Languages

Which didn’t stop them from trying to eradicate all use of it throughout the centuries, like no Welsh only speakers allowed to hold public office in their own country or forbidding the use of it in schools up until the early 20th century. Probably an inferiority complex! :wink:

I would still say there are just seven vowels but you’re listing the long vowels, just as there are long and short vowels in English.

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The complication there is what the Great Vowel Shift did to the long vowels.

Also, English has more than five vowels, even if you take long and short as “the same vowel”, and only include one regional accent.

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Vocabulary yes, but didn’t English rather jettison a lot of the grammar inherited from earlier languages, dumping gender, noun declensions, and so on?

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Note that that famous place name has four "l"s in a row. It’s a bit of a cheat, though (I think) since it’s really the end of one word and the start of another. Maybe some Welsh speaker can tell me, can you just combine words the way one can in German, or is it only for place names?

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The ll is a digraph, treated as one letter, so it only looks like cheating

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Now this is a language.

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And is thus destined to fail utterly just like all the other conlangs with that goal and approach.

Language just doesn’t work that way.

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Or, in Mandarin, “mā mā mà mǎ.” “Mother scolds the horse.”

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Oh cool. I was just reading about that.

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Schlämmer__Schätzelein__Isch seh wat du gemaaht hest

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That’s beautiful, and inspiring, and terrifying, all at the same time.

I think Lakoff had the perfect take on it all, though:

“For me, as a linguist looking at this, I have to say, ‘O.K., this isn’t going to be used.’ It has an assumption of efficiency that really isn’t efficient, given how the brain works. It misses the metaphor stuff. But the parts that are successful are really nontrivial. This may be an impossible language,” he said. “But if you think of it as a conceptual-art project I think it’s fascinating.”

People keep coming up with philosophically perfect languages, sometimes so that all possible thoughts can be uttered, and mapped, and categorised. In others so that only true things can be said (or, if strong Sapir-Whorf is assumed, thought).

The trouble is there that if a language is complex enough, it must be able to express things which aren’t true. Think about it: if you have the concept of negation, then you must always be able to take any true statement, and gramatically add “… is not true.” to it. It’s like a Gödel’s Theorem for linguistically prescribable truth.
In theory you could have a language which is complete and cannot be used to express certain concepts, but then it would be too constrained to be interesting.

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The one that always comes up is ‘Zoooologe’ but that really is contrived. A scientist specialising in eggs who works in a zoo.

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Even relatively simple phrases would be totally borked by remapping.

English: I am hungry
German: ich habe hunger (I have hunger)
Irish: Tá ocras orm (hunger is on me)

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Japanese: お腹空いた (“stomach emptied” or “stomach has become empty”). They don’t even need personal pronouns because it’s obvious that it’s the speaker’s stomach unless the speaker indicates that they’re talking about someone else.

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ETA:

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Espanol: tengo hambre = (I) have hunger
eta: I like the Japanese version, @Jesse13927 . really gets the point across!

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Or as they say in Italian, “ho fame”

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Or concepts like “to miss something” (be aware of its absence).

En: “I miss him”
Fr: Il me manque. (“He is missed by me” or “I lack him”)
Ir: Teastaíonn sé uaim (“He is missing from me”)
or just… Tá sé uaim (“He is from me”, as opposed to leim “with me”.)
or more poetically Is fada liom uaim é (“he is far from me”)

(The first couple of Irish ones also mean “I want it” or “I need it”. They’re not exact translations, and that’s also kinda the point.)

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Does the phrase “i miss my ex but my aim is improving” make sense in Irish?

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Not really.

“I miss my ex” (I am aware of my ex’s absence) would be Is fada liom uaim m’iarchéile (“My former partner is far from me”),
“I miss my ex” (I failed to shoot my ex) would be Tugaim urchar iomrallach ar m’iarchéile (lit. “I give a misplaced shot upon my former partner”). I think. I’m not a fluent gaelgeoir.

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