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This is on purpose not a very concrete question, I simply want to know some interesting properties other languages have that English doesn't, or features you even think English ought to have, this can be with respect to all linguistic fields you can imagine (grammar, phonetics etc.)

For the correct answer I'll choose the most voted property.

Sir Cornflakes
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Andrea Rowlatt
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  • There are features that are relatively common globally that are missing in most or all of SAE, including English, eg causative, or distinguishing "with" for instruments from "with" for people. – Adam Bittlingmayer Aug 22 '19 at 12:15
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    @AdamBittlingmayer: I guess (I haven't cast a downvote here) for the same reasons as there are close votes. I admit that I often use close votes and downvotes in combination because this enables some automatic sanitizing scripts. – Sir Cornflakes Aug 22 '19 at 13:56
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    And why the close votes? – Adam Bittlingmayer Aug 22 '19 at 14:53
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    @AdamBittlingmayer: You have enough reputation to look them up yourself by clicking on the close button (this action itself does not immediately cast a close vote) – Sir Cornflakes Aug 22 '19 at 15:29
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    @AdamBittlingmayer "…distinguishing "with" for instruments from "with" for people" Amusingly, Lakoff and Johnson (1980) claimed that no language on earth distinguished the two. Evidently they didn't look at anything outside SAE, since even Latin keeps the two distinct! – Draconis Aug 22 '19 at 17:24
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    I'm pretty sure somebody's going to answer about gendered nouns. English has a few gendered nouns. – Joshua Aug 22 '19 at 18:00
  • Thanks @jknappen but those are very general buckets. This question is really the complement of lists of languages questions, which are on topic. – Adam Bittlingmayer Aug 22 '19 at 19:49
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    Another unique feature: nil mainstream angst about threats to survival of the language or use as a global language. – Adam Bittlingmayer Aug 22 '19 at 19:57
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    @Joshua Can you name some? A word like "actress" refers to a female actor, but the noun itself has no gender. I'm also not counting the practice of addressing ships as "she". – chepner Aug 22 '19 at 22:36
  • @chepner: The only effect of gendered nouns in English is in pronoun selection, so you and I would disagree on whether tigress is a gendered noun or not. – Joshua Aug 22 '19 at 22:44
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    @chepner "Mother", "father", "daughter", "son", "sister", "brother", etc. How much this counts as grammatical gender depends on your analysis; some people say English has no grammatical gender at all, only semantic gender (since it's not a property of the signifier, it's a property of the signified). – Draconis Aug 23 '19 at 02:03
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    @AdamBittlingmayer Because it's a clear case of an open ended too broad question. – curiousdannii Aug 23 '19 at 13:21
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    @AdamBittlingmayer I suspect "features you think English ought to have" my be attracting down/closevotes because it's asking for opinions – Azor Ahai -him- Aug 23 '19 at 14:57
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    A productive diminutive form, which allows you to convert almost any noun into a "diminutive" version. For example, farfalline vs farfalle.

    By "productive", I mean a generalizable grammar construct that can be used to produce dimmunitative forms of almost any noun. In contract, English has it to a limited extent, but only as "hard coded" cases, e.g. piglet vs pig.

     – Alexander Aug 23 '19 at 23:44
  • But do most languages globally have it? In IE, certainly. – Adam Bittlingmayer Aug 24 '19 at 07:12
  • See also the non-duplicate but very relevant What characteristics are unique to Engilsh?. – Mitch Aug 28 '19 at 15:03

8 Answers8

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I'll give the glib answer:

A straightforward/predictable orthography.

Out of all the languages which have established writing systems, the vast majority are to some extent phonemic; not all have a one-to-one correspondence between phonemes and graphemes, but it's generally possible to figure out how a word is pronounced, given nothing but its written form.

Only a few languages lack this property; English is one of them. (Others include Mandarin and Japanese—so when I say "only a few", I'm going by number of languages, not number of speakers.)

