vijayjohn wrote:That's a metaphorical extension of the concepts of ideas and colors, though. You could do this with literally anything.
Mmh, true...
vijayjohn wrote:I think perhaps Chomsky was also trying to use this as an example of how humans are innately (according to him) able to determine what is grammatically or semantically acceptable in their (our
) native languages.
Probably. I wonder what Chomsky thinks about pidgins that don't have a standardised variety or anything. Trying to google for answers, I couldn't find anything... it seems like Chomsky hasn't explicitly ever mentioned pidgins? Or maybe I just suck at googling...
vijayjohn wrote:Yes. Malagasy is VOS and has a focus particle (no).
Oohh, Malagasy... every time there's some weird feature I can think of, but doubt whether it exists, it turns out at least one language spoken in Africa has it.
vijayjohn wrote:From what I vaguely remember, whatever is being focused comes first in the sentence and is immediately followed by
no, which is then followed by the rest of the sentence. Everything else in the sentence stays the same.
Here's a paper on it.
Interesting, thanks.
Naava wrote:Don't stop, we need more Finnish learners here!
Considering the best way to make people want to
not learn Finnish is to tell them about Finnish, because they'll end up considering it either too SAE to be interesting (if they speak non-SAE languages) or not SAE enough (if they only speak SAE languages), the best way to encourage people to learn Finnish is probably to
not post about Finnish.
...but yeah, more people should learn Finnish. It's actually a pretty cute language, and we as Finns tend to be too hard on it and probably drive away learners by being like "noooo don't learn Finnish, it's useless and sounds ugly".
Linguaphile wrote:This probably
applies to the Finnish equivalents as well.
Yeah, based on those examples, I
would say it's similar, and actually the first one in particular could be translated with the suffix
-han/hän on the noun to have pretty much that same implication:
Kimchihän on yksi kuuluisimmista korealaisista ruoista.
In some contexts this could have an additional implication, though. Like, a kind of smugness if it was in response to someone telling you they ate kimchi and you assumed they were trying to be all cool by flaunting their expertise on Korean cuisine, which, in all honesty, most Finns would probably think, and as such the appropriate response would be to let them know that everyone and their grandma knows what kimchi is.
But that implication of smugness/snarkiness/whatever isn't inherent, it could be a neutral statement of it being common knowledge that kimchi is one of the most famous Korean foods.
With the second one getting the same implication in there is a bit more tricky. Formally the conditional would be used, and at least to me it looks/sounds weird without it if the rest of the sentence is formal, so:
Kyllä minä haluaisin syödä pitsaa, mutta en voi koska olen dieetillä. (formal)
Kyl mä haluun pizzaa, mut emmä voi kun oon dieetillä. (informal)
As for the third one, it has so many possibilities and none of them singularly feels the most natural to me, but this translation would be the most concise. It almost feels like it requires a follow-up about how you'll be running late or something, though...
Menen kyllä juhliin.
And the one about roses, I'd say formally the most exact translation implication-wise has the
-han/hän suffix on the verb:
Ovathan ruusut kauniita, mutta liian tavanomaisia.
For the last one, I feel like I have to include at least these three possibilities:
Ovathan gepardit nopeimpien eläinten joukossa.
Gepardithan ovat nopeimpien eläinten joukossa.
Kyllähän gepardit ovat nopeimpien eläinten joukossa.
There are subtle differences in the implications of all three, which I'm not professional enough to explain in detail and the exact implications might vary depending on the context, so under some circumstances the order of the below matches could possibly even be different, but basically something like:
1) well, cheetahs
are among the fastest animals
2) well, of course
cheetahs are among the fastest animals
3) of course, cheetahs
are among the fastest animals
...if that makes any sense.
All in all, they're similar but I get Linguoboy's point about them not being equivalent. The Finnish and Estonian ones presumably match too closely with the English and German ones to be considered similar enough to the Korean to be worthy crutches, even if there's a lot of overlap?