European and East Asian languages

The Indo-European languages are all inflected languages. Some have lost more of it than others, I believe the Scandinavian tongues are the most stripped but they still decline pronouns. English comes pretty close. Still we use inflections for tense and number.

Chinese is not only not inflected (arguably synthetic, a word-building language, something German does modestly), it has simplified its grammar in other important ways. It has no prepositions. Relationships are expressed with nouns and verbs instead of our Stone Age paradigm of about twenty words that are so overused they've lost their meaning.

With the exception of a few particles like de--which are really nothing except placeholders to help you parse the sentence--Chinese really has nothing but nouns and verbs. That makes it very easy to adapt to new ideas and even whole new ways of thinking. We had to invent a new form of syntax in the last century to render concepts like user-friendly and cable-ready into phrases of less than ten syllables.

The universal word for "yes" is shi, but it simply means "(it) is." But you're right, most of the time they just repeat the verb out of the question. "No" is bu shi or just bu in front of the verb.

You have to understand the tones: they are phonemic. To a Chinese (or Vietnamese or anyone who speaks a tonal language) bu1 and bu2 (sorry I got no diacritical marks over here) are as different as dog and god are to us. Nonetheless you're right about the abundance of homophones... and wrong at the same time. The syllables that we call words in Chinese are really morphemes. The fact that almost all of the syllables can actually stand alone as words doesn't help the discussion, but they also serve as word-building elements. There are about 1,600 phonetically distinct morphemes in Mandarin; put only two together and you've got the possibility of more than two million "words."

In fact each morpheme is a reduction of, on the average, about four distinct words in a less streamlined Stone Age precursor to Chinese, so each syllable actually serves as four morphemes. Which meaning to select is determined by the next morpheme in the compound (or the fact that the syllable is standing alone, I guess the following morpheme is then null); the compounds have evolved so that no two are phonetically equivalent. Of course no Chinese person goes through that reasoning when hearing speech, any more than we say to ourselves, "Hmm, that sounds like 'sing' with the I umlauted to U, it must be the past participle."

Chinese people can understand their language without the tones if it's spoken slowly and dumbed down a little. In modern pop music, the convention that the tones of the music have to conform to the tones of speech has been abolished. There must be an incredible amount of redundancy packed into it. Which is amazing, since by my slapdash statistical analysis the average Chinese sentence has about 30% fewer syllables than its English equivalent. As a result Chinese is spoken more slowly than almost any other language I've heard. It's a dream for a student, you can actually follow along in real time.

Mei you for "not have" is not an irregular conjugation. Mei by itself is a subtly different word for not have so it's a reduplication.

There is no tense. When you say "dog eat fish" you're being just as vague about the time of the action as you are about the number of dogs or fish. If it's important that it took place yesterday and it's not clear from the context, you say "yesterday dog eat fish," which illustrates my premise by having three fewer syllables than the English version if you count the missing (and utterly useless) "the."

Japanese is nothing like Chinese. Highly inflected. A friend of mine was translating a short story into Japanese and he had to go find a Japanese woman to tell him how to conjugate the verbs in feminine gender. He understood them but had never really learned them.

Japanese has words that serve as pronouns. Watakushi, watashi, or washi, depending on your social relationship to the person you're addressing, means "I." Anata means "you." Chinese doesn't really have pronouns either. Wo, ni and ta function exactly like nouns. People say wait a minute, they have a plural inflection, but they're wrong. Men is a word meaning a kind of group, and can also be used with xiao hai zi, "child."

Japanese and Chinese are not related in the traditional chart of language families. However, recent research shows that all the languages of Eurasia are distantly related. It's quite possible that there's only one language family, which would prove that the technology of language was invented before we left Africa. It could have been the key technology that enhanced our ability to plan and communicate, making it possible to migrate out of Africa successfully for the first time.

 

All of the Slavic languages lack articles with the exception of (so I've been told) Bulgarian. That correlates interestingly with the fact that the Bulgars were not Slavs but another tribe who assimilated into the community. Perhaps their ancestral language had articles so they invented them for comfort. The same way the Franks brought the German preference for the present perfect over the preterite into French. Tu as parlé, not tu parlas.

