How fucked up is your language?

[Kafein]

You can write simple sentence in any order and it will be correct, and will keep the original sense :-) In theory the "most" proper order is "I am", but "Am I" means the same, it just suggest that you a proud of being :-)

"Ala ma kota (Ala has a cat) is a perfect example, if you say "Kota ma Ala" it still means "Ala has a cat" (stressing that the particular cat is owned by Ala), cause if you wanted to say that "Cat has Ala" you would need to use "Kot ma Alę" :-))))) And it you want to create a question, you just put a question mark at the end of the sentence: "Ala ma kota?" :-)

And Kafein, about the cases, we just use the first seven: Nominative, Genitive, Dative, Accusative, Instrumental, Locative and Vocative :-)

About German: I just love how the nouns can be produced by just glueing words together: "zweipedalenähmachine"

Okay, so like in many languages, word order bears the intent of your phrase (with intonation I suppose), but in Polish the semantic meaning is completely separated ? From a learner point of view it means understanding is harder, but expressing is a lot easier too, wich is... nice, I usually find writing and speaking much harder than reading and listening in foreign languages.

Wrong. Language being polluted by alien words and trash and language evolving with newly made words and stuff are two different things.

I wouldn't say that, but in the end it goes down to what is considered an "alien word". When a new thing needs a name, the people that invented it usually find one in their own language, and other languages quickly adopt the same word with minor variations on it for pronunciation. Words that are invented with no etimological basis sound totally stupid like... 95% of the time, especially when they refer to something that can already be named using a word derived from a foreign language. Those are actually the ones I would call alien words. Fabricated words are extremely easy to spot because they have no etimological roots, unlike most foreign words in their own base language.

That's also why I like languages where the existence or non-existence of a word is of little relevance to what you want to say, because the process of creating one is really simple, like Dutch and German. You want to say "a book about video games to read during the night" ? You'll be saying nightreadingvideogamebook and it will work.

But sometimes it is really beautiful: everyone in Poland knows the word "wihajster" which is used for thing that you cant recall the name of: "You know, this wihajster to turn the lights on" And it comes directly form German "Wie heisst er" which means "How is it called?" :-)

 

[RandomDude]

(click to show/hide)

"In addition to idiotic letters and hard phonology, Polish language has probably the hardest grammar of any known language. There are so many tenses, cases, aspects, forms, number classes, gender classes, moods and voices that you could go crazy just from knowing about their existence. In addition, there's a different conjugation of verbs for any tense, gender etc. With big probability, even 100% of Poles can use them, nearly none of them could actually say how many of them they have without thinking for a few minutes. To make matters worse, the Polish order of words is totally random."

The toughest thing we had to do in school, was to make the analysis of the sentence on the Polish language classes. The aim was to take every single word in a long sentence full of nouns, verbs, adjectives, definites, participles and all other shit and to describe what it is, like "a passive participle derived from noun, plural masculine form, past perfect tense". Horror.

And for English speaking guys, THIS is completely true, all forms are CORRECT and MEAN EXACTLY THE SAME:
 
"Polish is a rare example of the language that has totally random word order and this includes creating questions. Therefore you can write sentence Ala ma kota (Ala has a cat) in following ways:

Ala ma kota.
Ma Ala kota.
Ala kota ma.
Ma kota Ala.
Kota Ala ma.
Kota ma Ala


Now, how fucked up is that? :-) English is easy my friends :-)

And now I know where all the brain disease from the poles comes from

[Ninja_Khorin]

"Polish is a rare example of the language that has totally random word order and this includes creating questions. Therefore you can write sentence Ala ma kota (Ala has a cat) in following ways:

Ala ma kota.
Ma Ala kota.
Ala kota ma.
Ma kota Ala.
Kota Ala ma.
Kota ma Ala
[/i]

Now, how fucked up is that? :-) English is easy my friends :-)

Same can be done in Finnish(Ala has a cat):

Alalla on kissa
On Alalla kissa
Kissa Alalla on
On kissa Alalla
Kissa on Alalla
Alalla kissa on

Some examples of how you can bend a word:
    istua "to sit down" (istun "I sit down")
    istahtaa "to sit down for a while"
    istahdan "I'll sit down for a while"
    istahtaisin "I would sit down for a while"
    istahtaisinko "should I sit down for a while?"
    istahtaisinkohan "I wonder if I should sit down for a while"

Can lead to some interesting forms that no one can be bothered to use because it hurts the brain like:
järjestelmällisentelentelemättömyydellänsäkään

No, I won't translate, because I can't be arsed to decode it.

[Franke]

This "wihajster"-thing really made me smile. Always surprising when you see parallels between languages that seem so different at the first glance.

About alien influences fucking up a language:
I think you have to differ between foreign words that describe "new" items for which simply no word had existed before ,like the example computer before. I really couldn't find a matching German word for it (closest would be Rechenmaschine - calculating machine), and foreign words that simply replace words from that language that existed before, just because it's "in" or more comfortable. The latter happens much too often imo...

[djavo]

Well the question is do I have to finish my polish, or polish my finish?

[Kafein]

Well the question is do I have to finish my polish, or polish my finish?

Djavo you gotta stop trolling, that one was nearly what I would call a joke. A bad joke, but still, a joke.

[[ptx]]

I wouldn't say that, but in the end it goes down to what is considered an "alien word". When a new thing needs a name, the people that invented it usually find one in their own language, and other languages quickly adopt the same word with minor variations on it for pronunciation. Words that are invented with no etimological basis sound totally stupid like... 95% of the time, especially when they refer to something that can already be named using a word derived from a foreign language. Those are actually the ones I would call alien words. Fabricated words are extremely easy to spot because they have no etimological roots, unlike most foreign words in their own base language.

