Comments by "Laurence Fraser" (@laurencefraser) on "NativLang" channel.

Cats are difficult to train... but it's not for lack of ability to learn!
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@toaritok more like we pretend it Doesn't make sense because no one can be arsed to find a way to actually mark stress, among other things. Once you realise that English Digraphs are functionally their own characters (also, there are actually more of them than are usually acknowledged) and that the rules for how you read a character at the start of a syllable and at the end of a syllable are different, it becomes a lot more consistent. Even more so once you realise that written English is standardized to two main forms (with a couple of minor regional variants thereof) while pronunciation has, at Minimum, one per country if you only include "standard" dialects, but actually at least hundreds of variations.... Basically, English spelling is taught to native English speakers in an utterly nonsensical way. This isn't terribly surprising, as getting a computer to read it out correctly requires approximately 63 rules, as well as indicating which dialect you're going for and where the syllable breaks are. The stress patterns too, if you want it to get them right consistently. Note that English Used to use a diacritic (oater replaces by a hyphen to make it easier to type on typewriters) to disambiguate between a vowel on each side of a syllable break with no consonants in between and a digraph that happened to use the same characters, but has never marked the difference between s-h and sh- or - sh Point is, you have to simplify it in order to start teaching kids young enough that they get enough vocabulary down soon enough, but that means too young to really get the hows and whys of it.... But then this is never corrected even as they get older!
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This isn't quite the case (at least in most dialects). You can absolutely get "the green one I have, but..." but the rest of it will be SVO (usually). Because English absolutely can do topic fronting (Pretty sure that's what's going on with it's questions, actually), and it can leave bits out, such as "I" or "You" as the subject when context makes it obvious, at least in casual speech, or definite articles, and of course English imperatives typically leave out the subject even in more formal speech too (unless imparting heavy emphasis or differentiating instructions to one party from instructions to another party). Heck, it could even use a passive in the second part or otherwise rejigger what is being said (it's not rare to hear '... but the red one is still hiding from me', for example)... (and edit: I just realised my understanding of the specifics breaks down just far enough at this point that I can't clearly explain why reordering the second half of that sentence doesn't work, even though reordering the first half does <_<) Of course, English being English, (and humans being humans) there's almost certainly a dialect or three that absolutely does this all the time just to make things difficult :P
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@ryalloric1088 On the other hand, they also tend to avoid conjugation and declension as much as possible, including case marking and the like, to keep the individual words simple to learn and easy to understand. Without such marking, SVO is actually a fairly logical order to fall into, as the verbis a fairly clear and distinct marker indicating where the subject ends and the object begins. (actually, English settled into it's rigid SVO order at least in part due to a similar issue, where many of it's case markings (and verb forms indicating agreement with the subject) were lost due to interacting with the (norse?) spoken by the danes in the danelaw, where the markings caused problems, as the same things were marked in both langauges, but with different sounds. It's why we still have an distinct verb form for third person singular subjects: It was the only one that was indicated by the same sound in both langauges! (the specific sound used changed later, but it was the only one not filed off because it was the only one that didn't cause confusion). ... Actually, there may have been other factors in the loss of case marking, but that was definitely the origin of the odd subject-verb agreement in English, and the loss of those markings is why English is so rigid in it's word orders and favours SVO so strongly.
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If it helps any, English arguably doesn't have a Future tense, as such. We use mood and aspect to distinguish future events from present ones (ok, it's more complicated and messy than that, but it should be a helpful starting point for getting your head around things, maybe.)
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@jgr7487 true, but the subject matter isn't usually quite so... chopped up... as this series.
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Nope, because that sentence is faulty. The "at" is stranded, not because it's at the end of the sentence, but because it has no valid target. 'At', in this context, requires a point on a measurable scale as a target. The sentence doesn't have such a thing. Meanwhile, 'is louder than' is incompatible with everything after 'the third one'. Replacing "is" with "runs" works better, but still requires "run at" to be replaced with something that indicates aspect and/or a temporal trait... I mean, it's got all the things in it, it just doesn't actually Work.
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literal fruit you'll find there is actually a difference between k and q. The q is further back in the mouth. English just doesn't have that as being distinct unless followed by a w sound (written as u). Trying to pronounce kwi as an actual k (like in kick) rather than q both feels awkward and, if you manage it, sounds different. Of course, I'm fairly sure that there are no k/q minimal pairs because of the whole qu thing, and, English spelling being what it is, there are a few exceptions, so you could make a case that q is unnecessary fairly easily, but it does have its own sound. I believe you're right about x though. Generally at least. Dialects can be weird.
