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Ian Fisher
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Poly
grammar
ous
Explore linguistic diversity
about
English:
A
hungry
tiger
chased
a
mouse
in
the
forest
.
Translation:
-
Transliteration:
-
Basic word order
Subject–verb–object is the typical word order for English and other European languages. Cross-linguistically, it is about equally as common as SOV.
SVO
Subject–object–verb languages place the object before the verb. It is uncommon in European languages, but worldwide it is about as common as SVO. Examples include Hindi, Japanese, and Turkish.
SOV
Verb–subject–object languages place the verb first in the sentence. They are considerably rarer than SVO and SOV languages.
VSO
Definiteness
The indefinite article in English is the word 'a' or 'an'.
Indefinite article?
The definite article in English is the word 'the'.
Definite article?
Nouns
Do adjectives precede nouns or follow them?
Post-nominal adjectives?
Many languages divide nouns into classes that behave differently with respect to adjective–noun agreement or other phenomena. In Romance languages, this is typically a two-way distinction between 'masculine' and 'feminine' nouns, but in some languages there are more than just 2 classes.
Nominal gender?
English has a count vs. mass noun distinction, where some nouns can be directly quantified while others cannot be (you can say '3 tables' but not '3 furnitures'). In some languages, all nouns behave like mass nouns in English.
Count nouns?
Inflections
Do nouns take special endings to mark their grammatical function (subject, object, etc.)?
Nominal inflections?
Do verbs take special endings to mark tense, number, gender, etc.?
Verb conjugations?
Adpositions?
prepositions
In English, prepositions come before the noun, but in some other languages they come after and are hence known as 'postpositions'. The generic term for a preposition or postpositions is 'adposition'.
postpositions
both
Adjunct position?
pre-verb
post-verb
A West Germanic language spoken originally by the Anglo-Saxon tribes of England and now by more than a billion around the world. Genealogically it is closest to Dutch, German, and the languages of Scandinavia, though it has taken a large proportion of vocabulary from French and Latin.
English
A Romance language of Western Europe, also spoken throughout France's former colonies in Africa. Like all Romance languages, French has a system of grammatical gender and moderately complex verb conjugations. Phonologically it is notable for its guttural 'R' sound and large inventory of vowels.
French
An East Slavic language closely related to Ukrainian and Belarusian. Compared to the languages of Western Europe, it has retained a complicated system of noun declensions. Its phonological system is marked by a systematic contrast between palatalized and unpalatalized consonants – and a propensity for formidable consonant clusters.
Russian
An Indo-Aryan language spoken by hundreds of millions in India. As part of the Indo-European language family, it is distantly related to English and most other European languages. Hindi is mutually intelligible to a degree with the Urdu language of Pakistan, though they are written in different scripts
Hindi
Properly speaking, a group of related Sino-Tibetan dialects rather than a single language. Standard Chinese is distinguished by a lack of inflection or conjugation, a topic-prominent structure, and phonetic tones. Other Chinese dialects – some of them with tens of millions of speakers – share these features to varying degrees but differ in vocabulary and pronunciation.
Chinese