What's the weirdest feature your language has? Whether rare, atypical or hard for foreigners to understand

What's the weirdest feature your language has? Whether rare, atypical or hard for foreigners to understand.

Bulgarian verbs can show evidentiality (if the action has been witnessed or not).

Other urls found in this thread:

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ghoti
twitter.com/AnonBabble

vowel harmony

AOU are never in the same word as ÄÖY

if they are it's either a compound word (one big word made of many words) or a foreign word

natives often misspell these foreign words to have vowel harmony, olympia becomes olumpia

it might also apply to consonants, with kebab easily becoming kepap

The second-to-last digit (tens) of a number is spoken before last digit (ones).

Example:
21 = "one and twenty" (einundzwanzig)
374 = three hundred, four and seventy" (dreihundertvierundsiebzig)

When quickly dictating a number with more than two digits to someone this can lead to writing down digits in an incorrect order, even among native speakers.

it seems like turkic languages, mongolian, korean and some siberian ones share this as well

why don't you fix that shit as the swiss and belgians did with french?

Hungarian has it as well. No idea about Estonian.

why don't you use Ä

What sound is Ä?

same here

it's front a

position your tongue at e sound and then do a

probably that b/v are pronounced the same or the weird phoentic change during the 17th century when we developed the /x/ and /θ/

So ae sound?

We don't have it natively in the language as a result natives mispronounce English words with ae as e. Have becomes hev, and becomes end and so on.

My mother tongue (Adyghe) is in weird in many aspects.. It's an ergative language and has between 50 and 60 consonants depending on the dialect

Two different words for one(1), en and ett. Natives know the difference but there is no logical rule for when to use which.

also, our adjectives are batshit insane and formed by no rules, phonological or morphological apparent to a layman

pések (sand) -> peščén (sandy)
poróka (wedding) -> poročèn (married), poróčen (related to the wedding)
krí (blood) -> krváv (bloody), kŕven (related to or by blood)
jèzik (language) -> jezikòven (linguistic)
jèzik (tongue) -> jezíčen (related to the tongue)
vòda (water) -> vodén (watery), vodnát (full of water)

just a total mess of suffixes and accents

>Are you even trying?

one in faroese:

ein, einum, eins, einir, einar, eina, eini, einari, eitt, einum.

that's literally every language with declension

In German, there is not really a general rule how to form the plural of a word:
Ohr → Ohren
Turm → Türme
Wurm → Würmer
Auto → Autos

Sometimes, the words don't change at all:
Messer → Messer
Lehrer → Lehrer

Sometimes, vowels in the word stem can change (umlaut):
Hand → Hände

But sometimes, they don't:
Hund → Hunde

Sometimes, this umlaut is the only difference between the singular and plural because there is no ending:
Kloster → Klöster
Vater → Väter

Btw, as far as my knowledge goes, there are actually a few relics of this umlaut in English:
brother → brethren (German: Bruder → Brüder)
goose → geese (German: Gans → Gänse)
man → men (German: Mann → Männer)

they don't have the same pronunciation

Irish has prepositional pronouns, which is fairly rare, I think. Basically, you conjugate prepositions to suit the person to whom it refers. For example:

On me - Orm
On you - Ort
On him/it - Air
On her/it - Uirthi
On us - Orainn
On you (pl.) - Oraibh
On them - Orthu

We also generally form sentences Verb-Subject-Object.

Nothing. English is the best language. Simple to learn and not overly complicated like pretty much every other language. I have noticed foreigners are terrible at understand slang or the simplest idioms

...

>I have noticed foreigners are terrible at understand slang or the simplest idioms
Obviously. Those things vary from place to place and often are not logically decipherable.

Nah, they're pretty straightforward if you have a simple understanding of English, you don't even have to know any grammar, just the meaning of basic words.

Tbh that sounds kind of useless.
And to answer your question, there is nothing unique in brasilian, all we have is shared by other latin tongues like portuguese.