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I'd probably indicate me, the food, then eating... unless I was specifically trying to ask permission to eat that particular item, rather than just indicating hunger or a desire to eat, in which case I can easily see myself indicating the food, then eating, then me (with questioning expression).
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@halagavi While you're correct about English not liking ambiguous grammar, in this case there's a little more to it. Just saying "Rain" in English is meaningful... The problem is that the meaning is an imperative verb: You are commanding who/whatever you're speaking to to perform the act of raining. Well, you can also say 'Rain' by itself and have it be a noun if you are asking a question (I think the question would have to be 'what is X?' or 'what is the word for X?', though), because questions are weird and the constrution of answers to questions are weirder. Basically, zero-marking the subject has an actual meaning (or several), so when you don't want to use that meaning you need to mark the subject. Especially as sentences with no Verb are also possible, and English can turn a noun into a verb (among other things) just by moving where it is in the sentence without otherwise marking it in any way.
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@kekeke8988 I'm in my 30s. These were common when I was in primary school. Noticably, most of them vanished as the kids got older and expanded their vocabulary, but to the best of my knowledge they can still be heard from kids, poorly educated people, and various media (though there it's often hard to tell if its intentionally trying for a specific tone or the writers are just bad at their jobs.(and varies from show to show besides.))
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That's 'garden path', not garden pass, it comes from an idiom where you 'lead someone up the garden path'. I have no idea quite how that ideom came to be, but it broadly means to mislead someone. In linguistics, it means to construct a sentence such that the listener or reader has to completely reanalyse the sentence with every word or clause, because each new piece of information invalidates the default reading of the sentence up to that point. It's a thing you can do in English with a bit of work, and doing it accidentally is generally considered to amount to being a very poor writer or speaker (Newspaper headlines are particularly prone to Very Unfortuante misunderstandings when this is done unintentionally... and clever jokes when done deliberately). It should be noted that the classic English question-and-answer joke that so confuses Japanese people is in part taking advantage of this sort of trick (a question is asked, an answer given. In no sensible context does the answer given as a punchline actually impart a meaningful answer to the question as initially presented, except that by way of the use of some sort of word play (usually a pun) the punchline itself retroactively changes the meaning of the Question such that it is none the less a valid answer). A 'garden path' leaves you essentially getting hit by that sort of nonsense multiple times in the course of trying to follow the meaning of a single sentence.
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Understanding why they find it upsetting doesn't change how unreasonable being upset by it is, of course. Such responses are generally a result of ideological indoctrination and (either consequently or additionally) a lack of actual thought on the part of the person becoming upset by it. It isn't exactly something that should be excused. There are rare exceptions of course, I say 'generally' for a reason, but that's the usual way of things.
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@MyMy-tv7fd It is the difference between a bare stem, where that bareness is meaningless (leaving things unstated or unclear), and a bare stem, where that bareness is meaningful (the lack of modifiers is itself a modifier, essentailly). Zero marking is the latter. Mind you, English can do zero marking as well: cat, The cat, A cat, The Cats, cats, Cat. The first one is a bare stem. The second has a marked definite article, and a zero marked singular number. The third has a marked indeifnite article and a zero marked singular number. The fourth has a marked definite article and a marked plural number The fifth has a zero marked indefinite article and a marked plural number The sixth is a proper noun, having a zero marked definite article and a zero marked singular number. (it also has nothing to do with cats, being a diminutive of Cathrin (or many other variations on that name). Note that the 'cat' in 'the cat' and 'a cat' is not, gramatically speaking, a bare stem, despite having no afixes. English only really uses the bare stem of nouns as a reference form. The important part is that a bare stem is making no distinction between various possible options (it doesn't mark number or definiteness, in the case of 'cat'), while a zero marked term Does make a distinction, and one (or more) of the options is (or are) indicated by saying or writing something, while the other is indicated by the fact that you did not. It's basically the difference between starting counting from 0 vs starting counting from 1. Humans tend to naturally do the second, but because of how many things in computing work, almost all computer related things start at 0 instead. so rather than having a number list like: 1: rabbit 2: duck 3: badger Computer code will usually read like this: 0: rabbit 1: duck 2: badger Zero marking is a similar concept.
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Cases are a different thing again, and are a function of nouns, not verbs. They use aspect and mood in such a way as to render tense unnecessary. (English uses all three and mashes them together in a convoluted mess, for contrast.)
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The entire point of passive voice is that it flips which entity is the subject and which entity is the object so the sentence is still SVO, to my understanding. And so far as I can tell, English does topic-comment too, just not all the time as the default. ('that it is' is, to my understanding "(topic) (subject) (verb)", and the subject may well even be a dummy subject, depending, because English really does't like not having a subject (despite the fact that you can drop 'I' and 'You' in the subject slot in casual speech, or at least casual writing, in many sentences without any great issue).
