I'm trying to find out if it's true that my Malay language could be a language that takes to long to express something (in writing or in pronouncation or both sometimes). One example is below -
English: I found a cat.
(if I translate that:)
Malay: Saya telah menjumpai seekor kucing.
Can anyone help me out to prove this theory? How do you say 'I found a cat'(must be in past tense) in your language?
Italian: Ho trovato un gatto.
Italian dialect: Ho catà en gato XDDD
Deutsch: Ich habe ein Katz gefunden (I think it's right, I'm not German)
Swedish: Jag hittade en katt
Japanese: 猫を見つかった (neko wo mitsukatta)
Serbian: нaшao caм мaчкa
Cat, hat. In French chat chapeau. In Spanish, el gato in a sombrero.
>>4
It is: Ich habe eine Katze gefunden.
That's perfect, though. Normal past tense would be: Ich fand eine Katze.
NG:猫を見つかった
OK:猫を見つけた(neko wo mituketa)
>>6
Uh. He's asking for "I found a cat" not "Cat, hat". >_>
nederlands - ik heb een kat gevonden
rumantsch grischun - jau hai chattà in min/in giat (totally not doing all the possible subforms)
moujér - minkixän
Hm... so far Malay is leading in the numbers of letters. However, Japanese writing is a troublesome in the whole scheme of things. Maybe this is worth checking out after all.
English: I found a cat. (10)
Malay: Saya telah menjumpai seekor kucing. (30)
French: J'ai trouvé un chat. (15)
Italian: Ho trovato un gatto. (16)
Italian dialect: Ho catà en gato (12)
Deutsch: Ich habe eine Katze gefunden. (24)
Swedish: Jag hittade en katt (16)
Japanese: 猫を見つけた (6)
Japanese (romanize): neko wo mituketa (14)
Serbian: нaшao caм мaчкa (13)
nederlands: ik heb een kat gevonden (19)
rumantsch: jau hai chattà in min/in giat (17/18)
moujér(?): minkixän (?)
Ah... I forgot. Thank you for everyone for participating.
>>11
(?)(?)(?)(?)(?)(?)(?)(?)(?)(?)(?)(?)(?)(?)(?)(?)(?)(?)(?)(?)(?)(?)(?)(?)(?)(?)(?)(?)(?)(?)(?)(?)(?)
also, counting letters is obviously a totally worthless approach to this question, but great fun nonetheless.
How about counting syllables, instead?
I'll count the words!
English: I found a cat. (4)
Malay: Saya telah menjumpai seekor kucing. (5)
French: J'ai trouvé un chat. (4)
Italian: Ho trovato un gatto. (4)
Italian dialect: Ho catà en gato (4)
Deutsch: Ich habe eine Katze gefunden. (5)
Swedish: Jag hittade en katt (4)
Japanese (romanize): neko wo mituketa (3)
Serbian: нaшao caм мaчкa (3)
nederlands: ik heb een kat gevonden (5)
rumantsch: jau hai chattà in min/in giat (5)
Spanish: Encontré un gato. (14) (3)
Syllables? You mean something like below? I wasn't sure if I'm doing it correctly for the Malay word (or even English for that matter) so I thought I start with something simpler and luckily the theory was correct on two accounts already.
English: (I) (found) (a) (cat). (4)
Japanese (romanize): (ne)(ko) (wo) (mi)(tu)(ke)(ta) (7)
then:-
Malay: (Sa)(ya) (te)(lah) (men)(jum)(pa)(i) (se)(e)(kor) (ku)(cing). (13)
>>15
You could be cool like Haspelmath and count the average morphemes per word for very large corpora from different languages, and then you would get very predictable results (Vietnamese 1.03, English 1.68, German 1.92, N. Inuktitut 3.72).
And then you'd wake up and realize you still lose, because it is a largely dialectal and idiolectal matter at what speed a (SSS) phrase is being verbalized, and therefore an Esquimau could still be faster at telling you about his cat than a Viet Cong!
Counting words is even more useless! Example: Is "o" an actual word in Japanese, or not?
(PS: If you say "wa", you should be saying "o", not "wo".)
>>20
Like in the moujér example I gave above, word boundaries are actually very often rather blurry. Minkixän is a conglomerate of minki ("cat, neutral") and the inflected form of the verb xäana ("to happen upon"), which in the first person singular, present tense, is affixed to the object, to form minkixän. Now does that constitue one word? Two?
Moreover, asking for a concise, universal definition of "word" in a room full of linguists is a pretty sure-fire way to start war and strife of epic proportions.
Icelandic: Ég fann einn kött.
Norwegian: Jeg fant en katt.
Haspelmath? Syllables required caution, with that thing I have absolutely no idea where to start. Even this cat thingie was something that I just pulled out of the blue when I saw this board.
