How Is "I Love You" One Word? - Speed VS Simplicity

            Let’s look at some sentences that all mean the same thing.

            English: “I love you.” Three words. It’s necessary to have all the words to retain the meaning that it is me, the subject, being in the act of loving  you, the object.

            Latin: “Amo te.” Two words. You can make the sentence three words –“Ego amo te” – but it’s unnecessary. Because of conjugations, we already have the meaning. The additional pronoun would only be used for emphasis, as in “I love you – she doesn’t love you!” This is the standard for most languages with verb conjugations – Finnish “(Minä) rakastan sinua”, Spanish “(Yo) te amo”, etc.

            Hungarian: “Szeretlek.” Now, if you’re like me, your first reaction was probably “There’s at least one word missing from that. We need an object.” Actually, nope. Hungarian has a special conjugation for verbs denoting a first-person subject and a second-person object. (As in, “I understand you” – “értelek”.) So, by putting “szeretni” (“to love”) into that conjugation, we get the sentence “I love you” without the need to state a subject or even an object.

            Obviously, “szeretlek” is much quicker to write than “I love you”. But I was more than a little unhappy to learn that there was yet another conjugation I needed to form. (If there’s one word of warning I can give to any future Hungarian students it’s that the verbs. Will. Murder. You.) I would prefer to be able to simply put a first-person ending on “to love” and throw “you” into the accusative.

            So, I realized that linguistic “convenience” does not come from speed, but from simplicity.

            While English pronunciation may be more screwed up that a staircase designed by M.C. Escher, you can say one thing for the language: It’s grammar is overwhelmingly simple. To form our sentence, all you need to do is state the subject, uninflected (I), the verb (love – still in the infinitive form, to boot!), and the subject, uninflected (you). Syntax:  It’s not concise, but it’s simple.

            And simplicity is, I think, what makes a language convenient. So just remember: 1.We’re lucky that English has simple grammar, or we’d be completely screwed, and 2.Sometimes “I love you” can be one word.

"DUCK!"

            You had one of two possible reactions to that:

            “Where? I don’t see a yellow bird on this page!”

            “Why? What’s coming at me?”

            I’ll admit, I was reminded of this by one of my favorite TV shows, Whose Line Is It Anyway. (Here’s the clip, in case you’re interested, or if you just want some serious laughs.) I then headed off to tvtropes.org, where I was sure I had seen this before.

            Sure enough, in the article titled “Duck!”, I found what I was looking for. It lists the two common meanings of duck, and continues on to how they’re used in fiction.

            “Characters in fiction have a surprising tendency to mix these words up. Generally, if an object is coming at someone very fast, and they are advised to "duck!" they will immediately look around for a duck…thinking the word to have been a reference to the latter example, that is, the bird. Or, if there is a duck, and someone informs them of its presence with the demonstrative "duck!", they will cover their head to avoid an incoming object, thinking the other character to have been advising them to lower their head, as in the former definition.”

            What is interesting to me is that this seems to be the only word that is subject to such confusion in a humorous context. When someone shouts “Run!”, another character doesn’t start examining her tights for a run in them. If a villain tells the hero to “Die!”, she doesn’t look around for 1.A cube used in games, or 2.A coloring tool.

            I still like the article, though, because it shows how much we can make fun of our own language.

            .

            .

            .

            “WATCH OUT! DUCK!”

            .

            .

            .

            “No, you idiot, it’s a swan.”

Don't Be Pregnant, Everyone Makes Mistakes! The Ever-Glorious False Friend

            If you’ve spent a lot of time on the internet, you’ve probably heard the humorous story about some poor, non-native speaker of Spanish who tries to say he is “embarrassed” about something to someone. He assumes the word “embarazado” has the meaning – after all, it looks just like “embarrassed”! But nope, he ended up telling some confused Spanish-speaker that he was “Pregnant about this incident.”

            The linguistic term for this is false cognate, or false friend. (Some people like to play it fancy and use the French faux amis.) It describes a word that either looks or sounds similar to a word in another language, but means something completely different. False friends are hard to overcome, especially if the language you’re learning is related to your native language – after all, Spanish shares so many similar words with English, it’s logical to assume that a shared root will equal a similar meaning. But it’s deadly if used wrong – usually leading to some profanity or another, though I won’t discuss those here. (I know, I know, disappointing. There’s always the internet, my friend.)

            Sometimes false friends come about between languages of a shared origin, but gradually develop independent meanings. Sometimes, the languages are completely unrelated, and that’s where the really different false friends start coming about.

            I had been thinking in Finnish for a little while, when I passed by a world map. I tried to see if I could remember all the continents (I never said I had a good memory – or skill at geography). Checking to make sure I had things right I scanned the map – and was confused – why was the map calling the large continent next to Europe a “thing”? Then I realized – I was thinking about the Finnish word “asia” – “thing”, or “matter”.

