I was a bit shocked when I realised, too. I mean, I studied French formally at some point and I had learned that it only has two genders but it never, you know, sunk in.

Québécois vulgarity tends to be inserted between the article and the verb, in a sort of semi-adjective form. So if you forgot if le porte or la porte was correct, you'd say l'ostie de porte which translates roughly to "the goddamn door" but lets you collapse le or la into l' and avoid the error altogether.

So I'd map "la table" to "το τραπέζι" and "un oiseau" το "ένα πουλί" and never notice that the gender has changed from one language to the other.

Unless I think about it.

And the same with pronouns also.

A trapezium is a table? (Checks etymonline) And apparently indeed, trapezium comes from a Greek word that means "little table" from "trapeza" meaning table. The things you learn.

(For those who can't read Greek, the Greek writing in YeGoblynQueenne's post are "to trapezi" and "ena pouli". I can read Greek since my mother studied Christian theology and had the alphabet in prominent display to help her learn it, but I can't understand a word of it.)

Have you ever visited Greece? It would be a strange experience, being able to read all the signs but not knowing what they mean. I know because I was in Bulgaria for a conference this summer and I could read everything... but understand not a word :)

That's because it's all in a Cyrillic alphabet which is very similar to the Greek alphabet (it's partly derived from it). Come to think of it, so is the Latin alphabet, but I'm used to seeing Latin signs everywhere, including in Greece.

I had trouble deciphering the alphabet at speed, but once I had I could often understand the word based on it's similarity to spanish (e.g. Σάββατο / Sábado) or english (έξοδος / exit).

I can read (a reasonable amount of) Greek after studying a lot of physics/math :D. But I only understand the words that trickled into the other languages I speak or can recognize a root for.

E.g. I was working on a paper with my thesis advisor and I used the plural of "lemma", "lemmata" (λήμμα, λήμματα). It's actually in the English dictionary, but he advised me to say "lemmas" instead because people reading the paper may not be native English speakers and it would just make the text harder to read. I always want to sneak in fancy words in my papers, but it's a bit tricky to do it right..

I'm not sure it should matter what one particular authority decides, in terms of language use. People, including people writing administrative documents should be free to write in the manner that feels most comfortable to them. If this creates a political problem, the political solution is the ballot box and altering the education or hiring policies.

Customary criticism is fine, but it makes no sense to say "you shouldn't say foo because some organisation that shouldn't have authority says you shouldn't say foo"; instead, you should have some direct reason why foo is problematic.

Your criticism shouldn't be circular either, for instance "you shouldn't use 'singular they' because 'they' is plural" is completely, aside from being historically wrong, ineffective as criticism, since it is merely because of the incorrect description of the word as "plural" by some authority that you believe it to be plural, whereas most people use it regularly to refer to a non-specific person.

They should also write in a way that conveyed information effectively. The so-called inclusive writing is extremely disruptive to the flow of reading and makes job offers, administrative documents and so on a pain to navigate (all for the sake of political positions very few people actually hold), defeating the point of language. I'm sure fellow French speakers will know what I'm talking about.

On the learning side, you also often get told rules that don't entirely make sense. For instance I'm told in a Mandarin class that there's a difference between 不 and 没 which is whether it's subjective or objective that something isn't true. But that's neither clear when saying something, nor clear in terms of examples I've been given. What's really weird is I speak another Chinese dialect that also has this distinction, and I also can't tell you the rule there.

I don't think that rule holds. 没 is usually used to negate either 有 "have" or something in the past. E.g. 我没告诉你。 "I didn't tell you." 不 is used for everything else, i.e. 我不告诉你。 "I'm not telling you." (The interesting thing is that "have" also has a past aspect in English, e.g. "I have told you." But Mandarin doesn't use 有 as a general past marker, only the negation 没)

> I speak another Chinese dialect that also has this distinction, and I also can't tell you the rule there.

Which one? Is the rule the same as in Mandarin, i.e. can you produce correct Mandarin sentences despite not knowing the rule, relying just on intuition? I think Cantonese uses 冇 to negate 有.