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Draconis
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    Why does this count as an "interesting" property? – user6726 Aug 22 '19 at 00:37
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    @user6726 Because native English-speakers, in my experience, don't tend to think about it as something unusual—even though it's reached the point that national English-orthography competitions are held in America (spelling bees). – Draconis Aug 22 '19 at 00:50
  • We have that. It's the text between the slashes in the dictionary. Nobody (including me) actually wants to use it. – Joshua Aug 22 '19 at 17:57
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    @Joshua I wouldn't call that English orthography, since nobody actually writes that way. It's just a phonemic transcription, like linguists use for any language. – Draconis Aug 22 '19 at 18:00
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    Is an orthography a property of a language? It's 1:n or arguably even n:n. – Adam Bittlingmayer Aug 22 '19 at 19:51
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    "Only a few languages lack this property; English is one of them." Semitic languages (and languages like Persian that use an abjad writing system) are another major group, since vowels are mostly not written.Therefore it's not generally possible to figure out how a word is pronounced, given nothing but its written form. – LarsH Aug 22 '19 at 20:26
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    English orthography is much more predictable as long as you don't think of it as a single orthography. Spelling rules are (mostly) consistent within a subgroup (Latinate words, Germanic words, French words, etc) but incompatible between subgroups. Is it phonetic? No. Is it more regular than it is given credit? Yes. – chepner Aug 22 '19 at 22:40
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    @chepner That's a big "mostly" ;) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Chaos – wjandrea Aug 23 '19 at 02:47
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    Yep. One word: Ghoti. – vsz Aug 23 '19 at 17:03
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    I have to disagree on one point: outside of proper nouns, Japanese is extremitusly phonemic, even with the Kanji characters (subclassified into "native"訓読み and "foreign" 音読みreadings). I would add French, actually, to the pile of non-straightforward orthographies. oui oui – Carly Aug 23 '19 at 18:03
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    @LarsH As far as I understand (I don't speak any of them), semitic languages do have a predictable orthography: if you hear a word, you can write it down. It's the reverse direction (pronunciation of a written word) that is unpredictable. (Compare, for instance, with French, that has almost fully predictable pronunciation but unpredictable orthography). – Federico Poloni Aug 24 '19 at 10:14
  • @FedericoPoloni I see what you mean, that in the strict sense, "orthography" refers to the rules for writing. But those are so intertwined with the rules for reading that it's understandable that we conflate the two. It's clear from Draconis' middle paragraph and first comment that he's including both. Maybe a better phrase than "predictable orthography" would have been "predictable and unambiguous orthography." – LarsH Aug 24 '19 at 13:28
  • Regarding abjad writing systems, they can have the same unpredictable spelling as other types of writing systems, especially where the alphabet is borrowed from another language. E.g. Persian can use four different letters to write /z/. – LarsH Aug 24 '19 at 13:31
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    @Carly Logographic writing systems like CJK characters are inherently non-phonetic (and non-phonemic). They often hint at a pronunciation, but their basic function is to express meaning, and there is no direct correlation between form and sound. This is the opposite of phonetic writing systems like alphabets, abugidas and abjads, where the basic function of each glyph is to represent sound, and there is no inherent correlation between glyph and meaning. – Janus Bahs Jacquet Aug 24 '19 at 14:38
  • @JanusBahsJacquet It's worth mentioning also that Mandarin (one of the cited examples) has Pinyin (and other similar alternatives). Pinyin is so widely adopted / taught that it can be considered essentially a part of the language, albeit not used in general writing. Pinyin is 100% phonetic. – JBentley Aug 24 '19 at 14:41
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    @JBentley Yes, Pinyin is an alphabetic (thus phonetic) writing system applied to Mandarin, whereas Hanzi is a logographic (non-phonetic) writing system applied to the same language. Any language can, in principle, be represented by any type of writing system; most just happen to only have one type that has official recognition as the orthography for that language. – Janus Bahs Jacquet Aug 24 '19 at 14:45
  • @JanusBahsJacquet It's not as black and white as that (alphabetic = phonetic, logographic = non-phonetic). For example, consider the English "said" vs "paid" where the "ai" is pronounced differently. Then consider the Mandarin 妈 vs 吗 which are both pronounced "ma", derived from the phonetic component 马. Both English (alphabetic) and Mandarin (Logographic) have phonetic and non-phonetic elements. In fact some 80% of Mandarin characters have a phonetic component, and whilst I don't know the %, there is a large volume of English alphabetic words that deviate from the expected pronunciation. – JBentley Aug 24 '19 at 15:11
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    @JBentley I’m talking only about the basic function of each unit in the system. The entities ⟨a⟩ and ⟨i⟩ have no inherent meaning; they represent only some form of sound (which can frequently be overridden in an orthography like English). Conversely, 马, 妈 and 吗 at the core express only a meaning (horse, mother, question-particle) – their pronunciation could really be anything. Yes, the phonetic component hints at a pronunciation, but that is a bi-product, not the defining feature, and it’s not very reliable: all three are pronounced differently (and even more so 青, 镜, 倩, 锖, 靛, 猜). – Janus Bahs Jacquet Aug 24 '19 at 15:22
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    Just a glib rejoinder: spelling is not a property of a language. Just a cultural-historical artifact. – Mitch Aug 24 '19 at 18:09
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    I joined this SE community just to upvote this. Just today, I told my (native German speaker) son that the "l" is not voiced in "half". Did I mention that you of course voice the "l" in German "halb"? – Stephan Kolassa Aug 24 '19 at 23:19
  • Possibly, the least-phonetic alphabetic orthography is Tibetan. – dan04 Aug 25 '19 at 06:06
  • @Mitch: What property of a language is not just a cultural-historical artifact? :-) – LarsH Aug 28 '19 at 00:57
  • @LarsH haha yes. What's a better way to say it? Spelling is invented? Spelling is an afterthought? Spelling is artificial (many meanings of that work) attempt to capture phonology? Spelling is made-up? – Mitch Aug 28 '19 at 14:45
  • @Mitch Not knowing the ultimate origins of spoken language, it's hard to know how to rightly distinguish them from the origins of spelling. I think most would agree that phonology came first. I guess you could say something like, spelling is typically the collective work of a generally smaller number of generally more educated individuals. But there are many exceptions where the inventions of words and pronunciations come from literate individuals. – LarsH Aug 29 '19 at 14:09
  • The example of Mandarin is not correct, as (almost) all characters have a single well defined reading. You can theoretically think of Chinese as a syllabary with thousands of redundant symbols. This is not just being pedantic, because Japanese has a highly irregular system of reading characters (it goes way beyond merely the onyomi-kunyomi difference). It happens that there aren't many logographic systems surviving, but in theory a logographic system has no reason to be Chinese-like rather than Japanese-like. – Aqualone Nov 26 '20 at 00:29
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Here are some features that are common to many languages, but absent in English. It's worth taking WALS entries with a grain of salt, but the chapters are great at calling out potential issues and borderline cases and identifying areal patterns.

