OpenTube

16 Things The English Language Can't Do

Olly Richards

384,689 views

https://bit.ly/freeslkit_english 🚫🇬🇧 Think English has it all? Think again! There are a lot of things that English just can't do. I took a close look at the English language to find out just what English can't do. Here are 16 cool features missing from the English language.

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10 Reasons English is Ridiculously Hard 👉🏼 10 Reasons English is Ridiculously Hard

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🙈 CORRECTIONS:

"Cantará" (He/She/It will sing) should be "Cantaré" (I will sing)

⏱ TIMESTAMPS:

0:00 - English Has Holes
0:18 - #1: Missing Words
1:30 - #2: Clusivity
2:22 - #3: Tone + Pitch Accent
4:08 - #4: Reduplication
5:28 - #5: Echo Responses
6:40 - #6: Polite "You"
7:45 - #7: Question Particles
8:35 - #8: Copula vs. Locative "Be"
9:31 - #9: Null Subjects
10:34 - #10: Evidentials
11:37 - #11: Time-Independence
12:32 - #12: Hyper-Specific Tenses
12:50 - #13: Absolute Directions
13:38 - #14: Synthetic Future Tense
14:37 - #15: Distributive Numbers
15:23 - #16: Whistled Words

📜 SOURCES & ATTRIBUTIONS:

Thai Lesson 1 - How to say Hello
Thai Lesson 1 - How to say Hello

Why you can't hear Japanese pitch accent by ‪@mattvsjapan‬
Why you can't hear Japanese pitch accent

Kids are the Worst Liars
Kids are the Worst Liars

Evidentiality in Grammar
https://www.jcu.edu.au/__data/assets/...

Whistled language of the island of La Gomera (Canary Islands), the Silbo Gomero
Whistled language of the island of La Gome...

These Greek Villagers Whistle to Chat
These Greek Villagers Whistle to Chat

20 Comments

@storylearning Creator 4 years ago Pinned

Even the things English CAN do can be ridiculously hard 👉🏼 https://youtu.be/DrlX-L4o2KM

@user-mrfrog 4 years ago

I like the Icelandic word "gluggaveður" (window weather). It means the weather looks nice when we are inside the house, but not when we are outside!

@AJtheMaker 4 years ago

This video can primarily be summarised as: "Sometimes we need multiple words to say the same thing as another language's single word, tone or pitch"

@ViolettaBC88 4 years ago

About the yes/no answers to negative questions: if I remember correctly, German has a solution to the ambiguity too. The answers to a negative question in German are doch (yes) and nein (no), as opposed to the usual ja (yes) and nein (no). So if someone asks you "Have you not found that book?" and you answer with doch, it means "yes, I have found it", zero ambiguity. Doch is a specific word to answer "yes" to negative questions.

@NoMercyX97 4 years ago

That was really interesting, but most of these weren't things "English can't do" but rather things that English does differently than other languages

@fantastic7028 4 years ago

As Ukrainian and Russian speaker I can say that there're things which have better and shorter explanation in English. Language really depends on cultural and historical aspects. There're lots of things you don't have a direct translation for

@robthetraveler1099 4 years ago

8:07 I would say there's a semantic difference between "Does Ellie have dark hair?" and "Ellie has dark hair?" The first means you don't know (and had no expectation of) the answer before and are simply looking for information. The second means that for some reason you expected that Ellie didn't have dark hair, are surprised to learn that she does, and are looking for confirmation. It's usually a rhetorical question just to express your surprise.

@bethyngalw 4 years ago (edited)

7:32 the thing about the polite 'you' is that the whole point of the English shift is that we shifted from addressing only certain people with the polite 'you' to addressing everybody with the polite 'you'. So you are being courteous by saying 'you' regardless of who you say it to. It's the opposite of rudeness. The shift was to being polite to everybody. If you really want to still address your girlfriend as "thou" I'm sure she would find it a little odd but flattering that you seek to be so personal with her. That's why the personal 'thou/thee' in English lingered longer in religious language. It graduated from being the way you address every person you're close to, to only the way you address God, the one you are closest to of all.

@lennonsteeler 4 years ago

I've always explained the ser/estar difference as "identity vs. state" - it's similarly simple to "permanent vs. temporary" but covers more of the nuances

@sharp4174 4 years ago (edited)

My biggest frustration speaking english as my second language is that there is simply no word for the day before yesterday or the day after tomorrow

@tobiasfuchs7016 4 years ago

No, using pitch to encode literal meaning has the effect that you can use pitch for fewer other things, like sarcasm or rhetorical questions. That's also why native speakers of pitch-based languages have a harder time to get our way of expressing deviations from literal to actual meaning.

@thisisnotmyrealname6046 4 years ago

I am a 21 year old German native speaker, I lived most of my life in Germany and I don't think I have ever heard anyone use the word "Waldeinsamkeit".

@bonedface 4 years ago

4:27, Fun fact: in vietnamese, duplicate the adjective will imply slightly lesser intensity of the word. For example: mặn = salty, mặn mặn = a bit salty, cao = tall, cao cao = I'm not sure but it's pretty tall.

@chr13 4 years ago

The German word "umfahren" can mean "to drive around" or "to run over", depending on whether you stress "fah" or "um".

@lindybeige 4 years ago

English uses tone for meaning a lot. We commonly use tone to change 'yes' into meaning 'no'. Ironic, eh?

I notice that the English instructions in a multi-language manual for some product are almost always by far the shortest.

@outcast4087 4 years ago

No. English does not need all this additional complexity. I am not a native speaker, but I always admired how versatile yet relatively simple English language is. It is relatively easy to learn (the most difficult part of is probably the Tenses, but half of them are not really used that much in daily scenarios, and the other half of them you can learn over time). I especially love the straightforward way of creating new words in English - you just connect them, simple as that, nothing else required! You can't really do that in Russian, for example, which is actually my mother tongue, you have to add some other descriptive words to it, and it's kinda disappointing.
And about versatility - English is perfect for anything: Technical and scientific terms, programming, poetry, writing, daily matters, romance and even swearing! All of that in one single language!

@PeterVonDanczk 4 years ago

Fun fact: in spoken colloquial Polish you can skip even the "czy" particle and as long as you keep the correct sentence intonation, that will be still a valid question :-) Some other languages do it as well.

@7Theodoric7 4 years ago

A thing that English is really lacking in for me personally is diminuitives. As an Afrikaans person, it is much easier to mention the diminuitive of something than to try and do it in English. Russian is also really good and rich with this, whereas English has it for some words (doggie, kitty, etc.) but then becomes limited when you try and apply it to other words or names.

@ChristophJakob 4 years ago

I was expecting the German "doch" at point 5, haha. I kinda love how confused people who are learning German are, when they realize that for yes-no questions, we have 3 words in German. And I'd say that "doch" is much more common than saying 'no' to a negated question as well.

"It's not raining, is it?"
German: "Doch."

@EricGalluzzo 4 years ago

Another thing that other languages let you do is to reorder words to provide emphasis. In English, you can say "Bob hit Fred." But if you say, "Fred hit Bob" it means something completely different. You can say "Fred was hit by Bob," but that changes the impact of the sentence.

In Greek and Latin, you use nominative and accusative forms of "Bob" and "Fred" (respectively) to differentiate them. So you can completely reorder the words in the sentence - even putting the verb first if you want - to emphasize the word you want.