Not exactly irrelevant, but very flexible. There are some rules to word order in Hungarian, but you typically rearrange the sentence to emphasize the important part by putting whatever is important in front. For example, if you ask a question, the question word that you expect an answer to always goes in front, "What should I wear?" and the answer should start with the word that answers that question, "The red dress, you should wear". Without delving into an entire Hungarian grammar lesson [because 1) I'm not qualified and 2) It would take several months], you can think of word order in Hungarian like the word order that Yoda uses. Yoda might say "Patience you must have my young Padawan." but he would never say "Must have you young Padawan patience." Why? Because he's putting emphasis on patience, so he starts the sentence with that, and then the rest of the sentence falls into an order behind that, but isn't random.

Also, while Finnish and Hungarian both have flexible word order and are both agglutinative, a language being agglutinative has little to do with word order and is about the fact that rather than using multiple words, you add prefixes and suffixes to words to add meaning. For example, "I play with my dog" is only two "words" in Hungarian: "kutyámmal játszom" which is basically "dog+my+with play+i", but because of the agglutinative nature, the boundary between what is a "word" and what is a sentence is a bit fuzzy and the words can get very long, for example: "megszentségteleníthetetlenségeskedéseitekért" which roughly translates to "because of y'all's continued behavior as if you could not be desecrated".

Because of agglutination Hungarian also has a very fun tongue twister: "Te tetted e tettetett tettet? Te tettetett tettek tettese, te!" which basically means, "Did you do this pretend deed? You doer of pretend deeds, you!"

It sounds like Hungarian effectively built this into the language, which is super interesting!

Because it really affects the meaning, I also think that your parent's statement that "you typically rearrange the sentence to emphasize the important part" is not strong enough. You don't just "typically" do this. You do it because you must, because most permutations of a given set of words -- although perfectly grammatical, and referring to the same event -- are simply pragmatically incorrect in the context of the conversation or text.

Absolutely. So much so that in the Hungarian dub of Star Wars Yoda speaks normaly, like any other character. His vocal weirdness thing completely gets lost in the translation.

Yes. My point was merely that this is bad. Yoda is supposed to talk differently. If he doesn't, then the translator didn't do their job properly.

https://www.puhutaan-suomea.net/kokoo-koko-kokko-kokoon/

I'd argue that word order is just as relevant (and indeed constrained by meaning) in Hungarian or Finnish as it is in, say, English, though the details of how each language's syntax works are very different. Also, there are plenty of languages not usually characterized as "agglutinative"(e.g. Russian) in which affixes rather than word order are the primary determinant of the role that a word plays.

"Agglutinative" is really just a way of saying that meaning-bearing morphemes in the language tend to be more closely bound together: where in English, for example, we'd express "in our houses" with 3 words, whereas in Hungarian, these would form a single word "házainkban" (ház[a] "house", -i- plural, -nk "our," -ban "in"). We know they're separate words in English because other stuff can come between them ("in each of our big houses"); not so in Hungarian. (So arguably agglutinativity is more about constrained morpheme order than it is about free word order!)

>Topic/subject languages, like Japanese, where previously defined context can radically alter meaning. "Watashi wa hamburger desu" can mean "I'm a hamburger", "I'll have a hamburger", "If you ask me, it's a hamburger", etc.

Of course context can radically alter meaning in English too; think of the waiter who says "which one of you is the hamburger?" ("Me, I'm the hamburger, and he's the Caesar salad.")

Almost all language classifications exist along a spectrum, or perhaps it'd be better to talk about a high-dimensional space. Different languages rely more or less on different strategies, but there are almost no linguistic features for which analogues can't be found in most languages.

I agree; GP didn’t choose the best examples for this. But there are languages like Yimas, Tiwi and Dyirbal for which word order truly is insignificant, so the point still stands.

There's a difference between "free ordering of constituent phrases", where you may rearrange subject noun phrases, object noun phrases, adverbial phrases and the verb into any order depending on emphasis etc., and completely free word order - like in the languages you mentioned - where "the little man walked through the big door" could end up as "man door through walked big little the the" or something like that, completely breaking apart what we'd consider "constituent phrases" in a language like English, where "the little man" etc. always move together in a sentence.

