Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Language/2018 May 4

= May 4 =

What is the etymology of the Aramic root "גני or גנא"?
What is the etymology of the Aramic root "גני or גנא" (gny / gna) in meaning of sleeping or laying down)?93.126.116.89 (talk) 04:39, 4 May 2018 (UTC)
 * Maybe you already tried: the CAL says GNY is a lot of things, some of them related to hide, hidden:

gny vb.  to lie down gny vb. #2 D to revile, to disgrace, to reprove gny vb. #3 to hide, to be hidden gny →gnḥ vb. a/a to be amazed at; to grumble gny, gnyˀ n.m.  spirit, genie gny, gnyˀ n.m. #2 hidden thing; pagan idol gny ( gnay, ginnē) n.m. #3 disgrace, shame gny n.m. #4 (??) gny →gny, gnyˀ n.m.  spirit, genie gny (gnē) adj.  hidden gnyʾk n.m.  an installation of idolatry gnyb adj.  stolen gnybh, gnybtˀ n.f.  theft gnybw, gnybwtˀ n.f.  stolen object gnyz (gnīz) adj.  hidden, concealed gnyzʾyt (gnīzāˀīṯ) adv.  furtively gnyzw, gnyzwtˀ (gnīzū, gnīzūṯā) n.f.  hiding gnyḥ (gnīḥ) adj.  amazingly terrible gnyḥʾyt (gnīḥāˀīṯ) adv.  terribly gnyḥh, gnyḥtˀ →gnyḥ (gnīḥ) adj.  amazingly terrible gnyḥw, gnyḥwtˀ (gnīḥū, gnīḥūṯā) n.f.  frightfulness gnyy →gny ( gnay, ginnē) n.m. #3 disgrace, shame gnyn, gnynˀ (genyān, genyānā) n.m.  reproof


 * (Search at http://cal.huc.edu/searching/fullbrowser.html )


 * trespassers william (talk) 11:54, 5 May 2018 (UTC)

Why is the English language so easy?
If we compare to other European languages, English has no genders, no declinations, 99% of the plurals are regular, the conjugation is extremely basic (4 or 5 forms for any verb), no verb inversion like in German and so on. Why is it so simple, considering that it is surrounded by much more complex languages such as French or German?Ericdec85 (talk) 10:41, 4 May 2018 (UTC)
 * English is not easy, it is just that it is more analytical, where its grammar is expressed more with syntax than with morphology. There exist easier languages among Germanic, I bet all principal North Germanic, bar Danish and Icelandic, are easier (and the problem with the former is largely only its pronunciation), Dutch is easier, and Afrikaans is a walk in the park. Standard German is a semi-artificial language with a morphology that has been deliberately made more complicated, German dialects are more analytical. So there is a definitely a tendency in Germanic languages to analytism (bar Icelandic), it is that English just got into its extremes (and still I consider Afrikaans more extreme in this regard). P.S. English is "surrounded" neither by French nor German, it was originally on one big island and many smaller ones.--Lüboslóv Yęzýkin (talk) 12:00, 4 May 2018 (UTC)
 * According to Gender in English, it once did, but it faded out of use by about 700 years ago. As for English being "easy" in general, I once worked with a native Spanish speaker who said that English grammar is easy in terms of sentence construction, but spelling and pronunciation and usage are very difficult compared to Spanish. ←Baseball Bugs What's up, Doc? carrots→ 11:45, 4 May 2018 (UTC)
 * Like Dutch/Africans, and Norwegian/Swedish. Also like Frisian. All of them are Germanic languages. HOTmag (talk) 11:47, 4 May 2018 (UTC)


 * Note a couple of thinking points:


 * In English pronouns are declined
 * not having declination for nouns does not make is simpler. Nouns still have case, but it's not explicit.
 * English morphology might be simpler, but is its syntax simple?
 * In English, as well as in French, but certainly not in German, spelling is quite irregular. To be sure how a word is written, it's not enough to hear it.
 * German is not spread around so many countries — hence no such diversity in vocabulary
 * English (but not German) has hasn't free word order. That doesn't means you can't put the words where you please. It's much more difficult to get the order right than in German.
 * Maybe you mean English doesn't have free word order? HOTmag (talk) 11:54, 4 May 2018 (UTC)
 * Yes, negation was on the wrong sentence.Doroletho (talk) 12:06, 4 May 2018 (UTC)
 * So you must be a Brit, aren't you? HOTmag (talk) 12:44, 4 May 2018 (UTC)


 * does English or German have phrasal verbs?Doroletho (talk) 11:51, 4 May 2018 (UTC)
 * English has tons of them. See Phrasal verb. ←Baseball Bugs What's up, Doc? carrots→ 12:28, 4 May 2018 (UTC)
 * Sorry, I meant to ask whether German has phrasal verbs. And indeed, English has tons of them.Doroletho (talk) 12:54, 4 May 2018 (UTC)


