No amount of exceptions and quirks will prevent you from learning any language as long as you have lots and lots of exposure. After your reach a certain base level you just keep improving as you use the language, and even the exceptions start to feel natural.
English is the only language other than my mother tongue I have achieved this level with. I’d like to think at least in writing it’s indistinguishable from a native speaker. Theoretically tho German should be easier for me as I’m Dutch. But my German never reached the same level because of the difference in exposure
My native language is a Slavic one but I can’t fucking learn Polish because the language is just too fucking funny to me.
It’s like how English speakers think Dutch is funny but turned up to 11.
The Slavic languages are interesting but I don’t know a lot about them. It must be amusing to be aware of the various levels of mutual intelligibility. Do you know any jokes Eastern Europeans make about this among themselves?
The one reason that Polish is so funny to me is the amount of homophones between it and my native language with vastly different meanings.
One of the funniest being:
Szukać - To look for (Polish)
Šukať - To fuck (Slovak, improper/slang)
Both pronounced the same way.
I assure you that Ukrainian is going to be just as funny to you, because we did loan like a third of our vocabulary from Polish. And another third is homophones, so you can have two layers of the broken phone game
Oh no.
If I ever get interested in Ukrainian it’s over for me.
Lovely. I used to have a Ukrainian coworker and she overheard me use the word ‘zoeken’ (search) and she thought I was swearing as I didn’t pronounce the ‘n’ strongly
They are not pronounced the same way, the Polish word always has the extra spit at the end
What?
THEY ARE NOT PRONOUNCED THE SAME WAY, THE POLISH WORD ALWAYS HAS THE EXTRA SPIT AT THE END
WHEN SOMEONE ASKS YOU WHAT YOU MEAN YOU SHOULD PROBABLY ELABORATE INSTEAD OF JUST REPEATING IT IN ALL CAPS.
As a Ukrainian, I can almost understand written Polish and Belarusian despite not speaking either. Spoken Polish tho… good luck
For me personally, German is really easy as I have been born German. Have you tried that as well?
I’m German, born and raised, but in Saarland. One time when visiting a friend in Berlin, I was at a bar and got a compliment on how good my German is even tho I’m obviously a foreigner.
That is damn funny. I don’t think we have the same thing in the UK as while we have many accents, they are so unique they sound nothing like any foreigner. I guess German accents can sound similar to foreigners speaking German?
Our accent is so thick that I can talk to my buddy and nobody around us can follow the conversation if they don’t speak it. It’s kinda neat lol
Actually no, but I’ll try as soon as I have the opportunity. Thanks for the advice!
I live 30km from the French border, I had 10 years worth of French classes at school. I always hated it, but I did an extra-curriculum to acquire a diploma because a classmate and friend of mine didn’t want to do it alone. My French is in a weird spot: I cannot form a proper sentence, but I understand listening exercises and written text well. I recently started to go through some French lessons on Duolingo and I’m already struggling with the sentences it expects me to form in unit 8…
It’s probably because you had a lot of exposure but insufficient engagement. I should probably have mentioned this in my original comment. You kind of developed a one way mastery of the language. Exposure will get you there after you get to a certain level but to get there you need lots of practice
I’m also Dutch and honestly I think part of it is the amount of subtitled English tv I watched when I was young. I tried the same with German struggled finding things to watch.
If you look at Germany or France they often dub over stuff while we subtitle everything.
It’s completely unwatchable with voice dubs isn’t it? I don’t get how anyone puts up with it
I’ve had family tell me The Emperor’s New Groove is actually great with Dutch dubs but the title in Dutch just translates to “Emperor Cuzco”. No one is gonna convince me most jokes don’t get lost in translation when the first time it happens is in the title!
I know what you mean. When I learned Dutch (as a German) I got close to this state quickly but after I finished uni I left the Netherlands and my Dutch has deteriorated a lot.