            Also in Finnish, students might want to look out before they start talking about their pet “kaniini”. Despite its similarities to “canine”, it means “rabbit”. Don’t use the Hungarian “fog” when talking about the weather – it’s “tooth”. One of my favorite false friends is between those two languages. Finnish: “Vesi” = “Water”. Hungarian: “Vese” = “Kidney”. (I can imagine the restaurant order now: “I don’t want any wine, but could I have a glass of kidney?”)*

            False friends can be annoying when learning. One of the most pesky for me comes in quite a common word – “the”. In English, the definite article is “the” and the indefinite is “a” (or “an”). However, in Hungarian, “a” (or “az” before a word beginning with a vowel, like our “an”) is the definite article. So, “a macska” = “the cat”. (“A cat” is either “egy macska” or simply “macska”.) Switching the two around in my head is most annoying when translating from Hungarian into English.

           In related languages, there isn't an easy way to tell exactly how false friends come about. But one thing's for sure - no one should be discouraged by them. Don't be pregnant when you ask for a glass of kidney!

(*For reference, this only works if the speaker hasn't heard the word spoken aloud, only seen it in writing. Vesi = VEH-see, Vese = VEH-sheh.)

"What Did You Call Me?" - Our Distrust Of The Unknown (And Ourselves)

            I enjoy saying greetings/farewells in other languages, because usually, if you wave and smile at the person you’re addressing, they’ll understand you. At least, so my logic went. But I’ve noticed a trend among people when I do this.

            As I was exiting a class, I called to the teacher “Jó napot kívánok!” – “Have a nice day!” Almost immediately, the two people next to me asked “What did you call her?”

            As I approach a friend in the hallway, I cheerfully say “Päivää!” Her response? “What did you call me?”

            What astounds me is that it happens even when what I’m saying sounds like an English word  - “Hei hei” sounds close enough to “Hey” for recognition, wouldn’t you think?

            But I see this all the time, and I think it reveals a lot more than just that most people don’t know multilingual greetings. I think it’s a reflection of our natural distrust of two things. 1.The unknown. 2.Other people.

            The devil you know is better than the devil you don’t, right? Fear of what we can’t understand is only natural. But it’s not really the unknown we fear when we worry that what this person just said to us was an insult – it’s ourselves.

            To me, this shows an inherent distrust in others of our kind. We assume that, when we’re not there, people will be talking about us or spreading rumors behind our backs, unbeknownst to us. And saying something to us in a language we don’t understand is just another way of hiding their treachery, isn’t it?

            Forgive me if this sounds ridiculously over-analytical, but I think it’s telling that we can’t trust in people with a few words. Just try to be a little more trusting – if a person you consider your friend is smiling and acting friendly, they’re probably not saying “I’m going to murder you with a steak knife.”

            (If they are, it would probably be a lot longer.)

Welcome Your New Singular Pronoun, English!

Let’s review the singular third-person pronouns in English, kiddos!

            “He”

            “She”

            “It”

            “They”

            Notice an odd one out? Well, in the 21^st century, you shouldn’t. “They” is moving from a plural to an alternate singular third-person pronoun, used as gender-neutral.

            On the last day of a comedy improv summer camp I attended years ago, all the kids were give “certificates” on the last day. As I walked out, I lamented the use of “We congratulate your child on their achievements here!” I had only just started to notice societies improper use of what is, officially, a plural pronoun.

            Look around you. Really look. It’s everywhere.

            I still occasionally try to fight it, but I think it’s high time that everyone accepted the fact: “They” has, in addition to being plural, also become a singular pronoun.

Why? Well, as I mentioned in “He/She/It Is A Boy – De-Gendered Language”, English doesn’t have a singular, third-person pronoun without gender that can’t be used inoffensively. That’s the important part right there – since most of have some weird pride in having a gender, we get pissed off if someone calls us “it”.  We don’t have something like the Finnish “hän”, which can be used to mean “he”, “she”, and “someone that definitely has a gender, but it’s unknown”.

            And since we want to be politically correct, but don’t want to have to keep using the cumbersome “he-slash-she”, we simply took the only other third-person pronoun we know, and it’s gradually gotten acknowledged as an acceptable singular.

            But not officially. Nope, we still teach our kids that “they” is only plural. But I think it’s only a matter of time before textbooks start noting the change.

            This morphing has been fought furiously – more intensely than a lot of language changes I’ve seen. Why is this? Y’know, I’m really not sure. But to everyone who just can’t stand this change, let me assure you:

We are not the first, and this is not the first change.

            We all know old-fashioned English. We usually encounter it in obnoxious attempts to be fancy (usually used improperly), works set in ancient times (usually in locations/periods which make no freaking sense anyway), and stores titled “Ye Olde ___”. But it’s important to look at the pronouns in early English. Y’know “you”? Good old “you”? Well, “you” used to only be plural. (“Ye” could also be used for the second-person plural, but was all but replaced by “you” by 1600.) “Thou” was singular.

