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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Mueen Nawaz <m.n### [at] ieeeorg> wrote:
>         I like how some people just do (s)he. That way you can read it any way
> you want.

  Yeah. Everything in parentheses can (not) be ignored. :)

-- 
                                                          - Warp

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Jeremy "UncleHoot" Praay wrote:
> A good child should wash his hands.
> A good child should wash their hands.
> A good child should wash his or her hands.
> 
> A good boy or girl should wash his hands.
> A good boy or girl should wash their hands.
> A good boy or girl should wash his or her hands.

Good children should wash their hands.

Problem solved.

By the way, in Spanish the 3rd parson pronouns are gender-specific too, but
there is no need for a pronoun in that sentence. The person you're talking
about is kind of part of the verb, which isn't gender specific. However,
there is no gender-specific noun meaning "child", so you have the same
problem anyway! :D

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>  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.

All those counter types mostly stem from two main sets, one for discrete 
items (like 2 cups, 3 beers) and one for measuring continuous things (4.2 
volts, 2 metres etc).  I think in Japanese they just join together the 
number word and some kind of "helper" word, like in English you would say 
"two cups of coffee", in Japanese they just join "two cups" together and 
make it one word.  Of course you then end up with 52513 different ways to 
say 1-10 :-)

If you are a foreigner, just remembering the two base sets is fine to get 
you by, it's perfectly acceptable and understandable to ask for "two coffee" 
instead of "twocup coffee", but you can't use the "two" that you use to 
measure things, you'll get a blank look for that.

>  Japanese has many other quirks too.

I like the fact that you don't need to conjugate the verbs depending on the 
subject of the sentence, also that there is no word for "the" or "a", and 
the best bit is no noun genders and mostly no plurals as you say.

> (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.

Similar in German, it seems to me that the present tense is used for 
actually doing something at that moment, that you do something in general, 
or that you are going to do something in the future.  As you say, it just 
depends on the context.

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scott wrote:
>
> If you are a foreigner, just remembering the two base sets is fine to
> get you by, it's perfectly acceptable and understandable to ask for "two
> coffee" instead of "twocup coffee", but you can't use the "two" that you
> use to measure things, you'll get a blank look for that.
> 

Well, if they associate it ie. with liter, it would be pretty hilarious.
Think about a couple going to a coffee shop and ordering two liters of
coffee :).

-Aero

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scott <sco### [at] scottcom> wrote:
> > (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.

> Similar in German, it seems to me that the present tense is used for 
> actually doing something at that moment, that you do something in general, 
> or that you are going to do something in the future.  As you say, it just 
> depends on the context.

  Of course it makes the job of computer translation programs a real
nightmare, because how eg. a Finnish verb should be translated to English
depends on the context and the meaning of the sentence.

-- 
                                                          - Warp

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>> If you are a foreigner, just remembering the two base sets is fine to
>> get you by, it's perfectly acceptable and understandable to ask for "two
>> coffee" instead of "twocup coffee", but you can't use the "two" that you
>> use to measure things, you'll get a blank look for that.
>>
>
> Well, if they associate it ie. with liter, it would be pretty hilarious.
> Think about a couple going to a coffee shop and ordering two liters of
> coffee :).

Hehe yeh I think that's exactly the reason why you get a blank look if you 
use the wrong set.

Another thing I just remembered about Japanese numbers is that they are 
grouped in 10000's rather than 1000's, so they have a word for 1e4, 1e8 etc 
rather than 1e3, 1e6 like we do.  It makes reading out numbers quite 
difficult for people used to the 1e3 system, especially given that because 
of their currency prices typically are quite big numbers.

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>> Similar in German, it seems to me that the present tense is used for
>> actually doing something at that moment, that you do something in 
>> general,
>> or that you are going to do something in the future.  As you say, it just
>> depends on the context.
>
>  Of course it makes the job of computer translation programs a real
> nightmare, because how eg. a Finnish verb should be translated to English
> depends on the context and the meaning of the sentence.

Yep, even Google can't do simple sentences from German to English, they 
always come out like "Tomorrow I go to England", missing the "will".

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scott <sco### [at] scottcom> wrote:
> Another thing I just remembered about Japanese numbers is that they are 
> grouped in 10000's rather than 1000's, so they have a word for 1e4, 1e8 etc 
> rather than 1e3, 1e6 like we do.  It makes reading out numbers quite 
> difficult for people used to the 1e3 system, especially given that because 
> of their currency prices typically are quite big numbers.

  And let's not talk about the traditional Japanese years (used eg. in
currency)...

-- 
                                                          - Warp

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scott wrote:
> It makes reading out numbers quite
> difficult for people used to the 1e3 system,

And vice versa. My chinese wife always pauses when trying to pronounce a 
big number, trying to figure out how to say "three hundred thousand" or 
something.

-- 
Darren New / San Diego, CA, USA (PST)

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