Most monolingual speakers think that other languages are basically just their language
with different words in a slightly different order and maybe a different way of writing.
Turns out, though, that there are lots of interesting features in other languages, some
of which English would really benefit from having. I'm going to talk about four of them.
Number one: Time independence.
If you want to describe an activity in English you have to say when it happened, or when
it will happen. You have to. That's how verbs conjugate. I danced -- past. I am dancing,
I dance -- present. I will dance -- future. There is no way in English to describe the
concept of a person and dancing, but not to mention anything about time. Chinese, on the
other hand? Verbs do not conjugate.
In most cases, the meaning is obvious from context. I don't mean to imply that Chinese
doesn't have a tense system, just that it's not a requirement. It's not baked into every
single sentence.
Side note: tenses aren't as simple as past, present and future, and there's some lovely
subtle tenses in other languages. More on that in a later video.
Anyway, if you want to write poetry with a more vague sense of time: Chinese is one of
the languages to choose.
Number two: Clusivity.
The word "we" is confusing. Imagine going up to someone and saying "we've just won the
lottery!"
There are two possible meanings there. Number 1: "we" refers to the speaker and the listener.
We've just won the lottery! Brilliant! Number 2: "we" refers to the speaker and the speaker's
friends... but not the listener. We've just won the lottery! But you haven't.
In languages with clusivity, there are different words for "we", depending on whether you're
including the listener or not. It shows up in languages in South Asia, Australasia, and
all over the world... apart from Europe. And I really wish English had clusivity, because
once you describe it, it's a blindingly obvious missing thing that we -- er, we all -- could
really use.
Number three: Absolute directions.
This isn't all that useful, but it is cool. In a few languages, notably a couple of Australian
ones like Guugu Yimithirr -- that's the one that's been extensively studied -- there are
no words for left, right, forward or backward. Instead, you always use cardinal directions:
the equivalent words for north, south, east and west. In this studio, north is that way,
so right now, I have a north foot and a south foot. If I turn, I now have a west foot and
an east foot. I think. I'm having trouble tracking something simple like that: but if
you're a native speaker of a language with absolute direction, your brain just handles
it. You always know which way you're pointing -- and if you don't, you have trouble speaking.
As a language feature, I'd say relative directions are a lot more useful, particularly
for those of us that go on the London Underground often -- but it'd be great to always know
which way was north.
Number four: evidentiality.
In the same way that time is baked into English sentences, there are languages all over the
world where evidence is baked in. If you're reporting something that happened, you have
to include whether you personally witnessed it or not. You can do this in English, of
course: "I saw that", "I heard that", but it's not required. Some have five or more
different categories of evidence, based on whether you saw it with your own eyes, experienced
it firsthand but it didn't involve seeing anything, whether you've inferred it from
something else, whether you're reporting what someone else said... all these concepts, which
are complicated to explain in English, are expressed just by how you change the ending
of a word.
These fantastic features are one of the reasons why keeping minor languages alive is important.
If English had dominated the world and stamped out every other tongue, then we'd lose not
only these rich languages, but we'd lose the insights that we gain of what the human mind's
capable of.
So here's my question to you: can you think of a brand new language feature. Something
that every language should have, but doesn't.
Next time: why things aren't always black and white. Or blue and green.
[Translating this video? Add your name here if you'd like credit!]