I wonder whether the absence of articles is common in the Eastern Branch of the Indo-European languages. Hindi? Farsi? Armenian? As far as I know, the Western Branch all have them. (Does anyone here speak Gaelic?) Another interesting phenomenon, since they all invented them separately. The articles were not inherited from their common ancestor but perhaps the psychological preference for them was. Latin didn't have them although Greek had "the."

Chinese and Japanese don't have articles, but then they don't even have the same paradigm of parts of speech that we do. Hebrew and Arabic, on the other hand, do use them.

It is as unlike the Indo-European languages as it is unlike Chinese. There are many more than two kinds of languages.

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I haven't studied it formally so I can't say much about it other than that it's very strange. And that's no excuse. I haven't studied Hebrew formally either but it's not terribly inscrutable.

One thing I think Chinese and Japanese have in common is that their grammar can be seen as having a huge number of micro-rules that each apply to a small number of cases, unlike ours which have a small number of highly general macro-rules. For example, in both languages you must count all things in units. You can't say "one widget," you have to say "one some sort of unit of widget." There is a unit for large flat things: san zhang juo-zi, three tables. A unit for animals and trousers: san tiao gou, san tiao ku-zi, three dogs, three pairs of pants. A unit just for books: san ben shu, three books.

I got this incredible feeling of a culture that is just impossibly ancient and civilized when I discovered that the Chinese had books for so long that books have their own grammatical micro-rule.

I'm not quite sure how you're using "indigenous" since it just means "native" and most languages except constructed ones like Esperanto and Swahili have native speakers. Perhaps you meant "aboriginal."

I'm not familiar enough with the Scandinavian languages to understand why Danish would be any more unusual than Norwegian and Swedish. Danes and Norwegians can almost understand each other with a little effort, almost as easily as Czechs and Slovaks. Icelandic on the other hand is a pretty interesting Scandinavian language because it's almost Old Norse caught in a time warp, the language Beowulf spoke. (He was not English, all the Germanic peoples have legends from their ancestors' strange trek across Scandinavia and through Denmark into the main part of Europe.)

Dutch, hmmm. It sort of splits the difference between English and German.

Turkish, yes. One of Europe's few non-Indo-European languages. Unlike the Basques, who were there first, the Turks are recent arrivals, the descendants of a Mongolic people who comprised one of the many waves of "Mongolian hordes" that terrorized two continents. As are the Magyars (Hungarians). As are the Finns and their close cousins the Estonians and the Saami (formerly known as Lapps).

Many non-Indo-European languages seem exotic to us because they analyze the world differently. It broadens one's thinking to learn any second language, but to learn one as different from ours as Chinese, Japanese, or any of a great number of African and American languages is to "see" the Western world through the tongue of an outsider.

Actually not, but Chinese plays the role of Latin in China's neighboring countries. They were acculturated by Chinese Buddhist monks, who brought them writing, classic literature and many other artifacts of an older civilization. Just as the Roman monks did throughout their neighborhood. The languages of the nearby peoples are full of borrowed Chinese words for concepts that were introduced to them. Our Germanic language uses borrowed words of Latin origin for some real bread-and-butter concepts, such as "very," "use" and "question." Japanese, Korean, Vietnamese, etc. have everyday words borrowed from Chinese, although I'm not familiar enough with those languages to start enumerating them.

Wait, of course I am. Everyone can count in Japanese but they don't realize that the Japanese count in Chinese: ichi, ni, san, shi, go, roku, shichi, hachi, ku, ju. You don't have to know Ancient Chinese to recognize those as Mandarin yi, er, san, si, wu, lyou, chi, ba, jiu, shi, with some across-the-board phonetic shifts. They use their native words for numbers in other contexts than counting, sometimes haphazardly. A fourth-degree judo or go master is yo-dan, not shi-dan, even though third degree is san-dan.

 

Written Danish and Norwegian are pretty difficult to tell apart. Both use the old forms of the umlauted vowels: the AE digraph and the O with a slash through it. Swedish just uses the umlauts. (Sorry, I don't seem to be able to get through with the full character set.)

