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

Then there's the right to arm bears...

Favourite Marx Bros moment:

Mrs Teasdale: 'It's my husand! Duck behind the couch.'
(Groucho disappears behind the couch)
(Husband walks in)
(Groucho stands up)
'There's no duck behind the couch!'

<>

Well, sometimes perhaps. However I think "She said she saw him doing something" is a pretty normal sort of scenario/sentence.

My stab at translating "She said she saw him kissing another woman"(Read large "S" as "sh"):
Dedi ki, eSi baSka kadin opurken, onu gordu.

I found I had to say 'eSi' (her husband) instead of 'onu' (him).

I mean 'eSi' instead of 'o' (he).

But the point is, WG, that Turkish speakers would get around the apparent inadequacies of their language by saying things that would seem odd to us but quite natural to them.

It's amazing the things languages can do with out - or, concersely, the things tay have that we don't seem to feel the need for. For example, we don't distinguish between (have I got these right) haber/tener and estar/ser - a distinction seemingly obvious to the Spanish. Are we handicapped relative to the Spanish? I doubt it.

Then again, the distiction between the definite and indefinite articles seems obvious to you or me. (He's certainly *a* bonobo, but I wouldn't say he's *the* bonobo.) Yet the Slavic languages do without either. (and presumably don't have the annoying problem I have on my iPod, which lists half the bands under 'The'). Can Slavs distinguish between any old bonobo and an especially notable bonobo? I expect so.

I agree. Still interesting, though.

Oh certainly interesting. Otherwise we'd be talking about something else. Like football. Or who the *are* those allegedly celebrated people prancing around on the telly in the gardens of a luxury hotel.

Douglas Hofstadter, that eminent computer scientist and general genius, once wrote an essay in which he replaced all gender-referencing words with ones which indicated the race (black or white) of the person referred to. He did it gradually so that you didn't notice at first, but it got more ludicrous as it went on. He had the words "ble" and "whe" as personal pronouns used to refer to black and white people respectively rather than "he" and "she".

It all went to show how the "he"/"she" distinction is completely arbitrary and probably unnecessary.

It's absent from Swedish.

But I can assure you that the people themselves are wonderfully gender dimorphic. I was working with some very attarctive former marine engineers the other week, If that's what their engineers look like, I can't wait to see their supermodels.

I tell you...you'd not have neded a girl in every port on one of their ships.

<>

Sure we could do without it, as indeed the Turks do, but that's not to say it isn't useful.

The "he"/"she" thing is a useful grammatical tool, for example, if you have a male and a female in one place doing different things. "He got up when she entered the room. He kissed her on the cheek. She said she was glad he had waited."

We straight away know who did what, in a way that is simpler than if we were dealing with, for instance, two women:

"She got up when she entered the room. She kissed her on the cheek. She said she was glad she had waited." It all gets a bit vague now. Yes, there are ways around this, but the gender distinction in English gives us a short-cut where there are people of different sexes involved.

The "whe"/"ble" thing would also be useful in the same way.

If we wanted, we could have more prepositions for more categories of people. In a way, you might argue this is what we do with names. Some people (around 51%) belong to the "she" category. Of these, an even smaller number belong to the "Sue" category, while others are denoted by "Sheila".

"Sue got up when Sheila entered the room. Sue kissed Sheila on the cheek. Sheila said Sheila was glad Sue had waited."

It's to do with evolution; that has determined what it is we find easy to remember and distinguish. A computer would have no trouble numbering the people as they entered a conference, and referring to them that way: 73 disagreed with 54's analysis but couldn't make 73's point clear because of rowdy interruption from 48. We have enough trouble remembering who's who in a Russian novel, despite their colourful names.

But of course linguists make up the most ambiguous sentences they can. That's where the cognitive interest lies. Like the duck-rabbit http://socrates.berkeley.edu/~kihlstrm/images/Jastrow/EhrenheitDuck.jpg

"it´s amazing the things languages can do without..."

Auxiliary verbs in negative sentences or questions:

¿ Trabajas?: Do you work?

No trabajo : I don´t work

+ His, her, its : su
+ English spelling

I say to cheer people up that English learners of Spanish have a painful path to cross because of the Spanish verbs,-" C´mon, don´t be so fussy, Spanish verb system is crazy for them and they manage to learn it"
However when they start with the phrasal, phrasal prepositional verbs or whatever you want to call them, I can´t find the word to smooth that wired path of learning.

*****
Gender:

In order to be politically correct, since quite a few years ago we can find in oral and written Spanish a double ending for gender. It´s quite controversial

Trade Unions leaders: Compañeros y compañeras

Any: because the men and women of this country...

The boys and girls of this school( we don´t have kids or children)
The fathers and mothers group /before, we said La asociación de Padres
( we don´t have Parents)

Some say that we should avoid that and use whether the masculine or a neutral word if there is.
CRAZY

"aap / tum / tuu"

Wasn't that the title of a BBC TV show on learning Urdu, that was screened many years ago? I wondered where it came from!

Wasn't it 'aap ka (something)'? the 'ka' being an interrogative.

Then there was 'Hindi/urdu Bol Chaal' - which I'm planning to embark upon any week now...

I've just discovered this: http://home.unilang.org/main/index2.php

Off to explore!

Should we call it Spanish or Castillian? Here's the answer:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/spanish/2007/11/como_se_llama_esta_lengua_1.html#more

But isn't that like saying "you can only call it English when it's spoken in England by English people - elsewhere in the world you need a name that's neutral and "politically correct" and doesn't hearken back to the great days of Empire, and what was done to establish the language in those countries" So on that basis, what do we call English when it isn't spoken in England... "Latinized Anglo-Saxon"? "Insular West Germanic"? At least the ready-made word "castiliano" is there in Spanish...

>>Should we call it Spanish or Castillian?

I'm not sure I understand this word 'should'. What do its speakers tend to call it? Espanol or Castilliano?

Irish people are certainly completely happy to call the language we speak 'English'. The particular brand is 'Hiberno-English' when it differs from the way an English person would say it.

Overheard in Dublin: Aw Jaysus, me smoke's after fallin' in the t'ile'.