Name: Fantastic Features We Don't Have In The English Language
Uploaded: 2023-07-04T21:01:30.000Z
Duration: 4 min
Description: Thousands of YouTube videos with English-Chinese subtitles! Now you can learn to understand native speakers, expand your vocabulary, and improve your pronunciation...

The superlative

Most monolingual speakers think that other languages are basically just their language

with different words in a slightly different order and maybe a different way of writing.

Gerund

Turns out, though, that there are lots of interesting features in other languages, some of which English would really benefit from having.

If you want to describe an activity in English you have to say when it happened or when it will happen.

There is no way in English to describe the concept of a person and dancing, but not to mention anything about time.

Chinese, on the other hand. Verbs don't conjugate.

In most cases, the meaning is obvious from context.

I don't want to imply that Chinese doesn't have a tense system, it does, it's just not a requirement.

It's not baked into every single sentence by default.

Side note: tenses aren't as simple as past, present and future, and there are some lovely subtle tenses in other languages. More on that in a later video.

Anyway, if you want to write poetry with a more vague sense of time:

Chinese is one of the languages to choose.

The word "we" is confusing. Imagine going up to someone and saying, "Hey! We've just won the lottery!"

Number 1: "we" refers to the speaker and the listener. We've just won the lottery! Brilliant!

Number 2: "we" refers to the speaker and the speaker's friends but not the listener.

We've just won the lottery! But you haven't.

In languages with clusivity, there are different words for "we," depending on whether you're including the listener or not.

It shows up in languages in South Asia, Australasia, and all over the world apart from Europe.

And I really wish English had clusivity, because once you describe it, it's a blindingly obvious missing thing that we, we all could really use.

This isn't all that useful, but it is cool.

In a few languages, notably a couple of Australian ones like Guugu Yimithirr, that's the one that's been extensively studied.

There are no words for left, right, forward and backward.

Instead, you always use cardinal directions, the equivalent words for north, south, east and west.

In this studio, north is that way, so right now, I have a north foot and a south foot.

If I turn, I now have a west foot and an east foot.

I think. I'm having trouble tracking something simple like that but if you're a native speaker of a language with absolute direction, your brain just handles it.

You always know which way you're pointing, and if you don't, you have trouble speaking.

As a language speaker, I'd say, relative directions are a lot more useful,

particularly for those of us that go on the London Underground often, but it would be great to know always, which way was north.

In the same way that time is baked into English sentences, there are languages all over the world where evidence is baked in.

If you're reporting something that happened, you have to include whether you personally witnessed it or not.

You can do this in English of course. "I saw that", "I heard that", but it's not required.

Some languages have five or more different categories of evidence,

based on whether you saw it with your own eyes,

experienced it firsthand but it didn't involve seeing, whether you inferred it from something else,

whether you're reporting what someone else said...all these concepts, which are fairly complicated to explain in English,

are expressed just by how you change the ending of a word.

All these fantastic features are one of the reasons why keeping minor languages alive is important.

If English had utterly dominated the world and stamped out every other tongue,

then we'd lose not only these rich languages, but we'd lose the insights that we gain of what the human mind is capable of.

So here's my question to you: can you think of a brand new language feature?

Something that every language should have, but doesn't.

Next time: Why things are always black and white, or blue or green?