Persian(Farsi) also doesn’t have a word for “The”. We just say the word. There’s also no gender prefixes. The whole language is gender neutral.
Our ancestors were really up to something thousands of years ago.
And it kinda has me thinking what all of that extra fat really does for a language. I never feel confused about meaning when speaking Persian, so the the/he/she/it/they/them really can’t be doing that much heavy lifting if you can just completely ignore it and have a perfectly functioning language without it.
Let’s add dialects to the mess:
While not written in “book” German*, colloquial German may feature des, dat, det or dit instead of das, shorten der to dr or elide parts (like the French l’, except it may be attached to the previous word): Das ist das Problem mit der deutschen Sprache -> Des isch’s Problem mit dr deutscha Sproach
(“That is the problem with the German language.” Bonus: notice how the demonstrative pronoun “that” is also
das? Just in case you were hoping it was restricted to “the”…)* Hochdeutsch or Standarddeutsch (“High German” or “Standard German”), originally a written form slowly evolved over centuries to be most widely understood and has since been formalised. Informally, the term is also used for a spoken counterpart properly called Bühnendeutsch (“Stage German”), which isn’t always quite as “pure”, hence my distinction.
I bloody love my language.
I don’t get it, is Russian the worst here? I understand Finnish and Polish are pretty difficult in terms of these things as well (?).
There is no word for ‘The’ in Russian
English acting like it’s not a fucked up language where “the big, red, round, wrapped box” is fine but “the wrapped, round, red, big box” is wrong.
Yeah… English is a frankenstein language…
Also the adjective order is fucked…
Oh, we know it’s fucked up. I still can’t spell recieve and receipt and I have to look up pretty much every single new word I learn to find out how it’s pronounced.
I still can’t spell recieve and receipt
Hey, you got one of them right!
I thought through it and I’d wager a stiff draught that it ought not be so rough, though as I’m taught, it’s nothing to cough at that a sturdy, taut bough would snap under the weight of its idiosyncrasies.
I haven’t had a proper crush in over a decade, but I think that sentence just might make it. That is beautiful, and thank you for sharing it.
It sounds unnatural to me as a native speaker, but I don’t know that it’s “wrong”. Even the Germanic languages as a family don’t consistently have the same order for words like that, which is neat.
I know it’s not wrong, but it would definitely give one away as a non-native speaker and come across very awkwardly.
It’s only wrong in how it makes your soul feel. Gramatically, it’s okay.
Oh, no, it’s wrong grammatically too, they just don’t teach this unless you study linguistics. Most of all languages with fixed word order and some others have a natural order of adjectives. Tom Scott has a great vid about it.
Yes, Russian has an adjective order too. “A big old blue car” would be «большая старая синяя машина», saying «синяя большая старая машина» implies that “big old car” is a specific term.
I think this is the first time I’ve seen this meme format with more than two panels.
I’ts great work)(whoever actually came up with it!)
Wait till you hear about Chinese measure words. Check out that table.
w.t.f.
thanks for the link though, the pīnyīn overview page on that site is pretty nice
I understand all of these languages.
but I also never have sex.
life is full of trade-offs.
How do I unlearn languages?
I know Hungarian, English, and a very little Japanese. I feel really lonely.
You need to reach like 6 or 7 language before you can experience fifo overflow
6 or 7
ahajjahajajakaka
6 or 7
🤮🤮🤮🤮🤮🤮🤮🤮🤮🤮🤮🤮🤮🤮🤮🤮🤮🤮
Yeah but I have you tagged as manosphere, so that is probably a you problem.
oh and how do you label yourself then?
I have them tagged as judgmental lmao
Where are all these labels coming from? I don’t even see an option to tag individual users across the platform with labels.
Edit: Typed that all out, then hit the settings button, and what do you know, it’s right there.
Me? Thanks.
I can’t keep track of who is who without notes
Also English: This, That, Those, These
Those are pronouns. The meme is about (definite) articles.
pronouns
insert anti-pronoun joke here
Gwa.
(There are whole books written about the usages, but this is far from the worst thing to get wrong if you’re new to Japanese so don’t worry).
Czech is even worse than German.
Elaborate.
I thought there wasn’t a word for “the”.Never mind. I didnt realize it was for “the”. You’re correct, there is no “the” in Czech. I saw the German part and i was triggered by Czech cases (7 of them).
Oh! Well Czech is at least worse than Russian which has ‘only’ 6, then.
Ōlelo Hawaiʻi: ke / ka
Depending on the first letter of the next word.
Lithuanian: “”
I don’t know about Russian but at least Croatian which is also a Slavic language confuses the hell out of me (and I’m German)
Cases are what kill you in Slavic languages. Articles are a breeze though 😉
Russian has 6 cases. two more than german.
the added ones are instrumental and prepositional.
Technically it’s the other way around - the ones German lost in comparison to Russian were the Instrumental and Prepositional (Locative).
This is from the original 8 (or 9) cases in their ancestor, Proto-Indo-European: Nominative, Accusative, Instrumental, Dative, Ablative, Genitive, Locative, Vocative, (Allative).
confuses the hell out of me (and I’m German)
And rightfully so. I’m also German, I learned Sorbian (slavic minority in Lusatia), and I can very much feel your pain.
Russian doesn’t have definite/indefinite articles?
Most (if not all) Slavic-family languages do not. Neither do Japanese nor Korean. Some languages have a partial system (i.e. no a/an but the to show definiteness). Some languages have both but do it differently (Scandanavian languages suffix the definite article on nouns, but the indefinite precedes the noun like in English). Languages are messy and neat.
it doesn’t really use article at all.
it’s highly cased, the cases and inflection do all the work.
That doesn’t sound more simple.
The case are quite complicated, yes. But not having articles is way simpler. And I can’t say it ever caused confusion growing up.
English has strict word order and all these stupid helper words, how is that simpler?
Ok, it is relatively simple to learn for the indogerman family. And looks like, for chinese/korean/japanese as well.
Lol. English is the opposite of simple.
By being the devil we know, I guess? 🤷🏻
I think it’s the case with most Slavic languages. My wife’s native tongue is Serbian, and knowinf when and how to use articles was one the hardest parts of learning English for her.
And they aren’t clear when to use them either, it’s kinda cute when they look at you questioningly if they did correctly after formulating a sentence.
Neither does Polish. I know at least one polaka who confuses the/a(n) 15% of the time.
One of my Polish colleagues, who otherwise speaks pretty perfect English, seems to choose he/she/it at random when putting sentences together. Which is fine for objects, but misleading for people. “I saw a friend yesterday and she said such-and-such” for a male friend, and so on.
Slavic languages notoriously have gender for every object. In russian “friend” have two variants, one for male gender, one for female. Same at least with Ukrainian and Serbian. So when I translate sentence to English (which only have one word for “friend”) I subconsciously use default word + she/he to empathize gender.
It’s annoying habit, cause when I say or refer to “user” for example, I always assume it’s “he/him”.
Guess same for your colleagues.
…which sounds surprising to me, because AFAIK Polish also has separate he/she words (on/ona).
I assume he’s aligning the pronouns to the gender of the noun, rather than the person. “Susie is a great worker, he’s very efficient” kind of stuff.