Besides “tho” for “though”, soundin’ hella native brah 😎
I use tho instead of though as a native, although I think I might only actually do it at the end of sentences, tho. I’m not actually sure I use though during a sentence
I was raised bilingual, and spent most of my life in the UK
Me too!
Sounded out of place after “theoretically” tho
I agree, although I would’nt’ve noticed they weren’t a native if they didn’t mention it
One hunnit
it’s normal for natives to use “tho” in place of “though” but it’s a pretty casual way of writing it that, to me at least, seems quite out of place with the rest of the comment
American English is not the only native English
Have you tried french?
Qu’est-ce que c’est ? C’est un ver sur un mur, qui murmure des vers à côté d’un ver vert.
Then there are 98 conjugations of every verb, and 98 different groups of verbs.
Oiseau.
What I think is interesting about the word flea market is that it’s a calque in pretty much all languages.
The Swedish word is “loppis”, which is a cutesy colloquial term for “loppmarknad.” Loppa, meaning flea, and marknad meaning market.
Flohmarkt in German also means lit. “flea market.”
Marche aux puces is French, where “puce” means flea, I think this might be the origin of the term.
Japanese has the casual term フリマ (fleama), short for フリーマーケット, which is just the English term “flea market”, there’s also the term 蚤の市, just meaning “market of fleas.”I believe Portuguese calls it a “thieves’ market”, but Spanish, Italian, Russian, Turkish, Dutch, and Mandarin all use their own native words for “flea market”; mercado de pulgas, mercato delle pulci, Блошиный рынок, Bit Pazarı, Vlooienmarkt, 跳蚤市场.
For all of the concepts and such that are identical across cultures, few things have universal names. Typically they enter the language as loanwords as well (e.g. karaoke, from Japanese ‘空オケ’, hollow orchestra), so the term “flea market” stands out to me. I’m sure there are lots of other similar things I’m not aware of though.
Edit: It’s worth mentioning that other than Swedish (native), English, and Japanese, I don’t speak any of the other languages. I’ve asked a Russian-American friend about the Russian term, and a friend in Taiwan about the Mandarin term. Otherwise I’ve checked dictionaries and the like. Don’t take my word as fact, I’m not a linguist. It was just a pattern I found interesting, because the term itself is so particular. Any and all corrections are more than welcome.
I’m also delighted by the discussion this has sparked! 💖
That reminds me of the word ‘Frank,’ which was used by the Byzantines to essentially mean ‘all those non-Roman barbarians to the west of us’ and which, after the Crusades, spread as a word across Asia meaning ‘Europeans.’
Thank you for sharing! I had not heard of this before. I particularly enjoyed this bit
Farang khi nok (Thai: ฝรั่งขี้นก, lit. ‘bird-droppings Farang’), also used in Lao, is slang commonly used as an insult to a person of white race, equivalent to white trash, as khi means feces and nok means bird, referring to the white color of bird-droppings
That’s so colourful. I love it.
It also made me think of the fictional race in Star Trek, the Ferengi. At least according to Wikipedia that is precisely the origin of their name!
Frankly frankly reminds me of those folks from the north of Gaul
Japanese fleama though appears to be a loan word and not a calque like the rest.
Now this guy is paying attention!
This is true, I don’t know which word came first. I’d wager a guess that 蚤の市 predates フリーマーケット, but it’s really just a stab in the dark on the basis that English loanwords feel more modern, and it feels unlikely that a calque would be created after a loanword has been widely adopted.
Wouldn’t it be both? Assuming 蚤の市 and フリーマーケット have the same meaning.
I assume that 蚤の市 is a loan word and フリーマーケット a calque. But I don’t speak any Japanese.
No, it’s the other way around. 蚤 means flea and 市 means market. フリーマーケット sounds like flea market.
蚤の市
Yep! nomi no ichi. Nomi (蚤) means flea, and ichi (市) means market, no (の) is a possessive particle making it “flea’s market” or “market of flea”
Pretty much anything in katakana in Japan is loanwords.
