How is English less expressive than other languages?

<<"ya zadumal = I resolved/concieved/decided (tick)
ya zadumyval = I would resolve/concieve/decide (tick)"

No. I resolved, I decided = ya reshil. "I would resolve" marks the habitual, not the frequentative (in addition to 'would' marking the subjunctive, the conditional and future-in-the-past).
>>


I often decided, I used to decide, I decided from time to time, I was in the habit of deciding, I tended to decide, I took to deciding, I decided every day, I constantly was deciding, I was always deciding, I was deciding all the time...

Some of those must come close, I could think of many more... And anyway, how about in Russian, how do you say:

I have decided, I had decided, I will have decided, I will have been deciding, It had been being decided... etc

I'm sure you can actually translate them well, but it's analogous to your example.

"And anyway, how about in Russian, how do you say:

I have decided, I had decided, I will have decided, I will have been deciding, It had been being decided... etc

I'm sure you can actually translate them well, but it's analogous to your example."
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I agree, Russian has no means of expressing the perfect aspect.. nor can pretty much any other European language, I think (Ancient Greek could).

Again, I do not think that English is "less expressive than other languages", which is the title of this silly thread. I'll repeat for the third time: there are nuances in all languages, especially those that have been fine-tuned and polished by true professionals: novelists and short-story writers, scientists and philosophers, poets and songwriters.

And English owes its richness to the fact that in no other country in the world has the art of non-fiction writing been held in as great an esteem as it has in the Anglophone world: from the philosophical and political essays and treatises of the 17th-18th centuries to the writings of social scientists of the 20th century, abstract, technological, philosophical and scientific English has been getting ever richer and subtler and more precise. Other languages need to catch up, though English, as I've noted when I compared it to Russian, could learn a thing or two from other languages as well. I love words like "zasmeyat'" and "prizadumyvatsia". The first is the perfective aspect of "to laugh at (somebody)" (how do you laugh at someone to successful completion?), and the second one has entirely too many affixes yet remains perfectly understandable.

OK, I can agree with that. Although I do believe that translation is in general possible and successful. It is very rare to find a nuance that cannot in some way or another be rendered in another language.
In some cases, the rendering will sound somewhat contrived or unnatural, but that is how a language 'catches up' as you say. The other languages won't catch up unless someone starts rendering those lacking concepts into the language, and if it sounds weird at first, that will pass pretty quickly.

Woozle: Do you post in the Languages forum? You should.

See here for a somewhat related topic:

http://www.spinnoff.com/zbb/viewtopic.php?t=31851

Whimemsz
Šalea

PostPosted: Sun Aug 16, 2009 11:37 am Post subject:

Neon Fox wrote:
bricka wrote:
Is it too cynical to suggest that polysynthesis is just not bothering to put spaces between your words? :D


No, that would be agglutination. ;)


Agglutination and Polysynthesis aren't mutually exclusive terms. Part of the confusion comes from the fact that many of these words have different definitions for different people, but the scheme I'm most familiar with is where there's two types of languages, "analytic"/"isolating" and "synthetic"; "synthetic" is then subdivided into "fusional" and "agglutinating". So:

*Analytic = a low morpheme-to-word ratio (i.e., most words consist of a few, or just one, morpheme(s), and grammatical concepts are generally expressed with separate particles or periphrasis)
*Synthetic = a high morpheme-to-word ratio (i.e., grammatical concepts are generally expressed with affixes, and many words thus contain a fair number of morphemes)
*Fusional = many/most morphemes encode multiple grammatical concepts
*Agglutinating = many/most morphemes encode few or just one grammatical concept(s)

At its most basic level, polysynthesis is just when a language exhibits a very high level of synthesis (although that's a really simplistic definition, and most linguists would add traits like noun incorporation, etc. to it). So polysynthetic languages can be fusional or agglutinating.

In practice, of course, these are continua, and most languages exhibit a mix of analytic and synthetic tendencies, and a mix of fusional and agglutinating tendencies. For example, in Ojibwe, a polysynthetic language, independent order* verb inflections are fairly agglutinative, with most grammatical concepts being assigned their own morphemes (e.g., giwaabamigosiiwaa = gi-waabam-igo-sii-waa = 2-see-INVERSE-NEGATIVE-2PL.INDEPENDENT, "s/he doesn't see you guys"), while conjunct order* verb inflections are often quite fusional, with many affixes encoding multiple grammatical concepts (e.g., waabamik = waabam-ik = see-3SG>2SG.CONJUNCT, "(that) s/he sees you").

*The independent order (system of inflectional paradigms) is roughly equivalent to indicative verbs in main clauses; the conjunct order is roughly equivalent to verbs in subordinate clauses.

Also, polysynthesis isn't just removing spaces/breaths/divisions/whatever between independent words. There are various means for identifying what constitutes a "word" in a given language (intonational patterns, clitic placement, placement of inflectional affixes, insertions of pauses in running speech, etc.), and so the decision to call a long complex of morphemes a single "word" in one language and a number of independent words in another isn't just an arbitrary decision.