifier to say it's a fruit, but it's obvious apple is a fruit. But actually, the classifier is to define what state something is in. Because you have all kinds of classifiers, "apple fruit", "apple juice", "apple smoothie", "apple pie", "apple wine(cider)" and then it makes sense. This rule is consistent in Vietnamese, which can be useful, because if you know your classifiers and a noun, you know how to refer to a lot of things. Eg. if you know the word for all the different animals and the classifier for 'animal' and the classifier for 'meat', if you know "cow" then you know "beef", if you know "pig" then you also know "pork", if you know "deer" then you know "venison" and if you know "people" then you know you can help cannibals in Vietnamese. And that's another thing I like in Vietnamese, the languages rules are pretty logical and consistent, which helps with learning that language, because it is easier to figure out how to communicate an idea you've not yet learned.


jeff_lindqvist wrote:
Le Baron wrote:There's also the fact that aloha means both hello and goodbye... I'm sure some other languages have this feature.


Italian ciao springs to mind...


And in Spanish you have "chao" for "bye" and "chao" in Vietnamese is "hello". So it's like Italian's "ciao" decided to split itself in two and go separate ways.
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