I’m moving my posts from Reddit to Lemmy before delete them.

This post is from 2021-03-09.

  • 5SpeedDeasil@lemmy.world
    35·
    1 year ago

    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”

    • dreadgoat@kbin.social
      34·
      1 year ago

      “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.

        • dreadgoat@kbin.social
          4·
          1 year ago

          Not really, topic markers are… uh… and case endings… analytical instead of… wait a minute
          Der Hund ist rot; 犬は赤いです
          Ich esse den Hund; 犬を食べる
          no it can’t be
          Der Knochen des Hundes; 犬の骨
          fuck
          Ich gebe dem Hund einen Knochen; 犬に骨をあげます

    • zefiax@lemmy.world
      4·
      1 year ago

      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.

      • muhyb@programming.devOP
        1·
        1 year ago

        So it’s kinda different from general Indo-European. In that regard, Bengali looks like Turkish, no articles no gendered anything.

        Three version of the language? You mean the alphabet or?

        • zefiax@lemmy.world
          2·
          1 year ago

          Nope I mean of the language itself has three different version for most words.

          So for example, for the word “you”, when you are speaking to someone who is a close friend or sometimes a child, or someone of much lower social standing, you would say “tui”. If you are talking to a friend (not close), someone of similar age that you know well but aren’t super close, speaking to someone noticeably much younger than you, or to an elder who you are very comfortable with, you would say “tumi”. When speaking to someone you don’t know who is visibly not much younger than you, or when speaking to most elders, you would say “apni”.

          If you don’t want to assume age and you aren’t speaking to a child, it’s best to default to “apni” as that is the most respectful form of the language.

          So there are three versions of the language with it’s own set of words based on the level of formality in the social interaction that is taking place.