Very interesting about flew markets though, Norway is the same as Sweden here.
Add Finnish to the list, “kirpputori” = flea market.
Is tori ever used like plaza, like the Swedish word “torg?” The way I read tori in my head makes it sound almost homophonous with torg, hence why I ask.
A number of Slavic, Baltic, Norse, (and also Finnic languages like Finnish and Estonian) use some form of this word for market. It originated in Proto-slavic and passed through Old Norse into descendant languages.
https://en.m.wiktionary.org/wiki/търгъ#Old_East_Slavic
The most interesting thing is that the root appears to have borrowed into Finnish twice, once probably from Slavic (as turku) and once from Old Norse (as tori).
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Are you referring to Brazil Portuguese and Portugal Portuguese?
(I’m just randomly curious. And while I’m asking,)
In which country is it Mercado de Pulgas? Do you know if the other one uses Mercado de WhateverThievesisinthatPortuguese?
In European Portuguese it’s “Feira da Ladra”, or “Fair of the (female) Thieve”
I started talking to a dude from Brazil a couple of months ago, and was blown away just by how different Brazilian Portuguese is from Portuguese, even just phonetically. I should’ve probably mentioned that I really only speak English, Swedish, and Japanese, so any other examples are ones that I’ve dug up in lexicons and the like, so there may be terms that are direct translations but not actually used colloquially.
I can totally see different words being used between Brazilian Portuguese and Portugal-Portuguese.
thieves market
I’ve definitely been to a few flea markets where I thought all this stuff was stolen.
Aha! See, my first thought was that maybe it had something to do with pickpockets being present!
“Hippopotamus” is another one. It derives from the Greek words hippos (horse) and potamos (river) and this concept of river horse is present in many different languages:
- German: Flusspferd (lit. river horse)
- Dutch: Rivierpaard (lit. river horse)
- Finnish: Virtahepo (lit. stream horse)
- Danish: Flodhest (lit. flood horse)
- Chinese: 河马 (lit. river horse)
- Arabic: فرس النهر (lit. river horse)
- French, Spanish, Italian and Portuguese use variations of hippopotamus.
Tiny variations exist as well:
- Hungarian: Víziló (lit. water horse)
- Afrikaans: Seekoei (lit. sea cow)
Actually, the Dutch translation is “Nijlpaard”, not “rivierpaard”.
But, it uses the Dutch name for the Nile river, “Nijl”. So it’s lit. “Nilehorse” - which is technically the same as “river horse”, just more geographically specific.
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Aye! Flodhäst in Swedish, and カバ (河馬, 河 river, 馬 horse) in Japanese.
Unimportant extra: it’s not a calque in British English, because we don’t use it (to the best of my knowledge). Like a potluck, we have the concept but not a word for it, and we don’t use the American phrases either
We have a car boot sale, but that’s literal
There’s probably regional exceptions
Perhaps the Giant London Flea Market will start a trend: https://www.queenelizabetholympicpark.co.uk/whats-on/giant-london-flea-market
Vlooienmarkt in Dutch, also literally flea market.Edit: Nvm, I’m blind, I see you already mentioned it.
It’s almost like most of those languages you mentioned, had their speakers go everywhere around the world, approximately 500 years ago, and they colonized most of the world, causing many places around the world to use similar idioms…
English is not a language.
English is 6 drunk raccoons driving an M1 Abrams through a Wendy’s drivethru.
Hey that’s the raccoon whisperer but Soldier from TF2. I’ve never seen that, that’s great.
I did nothing, but fed raccoons for three days
Similar to this?
