I’m a conlang enthusiast, and specifically I study loglangs, which are a branch of conlangs that are based around predicate logic. My motivation for learning these languages was that I was always bothered by all the strange irregularities in my natural language (like the simple past tense being the same as the past participle, and the word inflammable meaning two opposite things).
Learning languages like these has only drawn my attention to even more natural-language nonsense. Occasionally I explain this to conlang lay-people, and maybe 50% of them are surprised to find that English is irregular. Some of them even deny that it is, and state that it all follows a perfectly normal pattern. This is a perpetual annoyance to me, simply because I spend so much time immersed in this stuff that I’ve forgotten how hard it is to spot from scratch.
Well, a while ago I wanted to start learning Mandarin from a friend of mine who speaks it as their first language. While introducing the language, they said that things like tenses were expressed as separate words (“did eat”) rather than sometimes-irregular modifications of existing words (“ate”). This reminded me of loglangs, so I gave them the spiel that I gave in the two previous paragraphs—natlangs, irregularities, annoyances, etc.
“Huh,” said the friend. They then turned to another native Chinese speaker and asked “Does Chinese have anything like that?”
I said, “I guarantee it does.”
This was months ago. Just now I was reflecting on it, and I realized that I have almost no evidence whatsoever that Chinese isn’t perfectly regular (or close enough that the thrust of my claim would be wrong).
It’s clear to me now that my thought process was something like “Well, just yet another conlang outsider who’s stunned and amazed to find that natural languages have problems.” That brought to mind all the other times when I’d encountered people surprised to find that their mother tongue (almost always English) had irregularities, and the erroneous conclusion precipitated right out.
You may also be integrating something you’ve read and then forgotten you read, and this added weight to your visible-and-suspect though process in order to make a true statement. It would not surprise me to learn that at least some of your study has included examples of irregularity from MANY natural languages, including Chinese. So “I guarantee it does” may be coming from multiple places in your knowledge.
So, was it actually incorrect, or just illegibly-justified?
Hmm, good question. I guess I wouldn’t be surprised to learn that I’d read about Chinese having irregularities, though the main text I’ve read about this (The Complete Lojban Language) didn’t mention any IIRC.
I wouldn’t be surprised if Chinese had no irregularities in the tense system – it’s a very isolating language. But here’s one irregularity: the negation of 有 is 没有 (“to not have/possess”), but the simple negation of every other verb is 不 + verb. You can negate other verbs with 没, but then it’s implied to be 没有 + verb, which makes the verb into something like a present participle. E.g., 没吃 = “to have not eaten”.
I just caught myself substituting judgment of representativeness for judgment of probability.
I’m a conlang enthusiast, and specifically I study loglangs, which are a branch of conlangs that are based around predicate logic. My motivation for learning these languages was that I was always bothered by all the strange irregularities in my natural language (like the simple past tense being the same as the past participle, and the word inflammable meaning two opposite things).
Learning languages like these has only drawn my attention to even more natural-language nonsense. Occasionally I explain this to conlang lay-people, and maybe 50% of them are surprised to find that English is irregular. Some of them even deny that it is, and state that it all follows a perfectly normal pattern. This is a perpetual annoyance to me, simply because I spend so much time immersed in this stuff that I’ve forgotten how hard it is to spot from scratch.
Well, a while ago I wanted to start learning Mandarin from a friend of mine who speaks it as their first language. While introducing the language, they said that things like tenses were expressed as separate words (“did eat”) rather than sometimes-irregular modifications of existing words (“ate”). This reminded me of loglangs, so I gave them the spiel that I gave in the two previous paragraphs—natlangs, irregularities, annoyances, etc.
“Huh,” said the friend. They then turned to another native Chinese speaker and asked “Does Chinese have anything like that?”
I said, “I guarantee it does.”
This was months ago. Just now I was reflecting on it, and I realized that I have almost no evidence whatsoever that Chinese isn’t perfectly regular (or close enough that the thrust of my claim would be wrong).
It’s clear to me now that my thought process was something like “Well, just yet another conlang outsider who’s stunned and amazed to find that natural languages have problems.” That brought to mind all the other times when I’d encountered people surprised to find that their mother tongue (almost always English) had irregularities, and the erroneous conclusion precipitated right out.
You may also be integrating something you’ve read and then forgotten you read, and this added weight to your visible-and-suspect though process in order to make a true statement. It would not surprise me to learn that at least some of your study has included examples of irregularity from MANY natural languages, including Chinese. So “I guarantee it does” may be coming from multiple places in your knowledge.
So, was it actually incorrect, or just illegibly-justified?
Hmm, good question. I guess I wouldn’t be surprised to learn that I’d read about Chinese having irregularities, though the main text I’ve read about this (The Complete Lojban Language) didn’t mention any IIRC.
I wouldn’t be surprised if Chinese had no irregularities in the tense system – it’s a very isolating language. But here’s one irregularity: the negation of 有 is 没有 (“to not have/possess”), but the simple negation of every other verb is 不 + verb. You can negate other verbs with 没, but then it’s implied to be 没有 + verb, which makes the verb into something like a present participle. E.g., 没吃 = “to have not eaten”.