Apparently Japanese really is weird
We now interrupt our regularly scheduled TV posts for a return to roots: linguistics nerdery!
Studying linguistics, I’ve internalized the idea that all languages are created equal and that one can’t really call any language “weird”, no matter how exotic it seems. It’s exotic only in relation to your native language, which to a native speaker of some other language surely seems as weird as theirs does to you. (Example from English: the pronunciations of words of the form “[consonant]ow” — learners hate these.)
Linguistics textbooks and scholars can say that all they want, but I’m going to have to say that there are some things about some languages that are pretty darn wild. One of these is Japanese and its possession of closed lexical word classes. “Word classes” is the syntactician’s term for what elementary school teachers call “parts of speech”: a class of words characterized by their interactions with words of other classes (if this definition sounds circular, don’t worry about it; syntacticians don’t). Lexical word classes are, informally, those that BLAH. Japanese verbs and adjectives are closed classes. That is, Japanese doesn’t get new verbs or adjectives, or at least words that are “pure” verbs and adjectives, strictly speaking. It does get these things through periphrastic constructions (new verbs come from putting the verb “to do” with what is essentially a gerund, and new adjectives are not really adjectives but things that act almost like verbs). As you might imagine, I am very glad that I don’t have to learn Japanese grammar through stuff like this. I still possess a few of the more crucial native-speaker instincts for Japanese, among which is an ability to guess what an onomatopoeia means. (Japanese people love onomatopoeia. A lot.)
Another thing that I have to point out as weird: the sound ع in Arabic, technically the voiced pharyngeal fricative, but in my head the gargle. Apparently almost no other language has it. I am bitter towards this sound because I was trying to learn how to pronounce it while I had a cold, and it actually made my sore throat worse. Also you have to say it if you want to say “Arabic” in Arabic. I can deal with all of Arabic’s other throaty sounds, even ح, the voiceless version of the above, but the gargle I cannot.
