lengthen your consonants for just ₹10 today
comparing what english lacks with various languages
English is a pretty interesting language: on one hand, we use rare sounds like the dental fricatives, no gendered nouns, and no verb conjugation; on the other hand, we lack clusivity (inclusive “we” vs exclusive “we”) or a word for trying to do something, but messing it up even more (enter German word “verschlimmbessern”). Honestly, there are a lot of features that English is missing, necessary or not. Let’s go through a couple today :)
Gemination
The lengthening of consonants (denoted using ː)
Although uncommon in English, it can constitute the difference between saying “address” and “leaf” (Hindi: patha and pathːa, respectively) for many, many languages. In Tamil, gemination allows for the difference between kaḷam (field) and kaḷːam (fraud), or puli (tiger) and pulːi (dot). In agglutinative languages like Turkish, adding suffixes to a root can also trigger gemination, like in the word hattın, where the “t” in the original word hat is geminated with the addition of the -ın suffix.
However, I said it was uncommon in English, not absent. When the same fricative, nasal, or stop ends a word and begins the next, gemination can occur: For example, the “sh” between “fish shop” is geminated, combining into one singular phrase (fishːop). Though it doesn’t change meaning in most cases, gemination can also distinguish between “unnamed” and “unaimed”, where the “n” is lengthened in the first word.
Verb Conjugation
Changing a verb depending on who is doing the action
I know I put this as a supposed benefit of English, but hear me out on this one. I would love to be able to drop the subject the subject/pronoun of a sentence (for efficiency, y’know?). I mean technically you could do this in English with some specific verbs: for example, saying “mŋgonadhajim” (I’m going to the gym) could be argued as a case of dropping the pronoun “I”, but most of the time a small vowel (uhmŋgonadhajim) is inserted as the pronoun anyway, so it doesn’t really count. Other than slang, there are other scenarios, like saying “Can’t find this damn thing!” or “Listen to me,” where the subject is dropped in English.
While English isn’t pro-drop (excluding the subject), most languages around the world are. For example, in Spanish, saying yo camino and camino (both meaning “I walk”, where as the latter excludes the subject yo/“I”) are acceptable due to the fact that the verb camino is conjugated to the first person present tense. To change the subject of the verb to let’s say tú/“you”, the conjugation simply has to be changed to caminas, which by itself means you walk.
Alongside Spanish, many of the world’s largest languages, such as French, Italian, Arabic, Chinese, Japanese, Hindi, Korean, etc. are all pro-drop. As a speaker of a pro-drop language (Tamil), I can say it’s definitely pretty helpful when you don’t have to say the full subject or pronoun and saves me time (to do what exactly, I don’t know, but time is definitely saved).
Aspirated Consonants
Consonants pronounced with a puff of air
I will never be more grateful that English does not differentiate between aspirated and unaspirated phonemes. I’m not saying that English doesn’t have these aspirated consonants, however; it simply doesn’t differentiate between to the two types.
Aspirated stops (pʰ, tʰ, kʰ) occur in English only before a stressed vowel and if that consonant doesn’t have an “s” before it or a liquid/glide after it. For example, when saying pot, you can feel a puff of air after the “p”; when saying spot or plot, however, the puff of air noticeably decreases, showing how aspiration works in English.
As mentioned previously, English does not differentiate these aspirated consonants from their unaspirated form, meaning there is no separate letter for “p” and “pʰ”. In many languages, however, this difference is phonemic and plays an important role in distinguishing words.
The Indo-European Indic languages (as well as Dravidian languages with influence from these Indic languages) are well known for differentiating between these consonants. Additionally, these languages use abugidas, a writing system in which a consonant-vowel pair is represented using a singular symbol. As each consonant, aspirated and unaspirated, requires its own symbol, these combinations can become pretty long.
Personally, I am not a fan of differentiating aspirated and unaspirated consonants, but if you want to learn languages ranging from Danish to Hindi to Mandarin, you definitely want to learn how they work.
If anyone wants to learn how to read and write in some Brahmic abugidas, I have linked a Google Doc below which I created myself to learn them. Enjoy!
These are just a few of the features that various other languages have and English doesn’t. Languages around the world are incredibly unique in ways that English speakers usually can’t understand immediately due to the lack of presence of these features, but learning about them is step 1 to being the well-rounded and aware linguist of the modern world :)
resources:
learn the abugidas of india!
gemination map: click here
gemination: click here
aspiration map: click here
aspiration in english: click here