Barbarism.
Newly created words for foreign things, at least in latvian, have etimological roots, at least most of them. For example, "spam mail" - a new word was created for this - "mēstule", a combination of "mēsls" (dung or shit) and "vēstule" (letter). Still, people use "spams", "spam meils", etc, which is as far from latvian as it gets. When you get someone using more than a couple of such words in a sentence, it is just fucking painful. Might as well be speaking english, rather than latvian. :/

[The_Bloody_Nine]

Wrong. Language being polluted by alien words and trash and language evolving with newly made words and stuff are two different things.

Wrong. Languages evolved since thousands of years by being polluted by alien words and trash.

I'm very often distracted and downright disgusted when I here some young men speaking german. Its an alien and ugly language for me, same with some regional dialects/grammatical characteristics. But its just plain wrong to think it is something new happening here and the language is getting worse or its the downfall of good language. Languages change, disappear and new evolve. This has been since the dawn of human speech and you can't and shouldn't do nothing against it, IMO.

[[ptx]]

Language being polluted by alien words and trash and language evolving with newly made words and stuff are two different things. - you didn't exactly disprove this part.

This has been since the dawn of human speech and you can't and shouldn't do nothing against it, IMO.

I disagree.

[kinngrimm]

Does it matter if there is a difference in the long run? 1000 years from now, people are used to things we aren't now.

From the perspective of humans spreading in waves over the continents, settling here and there and creating new waves from there till all land was occupied but not stopping the waves as humans didn't stop breeding, but then more and more social structures developed and city and afterwards nation states arrived on the maps drawing the limes(border) for those who aren't accepted from the outsite anymore to settle within, bringing us to a point tribes couldn't exist in their originated forms anymore as they weren't allowed to cross those borders and then we have wars rising over land and settling grounds again spreading humans of different "tribes" spreading language and knowledge and now we got the Internet ...

Point being, you couldn't stop a process which is so deeply in our nature. Young people do adept things for themselves older people wouldn't like  so in the end it is the same old thing happening over and over again. Is it bad? I don't want to be the judge about that. In terms of evolution, on a biological or none biological level, it is still the same when you ask for reasons. Evolution doesn't have a reason for something, there is no good or evil mastermind, it is just happening(with certain implied rules we catagorized in the laws of physics).

Look up Biosemantics, arround 11 years ago i found that line of thought in reallife universities, but i was brought to it through sifi books of Isaac Assimovs "Foundation Triology"

[RandomDude]

This thread was for fun and you're derailing it into a boring piece of shit.

This is a place for people to give examples of a humourous side of their language and to maybe open other peoples eyes (myself included) into whaat other languages are like.

It doesnt really matter where the language came from, how it was formed or w/e, only what it's like today and if/why you're frustrated with it or find it really funny.

[The_Bloody_Nine]

Language being polluted by alien words and trash and language evolving with newly made words and stuff are two different things. - you didn't exactly disprove this part.
I disagree.

yes, you can probably distinguish between those two processes. My point however is that both (and especially the polluting-part) are allways part of the synthesis of new languages.

Sorry for your thread, random dude.

btw. has some german here noticed that the use of indefinite articles has nearly ceased to exist?

[Thomek]

I can confirm. Polish is a completely fucked up Language.
I had to learn it my first year in Poland.. I was so naive..  I have never been so close to wanting to kill myself as in the language year. Old school teachers drawing lists of rules on the blackboard day in day out.

Never try to learn Polish, unless you already speak some other slavic language!

@Kafein
The reason word order doesn't matter in Polish is because the cases which are usually expressed in different endings/aka conjugations define the relations between the words..

@Khorin
I think perhaps finnish beats Polish in complexity, without having any knowledge of finnish of course..

The moment I thought I got the basics down the teacher started throwing more and more complicated shit at us.. After about 4 months they revealed to us that almost ALL VERBS had a second version, separate from all conjugations, namely the perfective version of the verb. (When something is already done) These verbs often had completely different "names" like i.ex

To see:
Widzec imperfective
obejrzec perfective

The verbs and nouns of course change according to a host of different circumstances, whether it's a question, the person is male/female, dead, inanimate etc..

The easiest are the verb conjugations.

7 different objects x2perfective/imperfective x 2/3 tenses or about 42 or 53 versions of one verb in one word. It's highly regular so thats easy.

Now remembering words.

every single fucking verb in the polish language seems to start with:
Przy
Prze
Za
od
ob
etc...
and end in ec or ac.

They are all sick combinations with the root (the unique thing) hidden in one or 2 letters in the middle or in the combination of the base sounds. When you speak to someone you have to backwards filter out all the 42 tense conjugations, separate the word from the rest of the sentence to find out what they are saying. And polish people speak FAST, because many words have so many stances(?).

The rules are so complicated many poles struggle with using it correctly.

Been here almost 5 years, and still speak like a child.

Norwegian on the other hand, most people from any country pick it up decently in half a year, and 90% of norwegians speak good english.

It's not fair.

[Kafein]

I think it's a good thing to learn a difficult language as mother tongue. Languages such as english or espagnol are easy enough to be learned afterwards with a reasonable amount of practice.


From a french perspective, languages based heavily on declinaisons and very little on word order are confusing. You need to learn a larger amount of regular, simple rules, but you also lose the complexity of word order rules. Those are so obscure you will never "learn" but the simplest ones theoritically.

[isatis]

funny thing about french :

searching for synonyms

Starting from one random word with only one meaning : Nèpe (a little scorpion)
and, after a while. I got ''bouilloire'' which is a kettle (dah thing who make water boil)
Give children a synonym dictionnary and that's the kind of thing that can happen in their text...


Those polish/hungarian/finnish language make me scare

I saw the warning of watch your dog in picture of a friend of mine... their was a reason why he took this in picture !