That's the obvious part of it. One would except laguage spoken by non-native speakers to lose most of the complexity in inflection. But what about, for instance, how the same word can be used as distinct lexical categories. The extreme case of the phenomenon is to use proper name as a verb: Houdini yourself out of a situation. In Chinese I've seen a text describing how killers of king Wu were going to "wu" his minister.
That actually happens a fair amount with non-native speakers, since our uncommon words are sometimes very similar to their common words. For example, an italian recently called me ascetic, and I had to look it up.
It's extremely common in every situation like this, the grammar of the original language stays but the lexicon (nouns especially) gets rapidly switched out with borrowings and calques from the surrounding language.
Sometimes, though my example was intentionally obscured to prevent machine translation and you were not aware of Korean conjugations (usually omitted in identifiers) ;-)
I have seen numerous instances of pseudo-English when it comes to naming. It is hard to name things in non-native tongues. When reasonable, reducing that overhead can be indeed beneficial.
So a because a term in one language doesn't have one to one translation with the exact same connotations in another we have to make up a new term? Seems more like a this would simply make the case for folks to become a loan word rather than creating a new term altogether. there are many words in other languages that don't have a direct translation to a English term we don't make up a new word in those cases.
Isn't this a case with any niche terms? For instance I've had the same issue with names of various kitchen tools and utensils - you know their name in your mother tongue, and when you need it you usually get away with: "give me, err, that thing", so you never pick up the proper name in English...
That's (for better or worse) an almost defining characteristic of the English language. We take words from other languages and adopt them as English words. It doesn't matter if the word in English means the same thing as the original word, it doesn't matter what language it came from, it doesn't matter if we're combining two words from different languages to make a new word (television is the Greek word 'tele' combined with the Latin word 'visio').
English is an incredibly dynamic language with very loose rules. If a loanword sounds exotic, well that's half the fun.
Well, but probably most of the languages work this way, maybe all of them. English vocabulary resembles a pile of goods stolen from french, germanic languages and so on.
Well... sure, not as useful, but I still think it's interesting. For instance, in english we have multiple words (goat, sheep) for what in chinese is a single word (yang2). If an unsupervised model split our mammals which have fur and bleet into two categories 'concept 19281' and 'concept 19282', we might think that it's done well to separate the goats and the sheep, but the chinese speaker might think that it's failed to group the same animal together.
Now imagine that reversed, that what we considered one thing could be considered 2 or more by the model, we had just never thought of them separate because we had no words to describe them.
There are many of these examples, where one language has one concept that's split among others in another language, and the speakers of the first language might never know the difference unless those words exist.
As a non native speaker, my biggest gripe is that words which meanth the same thing have diverged.
For example, "egregiously" meant "very well" and "egregiamente" still does in Italian. But in English, it now means "very badly".
At the same time, people who spend a lot of time using English end up reimporting words with the same root into my own language when we already have something (e.g. the word spelled "decade" in Italian means "ten things" while the semantically equivalent "ten years" is "decennio", but some people will now commonly use the former to mean the latter because they just mock English)
Yep, other languages (Chinese for example) don't see it as odd if you have to use the same word repeatedly --people don't feel pressure to use synonyms to say the same thing or elaborate on a given topic. Wish more writers of English felt the same way.
That might be something that foreign speakers find easier to get right because they have to actively learn it, and the words are more different in other languages so they wouldn't confuse the concepts.
As a native speaker of portuguese, which uses the exact same two words, I can't think of any exceptions.
I don't see why this would be a "strange" and "random" language quirk when it makes perfect sense in practice. The only situations I can see where it wouldn't make perfect sense would be in situations where you're translating to English, which is not a productive way to think about languages.
using suffixes and syntactic variations to distinguish concept also does not translate, in the literal sense of translating to other languages, especially those that have different rules for suffixes. Scanlon or whatever other name is much easier to translate to any other language than random unusual words
There’s definitely something going on, in non-English it sometimes emits words which don’t exist in any dictionary and are used by absolutely noone, but they’re based on existing words and convey correct meaning (humans understand and are able to say which existing word should be used instead).
However, this happens very frequently in humans, we have multiple different languages and even multiple synonyms for a lot of (most?) words in every one of those languages.
At the same time, would correlation of two things make one of them worthless to have/know/understand?
there are a lot of words that dont map directly onto another word.
heck, i'd argue that most abstract words are just close-ish approximations, which can be used to convey the same thing, but are also useable in different contexts with significantly changed meaning.
Take yesterday's wordle for example: tangy. few languages have something that maps onto exactly this meaning. Its still easy to translate it with a sentence, but its likely going to be more than one word. And the chosen translation will likely change significantly depending on the context the word is used in.
Good question, my native tongue doesn't have too many rules by fiat. The one thing that always gets me is when people stick an English word in the middle of a sentence and then modify it with a native prefix or suffix. And it's a natural thing for people to do, grab a word you hear a lot and shim it into your native language.
But if you're fluent in both languages that kind of mixing just sounds soooo wrong!
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