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-ette is a diminutive suffix, by the by. It's Where we got 'diskette' (a smaller disc) from, for example. (And, yes, it is often used to indicate femininity as well, as is common in many languages)... Possibly cassette too (a small case, which holds the tape). There are a few others diminutive ... Thingies... Too, but as is the case with a lot of things like this, they're mostly not super productive in modern standard English. Not across dialects, at least.
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Rough summary (if I haven't misunderstood): Maya's tense/aspect/mood system doesn't actually have a Tense element, instead offloading that work onto aspect and mood, in such a way as to let them also skip a bunch of temporal adverbs and adjectives. English does a lesser version of this when dealing with the difference between present and future. It marks the Past tense as a tense, then lumps present and future together as a null-marked "not that", so far as tense goes. Moods and aspects are then combined in such a way as to render the incorrect option between present and future nonsensical (or the distinction irrelevant), rather than actually having two separate tenses. (And yes, some of the mood markers commonly get described as marking "future tense" instead, but that's almost entirely because no one bothers actually explaining aspect or mood to the native English speaker untill said individual tries to learn a language that uses them differently. (Or studies linguistics, even at the level of a hobby, and goes "Oh, so That's how that works!")) Maya seems, going by the video, to do something similar, but instead of just the present/future distinction, uses it to indicate all temporal distinctions and relationships (past, present, future, before, after, during, and so on.)
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English disagrees.
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@galoomba5559 a significant chunk of the failures, from memory and assuming that's the zompist article I think it is, was a computer having trouble telling the difference between a digraph and a syllable boundary with one of the components of a digraph on each side of it, which is less of a problem for humans. That said, for all that Most of the issues with English orthography are poor explanation more than a poor system, it Does have some room for improvement, and I wish it would do the following: Mark stress! This one change renders the Entire vowel system vastly more intelligible, as a lot of the spelling rules for vowels seem to apply or not at random. Most of the time it's actually that they only apply to stressed or unstressed bowels with no other indication as to which you're dealing with. (Collapsing the unreasonable number of different ways to spell what is called 'the long E sound' wouldn't hurt either) English has a rule against ending words in V. This rule needs to die. It results in V sounds spelled with f (forcing f sounds to be spelled as ff, when they're not ph), or as ve... With no concern for the fact that there's a rule that says the E affects the vowel on the other side of the v unless the v is doubled... Except there's a (actually reasonable) rule against doubling V as well! C has the same problem as V, but uses s and k to cheat around the doubling limit. (Also, v tends not to show up in the middle of words. C does, so you sometimes see cc, but that's not double c, that's k-syllable break-s. If there were Not a syllable break it would be written as x. And then there's -ough. Just... -ough. It's a disaster that needs to die. Four things. Fix them and the vast majority of English's nonsensical spelling problems are solved. You still have some stupid silent letters that could be done away with here and there, but given the disaster that is US spelling as a result of Trying to do that (and not taking dialects into account), and the fact that a fair number of them are "this individual word is just dumb" but quite a few others are 'this is only silent in this form due to other factors, it Comes Back when we add/remove an affix. Having it silent in this form is a much simpler rule than the one that would be needed to explain when and why to add it to the others'. And Then there's the homophones, spelled differently for improved reading comprehension/speed. They often use silent letters. Not arbitrarily, morethe sound was lost in spoken english but the spelling's unchanged. So, on balance, I'd leave silent letters alone so as not to break anything. Note that only One change involves altering the character set, and none of them involve learning new values for any character. Two of them are eliminating exceptions that only Cause problems! 90% sure the V rule is an artifact of how recently (as such things go) U, V, And W came to have distinct forms and values. The history of which is long, convoluted, and also the origin of Y, and I think another letter I'm forgetting. Basically, one written form was used at the begining of words, the other elsewhere, and both were used for all three sounds. So, of course, when they could be confused you needed Sone way to indicate which you meant, right? Which eventually became standardized into the current mess.
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Not extemely so, but... you're not wrong.
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@robetheridge6999 problem easily solved: they're postpositions. Most English "prepositions" are actually "adpositions" usable in either slot. The "rule" is wrong twice over. Not only is the usage it forbids permitted (and arguably sometimes required), but, by definition, when used coherently in such a manner, they aren't prepositions at all, but postpositions instead. Otherwise this rule results in " ... up with which I shall not put!". For "...which I shall not put up with!" And other such nonsense.
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I know English word order is as rigid as it is (not unchanging, but the changes are goverened by fairly strict rules) precisely because it used to have a lot of affixes indicating case and verb/subject agreement and such, then lost most of them and compensated for that by using the word order to impart that information instead.
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It simply isn't taught.
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