> There's a difference between "free ordering of constituent phrases", where you may rearrange subject noun phrases, object noun phrases, adverbial phrases and the verb into any order depending on emphasis etc., and completely free word order - like in the languages you mentioned - where "the little man walked through the big door" could end up as "man door through walked big little the the" or something like that, completely breaking apart what we'd consider "constituent phrases" in a language like English, where "the little man" etc. always move together in a sentence.

But how common is it to have the former without the latter? Most languages I read about have either both or neither.

Many language seem to have at least a somewhat flexible ordering of constituents. It may often depend on emphasis, information structure, etc. German for example can be quite flexible in that regard, and the effects this has on information structure are rather subtle (however, the verb always has to go in the second position, so it's not totally free). There are probably languages where it's even more free, but I don't have any examples off the top of my head. By contrast, there are languages where word order is very rigid (even in English, while you can rearrange constituents up to a point, it's not nearly as common as in German, and I would argue that it can often sound slightly archaic)

This I don’t agree with.† The rest of your post, however, I agree with entirely, and how I forgot the examples you mention I’m not entirely sure.

[† see what I did there?]

The "desu" isn't strictly necessary. You can just say "oishikatta".

With that said, Japanese does have a bunch of curious features, like different words for ordinal numbers depending on what you're counting (e.g. "one, two" can be translated to "hitori, futari" for people, or "ippon, nihon" for long objects, or "ippiki, nihiki" for small animals, etc), a plethora of onomatopoeias even for things that don't actually make any sounds - notoriously, "pika" (as in pikachu) is word for the "sound" of sparkling, politeness conjugations (e.g. "da" vs "desu" vs " de gozaimasu"), and many other things.

Disclaimer: I'm a Japanese native learning Chinese.

Consider the examples offered: ..."hitori, futari" for people, or "ippon, nihon" for long objects.... The "number part" varies considerably: one and two are "hito-" and "futa-" in the first case and "i-" and "ni-" in the second. In the second example, the counter is "-ppon", with a plosive stop; in the second, it's "-hon" with an affricate. The combination of varying number pronunciations and the

Japanese shares many, many grammatical features with Korean, including much of the politeness grammar system; however, when I looked over a Korean grammar linguistics book recently, I wasn't able to find anything to indicate that counting was as complicated as this.

Note also that ~hon changing to ~bon/~ppon is a general feature of Japanese compound words, it's nothing to do with counters specifically.

There is sometimes variation where a person needs to learn which each number for which thing uses which system. For example, with people, a common way of counting is "hitori", "futari" (your irregular cases), and then "san nin", "yo nin", ... (your regular cases). It's not always that way; but the flexibility exists and that is quite different from Chinese.

The sound change -hon to -ppon and similar sound changes are not actually regular in Japanese -- there's not a clear phonological rule for them. Although counters don't generally vary in pronunciation for each count of the counter, many of the common ones do; and these variations must be learned per number, per counter.

The earlier commenter spoke to characteristics of Japanese that might seem unique to a student. Counters certainly are shared with Chinese; but these other things -- the variation in the numbers and the variation in the counter, itself -- are not.

wiki: https://ja.wikipedia.org/wiki/%E9%80%A3%E6%BF%81

As for whether it's unique, wiki suggests that Korean has something similar but I wouldn't know.

My earlier comment did discuss Korean, by the way.

There is a loose rule for compound word contractions (adding tenten to the first letter of the second word), e.g. "sakura" gains a tenten in "senbonzakura". However, as you said, this is not universally the case. For example, "ehon" (lit. drawing book) is simply "e" (drawing) + "hon" (book), not "ebon".

The latter case is perhaps the easiest, since "slippery" is an adjective derived from the verb "slip", still in use. (The word "glitter" is also derived from a verb, but this verb is no longer used.) Generally, words that are onomatopoeia don't have an etymology like that; if they did, then the sound would not be the result of trying to create the impression of something. For example, the "-y" in "slippery" is there because it's an adjective. The extent of onomatopoeia in Japanese is indeed quite different from English (and Chinese).

I'm trying to learn the language, but man it's difficult.

I get there's a subtle difference but it's not that far off. We also say "I have 6 meters of rope". "meters" is the counting unit, which is the same concept as all the Japanese counting units.

As for the onomatopoeias, at some point you get used to them and they feel like they fit and you can start to pick them up without having them explained. Even the ones that don't seem like the make a sound, start to make a sound, at least in my mind once I've internalized it.