In no particular order, here are some common features that English does not have.

English does not have an associative plural construction.

English does not have distributive numerals.

English does not have productive full or partial reduplication, according to this source cited by WALS.

Greg Nisbet
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  • I'm sure I've encountered reduplication in English. "Like-like"? "Super-duper"? – Brilliand Aug 22 '19 at 20:14
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    It's not a big feature of the language, but it's there -- fancy-shmancy, hoochie-koochie, pussy-wussy -- and it's largely pejorative in English. – jlawler Aug 22 '19 at 21:20
  • Maybe I'm misunderstanding precisely what an associative plural is, but I would think English has several: "-ians", "-ists", "-ites", etc. – chepner Aug 22 '19 at 22:45
  • @jlawler, WALS cites this source for the No productive full or partial reduplication feature value for English. I don't know exactly how they're tackling borderline grammatical uses of reduplication (like shm-reduplication and contrastive focus reduplication) that English definitely has and can employ in novel contexts. – Greg Nisbet Aug 23 '19 at 04:56
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    @chepner, an associative plural is a construction like 田中達 (tanaka-tachi) meaning Tanaka and her/his associates, Tanaka and her/his family, or something similar. – Greg Nisbet Aug 23 '19 at 05:04
  • OK, yeah, I guess "Tanakian" would more strongly imply a group of followers or adherents, without including Tanaka himself. – chepner Aug 23 '19 at 13:11
  • Some more examples of English reduplication: win-win, lose-lose, and many more listed here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reduplication#English . Though, it's possible the original authors mean something specific by 'productive' that we are missing here. – Phlarx Aug 23 '19 at 18:30
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    Does associative plural have to be an affix? We have the phrase "et al" (borrowed from Latin and then abbreviated, of course). – Barmar Aug 23 '19 at 19:34
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English lacks a simple vowel system: Cross-linguistically, three (/a/, /i/, /u/) or five (/a/, /e/, /i/, /o/, /u/) vowel systems are very common, having a lot of different vowel qualities like English is uncommon.

