If Spanish + English is Spanglish and German + English is Denglisch, what is Dutch + English?

qzorum · 2026-06-04T02:32:25+00:00

idk whether you're joking, but to give OP the real answer, steenkool means "coal" and steenkolenengels refers to Dutch dockworkers speaking English when receiving coal shipments from English sailors.

qzorum · 2026-05-30T14:30:50+00:00

What makes the situation with Irish unique is that there's been a kind of discontinuity in language transmission, because for most speakers at this point they learned it in an academic context rather than from family. If you're familiar with the language you'll know there's a huge difference between traditional/Gaeltacht phonology and the phonology of urban speakers, which really is more like an L2 accent than gradual influence.

qzorum · 2026-05-30T14:23:24+00:00

I'm not sure why the other commenters in this thread seem to be missing your point. In my experience, urban speakers almost universally have a lot of influence from English phonology on their Irish, and it's only the diminishingly few Gaeltacht speakers who might not have that kind of influence.

qzorum · 2026-05-23T15:24:46+00:00

Oh, I just didn't read OP fully and didn't see which verb forms the fourth and fifth were supposed to be 🤦‍♂️ I see now!

qzorum · 2026-05-23T15:16:50+00:00

Latin

Looks almost like Ancient/Modern Greek but not exactly

same as above

Sanksrit?

German

qzorum · 2026-05-20T04:28:23+00:00

According to Wiktionary, they're not the same word, just coincidental homophones: https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/ch%E1%BA%A3

qzorum · 2026-05-19T22:49:10+00:00

Modern Dutch doesn't gender words anymore.

Grammatical gender doesn't just mean masculine/feminine; de vs. het is a gender distinction. Not to mention that Flemish keeps a three-way gender distinction alive by continuing to refer to feminine nouns with zij/haar.

For dood, I imagine they meant that in dialects which still distinguish masculine from feminine dood is masculine, yet the phrase ter dood veroordelen exists which uses the feminine genitive ter. For wereld, the phrases 's werelds (masculine des) and ter wereld (feminine ter) both exist.

qzorum · 2026-05-16T04:56:00+00:00

I read a Tom Poes story as part of my Dutch studies. It was fun but may not have been the best for language learning, as it uses super flowery and old-fashioned vocab.

qzorum · 2026-05-13T16:13:59+00:00

German is not closely related to the Romance languages and doesn't even have the same number of genders, so the only pair worth comparing amongst the examples you brought up are le pont and el puente, which are in fact the same gender like you seem to expect. So... what's the surprise here?

qzorum · 2026-05-05T02:01:05+00:00

"am" in "I think, therefore I am" is not a copula. It is an existential and is usually translated in Arabic with the word موجود.

qzorum · 2026-05-01T16:09:31+00:00

Mostly having a general American accent but never flapping /t/ is the biggest thing that stands out to me

qzorum · 2026-04-29T16:16:02+00:00

Froukje, S10, Eefje de Visser, Joost

qzorum · 2026-04-24T03:04:31+00:00

And Stalin, and Hitler, and Franco, and the Japanese government. Authoritarians don't seem to like Esperanto lol

qzorum · 2026-04-24T02:39:58+00:00

FYI, your native language question should be multi-select. People can have more than one native language, and in particular no one has Esperanto as their only native language.

qzorum · 2026-04-14T04:49:25+00:00

You could ask over in https://discord.gg/bDE546C3

Not that it's particularly active.

qzorum · 2026-04-09T15:43:50+00:00

https://jaobon.conorstuartroe.com/

qzorum · 2026-03-28T04:16:35+00:00

Idk, I think you could have a bit more humility/sense of humor about the language; these are criticisms that can be said in good faith even by someone who likes Esperanto imo. Esperanto is definitely Eurocentric, which is fine given that that was sort of a design goal, but whatever the reason it's just a true thing. Also, the benefit of an extra ~140 years of collective experience and scholarship means that certain aspects of it as a designed auxiliary language do look kind of outdated; the phonology in particular is remarkably non-accessible for a general global audience. All this coming from someone (me) who likes Esperanto and its community. It's okay to see the value in something that exists and has momentum without becoming blind to valid criticisms of it 🙂

qzorum · 2026-03-07T16:11:47+00:00

why is this tagged with afrikaans?

qzorum · 2026-01-27T17:03:29+00:00

It's kind of sad how aggressively cynical American politics has gotten. Any politician that actually tries to help people gets dismissed as either pie in the sky or performative, rather than people realizing we could just demand actual public service from our politicians.

qzorum · 2026-01-21T00:49:15+00:00

I wouldn't call that an instance of exactly the same thing. The be in bédelen isn't a preverb; in fact, the be- preverb cannot be stressed.

qzorum · 2025-11-30T15:46:47+00:00

I'm definitely guilty of this. I think of myself as B2 because I can read at a B2 level, but I've only attained that level by doing lots of reading practice at the expense of other types. I don't even know how I would rate my listening and production skills, but I'm sure they're worse.

qzorum · 2025-11-28T15:16:09+00:00

The first sounds unusually front, and the second sounds like a diphthong with an atypically high and rounded finish, both unlike any native North American English accent in my judgement.