Anyway I just wanted to test this theory because of something that my mother once said when I was learning math a very long time ago. She said that I should be counting in English than Malay to count faster (she learnt math in school in English while during my time we changed it to Malay already). If I could count in Chinese, she said it was better (she once work in a Chinese school as a clerk). One example that she use was the number '9'. It's 'Sembilan' in Malay with 3 syllables ('sem','bi','lan' [if I'm doing this correctly]) compared to English's 'nine'. She was frustrated that most of the primary school kids she saw writes the number as long as it take to speak the 3 syllables. Sometimes even when they are doing calculation with their hands or in their heads (according to her) they take it longer to get past that number.
As I grew older, this particular trait of the Malay language continues to intrigue me from time to time. Even simple phrases like 'I love you' seemed longer when translated to 'Saya cintakan awak'. While I'm not certain if her theory was 100% correct, it does provide a food for thought to me.
Anyway, this is just an experiment I wanted to try with the board (and my first time starting a thread in 4-ch). Thank you for your comments and participation.
>Even this cat thingie was something that I just pulled out of the blue when I saw this board.
obviously, yes.
>Anyway I just wanted to test this theory
you failed.
"testing" such a "theory" by collecting a few variations of one deliberatly picked phrase on the internet will result in failure.
>She said that I should be counting in English than Malay to count faster (she learnt math in school in English while during my time we changed it to Malay already)
No, you shouldn't. You should be counting in your primary language, because, neurologically speaking, the use of your primary language for counting means less effort and less operations that need to be serialized.
> It's 'Sembilan' in Malay with 3 syllables ('sem','bi','lan' [if I'm doing this correctly]) compared to English's 'nine'.
This sentence is making me giggle and giggle.
It's not really all that funny.
I failed. I'll stop now.
This thread was a experiment that I created to test a theory but it was not really the correct way to it. So I stop analysing the theory, but that doesn't mean I stopping anyone from anything though.
Finnish: löysin kissan
(löy)(sin) (kis)(san) = 4
löysin = I found. The "I" is already understood. "minä löysin" would be the full version of "I found"
kissan = Finnish has no articles (a, an, the). "kissa" means "cat", though we add an extra N.
Now I just wish I knew more languages. :(
don't we all
i think such a thing (the lenght of sentences in a language) cant really be measured by trying out one sentence on the net and comparing it to its aquivalant on other languages... each language has some sentences that come out really long in it comparing to other languages, and some that come out really short. it all depends on the unique grammar of that specific language and also its unique vocabulary. i can think of at least a dozen sentences that can come out really short in hebrew in compare to english or japanese, and also vice versa...:)
BTW, the Finnish translation of the sentence sounds really samilliar to the hebrew one... have we discovered a hidden connection between the two languages? ;)
compare: מצאתי חתול - matsati khatul
both in hebrew and in finnish the sentence is comprised of only two words... and the first word means "(I) found" (like in Finnish, the "I" is understood by the conjegation of the word =) the full version would be "ani matsati"
also, the second word "khatul", simply means "cat", as in hebrew (like in Finnish =) we also dont use "a\an" in the language however, there is no addition to the word "cat", it comes as it is... so well, i guess there is no hidden connection between the two languages but this was fun anyway (and you must admmit the grammar does get pretty close...=)
also while i was learning russian, i noticed that some grammar points were really identical between the two languages.... it was sometimes so similliar that i could think of a sentence in hebrew and translate it word-to-word into russian ;) and thats pretty funny because the languages arent alegendly connected in any way :X a coincidence? :O anyway, it did help me to grasp the language better at that time so im happy about it=)
>>18
However, due to the nature of Malay language of having more syllables per word as compared to other languages, it would result in less number of homophones in the language, so the chance of getting confused while communicating is immensely reduced, as compared to Japanese (a lot of homophones) and English.
>>11
hungerian [correct spelling not included]: én találtam egy masckát
orz at shitty spelling, my mom's hungerian, but it's like my third language or so. can't spell hungerian worth jack (i don't even know all the letters in their alphabet, crazy double-letter letter people with their ly, gy, cs, cz etc letters), i can barely speak it. I've just heard it on a daily basis for almost two decades and thus have soaked up some stuff.
>>35
Let's fix that... The "én" is not needed, the first person can be inferred from the verb endings (and context, much like how generally you don't put "私は" in every Japanese sentence). Also it's spelled "macska" and "hungarian" :) And yeah, the double letters are annoying, but most foreigners seem to have more trouble with the difference between short and long vowels like ö vs ő.
So that would be: "Találtam egy macskát."
can't you just say
kucing saya jumpai?
