Re:English has been my pain for 15 years (2013)
by 2143 on Wednesday December 22, 2021 @02:20PM
(#29653796)
Sanskrit could also be like Haskell.
Structured. Very precise rules. Yet nobody speaks it in practice.
Also while on the topic, may I point out that there are some things you could say in some languages that are nearly impossible (AFAIK) to say in English.
Let me give an example.
(Okay how do I — for the benefit of all of you — express something in English that I'm trying to prove is impossible to express in English?).
Consider the statement: Joe Biden is the 46th President of the United States.
How do I express a question in English that asks this "order-number" of Biden such that the answer is "46"?
Something like "Joe Biden is how many-th President of the United States?"?
But I can't ask that because there's no such word(s) "how many-th" in English!
Yet it's trivial to express this in plenty of languages. I belive German is one language where this can be easily expressed. It's trivial in the Indian languages that I know.
In English I would have to ask something like "Biden is the n-th President of US. What is n?", which is totally lame.
I hope you understood what I'm trying to convey.
If you want to get started about these kinds of things look up "declension" on Wikipedia [1].
I'm not a language expert so I don't really know what I'm talking about (perhaps experts can contribute and correct me), but the tldr is that:
* the declension situation of modern English is primitive
* German has 4 cases of declension
* Latin has 5 cases of declension
* Sanskrit & Hindi has 8 cases of declension
* Ukrainian declension situation also seems to be fairly advanced
In languages with more cases of declension, it's apparently easier to express certain things.
Structured. Very precise rules. Yet nobody speaks it in practice.
Also while on the topic, may I point out that there are some things you could say in some languages that are nearly impossible (AFAIK) to say in English.
Let me give an example.
(Okay how do I — for the benefit of all of you — express something in English that I'm trying to prove is impossible to express in English?).
Consider the statement: Joe Biden is the 46th President of the United States.
How do I express a question in English that asks this "order-number" of Biden such that the answer is "46"?
Something like "Joe Biden is how many-th President of the United States?"?
But I can't ask that because there's no such word(s) "how many-th" in English!
Yet it's trivial to express this in plenty of languages. I belive German is one language where this can be easily expressed. It's trivial in the Indian languages that I know.
In English I would have to ask something like "Biden is the n-th President of US. What is n?", which is totally lame.
I hope you understood what I'm trying to convey.
If you want to get started about these kinds of things look up "declension" on Wikipedia [1].
I'm not a language expert so I don't really know what I'm talking about (perhaps experts can contribute and correct me), but the tldr is that:
* the declension situation of modern English is primitive
* German has 4 cases of declension
* Latin has 5 cases of declension
* Sanskrit & Hindi has 8 cases of declension
* Ukrainian declension situation also seems to be fairly advanced
In languages with more cases of declension, it's apparently easier to express certain things.
I hope this was useful.
[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Declension