Talk:1709: Inflection

The article says that Japanese Kanji (which uses Chinese characters) is uninflected. This is based on a confusion. Japanese itself is highly inflected, with grammatical markers that are usually expressed using either Katakana or Hirigana syllabaries. The Kanji themselves are used for many words but are embedded in sentences that use both Kanji and one or both of the syllabaries. Both nouns and verbs are inflected. There is no such language as "Japanese Kanji" so this is just wrong. I will delete the corresponding clause in the main article. Billjefferys (talk) 12:35, 21 July 2016 (UTC)

It's also misleading to describe Chinese as a 'pictographic' language. The reason is that very few of the Chinese characters, as I recall from when I was studying it fewer than 100, are actually pictograms, that is to say an attempt to draw a picture of the thing in question. Some of these are 口 (kou, 'mouth'), 言 (yan, 'word', a picture of a mouth with sounds coming out of it), 日('ri', the Sun), 月 ('yue', the Moon), and some others. Then there is a somewhat larger group of characters best described as 'ideographs', that try to convey the meaning of the word symbolically, such as 中 ('zhong', middle), or which try to convey an idea using two or more other characters that may or may not themselves be pictograms. Examples of the latter would be 好 ('hao', good, with the character for 'mother' on the left and that for 'child' on the right), and 明 ('ming', bright, combining the characters for Sun and Moon above). But the vast majority of Chinese characters consist of a phonetic component, a part that is another character in its own right that conveys the sound (or conveyed it in ancient Chinese although the pronunciation may have shifted) and a part that gives a general notion of the meaning (called the radical). An example would be 钥 ('yue', key, composed of the character for the Moon (above) having the pronunciation 'yue', and the radical on the right which by itself means 'metal', so a metal thing that is pronounced 'yue'.

I'm not sure how to handle this. The description above is more complicated than should appear in the main article, but the main article as written is somewhat misleading as to the role of pictograms in Chinese. Billjefferys (talk) 17:50, 21 July 2016 (UTC)

Does anyone know what the emoticon part is trying to say? 108.162.215.170 16:59, 20 July 2016 (UTC)--

A loose translation would be "Yes". 162.158.255.106 18:19, 20 July 2016 (UTC)

👍=Correct 👏=Bravo/Congratulations 😊=I'm glad you get it --162.158.92.207 18:54, 20 July 2016 (UTC)

This comic was posted 3 days after the "World Emoji Day" (July 17) created by Emojipedia founder Jeremy Burge in 2014. The date July 17 appears in the calendar emoji used by Apple, but other tech companies use different dates in their version of this emoji. --162.158.92.207 17:30, 20 July 2016 (UTC)

"Emojish" could be a good replacement for English which suffers from highly nonphonemic orthography and is a pain in the 🍑💨 to wright corecttly. 😊 --162.158.92.207 17:57, 20 July 2016 (UTC)

I lost it at the end of the title text. My friend and I say wat to each other all the time. 108.162.215.144 18:13, 20 July 2016 (UTC)

When I saw the emoji, I realized that I understand them without having a spoken or written language equivalence. We are so conditioned to say "what is it trying to say?" and expecting a language equivalent. But that does not have to be the case. It made me wonder if very early humans using pictographs for communication automatically had language equivalents, or could they think by mentally visualizing the pictograph without translating everything to words. If so, could we train ourselves to imagine emoji instead of words. They clearly communicate something that need not be verbal. Rtanenbaum (talk) 18:59, 20 July 2016 (UTC)

I count 52 Spanish forms of "andar": ando andas anda andamos andáis andan andaba andabas andábamos andabais andaban anduve anduviste anduvo anduvimos anduvisteis anduvieron andaría andarías andaríamos andaríais andarían andaré andarás andará andaremos andaréis andarán anduviera anduviese anduvieras anduvieses anduviéramos anduviésemos anduvierais anduvieseis anduvieran anduviesen ande andes andemos andéis anden anduviere anduvieres anduviéremos anduviereis anduvieren andar andando andado andad. 108.162.219.12 20:13, 20 July 2016 (UTC)

First person singualar "I" is a strange mix. It uses a verb not listed in that chart "am", uses the plural form "have" for present tense, and the singular form "was" for past tense. Tahg (talk) 01:32, 21 July 2016 (UTC)

It also uses "were" for subjunctive ("If I were you..." // "If I were walking to the park right now instead of being on the computer...")108.162.221.98 13:19, 21 July 2016 (UTC)

Why didn't Randall not use MOAR as a substitute for MORE? 😞😞😞 --Björn