Not the same but in some sense similar, dogs don't say "bark" but with enough repetition many people perceive "bark" instead of the actual sound the small dog is making.

There's nothing context-wise that suggests one is supposed to suffix "hon/pon" (lit. "Book") when you're counting carrots, while tomatoes are counted with "hitotsu, futatsu". The rule for flat things is to suffix "mai", but while postcards are "ichimai, nimai", magazines are "hitotsu, futatsu" and pamphlets are "isatsu, nisatsu". Having to remember these seemingly arbitrary rules as a Japanese learner is often considered a bewildering experience.

IIRC 冊 ＝ bindings (very similar to the concept of pairs of socks, we have bindings of paper). So you count "sheets of paper" (枚）and "bindings of books" (冊）.

All I'm saying is there are lots of place in English were without a counting unit it's often awkward or ungrammatical. I agree it takes take some getting used to all the counters though and even Japanese have trouble with it as there's a game you play where you call out a thing and the next per says that thing +1 +the counter.

Example player 1: "Apple", Player 2 "apple ik-ko. banana", Player 3 "banana nip-pon. car", Player 4 "car yon dai. house", Player 5: "House go-ken" Player 5 might have just gotten that wrong and then everyone would laugh.

Edit: and there are the fun cases where it's not always on or kun: ichinichi, futsuka... or other fun exceptions.

Of course, it depends what you use Japanese for.

“In german, a young lady has no sex, but a turnip has.”

Imagine if Twain knew about some of the several-hundred-gender languages…

Edit: Since I am being downvoted it would be great if they understood the reference first. It is the Mark Twain humorous article on trying to learn the German language and in response to the above Mark Twain German language reference.

I’m pretty sure there’s no such thing. My understanding is that Fula, with ~24 noun classes, is widely agreed to have the most number of genders. A language with several hundred genders really would be unlearnable!

To the extent that genders are idiosyncratic, they are hard to learn. Bora, spoken in Peru, has more than 350 of them.

https://medium.economist.com/we-went-in-search-of-the-worlds...

Interesting. Wikipedia says that Bora has more than 350 "classifiers", but that doesn't seem to be the same concept as genders. There is a specific section at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Classifier_(linguistics)#Noun_... contrasting classifiers and "noun classes", of which grammatical genders are a special case. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_languages_by_type_of_g... lists one language with "50–140 noun classes", several Bantu languages with 16-20 of them, and apparently all other languages of the world have significantly fewer. (I am not a linguist.)

• Noun classes/genders: usually a fairly small set (<7 in most cases outside Africa), are marked on multiple words at once, commonly distinguishes male/female or animate/inanimate

• Noun classifiers: commonly small (<20) but may be a larger set, most commonly occur as free words next to the noun

• Numeral classifiers: can be a very large set, occur next to numerals to specify what you’re counting

• Possessive classifiers: occur in a possessive construction to show the exact relationship between two nouns

• Verbal classifiers: incorporated into the verb to show what kind of object it’s acting on

• Deictic classifiers: incorporated into deictic words (like ‘this’ or ‘that’) to precisely specify the kind and orientation of the object you’re referring to

And then of course these overlap somewhat. Tuyuca — the language with ‘50–150 noun classes’ — has a set of classifiers which act simultaneously as numeral classifiers, possessive classifiers and deictic classifiers, as well as modifying adjectives. GP’s example of Bora seems to use numeral classifiers.

(All this is taken from Aikhenvald’s Classifiers, which is probably the best resource if you want to know more about this.)

Greville Corbett, for example, who has written a textbook about "Gender" (in the linguistic sense), defines gender as a type of noun classification which triggers agreement. In that sense, he doesn't require that it be centered around male/female or animate/inanimate. Other linguists will use different terminology.

Aargh… I don’t want to think about it. Just don’t get me started on the literature on SVCs, alright?

(My favourite linguistics quote, from Anderson’s A-Morphous Morphology: ‘Linguistics will become a science when linguists begin standing on one another's shoulders instead of on one another's toes.’ Oddly enough, he spends the rest of the book stepping on the toes of everyone else.)

> Greville Corbett, for example, who has written a textbook about "Gender" (in the linguistic sense), defines gender as a type of noun classification which triggers agreement.

Aikhenvald concurs, though she prefers the term ‘noun class’ over ‘gender’.

