Nani?
Nani?
I’m moving my posts from Reddit to Lemmy before delete them.
This post is from 2021-03-09.
Funny enough, the Japanese doesn’t have the word “the” per say. It most depends on context and how you translate it. Example: ねこは赤です -> literal translation: Cat red Now time to add some English words to make it sound ✨better✨ “The cat is red”
28"Cat red" makes Japanese sounds way more vague than it really is, you're just not bothering to attempt to transliterate the grammar structures because it's too hard for English speakers to understand without a half-hour lecture.
It's "Cat (topic marker) red (basic copula)", which obviously carries a lot more information than just "cat red" to a person who intuitively understands what those weird grammar markers signify
Japanese not having articles is just as weird as PIE languages not having things like topic markers.
34Why say many word when few word do trick?
8はい、そうです。
7If you're interested, please do crosspost this (and any other linguistics memes you have) over to /c/linguistics_humor@sh.itjust.works
5
I speak bengali and we don't have the word "the" nor do we have any gendered nouns, verbs, or even pronouns. So much easier and straight forward and no pronoun politics necessary.
We do have a respect hierarchy though like japanese, so we have 3 version of the language lol.
4
Latin: German has 4 cases? That's cute.
26Permanently Deleted
1
Years ago I studied Malayalam while living in India (Malayalam is the language of Kerala state on the southernmost tip of the country). When I learned the grammar I was surprised to see that it had nominative, dative and accusative cases just like German, which was convenient since I'd studied German in high school. Turns out the grammar had actually been sort of imposed on Malayalam centuries ago by a wandering German monk.
19couldn't stop laughing. could I have a source please?
4Hermann Gundert. I was a bit off: he was a missionary rather than a monk, and it was a century and a half ago rather than "centuries ago". His book on Malayalam grammar was called Malayalabhaasha Vyakaranam. My Malayalam tutor at the time told me that Gundert learned the language in one week, which seems a bit unlikely.
5
Also Russian
12"Yeah, we don't have articles. But the words have genders. Just deal with it."
7
Meanwhile: plural in Japan (kind of).
12Funny though German has the more complex rules on the surface, English becomes the more complicated when counting all the exceptions.
10Do you have a source for this? Also, what sort of "exceptions" do you mean? German has cognates of most of the English inherited grammatical exceptions, and has many more classes of its own that aren't reflected in English.
6English exceptions aren't so bad, you just need to know that there's a ton of loan words, what their origin was, when it was anglicized, and which country's preferred version you're learning. If it's not a loan word it's either standard or somewhat re-latined to maintain class hierarchy.
6Oha, that's it?
4
you should see turkish
5Tagalog: Ang
Bonus: Tagalog pronouns are all gender-neutral. "He" and "She" is just "Siya", indirect form is just "Niya", and possessive form is just "kaniya".
Also bonus: Ang is an article for objects. There is another article designated for people (or sentient beings): Si.
3Use your data export to ensure you delete all your posts and comments before deleting your account. Using something like power delete suite does not get everything if you have a lot of activity on your account.
2Running it twice?
1It seems like Reddit slowly starts filling in those deleted comments. In my experience, like as much as 5 per day. There’s no guarantee it’ll eventually get all comments even if ran repeatedly, and if you have 17k comments like me, it’s still probably take years to get all comments at that rate.
1