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Most monolingual speakers think that other
languages are basically just their language

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with different words in a slightly different
order and maybe a different way of writing.

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Turns out, though, that there are lots of
interesting features in other languages, some

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of which English would really benefit from
having. I'm going to talk about four of them.

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Number one: Time independence.

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If you want to describe an activity in English
you have to say when it happened, or when

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it will happen. You have to. That's how verbs
conjugate. I danced -- past. I am dancing,

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I dance -- present. I will dance -- future.
There is no way in English to describe the

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concept of a person and dancing, but not to
mention anything about time. Chinese, on the

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other hand? Verbs do not conjugate.

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In most cases, the meaning is obvious from
context. I don't mean to imply that Chinese

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doesn't have a tense system, just that it's
not a requirement. It's not baked into every

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single sentence.

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Side note: tenses aren't as simple as past,
present and future, and there's some lovely

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subtle tenses in other languages. More on
that in a later video.

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Anyway, if you want to write poetry with a
more vague sense of time: Chinese is one of

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the languages to choose.

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Number two: Clusivity.

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The word "we" is confusing. Imagine going
up to someone and saying "we've just won the

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lottery!"

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There are two possible meanings there. Number
1: "we" refers to the speaker and the listener.

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We've just won the lottery! Brilliant! Number
2: "we" refers to the speaker and the speaker's

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friends... but not the listener. We've just
won the lottery! But you haven't.

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In languages with clusivity, there are different
words for "we", depending on whether you're

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including the listener or not. It shows up
in languages in South Asia, Australasia, and

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all over the world... apart from Europe. And
I really wish English had clusivity, because

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once you describe it, it's a blindingly obvious
missing thing that we -- er, we all -- could

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really use.

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Number three: Absolute directions.

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This isn't all that useful, but it is cool.
In a few languages, notably a couple of Australian

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ones like Guugu Yimithirr -- that's the one
that's been extensively studied -- there are

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no words for left, right, forward or backward.
Instead, you always use cardinal directions:

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the equivalent words for north, south, east
and west. In this studio, north is that way,

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so right now, I have a north foot and a south
foot. If I turn, I now have a west foot and

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an east foot. I think. I'm having trouble
tracking something simple like that: but if

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you're a native speaker of a language with
absolute direction, your brain just handles

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it. You always know which way you're pointing
-- and if you don't, you have trouble speaking.

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As a language feature, I'd say relative
directions are a lot more useful, particularly

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for those of us that go on the London Underground
often -- but it'd be great to always know

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which way was north.

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Number four: evidentiality.

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In the same way that time is baked into English
sentences, there are languages all over the

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world where evidence is baked in. If you're
reporting something that happened, you have

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to include whether you personally witnessed
it or not. You can do this in English, of

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course: "I saw that", "I heard that", but
it's not required. Some have five or more

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different categories of evidence, based on
whether you saw it with your own eyes, experienced

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it firsthand but it didn't involve seeing
anything, whether you've inferred it from

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something else, whether you're reporting what
someone else said... all these concepts, which

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are complicated to explain in English, are
expressed just by how you change the ending

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of a word.

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These fantastic features are one of the reasons
why keeping minor languages alive is important.

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If English had dominated the world and stamped
out every other tongue, then we'd lose not

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only these rich languages, but we'd lose the
insights that we gain of what the human mind's

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capable of.

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So here's my question to you: can you think
of a brand new language feature. Something

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that every language should have, but doesn't.

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Next time: why things aren't always black
and white. Or blue and green.

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