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ghoti
edumacate yourself

>idiom
>noun
1.
a group of words established by usage as having a meaning not deducible from those of the individual words (e.g. over the moon, see the light ).

russian has evidentuality too.
бля бyдy, coбaкa eлa pыбy

like fart after ice

>Raining cats and dogs

You telling me you can't understand what this means? And here I thought Americans were the dumb ones kek

same as pigs fly? why would heavy rain include cats and dogs? makes zero sense

In spanish we do, even spanish medieval texts mixed them all the time because at least back them we didn't tell them apart (this is why we write down abogado instead of avogado or voda instead of boda for example). Not sure about catalan, though.

>english
>dominant form of international verbal communication

So you've picked one that would be equally, or more, comprehensible if you reduced it to just the first word.

>Basket case
>At the drop of a hat
>Don't beat around the bush
>Under the weather (we're literally all under the weather, very time we leave the house)
>Pulling your leg

>see the light

ver la luz in spanish, it's exactly the same

we truly have a brainlet language. the only thing hard about it is verbs with random prepositions after them like "to go over"

>why would heavy rain include cats and dogs?

Because it's heavy. It's simple.

Those are pretty simple excluding "under the weather"

True, but it's nice and easy

>Those are pretty simple excluding "under the weather"
They're simple because you're already familiar with them, you dullard.

Tones
Writing system

Not having grammatical gender is kind of weird for an Indo-European language I guess

I hate this word

If you showed someone "Ghoti" and they didn't know about the concept, they would NOT pronounce it as fish. They would say something like "Goaty" or "Gotty". The word just takes a bunch of rules out of context to make a dumb joke

Indonesian don't have any tenses, instead it attaches time signal e.g. 'yesterday', 'currently', etc.
Also, it doesn't have grammatical gender

Ex:
Saya makan apel (I eat [an] apple)
Saya makan apel kemarin (I ate [an] apple yesterday)
Saya sedang makan apel (I am eating [an]
apple)
Saya sudah makan apel (I have eaten [an] apple)
Saya akan makan apel besok (I will eat [an] apple tomorrow)

i heard that chinese is similar.

>They're simple because you're already familiar with them, you dullard.
No, they're simple if you have some common sense and a menial understanding of English

quirky verbs
verbs that take another case than the nominative for the subject
so in Icelandic you say me (accusative) want, me (dative) feel like, my (genitive/possessive) is ashamed, etc. seemingly at random
very common error to say 'me (dative) need/look forward to' instead of correct 'me (accusative) need' and 'I (nominative) look forward to' for example

there are languages where you can find a handful of such verbs here and there but Icelandic is the only living language where this is more the norm than the exception and where this spans hundreds of different and common and uncommon verbs

It's consistent.

Hundreds of words have a form that feels much more natural/easier to inflect and/or pronounce but using it is considered to be a sign of an uneducated rural person and is heavily looked down upon. Nevertheless most people don't give a fuck and as you grow up surrounded by them, you form a natural habit of mispronouncing these words and have to either force yourself to stop caring or to remember all of them. Hopefully most of these words are very rarely used and old-fashioned.

isolated language making it hard for its natives to learn another language like English. dumb Japs don't tell the difference between "I can't speak English" and "I don't speak English"

The 'TH' is not common in Indo-European languages. (Correct me if I am wrong) I think that only Icelandic, Elfdalian and English preserve this sound fully.

+10 bonus points to explosives

You're missing the point

That's an advanced level.
To the basics, most foreigners can't pronounce Ы sound and can't distinguish Ш / Щ.

French has this thing called "liaison"

Basically in many cases the ending of a word that is usually silent is pronounced at the beginning of the next word if it starts with a vowel (or an H), and not always the same as it'd usually be pronouce.

Un grand homme = Un grand Thomme (h stays silent)

Des oeufs = Des zoeufs

Elles ont = Elles zont
Elles parlent would keep the silent s cause p is a pronounced letter.

Also you can't have 2 liaisons in a row.

"szczrzbrkdszcz"