Thread: International Party! (a thread for lovers of languages)
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Old 06-25-2010, 03:50 AM   #36
TGS
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Quote:
Originally Posted by ardeegee View Post
That reminds me of something I brought up once before-- I searched it down rather than to try to recreate the sentiment:

https://www.mobileread.com/forums/sho...6&postcount=74
The relationship between the language we use and the way we carve up the world - the categories we use - is fascinating. Prepositions are one of the weirdest language features and the way the prepositions in English do not quite map on to the prepositions in Danish cause me as a non-native Danish speaker, and the Danish people I teach English to no end of problems. English has far more prepositions than Danish and uses them in weird ways - why might you be "on" a bus but "in" a car for example, but in Danish be "på" a bus and also be be "på" work (if you ask Google på translates as "at")?

Colour categories are also fascinating - whilst all languages seem to more or less agree on certain central examples of some colours, the number of basic colour categories varies from language to language. You can read bits of a fascinating book here.
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