English lacks… Other languages?

…a phrase for ‘bon appétit’ Most other languages have a phrase. We usually borrow the French expression. ‘Enjoy your meal’ (usually American English) is more likely to be said by a waiter than a co-diner.

…a ‘you’ singular/ plural distinction Most languages have such a distinction, and English lost it quite recently – there are still a few areas of Yorkshire where ‘thou’ is still used. Interestingly, plural versions of ‘you’ are evolving back into English, reinforcing the importance of this difference, with ‘yous’ used in Northern Ireland and ‘y’all’ , common in some southern American states.

…a word for ‘halas’ (Arabic), ‘basta’ (Italian), ‘hvateet’ (Russian), ‘beka’ (Tigrinya), etc. Almost every other language I’ve learnt seems to have one word to indicate sufficiency, making it convenient when we need to be quick. In different situations we might render it as: ‘stop there’, ‘that’s enough’, ‘that’s it’, ‘I’ve had enough’, etc. It would be useful, faster and much simpler to have one, rather than having to choose from these alternatives.

…a non-gender third person singular pronoun For example: “if anyone has any ideas, she/he should…’ While not so many languages have such a pronoun (Sweden successfully invented one), given the increasing importance of sexual equality in English, there is a clear demand for such a word. Many argue that we should simply use ‘they’ in such situations, but it doesn’t always fit and can be surprisingly confusing to language learners.

English lacks… Other languages?

… a colour ‘Sky blue’ or ‘navy blue’? This may sound like a strange distinction to some monolingual speakers of English, who may perceive that these are simply different types of blue. But it’s interesting to note that many languages have this distinction. Russian has ‘goluboi’ and ‘siniy’, and Italian has ‘azzurro’ and ‘blu’. Whenever in either of these languages I use the ‘wrong’ blue, I get corrected. It’s similar to the red/pink distinction in English. One is a lighter version of the other, but they remain separate concepts, separate things in our mind, each with very specific associations. Pink is the colour for girls in English (not ‘red’, or ‘light red’), ‘goluboi’ also means ‘gay’ in Russian, and ‘il principe azzurro’ is ‘Prince Charming’ in Italian.

…plurals for some of the most common words In many lingua franca and world Englishes, ‘information’ can be pluralised, saving time and energy. However, native-speaker varieties of English stubbornly resist these logical innovations. ‘Three informations’ is much shorter than ‘three pieces of information’. Other examples include ‘advice’, ‘furniture’, ‘research’, ‘evidence’, ‘equipment’. We don’t even pluralise ‘money’, kind of ironic for a culture that invented capitalism!

…a ‘proper’ future tense Any English language teacher will know that English has a complex variety of ‘future forms’ (e.g. ‘will’, ‘be going to’ + infinitive, etc.) but no way to distinguish the future morphologically. We can add ‘-ed’ to ‘work’ to form the past, but unlike French (‘travaillerai’) or Spanish (‘trabajaré’), we have no morpheme to make it future.

…a word to describe ‘the day after tomorrow’, or ‘the day before yesterday’ A number of the websites describing colourful words that English doesn’t have point out that Georgian has a word for the day after tomorrow (it’s ‘zeg’ apparently)… and so does Russian (‘poslezavtra’). It also has a word for the day before yesterday (‘pozavchera’**). Why use four, when you can use one?

English lacks… Other languages?

…consistency when describing the years after 2000 Does anyone else find the word ‘noughties’ not very helpful to describe the decade between 2000 and 2010? The conversation often goes like this: A: ‘I think it was some time in the noughties?’ B: ‘In the nineties? No it was later than that!’ A: ‘No. I said in the “noughties”?’ B: ‘The what-ies’? etc. Even more important: do we say ‘twenty-sixteen’ or ‘two thousand and sixteen’ for ‘2016’? And for those who prefer the latter, why is it that we should suddenly change now after so many centuries? It’s two syllables and 10 characters longer!

…words for ‘smell’ Try translating the following joke into another language: A: My dog has no nose. B: How does it smell? A: Awful. It probably doesn’t work. Why? Because in most other languages, these two meanings of the word ‘smell’ are usually expressed through different verbs. Try translating these into another language and see how many options you get: 1. The flowers smell beautiful. 2. This room smells! 3. I can smell fire. 4. Smell this.

English lacks… Other languages?

…a simple way to say: ‘We are three.’ In standard varieties of English, you can’t say this. You have to say: ‘There are three of us.’ But why not? It’s clear. It is common in lingua franca varieties of English, and it’s generally a direct translation of what is said in many other languages.