In sǝq’ayǝƛaaɣ wǝaɣhaś, other than the part meaning “see,” there is a bit that reiterates that it’s me who was seen, even though the sentence would include a separate word for “me” elsewhere. It’s just that Kabardian speakers have to pack so much more into their version.
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This seems like a majestic monster of a word, and yet despite its air of “supercalifragilisticexpialidocious,” the word for “saw” is every bit as ordinary for Kabardian speakers as English speakers’ “saw” is for them. In the simple sentence “The men saw me,” the word for “saw” is sǝq’ayǝƛaaɣ wǝaɣhaś (pronounced roughly “suck-a-LAGH-a-HESH”). If there were a prize for the busiest language, then a language like Kabardian, also known as Circassian and spoken in the Caucasus, would win. Moreover, anyone who has sampled Chinese, or Persian, or Finnish, knows that a language can get along just fine with the same word for “he” and “she.” * And whereas Mandarin can mark tense but often doesn’t, in the Maybrat language of New Guinea, there’s pretty much no way to mark it at all -context takes care of it and no one bats an eye. Much of learning Mandarin involves getting a sense of how much one can not say in an acceptable sentence. There is no definite article like “the.” The word for “said” lacks not only a suffix for person, but is also not marked for tense it just means “say.” It is assumed that context will indicate that this event happened in the past. The word for “here,” zhè lǐ, can mean either “right here” or “to here,” just like in English. In Mandarin Chinese, a way of saying “The father said ‘Come here!’” is “ Fùqīn shuō ‘Guò lái zhè lǐ!’” Just as in English, there is no marker for the father’s gender, nor does the form of the word shuō for “said ” indicate whether the speaker is me, you, or him. Other languages occupy still other places on the linguistic axis of “busyness,” from prolix to laconic, and it’s surprising what a language can do without. German is, overall, busier than English, and yet Germans feel their way of putting things is as normal as English speakers feel their way is. It also requires specifying not just where someone is but whether that person is moving closer or farther away. This German sentence, then, requires you to pay more attention to the genders of people and things, to whether it’s me, you, her, him, us, y’all, or them driving the action. Why Can’t Everyone Do the ‘Asian Squat’? Sarah Zhang
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“Here” in the sense of just sitting “here” is a different word, hier. Then, her for “here” means “to here”: In German one must become what feels to an English speaker rather Shakespearean and say “hither” when that’s what is meant. The word for “said,” sagte, is marked with a suffix for the third-person singular if it were “ you said,” then it would be sagtest-in English, those forms don’t vary in the past tense. If the sentence were about a mother, it would have to use the feminine die, or if about a girl, the neuter das (for reasons unnecessary to broach here!). Der, the word for “the,” is a choice among other possibilities: It’s the one used for masculine nouns only. Although “ Der Vater sagte ‘Komm her!’” just seems like a variation on the English sentence, more is happening. In English, for example, here’s a simple sentence that comes to my mind for rather specific reasons related to having small children: “The father said ‘Come here!’” This statement specifies that there is a father, that he conducted the action of speaking in the past, and that he indicated the child should approach him at the location “here.” What else would a language need to do? It’s easy to think that what one’s native language puts words to, and how, reflects the fundamentals of reality.īut languages are strikingly different in the level of detail they require a speaker to provide in order to put a sentence together. Just as fish presumably don’t know they’re wet, many English speakers don’t know that the way their language works is just one of endless ways it could have come out.