Yeah, that seems like a huge minefield. Another one is anything related to aspect, Aktionsart and any combination thereof. Or, one of my favourites, active-stative/split intransitivity/split-S/semantic alignment.

> ‘Linguistics will become a science when linguists begin standing on one another's shoulders instead of on one another's toes.’

That's a nice quote. One reason why I became annoyed with linguistics is exactly this feeling that there wasn't enough progress because people couldn't even agree on basic definitions.

Oh yes, that confused me for a very long time. Thankfully I mostly understand it now (with the help of the good people at https://www.verduria.org/index.php), but no-one seems to be able to agree on terminology.

> Or, one of my favourites, active-stative/split intransitivity/split-S/semantic alignment.

Ooh, I wrote a whole series of essays on that! [0] Morphosyntactic alignment is a favourite topic of mine. (I perhaps didn’t spend as much time on split intransitivity as I should have… I really should write an addendum or something which properly covers split intransitivity. Know any good resources, by any chance?)

[0] https://www.verduria.org/viewtopic.php?f=4&t=545

I'll have to check your essays too!

edit: just had a quick look (not in detail yet). I love that you're using basically the same example sentences from Dixon that I also used in my thesis.

[1] https://github.com/Fryie/thesis

(And, yes, there’s only so many example sentences to go around :) )

It's quite impressive how much you know without formal training. I spent years learning about these subjects. However, since graduating in 2013, I haven't really done anything with linguistics.

Oh, I completely agree. I personally quite like Deal’s ‘ergative’ and ‘absolutive properties’ [0] as a first attempt; but I haven’t yet seen Lazard and Haspelmath, so I should look into that more.

[0] http://linguistics.berkeley.edu/~ardeal/papers/Deal-ergativi...

> It's quite impressive how much you know without formal training. I spent years learning about these subjects.

Why, thank you! But I don’t think I’m so different in this respect: I spent a good portion of my spare time last year reading everything I could find about ergativity, and had read lots about linguistics even before that. (What can I say; it’s an interesting subject!)

turnip = (die) Rübe

(for those wondering)

When I learned that “-chen” is a diminutive („Hund” = “dog”, „Hündchen” = “puppy”), I assumed there must be a “Mad*” as a non-diminutive alternative word for women. Turns out, there’s an archaic root in „Magd”, which also became the English “maid”.

Many people confuse the grammatical genus (as used in practice in contemporary German) of German words with the biological concept of sex. This is made even more complicated by SJWs who confuse these two unrelated concepts (genus, sex) with their concept of gender.

So, it is better to imagine the genus of German word as something like the "'color' of a word" ("color" in the sense of the "color charge" of quarks).

People described by their opponents as SJWs are more likely than, well, pretty much everyone else on the planet to distinguish biological sex, gender identity, socially ascribed gender, and grammatical gender.

The people who use “SJW” as a dismissive epithet, on the other hand, are most likely to fail to distinguish those things.

People described by their opponents as SJWs don't describe themselves as SJWs except ironically occasionally. People who want a neutral or positive tone use other terms like social justice advocates.

this lasted as long as it took for someone to tell him he sounded like a toddler. “do you have any mitten-wittens? my handsie-wandsies are coooooold” was i think what convinced him otherwise.

If people really confused grammatical gender with "the biological concept of sex", then we'd have a lot more arguments about random nouns needing to have feminine gender instead of masculine (there's this famous joke about "die Salzstreuerin"). But that's not really what happens. Nobody seems to care about the table being masculine.

What the argument is mostly about is that we use words that, by themselves, refer to masculine people and pluralise them to denote a possible mixed-gender group. This has everything to do with semantics (and so with how concrete biological/social gender expression is encoded in the words of a language), and isn't really that much concerned with grammatical gender, which after all disappears anyway as a distinctive feature once you're in the plural.

It's the people who complain about "SJWs" who say sex and gender are the same.

Ironically, you've just confirmed what GP said by confusing the concept of grammatical gender with the modern social studies concept of gender.

still, the grammatical sense predates the sex sense by a bit, and has always been around to mean “genre”. So you always have to disambiguate usage

And then people usually get very huffy about which non-sentient nouns “share” “their” “gender”.

> And then people usually get very huffy about which non-sentient nouns “share” “their” “gender”.

Seems rare to me.