More technically, 没 is the negative marker that applies to the verb 有, and 不 is the negative marker that applies to everything else. It isn't the 没 that marks a negative in the past as being past -- it is the (omitted) 有. That 有 is commonly not omitted in negative past sentences -- and it's also possible to use 有 to mark past time in positive-polarity sentences, though this is much rarer than the same marking in negative sentences.

There's a straightforward information-theoretic reason why 有 can be so commonly omitted -- it is the only thing that can ever follow 没, so actually realizing it doesn't add much. Everyone knows it's there.

> E.g. 我没告诉你。 "I didn't tell you."

This is the same sentence as 我没有告诉你, also fully idiomatic. The past sense is coming from the 有.

> But Mandarin doesn't use 有 as a general past marker, only the negation 没

This is plainly incorrect. 有 is used as a general past marker. It just isn't obligatory in positive-polarity sentences. Here are some things Chinese people have said to me:

你在中国 有看见过 美国没有的水果吗？("Have you seen any fruits in China that America doesn't have?")

我有吗 ("Did I?")

On the other hand, maybe that is a shortening of an originally obligatory two-part expression similar to Jespersen's cycle, famously observed in the appearance of "pas" and ongoing disappearance of "ne" in French "ne ... pas". https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jespersen%27s_Cycle

As you can see, there's more than one way to negate something. Well it's hard for me to know if the rule is the same, given that I don't really know what the rule is in either! As per my previous comment I can tell you what sounds right, but I can't tell you why.

Neuter has stayed as is.

There are, however, remnants of the masculine/feminine distinction left: e.g. klockan is ofter referred to as feminine (hon), and the "-e" in "storebror" (as opposed to "-a" which is used for utrum today and feminine in the past).

The -e/-a ending is still in common use not only in constructions like "storebror" but in general in adjectives pointing to a female or male person ("den fule mannen", "den fula kvinnan") although this usage is falling out of favour a bit ("den fula mannen" would not generally sound wrong to most modern speakers)

Another interesting remnant of old Norse that still lingers in modern Swedish is the accusative case ending -s in expressions like "till fjälls", "till skogs", "till sjöss", "till sängs" etc.

No, this is not accurate, neither historically nor according to modern usage. Animate objects tend towards utrum but plenty of inanimate objects are utrum too and there are no hard rules or mnemonics you can use to divine which is which.

It's "ett tåg" ("a train") but "en bil" ("a car"), "ett äpple" ("an apple") but "en banan" ("a banana"), "ett barn" (a child) but "en vuxen" (an adult). This is entirely arbitrary and non-obvious to non-native speakers and if you're learning Swedish, you just straight up have to learn which is which for every word.

For example, "a friendship" is "et venskab" in Danish, but "en vänskap" in Swedish.

If anyone pronounces <ch> as <sh>, <z> as <s> and <j> as <y> they're probably Swedish.

As a native English speaker, it took me a while to hear the difference between Swedish "tj" and "sj" (at least the way it's pronounced in Northern Swedish, like "schhh").

It does, but only in the onomatopoetic word "bzzz", as in the sound of a flying insect. And if you were to drop that sounding s, if you said that a fly went "bsss" around you, people would be weirded out, thinking the fly pissed on you or something. So pretty much every Swede can make the sound [z], and can hear the difference between [z] and [s], but only for this single word. It's so weird!

Now as for Swedish, what trips me up is that I've met so many Swedes that (otherwise) speak great English, but seem to pronounce J sounds in a distinctly Swedish way when speaking English. I've had fluent English-speaking Swedes in a university setting asking if I want to hear a "yoke" (joke) and or maybe telling me about their "yeans" (jeans). It's so weird. It's a bit like how many French people seem unable to pronounce an H when speaking English, but Swedes are damn good at English, unlike the average French person.

Likewise, I can identify English with a Danish accent pretty quickly, but I can't for the love of me speak it, because I'm not good enough at Danish. But a dead giveaway is that Danish realizes 'R' as [ʁ], and many Danes pronounce it the same way when speaking English. :-P And there's something with the vowels that's just weird that Danish people do... I can't put my finger on it.

