Fantastic Features We Don't Have In The English Language

most monolinguals 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 turns out though that there are lots of interesting features in other languages some of which English could really benefit from having I'm going to talk about four of them number one time independence if you want to describe an activity in English you have to say when it happened or when it will happen you have to that's how verbs conjugate there is no way in English to describe the concept of a person and dancing but not to mention anything about tongue 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 banked 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 number two blue civet II the word wheat is confusing imagine going up to someone and saying hey we've just won the lottery there are two possible meanings there number one we refers to the speaker and the listener we've just won the lottery brilliant number two 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 clue civet e 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 I really wish English had clue civet e because once you describe it it's a blindingly obvious missing thing that we we all could really use number three absolute direction this isn't all that useful but it is cool in a few languages notably a couple of Australian ones like Google you Murphy R that's the one that's been extensively studied there are no words for left right forward and instead you always use cardinal directions the equivalent words for north south east and west in this studio our 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 um I mean 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 and finally number four evidential 'ti 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've inferred it from something else whether you're reporting what some else has 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 gained 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 aren't always black and white or blue or green

Channel: Tom Scott

Views: 5,208,126

Rating: 4.9239779 out of 5

Keywords: tom scott, tomscott, linguistics, conjugation, time-independence, clusivity, absolute direction, guugu yimithirr, evidentiality, endangered languages, language

Id: QYlVJlmjLEc

Length: 4min 0sec (240 seconds)

Published: Fri May 31 2013

Reddit Comments

[u/the_lemon_king]

This is really fucking interesting. I've heard about other languages having really complex grammar systems, but until now I didn't even think about what that meant.

I wish I had the energy to create my own language, I'd include all of these things.

[u/mrdaneeyul]

In a language I'm working on, based loosely on Maori, I learned about the "clusivity" he's talking about. It's really interesting, actually:

• The Maori have words for we/us-inclusive and we/us-exclusive, and then different forms of the words if there's only 2 or if there are 3+ people: tāua, tātou, māua, and mātou.
• They specify between the second person singular (you, koe), and the second person plural: kōrua for 2, koutou for 3+.
• They/them also have 2 and 3+ variants: rāua and rātou respectively.
• They don't have two pronouns for "he" and "she" like we do--it's just ia.

It's been a while since I've worked on that language, but this video made me want to start up again.

[u/william_88]

As a non-native English speaker, I really wish English had accents.

Ex. Pólitics.

[u/Teninten]

Similar videos by the same person EDIT: Also, if this and other linguistics topics are super interesting to you, Wikipedia is your best friend and will help you learn so much about linguistics. It's also quite accurate.

[u/triceracocks]

I wish folks would post articles, rather than videos.