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This question is inspired by another one on ELL.SE.

To me, the most logical way to say "I am 20 years old" would be "My age is 20 years," because age is an attribute of a person. Maybe this is because I'm a programmer; in an object-oriented programming language with unit support, I might write something like:

person.age = 20 * year

That means "set attribute age of person to 20 times year, or in less confusing wording, "the age of the person is 20 years" The code is imperative, so it could be more like "Know that the age of the person is 20 years."

This would also match nicely with things like "My name is Joe".

person.name = "Joe"

Are there any languages where the typical way to say one's age is "My age is x years"?

Someone
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  • Are you in the same class as the author of https://linguistics.stackexchange.com/questions/44815/what-is-the-logic-behind-i-am-x-years-old? – High Performance Mark Jul 16 '22 at 05:52
  • @HighPerformanceMark that's the same question I linked to, just reposted on this site. – Someone Jul 16 '22 at 06:44
  • Oh ... I'm easily confused. – High Performance Mark Jul 16 '22 at 06:52
  • "This would also match nicely with things like "My name is Joe"." Hi. I'm Joe and I am a programmer. My father and my father's father were also called "Joe". Now I'm a Johnson, but that's what they call my father, Mr. Johnson. You can simply call me Programmer, because that's what I am. – vectory Jul 16 '22 at 07:51
  • German can say Mein Lebensalter beträgt X Jahre in a rather stilted, bookkeeping style. But this seems like a nonanswer cause it's not very relevant to the linguistics. A swallow does not a summer make. – vectory Jul 16 '22 at 07:53
  • Chinese sort of does this. The normal way of saying “I’m 20 years old” is just 我20岁, literally ‘I 20 age-years’ (Chinese has different words for calendar years and years you’ve lived), but quite a normal way of asking someone their age is 你年龄多大, literally ‘your age how big [= old]?’. – Janus Bahs Jacquet Jul 16 '22 at 08:13
  • Very possibly yes, and what research did you do… or is this not about knowledge? – Robbie Goodwin Jul 16 '22 at 22:20
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    Don't you also say I am one meter eighty rather than My length is one meter eighty, I am left-handed rather than My dominant hand is the left one, and I am black/white rather than My skin (color) is black/white? The premise of the question seems very doubtful to me, and the programming analogy just has nothing to do with it. – Keelan Jul 17 '22 at 12:32
  • Similarly to what @Keelan said, consider the phrase "I am alive". Any attemt to reformulate that as "My x is y" becomes almost impossible. "My life is ..." would implicitly presume you had a life. The simple fact is that the way programming languages tend to model things don't always match the way humans tend to model things. Also note that this is one of the reasons some people advocate against getters and setters. if(person.isAlive()), person.kill() and person.resurrect() are closer to idiomatic English than if(person.alive), person.setAlive(false) and person.setAlive(true). – Pharap Jul 17 '22 at 15:44
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    Speaking "as a programmer", I'd propose an attribute "date of birth", and "age" as a calculated property, or function, based on the current date, with an optional date parameter, answering "how old was that person on a given date". – devio Jul 17 '22 at 16:40
  • @Pharap but what is your weight/height? is fine, so I’m not sure about the possession explanation in your second comment. – Keelan Jul 17 '22 at 17:46

5 Answers5

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Indonesian has two main ways of telling age, both use the Arabic borrowing umur “age”, from Arabic عُمْر‎ (ʿumr) “lifespan, age”.
In order to say “Ali is 20 years old”, the first way is to use umur as a noun:

Umur Ali 20 tahun. — literally: “Age [of] Ali [is] 20 year”

The second way uses berumur which is a verb derived from umur and it means “to be ... old”, literally “to age”:

Ali berumur 20 tahun. — literally: “Ali ages 20 year”

As you can see, the first way is exactly what you are looking for, and the second way is even more like a function berumur(N, X) where N is an item and X is its age in units of time.