            So, English is just undergoing another big pronoun change. It’s nothing to worry about. I don’t need to be captain obvious and say “language changes”, do I? Just as “you” drifted from plural to both plural and singular, so will “they”.

            We’re also not the only language in which two identical pronouns are used for different things. As German students can tell you, “sie” means “she”, “they”, “you [plural] [formal]” and “you [singular] [formal]”. (Compared to German, we’re lucky in our pronoun specification.)

            Hungarian has it, not in the pronoun itself, but in the conjugations. (This’ll be a little confusing, just be patient.) There are separate, lone, pronouns for “you [singular] [formal]” and “you [plural] [formal]”. However, they take the conjugations of third-person singular and plural, respectively. To clear things up a little: “Van” and “vannak” are (sort of – see my article “What Do Modern Slang And Hungarian Have In Common?”) the equivalents of “is” and “are”. “Vagy” and “vagytok” are “you [informal] are” and “you [informal] [plural] are”. To ask a close friend how they are, it’s “Hogy vagy?” But, to a superior, it’s “Hogy van?” which, technically, is actually asking “How is you?”

            There are many more examples I could give, but I think you get the point: Not only is this not the only pronoun change English has undergone, we’re not the only language to have pronouns with double (or, in the case of German, quintuple) meanings. There’s no need to worry.

            So, congratulations English! Give a warm welcome to “they”, you’re new third-person singular pronoun!

He/She/It Is A Boy - De-Gendered Language

The first language I was taught in school was French. Unfortunately, the school I was going to was horrible, so I didn’t have the slightest understanding or even awareness about “masculine” and “feminine” words. I first became aware of the existence of gender in language when I moved to the school where I learned Spanish and Latin, both gendered.

            I remember my first reaction: “Why?” That’s still my reaction. Why is it necessary for concepts to have gender? Especially when it’s so nonsensical – why is “dress” (“vestido”) masculine? (If I was a generous person I’d applaud Spanish for promoting gender-representation noncomformity, but it’s way more likely that it’s just an evolution of “dress” as in clothes, or “to dress”. I am not a generous person.) Why do some words have gender if some words are neuter – why is a house feminine but a bedroom apparently has no gender? (Random side note: That was one of my first thoughts after the Latin explanation of gender, once I got past everyone giggling at “neuter”. I’ll fess up – I almost asked “Where’s the spay case?” Almost.)

            I will write more about the nonexistent necessity for gender in language in a separate article – right now, I want to talk about languages without it.

            And I don’t just mean languages where a word need not be masculine/feminine/neuter, it’s just a word – I’m talking about languages where the recognition of gender, or even sex itself does not exist in pronouns.

            Finnish was the first degendered - not a real word, just think it describes this well – language I was exposed to, and it was quite a relief to not have to worry about what ending my “potato” takes. But I was rather confused when I encountered the vocabulary list entry for the word “hän” –

hän – he, she

            In what was probably one of my greater moments of naïveté, I actually leaned over and asked my teacher “Which one is it?”

            Looking back on it, my astonishment upon learning it was “both” was hilarious. I kept thinking – “Well, how do you tell if it’s talking about a man or woman?”

            Now, let me make it straight: This doesn’t mean “it”. There is a word for “it” – “se” or “sitä” – but that is, like in English, used to refer to inanimate objects without any sex whatsoever. And it’s not just a more politically correct term to use in addition to separate words for “he” and “she”.

            I went on in that mindset for a while, until I realized – that’s genius. It solves effortlessly the problem we have of the constant need to say “he/she” or “his/her” as not to be sexist. It allows you to talk about those whose gender you don’t know without being offensive. It frees gender-neutral, transgender, and other non-binary people from the false dichotomy of “male” and “female”. It’s genius.

            (Though, this is not to say I haven’t been pissed after having to re-do a whole translation…but no language is perfect. It’s also worth noting that “he”, which means “they” is also gender-neutral…but so is it in English, so it’s not remarkable. )

            But wait, there’s more. I mentioned that “se” was the equivalent of our “it”…but only in formal Finnish. In everyday life, “se” is often used in place of “hän”. So, not only is Finnish gender-neutral, it’s becoming species-neutral.

Hungarian takes the same step, only it’s officially recognized and used in formal situations: “Ő” means “he”, “she”, and “it”.

            Estonian too: “Tema” for “he/she”. In fact, all Uralic languages use only gender-neutral pronouns. I mean it when I say: Awesome.

            There are other languages that follow the same degendered pronoun pattern, but these are the first three I became acquainted with, and I love them. Maybe English should take the hint.

And it might already have, though we haven’t officially recognized it. See my next article, “Welcome Your New Singular Pronoun, English!” to see how “they” is slowly becoming a gender-neutral pronoun.