Features of languages around the world

Language Discussions
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I am a language geek and I really love the beauty and surprise every language has concealed in it. I am from India and you might/might not know that it is home to more than 100 languages with every state having its own language and some local languages as well.
The languages I know are:

  1. Hindi (Indian)
  2. Punjabi (Indian)
  3. Awadhi (Indian)
  4. Gujarati (Indian)
  5. Haryanvi (Indian)
  6. English (British)
  7. Japanese
  8. Korean
  9. Chinese (China Learning)
  10. Indonesian (learning)
  11. Russian (learning)
  12. Arabic (learning)
  13. Hebrew (learning)

I learn them from randomly poping up to any website, book, YT channel, PDF or anywhere I get access to including Viki!

Weird idioms that my language has (word to word translation)

  1. Doesn’t knows how to dance and says the problem lies with the ground.
  2. Did the sky ate it or it got swallowed by ground?(the Hindi in this one is funny and it’s my favorite one)

And the feature I like the most is that the word order doesn’t matters in my language. I can say “She is good at cooking” in any way I can till the particals are perfectly arranged. An example " cooking good at is she" or “She cooking is good at” or " good at she cooking is". All mean the same.

I am curious about what other languages have in their boxes!

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I’m a language geek too! :heart_eyes:

I already revealed most of my language background at What languages do you speak/are learning?, so I won’t repeat everything, but here is some funny information about Dutch expressions:

I also mentioned some funny litteral translations of how the Dutch say things at English on Viki vs English on other drama websites.

Finnish doesn’t have an empty subject. So where in English you would say “It rains” (or “het regent” in Dutch), in Finnish you just say “rains”, because the “it” doesn’t mean anything (What rains? It!). If you do want to use more words, though, you could say: “rains water”. And “it snows” = rains snow.

In Finnish you can say some things in one word, where in for example English and Dutch you would use 3 words: on the table = pöydÀllÀ.
In Swedish and Norwegian you say the same thing in two words: pÄ bordet.
Actually, in Dutch you can also say “Op tafel” instead of “Op de tafel”, but it depends whether you’re talking about a specific table or not.

The Finnish word voi can mean (he/she/it) can/is able to, but it can also mean Oh! or butter.

In Finnish the stress of every single word is, by definition and with no exception whatsoever, on the FIRST syllable, even with loanwords which in their original language have the stress on another syllable.
Hotel = hotelli (pronounce HOtelli, not *hoTELli)

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Yo yo yo yo yo!
In Hindi, it is similar to voi, called VAH or in speaking the H sounds sometimes is not heard and it just sound VO or some people like few of my friends say VOI! It means He, She and It much like ‘That’ if the person is far away. And Yah or ye for he, she and it if the person is just near me much like ‘This’.
And I just saw you said Naam is also name in Dutch! Our languages despite being from different continent have some similarities.

I wonder if any language has this one:
Unlike many Asian or European languages, numerals in Hindi are said in a different way. Other languages have them as tens and ones as in forty-five; tens first and then ones unit. In Hindi, forty-five translates to four-forty chauvalis; chau a form of four char and valis a form of forty chalis.

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Yes! In Dutch 44 is vierenveertig, which litterally means “four and forty”. In German it’s the same: vierundvierzig. In Afrikaans, which is a daughter language of Dutch, it’s vier-en-veertig. Frisian has the same pattern: fjouwerenfjirtich.
And in the 19th century even in English it was “four-and-forty”.

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