Yellow Sky
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    Given that the examples in the question are OOP-style, the second way would match the question even more closely as person.age(X). – Janus Bahs Jacquet Jul 16 '22 at 17:34
  • Depending on the implementation, that's the same difference under the hood, but it says little about Object Orientation or Language for what it's worth (C, an imperative programming language, can do the same syntax with structures, but requires a ton of setup to do anything close to message passing OOP) – vectory Jul 16 '22 at 18:58
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    When you say "literary", I think you mean "literally"? They sound similar, and are related, but they mean totally different things in this context. :-) – ruakh Jul 16 '22 at 20:10
  • @ruakh - Hehe, corrected it. Thanks. – Yellow Sky Jul 16 '22 at 21:04
  • @JanusBahsJacquet but that could be telling the person to age 20 years, i.e. to become 20 years older. – Someone Jul 17 '22 at 03:17
  • @vectory It's not always the same difference sometimes 'cdecl' and 'thiscall' are different conventions. But either way, implementation is besides the point. Syntactically they are different, and this being linguistics SE I think it's fair to say grammar and syntax are of more interest. – Pharap Jul 17 '22 at 15:52
  • @Someone Yes, it's ambiguous. What is your point? – Pharap Jul 17 '22 at 16:06
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Most Indian languages use this construct. In my mother tongue, Bengali,for example, one would say "Amaar (my) bayesh (age) (is) kuri (twenty ) bachhar (years)".

Ananda Dasgupta
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In English, we don't always specify attributes. For example, "I'm Joe, I'm 20. I'm blonde and I surf but I'm also a programmer."

Kelli
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  • This is true, but it doesn’t answer the question. – Janus Bahs Jacquet Jul 17 '22 at 15:26
  • @Pharap What premise is being challenged? The only premise in the question is that what is to the asker the most logical way to describe a person’s age isn’t one normally used in English, and there isn’t really any challenging that: you can’t challenge what the asker finds most logical, and you’d be hard pressed to challenge that “My age is X years” is uncommon in English. – Janus Bahs Jacquet Jul 17 '22 at 15:50
  • @JanusBahsJacquet by mere transposition you can see how My son 's 9 [years] equals My son ['s year] is 9. Sorry if this requires reinterpretation of 's, so the equivalence is not strict (the plural s was innovated, no? So it doesn't matter much). More importantly, My nine-year-old [son] and My son is nine year[s] old commutates logically because, to speak with da Vinci, man is the measure of all things – we don't measure growth over time when we grow up we meassure time over growth. Children sometimes sign their age when prompted perhaps to indicate they grew old enough to count – vectory Jul 17 '22 at 20:58
  • I wasn't challenging anything. I was just offering another perspective. – Kelli Jul 18 '22 at 16:47
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Arabic ˁumrī X sana is at least one way to say it: "my-age (is) X year" (literally).

fdb
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  • How is that word for word "literally"? This and the equivalent Bengali answer show it's useless to expect that "to be" would translate with fidelity to other languages. Going down this road we might as well suppose that French ai translates 'is'. I am wondering how close nasalized ã is to am (especially in Portuguese, eg. bom where Fr. has bon < bonus)? Whereas Latin would probably not even use any auxilary now would it? "Viginti annos natus est." (*) But est is typically omitted. – vectory Jul 17 '22 at 21:12
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So in modern Chinese Putonghua, you can definitely say "我的年龄二十岁" (my age is 20 years) but I don't know anyone who actually would say that. Instead it is more common to say "我有二十岁" (I have 20 years) or just "我二十岁" (I 20 years) which illustrates the "topic-comment" syntax of classical Chinese. It is worth noting that 岁 is a word for "year" that is only used to describe the age of people, so any time the sentence uses the word 岁instead of 年 you already know that it is describing the age of the subject.

A.M. Kramer
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  • I’ve always rather wondered why it’s not 岁龄… – Janus Bahs Jacquet Jul 17 '22 at 15:26
  • Interesting to see compare this with how the question is asked: 你几岁？ you how.many year.of.age vs 你年纪多大(了)？ you year.count how.QUANT big vs 岁数多大(了)? (using another word for "age" or "year count") vs 您高寿？ you(HON) high.longevity(HON) with the interrogative implied by the honorific. – Michaelyus Jul 20 '22 at 10:10