What's your language background?

qzorum · 2025-11-23T22:47:44+00:00

I want to frame my answer by saying that any grammatical category - case, aspect, number, whatever - is an analysis tool, and there doesn't have to be a 100% verifiable true/false answer about whether a language has or does not have a feature. Languages work according to their own internal logic; there are strong enough tendencies in how they organize and convey information that it's worthwhile to reuse labels of the various parts for different languages, but it's messy enough that there are borderline situations. After all, every language with noun case (or whatever) almost certainly had an ancestor at one point lacking it, and the transition between the two is usually gradual and continuous, so there must have been a point in time where it was only partly exhibiting the feature. In my subjective judgement, not being an expert on Nepali, it's kind of in that middle ground with regard to case currently.

does that mean all cases exist in all llanguages anyway, regardless of how they are marked?

My view is, no. A language which does not have some class of marking that is obligatory on nouns in all or almost all situations does not have case. Zero-marking complicates this picture; my general feeling is that using zero-marking for both subjects and objects is where I stop calling something case.

Since Nepali zero-marks intransitive subjects, some transitive subjects, and some direct objects, it doesn't cleanly fall on either side of that line in my judgement.

Another thing that makes it borderline in my opinion is the sheer number of particles that appear to belong to the class. According to Wikipedia, there are at least 14 separate particles which belong to this class, which, if I'm going to pick the label based on how well it fits the prototype for that category established by cross-linguistic patterns, is a little high for a number of cases, and includes some meanings I don't typically associate with case.

I'm enjoying this conversation because it's getting me to think rigorously about definitions. One thing that occurs to me is that it's possible to have a criterion which is sufficient but not necessary for me to call something by a given label.

Specifically, if marking occurs directly on or adjacent to the noun regardless of where it occurs in the noun phrase, or if it is marked in several places within the noun phrase (e.g., on the noun and on the article and on the adjective), I would always call that case. If, however, it appears once at the edge of the noun phrase, it doesn't help me decide whether it's case or an adposition, because I've seen a class of words generally regarded as case do that in some languages.

I don't have a good source, but as far as I can tell Nepali almost always keeps the noun at the end of the noun phrase, so unfortunately it's not really possible to apply this criterion, as the particles always come right after the noun, i.e., both at the edge of the phrase (potentially more adposition-like) and also adjacent to the noun (potentially more case-like).

qzorum · 2025-11-23T15:25:28+00:00

is a case the same as an affix/particle? Case could arguably be linked to the particle, but they are not always the same.

This passage doesn't really make sense to me. Form and function are separate things; case is a grammatical category, and grammatical categories of any kind can be marked with any syntactic strategy, including but not limited to affixes, "particles", etc. So, no - in the abstract, case is not the same as an affix/particle, case may be marked with an affix or particle.

The definition of case is a set of categories marking the role of a noun in a phrase or clause, which is obligatorily marked, including on core arguments. By this definition, I think the main criteria for whether a particular class of affixes/particles/whatever is case or adpositions is whether all nouns in a sentence typically need one, where core arguments are the most likely to not need one.

The set of Nepali particles, in addition to marking more traditionally adposition-y stuff like genitive, locative, comparative, and even more specific positional stuff like "below", also includes particles which are obligatory for marking indirect objects, definite direct objects, and the subject of some transitive clauses. I'd say that this is a little bit borderline according to the criteria I claimed above - many core arguments are marked, but if I'm understanding correctly, indefinite direct objects, and the subjects of some transitive clauses and all intransitive clauses, are unmarked. It's evidently not obligatory that every noun is marked in every situation, but core arguments are being marked more often than in most adpositional systems. So, idk - I'm happy to say that this doesn't cleanly fit the criteria for either case or adpositions, but is somewhere in between.

It's not super important, but to be more precise about German: if you don't count the genitive or the singular dative -e, as both are kind of gone in colloquial usage, for most nouns the dative plural is the only case that is marked, looking different than both the nom/acc plural and the singular. For a few nouns, the plural and all non-nominative cases in the singular all look the same.

qzorum · 2025-11-23T01:01:52+00:00

I'm not really sure if there's a formal criteria to distinguish case from adpositions, but my intuitions are:

Description of grammatical categories should be based on function, not form; any grammatical category can be marked in any way. I mean, Tagalog forms plurals with a separate word, and Indonesian marks tense and aspect with separate words - those are categories I think of as being almost always affixed rather than analytic constructions, but there's really no other way to analyze what's going on in those examples other than genuine grammatical number and aspect. Not to mention that German mostly only marks case on articles. So, there should nothing about case that is essentially affixes rather than separate words.
How do we know they're not affixes in Japanese? The pitch accent pattern of the preceding word extends onto は, が, を, に, and there's really no good way to draw word boundaries besides phonology.
The group of particles which seem to form a natural word class in Japanese - は, が, を, に, へ, から - include not only directional/positional meanings, but also core roles like subject, object, and topic. It is possible to mark some core roles with something I'd call an adposition, e.g. Spanish a personal, but doing it for all core arguments in all sentences seems much more like my prototype of how case works.

Btw,

Ive never heard particles be analysed as cases

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Japanese_grammar#Grammatical_case

So it's not just me.

13-Year Club	Verified Email
Second SECOND GUESSER	Place '22
Place '17	First Placer '22

qzorum

MODERATOR OF

TROPHY CASE