 * In English, for each specific verb, the prepositional-adverbial modifier is always welded to the stem (e.g. "to understand") or always a separate particle (e.g. "to give up"). For German, in the case of many verbs, the modifier can be a prefix in some parts of the verb paradigm, and a separate particle in other parts of the verb paradigm.  And even when it's a prefix, the past participle prefix "ge-" can go in between the modifier and the verb stem. AnonMoos (talk) 13:36, 4 May 2018 (UTC)


 * Another point to consider is that English has more verb tenses (in the loose sense of the word) than most European languages. It retains an important distinction between the present perfect and the simple past, which Germans in particular seem to find very difficult, while at the same time having progressive tenses (which German and French lack).  Most neo-Latin languages have the same present-perfect/simple-past distinction in theory, but in practice they use one or the other in ordinary discourse, with the distinction being largely restricted to literature. --Trovatore (talk) 20:55, 4 May 2018 (UTC)


 * English is a very difficult language for various second-language speakers.


 * English does have gender. In spoken and written English, there are masculine words, feminine words, and gender-neutral words. He is the masculine pronoun. She is the feminine pronoun. It is the neuter pronoun for an object. They is the plural form of he/she/it or may be used as a gender-neutral.
 * English does have inflexions. Person vs People. People vs Peoples. Bird vs Birds.
 * Mandarin Chinese has no conjugation at all. That beats English.
 * Turning a statement into a question usually means changing the word order. The cat is sleeping. Is the cat sleeping?
 * English is a non-tonal language. That means people who are exposed to Chinese or Vietnamese since birth and throughout life tend to be confused when the intonation of speech in English changes. SSS (talk) 21:48, 4 May 2018 (UTC)


 * SuperSuperSmarty -- English has SEMANTIC gender (which in most cases tends to correlate with biological sex, and is only overtly visible in pronoun agreement). English does not have arbitrary grammatical gender (according to which the gender status of a large number of inanimate nouns -- and sometimes also some animate nouns -- is unpredictable from semantics, yet required to be shown on adjectives, and in some languages also on verbs).
 * Also, English has a rather small number of inflectional forms (irregular nouns have up to four inflectionally distinct forms, but regular nouns have only two in pronunciation, while "to be" is the only verb in the language which has more than five). It also has the property (for both nouns and verbs) that there is a default type of regular inflection, and a small residue of irregulars -- nothing like the five Latin noun declensions or four-and-a-half Latin verb conjugations.
 * English does have simple WH-fronting and inversion of finite verb and subject in questions, but English has nothing like the "V2" word order and different word orders seen in subordinate vs. main clauses seen in some of the other Germanic languages. AnonMoos (talk) 15:44, 5 May 2018 (UTC)


 * "English is a non-tonal language" – while this might confuse some learners, it certainly is a blessing to other learners. If it were tonal, many Westerners would have hard times with it. Sure a language couldn't be both tonal and non-tonal so as to be equally easy (or equally difficult) for everyone, right? --Theurgist (talk) 12:35, 6 May 2018 (UTC)

It's worth remembering that the relative ease or difficulty of foreign language acquisition really depends on what languages you already speak. Finnish is regarded among English speakers as being a very difficult language to learn. I suspect however that if you grow up speaking Estonian, Finnish is a relatively easy language to learn and English is a bear. Likewise, Dutch is one of the easiest major languages for English speakers to learn. Now, as for why English has lost many of its grammatical inflections over the years, this section touches on the issue. Basically, the English language has been very heavily influenced by Norse and Norman invaders, and within the resulting context of communication between different language groups in Britain, there were a lot of changes not only to vocabulary but to grammar. Falconus p t   c 14:37, 5 May 2018 (UTC)

I think these "English is easy"-claims focus too much on the lack of grammatical case with English nouns, when there are plenty of other complexities in English. The verb system with its cross of tense and aspect has already been mentioned. In oh so hard German for example, there are six tenses for a verb, compared to double that in English (and in German you can get by with just three or four of them and still be understood, whereas you need to know most of the English ones if you don't want to be misunderstood). There is also the use of "do" to form questions when there isn't already a modal verb. "Sings the bird?" as in German and many other languages would be a lot easier than "Does the bird sing?". English pronunciation is also arguably not very easy, especially the rather large vowel system and in particular the distinction between tense and lax vowels as in sheep and ship, which is common in the Germanic languages but difficult for speakers of many other languages. The stress-timed syllable pattern also makes the pronunciation more complex, since the correct placement of stress and use of reduced and unreduced vowels carries a heavy functional load. --Terfili (talk) 06:38, 6 May 2018 (UTC)


 * Also remember that there are great differences between learning a language enough (a) to read it, (b) to write it, (c) to understand the spoken language, and (d) to speak it. Then there are further gradations: learning enough Portuguese to get by on a holiday to Portugal is not the same as learning it well enough to read novels in Portuguese or to have long, complex conversations with native lusophones. --   Jack of Oz   [pleasantries]  18:58, 6 May 2018 (UTC) Hence, when wondering why a language is "easy" or "hard", one has to be very clear what one is actually wondering about.  --   Jack of Oz   [pleasantries]  21:28, 7 May 2018 (UTC)