French has other telltales of a Germanic overlay, especially in phonetics. The gargled R of northern France is Frankish, whereas the trilled R of southern France was favored by the Celtic Gauls. The cacophony of umlauted vowels. The schwa. Any consonant can be a final consonant. I can't imagine where chaotic forms like qu'est-ce que c'est que ça? come from: "what is that which that is which that?"

Romanian does the same thing to Latin with a Slavic overlay. It's the only Romance language with not only noun declension but the full paradigm. So many additional consonants that it needs to put cedilles under S and T to create new letters.

Back in the day, a few idealistic Esperantists who had married each other raised their children with Esperanto as their first language. Hardly enough of them to merit the term "population," and as far as I know they didn't actually live close enough to form a real community. I never met any of those kids and I have no idea how their lives progressed. They must be older than me, if they're still alive. I'm sure thay had to learn the local national language(s) eventually.

"Bibliotheca" is Greek. Biblios as in "bibliophile" or "bibliography," and -thek- as in "apothecary."

 

That's just their orthographic convention for long vowels. Finnish and Estonian (very closely related) do the same thing. German does it in a less standardized (an odd word to use about anything German) assortment of ways. E.g., a trailing H indicates a long vowel: ihr; two following consonants indicate a short one: bitte. (That's why they had to create that strange SZ digraph for an S sound, since SS would shorten the vowel and single S is pronounced Z.) Czech and many other languages represent long vowels more or less uniformly with an accent ague. Portuguese writes long E as EI and long O as OU.

Dutch does a decent job of writing consonants with phonetic consistency, but its vowel transcriptions are bewildering to me. IJ is the AI sound (English long I) but with a narrower A. You can hear the difference in the speech of many Americans, including mine. "Rider" and "writer" are pronounced identically, since we flap both the D and the T in America... yet they're not really. The AI vowel in "rider" is broad whereas in "writer" it's narrow. You can tell the words apart even if spoken out of context. If you don't pronounce them that way, listen to one of us Americans who learned to speak in Chicago. I wonder if this is a relic of the heavy Dutch influence in America's early years.

Yes, including the tones. As I said earlier tones are just as phonemic to Chinese as vowels and consonants.

No, it's not in one of the families of tonal languages. But tone is not used for inflection in Chinese, which has no inflections. Mei3 "beautiful" and mei4 "younger sister" are unrelated words, the similarity is as accidental as English "whether" and "weather."

Inflection is just one style of grammar that evolved over the 70,000 years since the first language spread out of Africa. (A hypothesis you younger folks will live to see proven or disproven by more sophisicated computer analysis.) The only completely uninflected language I'm familiar with is Chinese, and it also happens to have the most completely streamlined grammar in other ways as well. Perhaps loss of inflection is part of the long-term process of overall simplification. German retains more inflection than English and it also has much more rigid rules about word order and the inclusion of parsing placeholders: I have an old suitcase which I no longer use can in the room the hotel left. Not: I left an old suitcase I can no longer use in the hotel room.

Most of us are only familiar with Indo-European languages, which provide very similar viewpoints on the universe despite what seem to us like many differences. The Finno-Ugric-Ural-Altaic-Mongolic superfamily, which includes Hungarian, Turkish, Japanese and Korean appears to have more diversity among its members, perhaps because they have not kept in such close cultural contact with each over the millennia and moreover have come in contact with other language communities. From what little I know of Hebrew and Arabic, the Semitic languages' views of the universe seem to be heavily influenced by proximity to Indo-European peoples.

When you get into the Amerind superfamily (roughly everything in the New World except the Arctic and west of the Rockies) you've got people who were isolated from their kin for at least 14,000 years and some say much longer. In Australia it's more like 40,000 years. That's plenty of time to develop a much different perspective on life, the universe, and everything.

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Gaelic is also spoken in Scotland but not as assiduously as in Ireland. It's an easily understood dialect of the same language since Scotland was populated by Irish forces who took it over from the Picts, during early historical times.

That's not unusual. Greek, Hebrew and Arabic have definite articles but no indefinite. In the Romance languages, German, and perhaps other Germanic languages, the word "one" is used as an indefinite article. Our "a" and "an" are merely shortened forms of "ane," the ancestor of "one" before a phonetic shift.