Exactly! Just add a few sweaty rednecks and an extra large fry and you’re golden. 👍
𝕯𝖎𝖊𝖘𝖊 𝕶𝖔𝖒𝖒𝖊𝖓𝖙𝖆𝖗𝖘𝖊𝖐𝖙𝖎𝖔𝖓 𝖎𝖘𝖙 𝖓𝖚𝖓 𝕰𝖎𝖌𝖊𝖓𝖙𝖚𝖒 𝖉𝖊𝖗 𝕭𝖚𝖓𝖉𝖊𝖘𝖗𝖊𝖕𝖚𝖇𝖑𝖎𝖐 𝕯𝖊𝖚𝖙𝖘𝖈𝖍𝖑𝖆𝖓𝖉
bro typing in calligraphy 💀
*Typografer Gotisch
Bearbeitungsnotiz: Falsch, ist nur Fraktur
bro X’d his Y 💀
Your language is weird and fucked up in its own ways, but something like 1.5 billion people know English and most of them as a second language.
Und?
Und ich musste Google Translate verwenden, um Ihnen das auf Deutsch zu sagen, aber Sie müssen es wahrscheinlich nicht tun, um auf Englisch zu antworten.
If mean original comment should be english: no, text in german part of the meme.
I answer in german because that also part of the meme, comment section part of germany mean national language now german.
So what?
So that’s why it’s more confusing that English is weird but also very widely spoken?
Surely the only languages that are not weird are those specifically designed to be widely spoken?
And no-one wants to speak those!
Some languages are more weird than others. Like Spanish has a lot of rules that don’t work 100% of the time, but with far fewer exceptions than English. I mean I just used ‘fewer’ correctly, but most people don’t even get the difference between ‘less’ and ‘fewer.’ Not even a lot, if not most, native speakers.
It’s up there among the easiest languages to learn from my understanding and a huge number of people around the world do speak it.
He’s just racist, ignore him.
My man, it’s a meme. For some reason you can easily summon a horde of Germans whenever there’s a reference to the German language or Germany. I don’t know what causes this internet phenomenon, maybe our lacking national pride, but it is what it is. And that he’s writing in German is part of a different Reddit meme.
But he has point, our language is weird and fucked up.
Basically every language is weird and fucked up in its own ways.
I’m a native Arabic speaker, and I have to tell you this: the number system is pretty confusing, everything is gendered, and there’s like 100 different words just to describe lions. Also, Arabic poetry always rhymes.
English is a germanic language. Is loanword an actual calque, and not an “evolved” version of a root word?
No, it was imported from German. Frisian and Dutch have “lienwurd” and “leenwoord” too (also calqued from German)
English is a Germanic language, with a lot of it’s vocabulary imported from a Romance language (French). Hilarity ensues.
Loanword came into the language around 1860 so it is a claque. If it had been in the vocabulary since old-english then it would just be an evolved version of the German root.
English is made by English speakers, and English speakers like to do a bit of trolling. Especially when it comes to speaking, reading and writing English.
When you learn a new language, you acquire its vocabulary. The etymology of the vocabulary is often irrelevant and can sometimes be beneficial. For example, when I started learning Spanish, I discovered that most French words ending in -al and -tion (a language I already know) are the same in Spanish. This means that I have instantly acquired hundreds of new words in my target language.
English is actually quite easy. Yes, there is a lot of vocabulary, but almost no conjugations or declinations make it easy compared to some others. My native has 19 different cases with 2-3 variants each for tonal coherence, and 2 modes of full verb conjugation (with additional exceptions of course).
What i found very difficult in english is the fact that there’s no rule on how to pronounce words; you have to learn how to pronounce each word individually. which means that you might know how a word is written and what it means while not being able to recognize it when listening to someone speaking in english.
Is it caveat or caveat?
Where is the cave at?
But come on 12 different grammatical tenses.
They are mostly logical, it’s actually permutations of 3 by 4 conditions.
That’s what I’ve heard in general from people, surprisingly
Every language has these. Chinese prefers calques to loanwords, but even it has 浪漫 lang4man4 romantic
That’s a really interesting case of autological and heterological words
Urgh, I resent the english language so much. It’s so inconsistent and weird and unintuitive, which my dumb-dumb rules-focused brain just does not gel with. We should all just use Esperanto or something instead.
