International Party! (a thread for lovers of languages)

[HarryT]

Originally Posted by travger

Mindset HAS to be different to have evolved a language that needs to point out actors' sex and numbers in every activity.

No, you just think that because you speak a language which happens to have lost most of its inflections. Grammatical gender is a fundamental part of most languages.

[Kumabjorn]

Originally Posted by travger

hai = yes (japanese)

Actually hai はい and its variants ee ええ and haa はー are not an absolute yes, but a relational inflection, hence if you answer a negative questions that way, it will be the equivalent of no.

[travger]

Originally Posted by Kumabjorn

Actually hai はい and its variants ee ええ and haa はー are not an absolute yes, but a relational inflection, hence if you answer a negative questions that way, it will be the equivalent of no.

Well, in movies they are always yelling hai! and running to fulfill the order. (1. I have not seen many of them, 2. it was 1 of maybe 3 words I could make out during the movie )

And to my mind, confirmation of negative is logically 'yes' - eh, of course there are exeptions - but mostly.

[MacEachaidh]

Originally Posted by travger

Well, in movies they are always yelling hai! and running to fulfill the order. (1. I have not seen many of them, 2. it was 1 of maybe 3 words I could make out during the movie )

That's because they're responding to a positive statement - in this case an order.

Originally Posted by travger

And to my mind, confirmation of negative is logically 'yes' - eh, of course there are exeptions - but mostly.

The key is the word "confirmation". Think of it more like an agreement with what's actually being said - so if someone makes a negative statement such as "that dog isn't black", then "Hai" is really saying "That's correct, the dog isn't black". In English, when we say "Yes", meaning "yes, it is black", we're simply being lazy, and leaving out the affirmative statement and assuming the "yes" carries the full meaning. But we also apply tone and stress to the word - if you were saying "Yes" meaning "I agree, it isn't black", that "Yes" is going to be spoken very differently from if you were to say "Yes" meaning "Yes it is black, you're wrong."

[Kumabjorn]

Originally Posted by travger

And to my mind, confirmation of negative is logically 'yes' - eh, of course there are exeptions - but mostly.

Assuming you can't come tomorrow, and I ask you "Won't you come over tomorrow?"
Would you answer yes or no?

[FlorenceArt]

Just a little clarification, "hai" is not necessarily to be understood as affirmation or confirmation. In many cases it just means "I heard and understood you", from which it does not necessarily follow that I agree.

[Kumabjorn]

In those cases it is used as Aizuchi 相鎚 not as an affirmative response.

[travger]

Originally Posted by Kumabjorn

Assuming you can't come tomorrow, and I ask you "Won't you come over tomorrow?"
Would you answer yes or no?

Nice one I'd ask for a raincheck.

Have you read Karlsson books by Astrid Lindgren? He asked from one of the characters: "Have you stopped drinking brandy in the mornings?" - showing that to some questions there is no yes/no answer.

[Latinandgreek]

Originally Posted by omk3

I loved the bellen misunderstanding.

I learned German before I learned English, long time ago. In an English oral exam, I wanted to say something about going to the islands in a boat. I could not for the life of me remember the English word, but I could remember the German Boot, and it sounded almost right, so I ended up saying that I go to the islands in a boot . As I got very high marks, I guess the examiner thought I was just using a mancunian accent or something!

Another word that must cause humorous misunderstandings is embarazada, in Spanish. It is the same word as embarrassed, but it seems in Spanish it is mainly used to mean 'pregnant'. I imagine there are many situations where someone innocently wants to proclaim her embarrassment and ends up getting congratulations or weird looks.

Yes, I remember a teacher of mine (in high school) telling me about how she tried to tell a Spaniard that she was "embarazada" about something, and was really surprised when enthusiastically congratulated her... until she went home and looked the word up in a dictionary

[Logseman]

Actually the word "embarazada" has an interesting story. Embarazoso still means embarrassing in the normal sense, and embarazo can both refer to pregnancy or to embarrasment (though this second meaning is sort of quaint). And to make it funnier, "embarazada" is only used for human females. Pregnant females of other species are "preñada".

Spanish is one hell of a language to learn. The verb "to be" is split in two (ser and estar), there are almost 20 verb tenses... at least our alphabet is pretty straightforward, with the exception of the infamous h, g and q letters.

I've been very fortunate to be able to learn some languages, and I plan to learn more in the future. Omk3 pointed out before something about introducing words of other languages in our own thoughts... it's something which happens very naturally for me. In particular, I find German a very powerful language to convey feelings, as if one word would say more than three or four in other languages.

[Latinandgreek]

I'm starting both a Mandarin course and a Korean language course on Friday. They are beginners courses. Does anybody have any books or beginners dictionaries that might be of help to me in these classes, that they might be able to recommend? I just ordered the Oxford Beginner's Chinese dictionary and the Berlitz Korean dictionaries from Amazon. Has anybody used them?

[Freeshadow]

but the german grammar is crappy

Der Pickel namens Artikel und die Bürde mit werde, worden und würde usw.
Nimmt der Sprache Würde und macht sie hölzern.
Flexing languages are harder to learn, but you have less complicated shorter sentences as a reward.
The only thing german does well at is building word-connections.
that means if you ever want to get the highest scrabble score possible, play it in German.

[Logseman]

Originally Posted by Freeshadow

but the german grammar is crappy

Maybe if you Germans tried to learn it properly, it wouldn't hurt Does any non-linguist use properly the Subjunktiv I and II? Or do you even remember what ending goes with which case? And then you expect us poor foreign students to learn that Wahnsinn of yours

[omk3]

I wouldn't call the German grammar "crappy" - in fact it has a kind of internal logic that makes sense. It's, erm, organised. It's also rather hard to learn, and complicated. I'm very glad I learned German at school, because I would probably never have attempted it later in life, voluntarily. That said, there must be even more complicated grammars out there - a Lithuanian friend told me they have no less than seven cases, nominative, genitive, dative, accusative, instrumental, locative, and vocative. It does sound discouraging for a potential student of the language...

About embarazada... I wonder about the history of this peculiar meaning in Spanish. Maybe pregnancy is (or was) in some cases considered embarrassing? (Like out of wedlock?) It is interesting that it's not used for (other) animals.

[Freeshadow]

Logseman you are completely right, the most native speaking Germans "do it wrong"
Konjunktiv is also a popular example of being lost and forgotten. Thus I also had a hell of time learning the language
what - apart of poor grammar usage drives me up the wall regularly is

• the habit to mispronounce literally every "ei" as "ai" (even in foreign names or brands )
  I sometimes think it would really be better if they would use ᛇ for ei (yew tree is Eibe)
• the habit to read "sp..." as "schp..." and "st..." as "scht..." AFAIK only the northern german dialect doesn't