"kucing saya jumpai" actually means "my cat found"
"kucing saya dijumpai" means "my cat was found"
It`s rarely spoken in the longer form. It sounds really polite, but if I want to say "I found a cat" it would be simply
"Aku jumpa kucing". 3 words, 6 syllables, 14 letters. It wont make sense if read on its own, but if I happen to came across a cat on my way to school, then, after some greetings, Id probably say that or "Aku jumpa kucing tadi."( which means "I saw a cat a while back.")
>>34
I agree with you. But some misunderstandings do occur sometimes.
>>39
No, kucing is not counted as buah. In japanese it would be like "一台の猫をみつけた", only used if the cat happens to be a gadget by Sony or something like that.
>>40
but the first sentence can be used in yodaspeak. i.e. "cat, I found"
я нашел кота
In Romanian, it would be "Am gasit o pisica" - "I found a cat" with "I" implied.
Of course, if you want, it can be expanded by including "I" (or "me" rather):
"Eu am gasit o pisica" (rarely used, but it has the same meaning. This type of phrase would be only used to emphasize the fact that I found the cat, usually as a response to a question which was put to a group of people)
Estonian:
Ma leidsin kassi. Ma leid-sin kas-si.
I found cat.
>>1 >>23
my dear good friend, your mother theory is kindda hit a spot in malay language where it sound too long.
But the phrase you used is kindda formal for most malaysians' usage and it basicly the phrase used to actually learn malay (at primary school level)
anyway, this thread is kindda cute. but hope that you haven't forgoten (if you realized) that malay language is actually the easiest formal language to learn.
there's even some who implied that this language is an old language due to it ease and utter formality (the truth is that malay language is middle aged at +- 700 years old compared to millenias of the existence of other languages)
in short, i found a cat (just then) = aku jumpa kucing (tadi).
This is correct with minimal errors (very polite street talking)
p.s: i wrote this on perception that you are a) a malay, b) a malaysian or c)speaks or knows malay language to the $#$#%^$ point of trying to critize it
Well, OP here:
Well, a) and b) is correct though I didn't intent to critized the Malay language more than trying to test something that have been bugging me a long time. Plus, it was a good opportunity to try to test the board.
It's true that I used a formal version on the Malay language because I considered it was the correct version and the best one to show the point. Any 'rojak' (mixed) or 'pasar' (street talking) does make the sentence shorter.
Anyway, I'm glad it's as fun for you as it is fun for me (eventhough it's a failed experiment).
Actually, in Japanese you could (and most commonly would) just say, "猫を見付けた"
>>1
In Russian:
Я нашёл кошку. Ya nashól kóshku.
Generally speaking, кошка means 'she-cat', while 'male cat' is кот, but habitually that species of animals is referred as being female.
encontre un gatiwi
Latin: felem inveni
Ancient Greek: γαλέην εὕρηκα
Sanskrit: mārgāram viveda
Old Irish: fofúar in catt
>>51
Oops. mārgāram→mārjāraṃ
Polish: znalazłem/am(depends on gender) kota.
Old English: ic fand anne catt (5 syllables)
Or using perfect aspect: ic hæbbe anne catt gefunden (9)
So is moujér a little known language or just some shit >>21 made up?
mi trovis katon
oe encontre el terrible GATO
Cxu vi ne sxatas konstruajn lingvojn?
>>60
is that some weird shitty fake dialect of Esperanto?
Let me guess, it says some bullshit like
"Why don't you like constructed languages"
I do, it's just that esperanto is shit.
>>61
No, it's actual esperanto, but I don't have the unicode letters then, it was," do you not like invented languages", so you were close.
BTW, the Finnish translation of the sentence sounds really samilliar to the hebrew one... have we discovered a hidden connection between the two languages? ;)
compare: מצאתי חתול - matsati khatul
both in hebrew and in finnish the sentence is comprised of only two words... and the first word means "(I) found" (like in Finnish, the "I" is understood by the conjegation of the word =) the full version would be "ani matsati"
also, the second word "khatul", simply means "cat", as in hebrew (like in Finnish =) we also dont use "a\an" in the language however, there is no addition to the word "cat", it comes as it is... so well, i guess there is no hidden connection between the two languages but this was fun anyway (and you must admmit the grammar does get pretty close...=)
also while i was learning russian, i noticed that some grammar points were really identical between the two languages.... it was sometimes so similliar that i could think of a sentence in hebrew and translate it word-to-word into russian ;) and thats pretty funny because the languages arent alegendly connected in any way :X a coincidence? :O anyway, it did help me to grasp the language better at that time so im happy about it=)
>>24
Man, I know it's been a few years, but you're an asshole. OP had an interesting idea and you shat on him for seemingly no reason. Just last month I heard a report on BBC's Crowd Science about this exact phenomenon (people finding it easier to count in foreign languages where the syllables are shorter), so the topic itself has merit.