You must resent every single natural human language then, since all of them show the exact same kinds of irregularities, for the most part.
And, if we all did decide to use Esperanto because it’s regular (and therefore artificial), irregularities would inevitably be introduced within a single generation, because the nature of human language is to change, and that change will always result in irregularity.
You know what, YEAH, I DO
FUCK language, when’s true 1-to-1 perfect transmission of information and meaning coming out? Get on it, linguists/wizards!
Go speak Lojban with people numbering “beyond what can be counted on the fingers of one hand”.
Minor nitpick, you have causality inverted. Esperanto is artificial and therefore regular.
No, I have it the right way around. Artificial languages can be irregular, so your order doesn’t follow.
No regular language can be natural, though, so if you come across a regular language, you can always correctly conclude that it’s artificial through modus tollens:
“If a language is natural, then it is not regular. This language is regular, therefore it is not natural.”
You’re correct, but try to see it as permission to speak English your own way rather than getting frustrated attempting to speak “correct” English, a fiction which has never existed despite the efforts of generations of stuffy English teachers. There’s been “English as spoken by the privileged class” but it’s no more correct than any other version and breaks as many of its own rules as any other patois or dialect.
Also has millions of people ready to correct your pronunciation of a word that is written completely randomly compared to how it’s spoken.
Gaelic is worse about this. I’ve joked before that the best way to figure out Gaelic pronunciation is to look at the word and figure out the least likely pronunciation that still technically fits the letters, then try to chew on your tongue while saying that.
That has a lot to do with it being a Germanic language that borrows a huge amount of words from a Romance language (specifically French). So sometimes the rules resemble German, sometimes the rules resemble French, and the rest of the time is all about how it branched in a different direction than German did.
That’s true for every language, and maybe even more so. English is dominating the world, so the chance of inglish words and idioms getting to other languages is higher than from other languages to English.
While that’s likely true now, English has been “three languages in a trenchcoat” from the beginning and survived on theft ever since. Every word entry in the dictionary lists what other language it was taken from, or who invented it, usually as a joke. (For instance one of the possible sources of OK or Okay is a joke-misspelling of All Correct.)
Having English as second language, you don’t have to convince me that spoken language and spelling are only loosely related. While being dyslexic does not help either, something dies in me each time I am spelling “eye”, or “year” and struggle with the words like philosophy (fylosophy?).
Smh just learn Ancient Greek:
philosophy <=> φιλοσοφία <=> Phi Iota Lambda Omicron Sigma Omicron Phi Iota Alpha
So, phi should be a single letter, right? It is single letter in Greek and other languages.
Uh I had to quickly look at Wikipedia but apparently the reason it’s transcribed with Ph is:
At the time these letters were borrowed, there was no Greek letter that represented /f/: the Greek letter phi ‘Φ’ then represented an aspirated voiceless bilabial plosive /ph/, although in Modern Greek it has come to represent /f/.)
And so out of the various vav variants in the Mediterranean world, the letter F entered the Roman alphabet attached to a sound which the Greeks did not have.
So Greeks pronounced Phi differently from F and somehow someone decided that it should be transcribed as Ph because it sounded different from the transcriber’s sound of F. Maybe the Phi symbol just looked like a P.
I wonder if English’s history has made it particularly good at adopting words?
Your saying those crafty englishmen colonised, raped & pillaged everything down to the very words from everyone they encountered?
There’s no perhaps about it.
This is one of those things where formally, sure, there’s a difference, but I’ve never heard anyone use that first term. Everything’s a loanword. And these kinds of things are in many, if not all, languages, from my attempts at learning other languages.
Well yes, but you could say that about basically every science, not just linguistics. I can think of at least three such cases in German and more specifically German law.
Lots of !badlinguistics in this thread (but some goodlinguistics too though!).
