

Ask HN: What features are missing from the English language? - faitswulff

For instance, in Chinese, you can flip the sentence structure from Subject-Verb-Object to Subject-Object-Verb with 把 (ba3). So you can say &quot;I scolded him&quot; 《我骂他了》 or &quot;I him scolded&quot; 《我把他骂了》。 Either are valid.<p>I&#x27;m curious about the expressiveness of English versus other languages.
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pjungwir
The middle voice. You know active voice and passive voice. Ancient Greek has a
middle voice, where the subject does the action in a way that affects or
benefits themselves. (The exact meaning can vary for each verb.) In my
opinion, this is a lot like the reflexive in French ("Je m'appelle"). I've
also noticed that in English, we frequently use transitive verbs in an
intransitive way to signify "middle voice": "I stop the car" is active and
transitive, but "I stop" is intransitive with an implied "myself". In Greek
that would be παύομαι. Once you know this pattern you see it everywhere. I
wish someone would write a paper on it. :-)

The subjunctive would be nice too. We have it, but it's pretty much
disappeared.

The future passive participle in Latin expresses need or wish, so donandum is
"needing to be given". This is so useful I sometimes throw it into English
sentences, like "We should highlight the bugs fixanda".

Greek and Latin have _so many_ ways of creating if/then sentences that play
with tense and reality, it's amazing.

Latin (I think Greek too?) has easy ways to signify whether you agree with or
believe another speaker, when you're retelling what they said.

In Chinese measure words are pretty fun. But Chinese was a long time ago for
me. Also the use of tones is amazing.

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yen223
A gender neutral pronoun.

Saying "he/she" gets annoying after a while; using "he" (or "she") as the
default pronoun carries unnecessary sexist connotations; using "they" as the
pronoun when it already serves as the plural third-person pronoun just muddles
the water.

~~~
suchow
This kind of language change can't really be accomplished by fiat, so it makes
sense to look for the direction the language is heading in and push. More and
more we see people using "they" as a singular pronoun. But a large proportion
of people find this usage strongly ungrammatical, which is preventing it from
becoming mainstream. Eventually it will win out though.

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toolslive
Composability. In Dutch (and German too), you can take 2 nouns and glue them
together to form a new noun (the order determines the semantics). It's very
powerful and allows you to create new words "at runtime", at the very moment
you need them. As a side effect, the number of nouns in Dutch is infinite, and
you can quite easily build infinite words; for example it's easy to suffix
"plan" or "fabriek" or "verkopersassistente".

This feature does not fit google which seems to support only languages with
finite dictionaries (I wonder how well google search performs for Finish or
Hungarian)

(In case you were wondering; Yes, scrabble is really easy )

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gravedave
It's minor, but it would be nice to be able to drop the subject more often
when it's unneeded, like being able to say "Raining" instead of "It's
raining". Some latin languages have this, and would provide English with a bit
of terseness. For example, in this comment, I used "it" three times before the
first period, excluding the quote.

Also, I find verbs to be overused in English, whether for intent, desire,
location, hypothetical situations or other stuff. Some extra adverbial
suffixes would be a nice alternative.

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pmtarantino
Pronunciation. If you are not a native English speaker, the rules for
pronunciation are really hard to learn. At least in Spanish, you can know how
exactly to say a word just reading it, all the information is "there". This
doesn't happen in English at all.

~~~
faitswulff
Oh yes, English is very frustrating in this sense. This poem really puts it
your knowledge of English pronunciation to the test:
[http://pauillac.inria.fr/~xleroy/stuff/english-
pronunciation...](http://pauillac.inria.fr/~xleroy/stuff/english-
pronunciation.html)

The first verse:

    
    
        Dearest creature in creation,
        Study English pronunciation.
        I will teach you in my verse
        Sounds like corpse, corps, horse, and worse.
        I will keep you, Suzy, busy,
        Make your head with heat grow dizzy.
        Tear in eye, your dress will tear.
        So shall I! Oh hear my prayer.

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wodenokoto
I think there are many cool features of English. My favourite is how you can
change any noun into a verb.

A stone, to stone someone.

If the reader/listener has never encountered a novel transformation she will
tend to not accept it, but it is within the bounds of the language to do it
with any noun.

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lkbm
Locative case would be one of many examples. Dig around on Wikipedia articles
on grammar and you discover how many cases (and other features) exist
throughout language. I seem to recall Hungarian having eighteen cases, but I'm
not seeing that in the article for them, so maybe I'm misremembering.

~~~
faitswulff
Does that mean you could specify an object's location by referring to it in
the locative case?

~~~
lkbm
Basically. "in", "on", "by", and the like are subsumed by conjugation:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Locative_case](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Locative_case)

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dropit_sphere
Polymorphic verbs -> recursive clauses. Korean goes SOV as well, but---whoops!
Just as you think the sentence is ending it turns out the verb is being
conjugated as an adjective, describing the next noun, which is the _real_
subject.

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Red_Tarsius
If I remember well, Japanese has a very neat implementation of the _relative
clause_. Japanese relative clauses are formed by placing the modifying clause
immediately in front of the noun it modifies, without any relative pronouns.
You can even nest them!

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brudgers
Grammatical differences between Chinese and English may be more a result of
the differences in the abstractions in their respective alphabet encodings
than anything else. If so, then these are more likely tradeoffs than features
and bugs.

~~~
faitswulff
Perhaps I worded the question incorrectly, but I was curious about the
tradeoffs and differences in what you can easily express between languages.

~~~
brudgers

      Him, I scolded.
    

Is grammatically functional English.

    
    
      He. I scolded.
    

also works. Though neither would be preferred form outside of poetry or
oratory.

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2D
Ok this may sound stupid but I think there are a lack of words you can
satisfactorarily substitute in for swear words. I know this as I gave them up
for lent.

Also many people (example A: PG) with good vocabs still choose to use them.

~~~
suchow
If there were a word that you regularly substituted in for a swear word,
wouldn't it then become a swear word? Do you mean words like "heck" or
"freakin"?

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bbcbasic
Phonetics would be nice. No more arguing about how you pronounce a word. E.g.
Laugh = Larf or Laff?

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Corvus
The subject and object of a sentence are often ambiguous; if Tom put Bill's
suitcase in his car, whose car is the suitcase in?