Example: “Watashi ha hamburger desu”: With regard to “Watashi” = me/I (i.e. concerning “me”), “it is” a hamburger,

Which ends up translated to:

I am a hamburger. Or: For me, it will be a hamburger.

So the “wa” particule (actually “ha”) introduces the theme or topic in the sentence, rather than the subject. Very different from English.

Reference: theme and rheme in Japanese.

phonetically, it's "wa". The fact that it's written with the kana for "ha" is just a weird quirk of the writing system.

Conjugating verbs, inflection, capitalization, and plural forms of nouns are alien to at least Chinese and probably many other Sino-Tibetan languages.

The lack of phoenetic/spelling consistency is alien to many European languages, especially Spanish, which is remarkably consistent.

It also works for "I have" as in "Watashi wa korona da" or "I have Covid 19".

I know German also uses "have" this way quite a lot (at least for hunger, thirst, fear, and desire, probably for many other things).

I thought French mostly just had être (and occasionally avoir) for “to be”, and you’d need context to determine if “Elle est heureuse” means she is happy now or generally.

Funnily enough, Google Translate gives the former for both portuguese versions. I guess it is still translating through English.

eg. मैं पहले उससे नहीं मिला था |

(I have not met him before).

Kanji make it possible to sometimes guess the meaning and pronunciation of a completely unfamiliar word, but even in those cases it's just a guess. You can never be certain. And in fact, since you can't be certain, it means you need an entirely separate type of dictionary to look up these words, a reverse-kanji dictionary where characters are categorized variously by the number of lines, the presence of certain components, and other schemes of native and non-native invention. This is because you don't have a name for the word you're looking at, whereas in almost every other language, the "spelling" of the word is the name.

About four years into Japanese, the same point where in my Spanish studies I was picking up Don Quixote and enjoying it, I was struggling to cope with young adult fiction. No, I was completely defeated by it. Every page was a slog and it was impossible to progress without turning it into a study session where I looked up the pronunciation of every single unfamiliar word and repeatedly practiced writing unfamiliar characters.

At some point it becomes simply impossible to progress without active, intentional study. The so-called "osmosis" hits a hard asymptote and it's because of kanji. Reading fiction for 12 year olds means pencil, paper, and two dictionaries to decipher it. Or it used to; I guess mobile apps that can OCR the text and look up words have made this process vastly easier for younger learners.

The article is paywalled so mea culpa if this point is addressed in there.

Admittedly, once children become teenagers they are expected to be able to read a good amount of everyday kanji words and the use of furigana falls away apart from for unusual readings or less common words, and pretty much entirely for texts aimed at adults. Still, if you're content with quite simple content you can pick up a wonderful amount of language by osmosis with the helping hand of furigana.

So a Kanji that might be accompanied by furigana in a shounen manga (geared to kids) typically won't be accompanied by it in a seinen novel (geared towards young adults). Needless to say, adults don't necessarily want to read doraemon (a kids series) as beginner Japanese learners.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radical_(Chinese_characters)

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

Also, in the Japanese case, they were borrowed from Chinese centuries ago and commonly given one pronunciation based on what the Chinese word sounded like to Japanese people at that time, and another based on the Japanese translation of the Chinese word.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kanji#Readings

So yes, all of this is super-meaningful at an etymological level, but not transparent or reliable, and even trickier with Japanese rather than Chinese, because extra layers like kunyomi were added on top.

That being said, the meaning (or meanings...) of a kanji cannot be derived from its parts, just like the meaning of an English word cannot be derived from the letters that appear in it.

Also, as a rule, the same character will be read differently in different contexts. E.g. 生きる _i_kiru "to live", 生まれる _uma_reru "to be born", 学生 gaku_sei_ "student".

There are anki flashcard (spaced repetition) decks that can help drill the kanji into your head.

Finding accessible reading material is challenging especially at the absolute beginner stage.

In my japanese study I make sure I flashcard kanji every day. Without 300+ memorized reading even kids stuff will be hard.

EDIT: Just saw that you are 4 years into studying. That is a bit demoralizing for me that you still can't read adult level stuff. I can only read stuff along the level of "Ayako rides the train", etc.

I suspect that people who grew up with a non-alphabetic script have better "geometry abstraction capabilities" trained into their brains that would make them noticeably more performant in a test involving fantasy glyph memorization/reidentification.