Sir Cornflakes
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Tonality. It may seem exotic to English speakers but Yip (2002) says up to 70% of the world's languages may be tonal. I know English has things like record (v) vs record (n) but they are in complementary distribution.

mango
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    The distinction of record in english is one of prosody, not tone. (ie. stress or intensity, rather than pitch). – Octopus Aug 23 '19 at 19:06
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    Isn't it lexical? Additionally, I think that prosodic stress can involve pitch, and tone is not solely, or even necessarily mainly, to do with pitch (Pham, 2004). – mango Aug 24 '19 at 08:07
  • @mango Tone may not be solely to do with pitch (it’s just as often contour-based), but it is often (probably usually) separate from stress. English has lexical and constrastive stress, but not tones; recórd and récord are differentiated purely on the basis of stress distribution. – Janus Bahs Jacquet Aug 24 '19 at 14:43
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English doesn't have gendered adjectives, adverbs, or verbs.

There's a debate in comments about gendered nouns, but in no case does English have to match the adjective, adverb, or verb to the gender of the noun. The only time the gender of a noun matters is when you're replacing it with a pronoun.

Example of gendered adjective: the la from la torre (I think this is Italian; correct me if I'm wrong). In Spanish, the adjective one uno is also gendered and appears as una if the noun is feminine. But use of uno as an adjective is rare as opposed to the adjective un which also becomes una when pared with a feminine noun.

Joshua
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    la and uno are articles – wjandrea Aug 23 '19 at 02:38
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    There's only one obscure exception I can think of: blond man vs blonde woman, and that's because of French. – wjandrea Aug 23 '19 at 02:39
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    @wjandrea: When I went to school, an article was a kind of adjective. – Joshua Aug 23 '19 at 02:56
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    @wjandrea Similarly fiancé/fiancée, né/née, and so on. All of which are French loans. How much they count is debatable. – Draconis Aug 23 '19 at 05:23
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    Gendered adverbs are definitely linguistically unusual, I cannot think out of my head of a language having such beasts. – Sir Cornflakes Aug 23 '19 at 09:02
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    @Draconis: fiance is stabilizing in English by losing its second e and (more slowly) it's accent. If I weren't on my phone I'd bother with the accent now, but that just demonstrates my point. – Joshua Aug 23 '19 at 13:58
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    @Joshua It's generally easier to use diacritics with smartphone's keyboard. Pressing the letter for a bit will open up a list of alternate forms. – EldritchWarlord Aug 23 '19 at 15:13
  • @jknappen: Needed a class that's basically everything but nouns, pronouns, and possessive pronouns. – Joshua Aug 23 '19 at 21:39
  • @Joshua Articles have never been a kind of adjective in any language that I know of, certainly not English. – Janus Bahs Jacquet Aug 24 '19 at 14:41
  • @JanusBahsJacquet: Considering this literally depends on which elementary grammar book you had, this is a pointless debate. – Joshua Aug 24 '19 at 14:42
  • @Joshua Elementary grammar books frequently get basic grammar very wrong (nouns are not ‘thing words’ and verbs are not ‘activity words’ as I recall my own elementary grammar books from second grade saying). No serious grammar book of English will classify articles as adjectives for the very simple reason that they behave completely differently. – Janus Bahs Jacquet Aug 24 '19 at 14:48
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    @JanusBahsJacquet Determiners are different from adjectives, true, but in ways that certain classes of adjectives are different from other classes. True, they are not gradable and have no comparatives or superlatives, but this is true of some adjectives, too. The words of the phrase "What an ugly old black silk top hat" have only one idiomatic order. Each modifier has to occupy a specific slot. The determiner slot is just one of several. The notion that determiners are one of several contrasting classes of adjectives is not so easily dismissed, I think. – Rosie F Aug 25 '19 at 08:12
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    @Rosie But articles especially are different from adjectives in ways classes of adjectives are not internally. If you go by CGEL, adjectives have three core properties: function (attributive, predicative, postpositive), gradability and dependents (modified by adverbs). Not all adjectives have all three, but the articles have none. Adjectives also don’t inflect for number (the indefinite article does) and, being modifiers, their slots are inherently optional (the determiner slot is not). There’s a reason modern linguistics moved away from classifying determinatives as adjectives. – Janus Bahs Jacquet Aug 25 '19 at 08:59
  • @Rosie And even when it was common to call determinatives ‘restricting adjectives’ and things like that, the articles were usually still kept separate. – Janus Bahs Jacquet Aug 25 '19 at 09:00
  • @JamusNahsJacquet: Thank you. My English grammar textbooks were really old. – Joshua Aug 25 '19 at 14:50
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English doesn’t use infixes (except for a few colloquialisms where an infix is created for comic emphasis, like fan-bloody-tastic or abso-fragging-lutely).

