Real answer: these are actually real languages! They’re just conlangs, or constructed languages, instead of natural languages. The major problem with conlangs generally ends up being the limited vocabulary, but the grammar foundations are usually solid.
I actually really like Klingon as a language because it was intentionally designed to be alien, and specifically to be very Klingon. Most languages are Subject-Verb-Object (like English and other Western languages) or Subject-Object-Verb (like Japanese or Hindi). Klingon, however, is Object-Verb-Subject - it’s very direct with the emphasis placed on the target of the sentence, which makes sense with the Star Trek world and Klingon culture.
Fun fact, Klingon has at least one native speaker - some guy raised his daughter to speak Klingon as well as English. (I’m not a fan of this - on one hand, learning multiple languages from an early age is a huge leg up in being able to learn more languages in the future, but on the other hand Klingon is entirely useless as a primary language given its structure and the few other people who speak it.)
Speers was also the only person who would speak Klingon to Alec and the boy never saw Star Trek during this experiment, so didn’t ever see anyone but his father speaking it. As everyone else spoke English, Speers stated when Alec was about three years old, “He stopped listening to me when I spoke in Klingon. It was clear that he didn’t enjoy it, and I didn’t want to make it into a problem, so I switched to English…”
Today the teenage Alec no longer is fluent in Klingon and reportedly can’t even pick out the meaning of individual words of the language.
No, that’s still subject-verb-object or at least adjective clause-noun depending on how it’s read (it should have a hyphen in that case but stuff like that gets left out a lot)
Guess I got my subject and object confused. Never paid much attention to sentence diagrams
Even cooler, in my opinion, are languages that are even further outside of common indo european language paradigms, such as Navajo which uses degrees of animacy instead of grammatical gender and Basque which uses ‘focus’ and ‘topic’ to determine word order rather than subjects and objects.
such as Navajo which uses degrees of animacy instead of grammatical gender
What makes their use of degrees of animacy not a use of grammatical gender? Keep in mind that even though it’s called “gender” because in European languages it usually maps in some way onto human sexual identity, linguistically speaking grammatical gender has nothing to do with human gender identity.
Good point. What I meant is that it’s different from grammatical gender typical of European languages as you defined it.
Grammatical gender is a bad name for such a general concept that goes beyond the social definition of gender. In fact, that term is a bit eurocentric.
It’s funnier with French because no one hates the Dutch language more than the Dutch, but France thinks everything it does is the best.
It’s a stupid language making no sense at all. Weird grammer. Plus, it has weird sounds. Like the R and G, and flattened vowels. Whenever our prime-minister speaks English, it’s a massive shame factor for any Dutch person. Oh and not just the current bozo, the past several as well. Like if it’s mandatory to speak horrible English to become prime-minister or something.
French accent? Super sexy. Irish? Scottish? Oeh yeah. German? So sophisticated, or a female with soft German: rrrrrrrr, melting. Italian? Spanish? Greek? Hell yeah. Norwegian, Danish? So bad ass viking. Swedish? Sure. Even Sud Afrikaans English accent is sexy AF. That language even originates from Dutch!
But Dutch itself? Boner gone, give me a paper bag with 2 holes in it and fast!
It’s not without reason English officially isn’t considered a foreign language in the Netherlands anymore. There are even talks about adapting it as a second national language, as the general knowledge of English is of a certain level, it’s getting close to Dutch. The only people in the Netherlands who are unable to speak English are a few boomers and some who haven’t read any book besides the Bible.
The grammar rules make no sense and sometimes have more exceptions than cases it applies to.
I’m married to a foreigner and regularly get stuck trying to explain why a sentence is the way it is.
French people are busy hating on themselves. I’ve heard about French people hating on people from Paris so since Ive ment French people during my exchange/foreign semester I tried asking them if they really hate people from Paris and they confirmed it for me. All non Paris French people hate on Paris French people lol
This sounds similar to most dutch people silently hating people from Amsterdam.
I liken this to people’s irritation with NYC-philes - the ones who think the universe revolves around NYC, to the point when even on the west coast, they refer to it as ‘The City’. And so much of Paris is radically more inwardly-celebrating-cosmopolitan, diverse yet oddly intolerant uptight? - than the smaller cities much less the countryside, I think I can grok their irritation.
Having only visited twice in my youth, certainly no expert.
I wouldn’t say french is the best language by any means. I think that while it has a pretty extensive vocabulary it is quite inefficient and conservative by nature
The reason it has an extensive vocab is because the french are purists who need to invent their own version of every new word in existence, instead of just loaning words from other languages like every other language does.
An example of this is “computer”. Every other language uses that term, except for fucking french who call it an “ordinateur”
Some slight pushback from a French person: we aren’t purists, our old reactionary institutions are purist (notably the Académie Française which, fun fact, is officially “in charge” of the french language while having zero linguists in its ranks).
Hang out with a group of young adults in France and you’ll hear a ton of English and a decent sprinkling of Arabic amongst the French.
Also, it’s not just French, Spanish has “ordenador”. It makes some linguistic sense; computers do compute but they also sort and arrange numbers.
This is a tad misleading.
Other languages may use the word computer in their language but some also have their own word, even if not using it.
Spanish has ‘el ordenador’ and German has ‘der Rechner’.
Also, it’s a bit rich to say French has an extended vocab when English sometimes imported French words twice, like warranty and guarantee, or guardian and warden. In fact, English supposedly has more words than French.
French is purist but then English took words like ‘dette’ and ‘doute’ and added a ‘b’ just to keep it closer from Latin… right.
Les francophones aiment perpétuer l’idée que le français est une langue riche, complexe et difficile, mais en réalité c’est rien de si extraordinaire. ;)
Right, what’s ‘Dutch’?
Deutsch is the German word for German. I think they just made a typo and put the wrong flag or smth.
I mean only in English is the term Dutch used for the Netherlands. It’s a really old thing from around the 1500’s that stuck around.
Also that’s the flag of Luxembourg.
Houd je smoel anders zet ik je je kop tussen twee oren