(I have the opposite problem, I can't make that 'R' sound at all, which is why my Danish sounds pretty funny to native Danes.)

It isn't used like a vowel. There's no word 'XwY' for any string of letters X,Y - and you can't prounounce 'xwy' (for any single letters x,y) without adding vowel sound.

E.g., (spelling vs pronunciation) 'town' vs 'toun', 'own' vs 'oan', 'bow' vs 'bo' or 'bau', etc.

It definitely seems like the most vowel-like consonant after 'y'.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Semivowel

Awe, ewe, owe, awl, owl, own, two...

But my point was that in all other European languages, the letter 'W' is clearly a consonant, usually realized as [v] or [ʋ], and seen as a variant of 'V'.

English is the odd one out, English sees it as a variant of 'U', and it's not clearly a consonant, it's a semi-vowel as you pointed out further down.

It varies across the v <-> w spectrum depending on region, and also some words seem mostly nearer one or the other (but it's the same character, there isn't a second).

You sometimes hear that in native speaker's English, but more 'v's sounding nearer a 'w' than the other way around (as in native German speakers).

Fascinating how growing up with different languages teach us different sounds, and those we didn't use can be so difficult to produce, even if we can hear and understand the difference.

I struggle with two things in Hindi: aspiration (transliterated as 'ta' vs 'tha' for example, but that's not an English 'th', it's 'ta' with air forced out) which I usually either don't pronounce clearly, or it's way over-exaggerated; and retroflex consonants, which I can hear but often struggle to pronounce correctly quickly enough to flow with the rest of the word. And particularly 'd.a' which when correctly pronounced contains (to my ear) some 'r'.

For those that don't know.

It was nice to read it once again...

The English E covers е, и, (roughly) ы in Russian. The English y covers the same but also partially у and ё.

When you get to dialectic English, then all of those vowels have different vocalisations or they otherwise don’t exist. And in all cases Y is a vowel and the same as J.

I love languages and linguistics and this kind of thing.

What’s more, take this to Spain and South America and in Castellano your ‘ll’ is more like an English ‘y’, but in Latin American it’s more of a ‘dj’ or an English ‘j’.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Semivowel

EDIT: Also, the Spanish <ll> as /ʒ/ (S in English treasure) is not nearly as extent in South America as you might think. It's still mostly limited to Argentina and Uruguay:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ye%C3%ADsmo#She%C3%ADsmo

EDIT EDIT: I misread the symbols a bit, and in other areas of South and Central America it's /ʝ/ instead of /ʒ/, which is not a very big difference at all. (Palatal vs postalveolar... Basically neighbors.)

In Puerto Rican Spanish (at least, my grandmother's family's accent), the <ll> is more of a /dʒj/ sort of thing. "llama" comes out to "djyamma", with the "dj" softened significantly. Not sure how to express that more precisely in IPA, though.

The Wikipedia I linked is about the merging of <ll> and <y> to /ʝ/ if you want to read more. Interestingly, I don't hear this a lot in the northern Mexican Spanish I hear, even though all of Central America is marked as merged.

I didn't read it correctly the first time, and I was wrong to call it out in the first place. The difference between /ʝ/ and /ʒ/ is not so big for me to have said anything.

Also, did you mean Greek θ (theta)? θ started as aspirated /tʰ/, and it's a pretty common sound change for aspiration to become a fricative, in this case /θ/. φ also made a similar journey from /pʰ/ to /ɸ/ to /f/.

Not sure why phi would be mapped to the voiceless interdental fricative ("th") though. I thought that came from theta. But I have not studied Greek, so I really don't know haha.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Koine_Greek_phonology

(Click through the "stop consonant" sections.)

The letters 'b' and the 'v' are pronounced in Spanish as voiced bilabial fricatives after a vowel, and as stops after a nasal consonant (which in that position will be pronounced as [m]), and generally in utterance-initial position.

Swedes tend to pronounce English "yes" and "yoke" as well as "juice" and "joke" all with the same Swedish J sound.