Darren New <dne### [at] sanrrcom> wrote:
> My understanding (from a once-thru read of "teach yourself Swahili") is 
> that language doesn't have gender-specific pronouns. But it does have 
> different pronouns for things that are alive, things that are dead, and 
> things that aren't alive but aren't dead either.

> Alive would be people, animals, etc.
> Dead would be rocks.
> Neither apparently includes rivers, knives, and trees.

> Pretty unusual to this speaker of english. :-)

  You wouldn't believe how many counters there are in Japanese. By counter
I mean the adjective used to specify the amount of something.

  For example in English you say "two people", "two bottles", "two plates",
"two cars", "two floors", etc.

  In Japanese there are different counter adjectives depending on the thing
being described. For example there are counter for round objects,
cylindrical objects, people, flat objects, days... You name it. Almost
everything has its own counters.

  Japanese has many other quirks too. For example most adjectives (such
as "big", "long", "white", etc) can also be used as verbs (with tense
inflections, etc.) In other words, rather than saying "the car *is* white"
or "the car *was* white" or "the car *is not* white", there's no verb
"to be" per se, but you use the adjective as a verb, in all those roles
(it's inflected differently depending on the role).

  While many nouns have a plural form, explicit plural inflections are
actually seldom used, even when talking about more than one of that thing.
In most sentences the plural is not used (or there might actually not be
a plural form of that noun at all) and you have to know from the context
if it's talking about one or more of that thing.

  Kind of reminds me a bit of Finnish, which lacks a future tense.
(Well, *technically* speaking there is a kind of future tense, but it's
a bit awkward and seldom used. Usually there's no need, though. The present
tense doubles for future tense in most sentences, the actual tense being
implied by the context or the meaning of the surrounding words.. It's
surprisingly unambiguous.
  For example, you don't say "I will go to the shop tomorrow" in Finnish.
You say "I go to the shop tomorrow", and it's completely unambiguous. The
future tense is completely obsolete in this kind of sentence.)

-- 
                                                          - Warp

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