GRAMMATICAL GENDER CONFUSION: Hebrew, like many languages, has grammatical gender, where every noun is masculine or feminine. And like several languages, certain rules dictate usual behaviour of these nouns in terms of identification, pluralization, etc. And also like other languages, there's exceptions and bizarre behaviour. Example: ה, when ( Read more... )

One of the things I find interesting about languages (right, because there's only one!!) is the unique ways languages handle issues of living beings versus inanimate objects. English, of course, has the pronoun "it" and it clearly is used for non-living things -- a table, a chair, a car. However, there's exceptions to this rule -- cars or boats ( Read more... )

Hey guys, miss me? I'll do my best to keep at this. I had some down time but now I'm back ( Read more... )

Yay, super late MMs ( Read more... )

It's a famous phrase -- "Et tu, Brute?" -- and it also illustrates today's topic: the vocative. The vocative is a case which means that a person is being directly addressed; in the aforementioned case Brute is the vocative of Brutus. The vocative can be found in English, especially older English -- see the title of the movie O Brother, Where Art ( Read more... )

I sometimes wish I had a language-minded boyfriend. I ran in and showed Carl a new app I got for my phone.

"... okay?" he said to me, raising an eyebrow.
"Isn't that cool? I can type in Georgian on this thing!!!" I said, with an unmistakable amount of excitement in my voice.
"... okay?"

:: deflates ::

Today we're discussing "no", or more specifically, languages having many kinds of "no". We've touched on this several times, but my studies with Georgian have added a new aspect to this, as it does so many other concepts of grammar and language. Let's look at a simple Georgian sentence:

მე ქართულად არ ვლაპარაკობ.
me kartulad ar vlap'arak'ob."I ( Read more... )

All language-based questions today!

( Cut because Regev rambles )

One of my biggest stumbling blocks in learning Georgian was -- as stupid as this sounds -- the NOMINATIVE. The nominative is the case used -- in most languages -- for the subject of a sentence. In "I speak terrible Georgian," "I" is in the nominative. "The cat is urinating on top of the television" features "cat", in the nominative. In most ( Read more... )

As I've said before, I've been studying the Georgian language. It's been fairly difficult, and its highly agglutinative nature hasn't been helpful. One of the aspects I find fascinating -- again, not that it's helped learning the language! -- is the use of a preverb. This preverb is a prefix onto the rest of the verb acts as and indication of ( Read more... )