Mike Scott
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English does not double its negations. The correct interpretation of a sentence with two negatives really should cancel them out. You may have heard "I ain't got no satisfaction." It's deliberately incorrect for effect. While the author may well insist on a simple meaning, formal English demands the opposite of what the author intended, and this is very important to formal language that it behave this way. Complex electrical controls and option contracts would be very difficult to describe without this property.

Spanish on the other hand stacks its negatives. It doesn't take too long to get used to in general conversation and literacy but I can't imagine using it for technical work.

Some kinda source: Double Negatives in Spanish

Joshua
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    Not so. This is a prescriptivist’s unsuccessful attempt to impose a bogus requirement on English. Belongs in the bin next to what you don’t end a sentence with. Though I agree with the logic of it for avoiding arguments in critical applications. – WGroleau Aug 22 '19 at 20:05
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    This is called "negative concord", as it applies to more than just two negatives, and is a feature of many dialects in both the UK and the USA, just not the standard dialects of either country. Although Jagger wrote his lyrics in imitation of lyrics written by black American blues musicians, he wouldn't have needed to learn negative concord from there. – Robert Furber Aug 22 '19 at 20:10
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    Negation is much more complex than that; not all negatives cancel out. – jlawler Aug 22 '19 at 21:17
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    What nonsense is this? You're saying languages like Spanish or Italian aren't suited for talking about "technical work". That is beyond prescriptivist, that's some whack theory of language superiority. It's not true. Hence my downvote. – LjL Aug 23 '19 at 14:42
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    ObJoke: Can a double positive form a negative? – Barmar Aug 23 '19 at 19:41
  • @Barmar: I tell that one; however decomposing fixed idioms yields madness. – Joshua Aug 23 '19 at 19:45
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    @WGroleau Are those really comparable? Negative concord really is unidiomatic in many common English dialects, including the standard ones. P-stranding is idiomatic in all dialects. – eyeballfrog Aug 23 '19 at 21:35
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    I said no such thing. Double negative in Spanish is not ambiguous; it’s still negative. In English, the long unsuccessful attempts by prescriptivists to ban it are what makes it possible for pedants to argue the speaker meant something other than they meant. And IF I were to rate any language as “superior,” it wouldn’t be English. – WGroleau Aug 24 '19 at 00:25
  • https://www.chicagotribune.com/news/ct-xpm-2006-11-08-0611070296-story.html Putting math rules on a language is silly. And I did not say it avoids ambiguity; I said it avoids arguments. – WGroleau Aug 24 '19 at 01:54
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    @eyeballfrog Even if negative concord is ungrammatical in many dialects, it absolutely never turns the meaning of a sentence positive, in any dialect (AFAIK). So people who pretend to be confused and think "I didn't do nothing" means "I did something" are just lying. – Brennan Vincent Aug 24 '19 at 10:16
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    @BrennanVincent That's not really true. For example, in the exchange "I'll bet you did nothing to help." "I didn't do nothing.", the double negative is clearly intended to create a positive sense. I'm not sure whether that construction can work that way in languages with negative concord. – eyeballfrog Aug 24 '19 at 13:21
  • Fair enough; the emphasis on nothing changes the meaning. – Brennan Vincent Aug 24 '19 at 18:43
  • @eyeballfrog your example is not a negative concord or double negative; nothing in that sentence is a noun. It's the same part of speech as something here: "I'll bet you did a chore to help." "I didn't do a chore." – user151841 Aug 25 '19 at 16:03
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I am always surprised that there is no English word that is equivalent to French neuf (new to you or revised but not brand new (newly made)). For example in English someone can buy a "new used" car. I assume that other romance languages have a neuf word.

user25359
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    If you're going to make this argument, then there are literally thousands of words that can be chosen. The reverse is also true (for example, may languages use complex phrasing to express the same concept of possession that English expresses in the single verb 'to have'). – Austin Hemmelgarn Aug 25 '19 at 01:42
  • This doesn't answer the question as it has been asked. The OP is looking for cross linguistic features, not single words in single languages. Also, this is a meaning of a single word, not a feature of French as a whole. – CJ Dennis Aug 25 '19 at 10:29
  • Also FYI you have it backwards: neuf/neuve means new (not used) whereas nouveau/nouvelle means new (to you or revised). So you'd say nouvelle voiture for your new (latest) car and you'd say voiture neuve for a brand new car with 0 miles. A voiture neuve would typically be from the nouveau modèle, i.e. the new (latest) model. – asac Aug 25 '19 at 14:32