h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

Peculiarities of Irish:

1. No word for Yes or No.
2. Word order is Verb Subject Object.
3. Two different verbs "to be", distinguishing between temporary or superficial description and essence of a thing.
4. No neuter case, so everything is he or she.
5. Words can be inflected at start as well as end.

>>Word order is Verb Subject Object.<<

Which is pretty rare: only about an estimated 9% of the world's languages has that word order.

The most common word order isn't the one in English (SVO), but the one in e.g. Japanese, SOV.

There are six possible ways of arranging Subject Verb and Object. Are all six represented in the world's languages?

Yes. The two least common (OVS, OSV) though have only been found in some languages of the Amazon.

Percentages:

SOV: ~45
SVO: ~42
VSO: ~9
VOS: ~3
OVS: ~1
OSV: closer to 0

(the sample for this was 402 languages, so it's not nearly absolute)

On the Amazon, in the Amazon?

"of the Amazon" is OK.

You could say "in the Amazon Basin".

How do you manage without 'yes' or 'no', in practice?

Apparently, all variations of SVO are represented, but those with object first are very rare..

In practise, we can manage quite OK without yes and no. If someone asks us is it a nice day, we say "it is". If asked did I go to the film yesterday, I say "went".

The only time it becomes a problem is on Referendum voting papers. The English version has two boxes marked Yes and No. By rights, the Irish one should have the boxes marked "Agree" and "Disagree", but these are rather long words, so the Irish form says "Is" and "Isn't".

<<"Is", "Isn't"">>

Sounds about right for politics

I´m learning Spanish, and that has two verbs for "to be", too. Tricky at first, but actually quite useful.

Noggin

As far as I can see, the two Spanish verbs for "to be" are very similar in function to the two Irish ones, although not quite identical.

The inflection thing in Irish means that the sounds at the start of a word can change depending on the word before it, and the sound at the end of the word changes depending on the purpose of the word.

Mouth is "bay-ull" but "my mouth" is "muh vay-ull". The b changes to v. Similarly, a popular name is "Shay-mus", but when you address someone of that name, you say "ah Hay-mish".

I've obviously transliterated all these into English spelling.

Do the b/v type changes entirely depend on grammatical context, or are they influenced by the preceding word?

I ask because mutation is a feature of all Celtic languages and in Welsh it depends only on the preceding letter:

e.g. Cymru (Wales), Croeso i Gymru (Welcome to Wales), yng Nghymru (in Wales), Lloegr a Chymru (England and Wales)

I'm certainly not aware of the mutations having any grammatical value.

I don't know what you mean by grammatical value. They are part of the language. Some prepositions cause the first letter of the noun to be aspirated which turns a b to a v or w, an s to a h and so on. Other cause a consonant change called "urú" or "eclipsis", changing b to m, f to v, s to t, d to n etc.

In some cases, you can tell the meaning from the type of mutation:

a mac (ah mock) means her son
a mhac (ah wock) means his son

Is the cause of this the last sound of the preceding word, not the function of the preceding word (e.g.preposition)? In other words, is this a similar form of assimilation as in the English 'watcha' (what+you)?

I don't think so. I think it conveys meaning. I think you could have "an cat", "an chait", "an gcait". In each case the preceding word is the same, but the case of the noun is different.

Connected with peculiarities in Irish I came across the following quote by the writer Joseph O'Connor yesterday:

"How do you say 'I am sad' in Irish? Ta bron orm, which means literally 'sadness is upon me'; that is, I am the passive recipient of an emotion which is outside me...Irish features categories of passivity which other languages don't even dream about."

Including hunger and thirst, happiness . . .

There are a couple of nice expressions like that in Finnish. In slightly formal language you can say 'mine is cold' = I am cold. Otherwise coldness, hunger, thirst, longing etc. are formed as 'I have x' or 'with me is x' (depending on how you choose to translate the adessive suffix). So 'I miss you' sounds a bit like 'I have longing of you'/'longing for you is with me'. But the subject is still the self, so the sense isn't as passive as in the Irish expression.

Is, Isn't - that sounds cute! (No, I am not belittling, I just like the way of getting around this particular thing.)

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I really like that! With me is cold, right now.