Features English is missing - but most other languages have

I'm surprised grammatical gender wasn't mentioned. I never knew it was a thing until I took a foreign language class and realized my door was in fact a girl.

As a native Russian speaker, I love English for its kind of... Mysticism. When I write songs about something that's hard to explain, I always use English, because my native language is too direct and detailed for describing what can have a million meanings. Personally, I don't think there are bad or dumb languages in the world, they're all just different and good at their own purposes!

"We each read three books."
There, that wasn't hard, was it?

So a reason like this is why many non-native English speakers, especially us Indians have a weird accent while speaking English because in our languages, we only pronounce the word exactly as it is written. It's just a neat feature to have in a language.

I hear they’re adding a lot of new features to English 11, which is a free upgrade if you speak a licensed version of English 95 and up.

I love your pronunciation. Most of the time, narrators simply pronounce everything the English way without making an effort -- so here's a heartfelt thank you for speaking words as they are pronounced in their respective languages. It's so enriching to us listeners, and so respectful to the languages and cultures. Marvellous. I'm happy to have found this channel.

"You can't repeat a word twice to create a new meaning." Yeah, yeah.

Rather than 'saya-saya' (I've never heard that used at all, native speaker here), I think you're referring more to an expression of exasperation commonly found in Javanese Indonesians. And I mean Java as in the island, not the ethnicity, because the feature can be found across the ethnicities on the island including, but not limited to, all variants of Javanese, Sundanese, Betawinese, Maduranese, and the Indonesian dialects combining any of these.
We usually reduplicate someone's name (or pronoun) to express exasperation, but it only works in spoken contexts because of the expression and intonation changes. When written, it doesn't really make sense. It also isn't a true reduplication, as it was merely a repetition ('"Ujang, Ujang!" I said in exasperation as Ujang broke another vase', for instance). True reduplication would be Indonesian-Malayan words such as kura-kura (turtle), kupu-kupu (butterfly), undang-undang (law or legislation), or the Indonesian-Malayan plural form like orang-orang (persons or people, from _orang_ person), or kucing-kucing (cats, from _kucing_ cat).
Also there are various nuances to reduplication. _Ramai_ means crowded, but _ramai-ramai_ means 'to [do something or go somewhere] together with a lot of people'. _Anak_ means child in the familial relational sense, but _anak-anak_ also means child, but as in 'a young person'.
It's complicated, really.

About the "it rains" thing: in Italian "piove" is also referred to a third person. The main difference is not about the rain or the snow, but the fact that we can use verbs without specifying the subject. That's a lot deeper than just talking about the weather. And it's also one of the biggest mistakes Italian students make when talking in English: not specifying the subject!

In Spanish, you can also say "está lloviendo" (it's raining), which is a lot more common than "llueve" (it rains) in my experience. The former would serve as a sort of present continuous form, whereas the latter works as present simple.

Honestly, in a way just using 'you' for formal and informal in English might seem a bit basic at first but actually I find it to be a nice feature. I speak French and Italian (I live in France) and it's sometimes confusing what to use between the formal and informal version. In English, it's always 'you' so there's no akwardness either way xD

I think the majority of Austronesian languages have different words for inclusive and exclusive "we". This avoids awkward conversations.

This whole comment section reminds me of a story.
"An english teacher said to his class, 'in many languages there is an equivalent to a double negative, in which two negatives make a positive. But there are no languages where a double positive makes a negative.'
From the back of the class a student said, 'yeah right."

One of the things that English does really well is absorb words from other languages. That may be a result of the formation of English as a trading language used between the Anglos, Saxons, Celts Jutes and others who occupied ancient Britain at the same time.

In Cantonese (and I think in Mandarin as well), doubling a word is often used in toddler speak. So a two year old might say cheh-cheh (which translates to car-car) for car. Doubling a name isn’t unusual either (if someone says her name is Ting Ting, it’s really just plain Ting (or more likely something generational Ting). It’s the equivalent of y/ie/i in English (as in Jenny/ie/i).

I actually like English as it is. Easy to speak, easy to learn. Also, in Spanish we use "está lloviendo" it's the present continuous. "Llueve" it's still right but sound really really weird on a conversation unless you use something like "Mira como llueve" ._.
I don't think being a simple language is bad. It's actually perfect to comunicate. If you take another popular language as Spanish , you will notice a lot more people struggle learning it and they usually give up.

In general, I love this series of Clip-Share videos. However, this one seems pretty weak to me. The linguistic items mentioned are basically just what I call "plumbing". Reduplication, for instance is common but it doesn't engender any specific thought. The Indonesian for car, 'mobile' is pluralized by reduplication, eg: 'mobile-mobile'. Is this any better than 'car cars'? Does it add some special element? The same goes for the word order example. The normal SVO of English can be in any order but doesn't change meaning.
Much more interesting would be examples where languages have deeper meaning embedded in their structure. Whorfian concepts are the real question. English has an implicit 'noun' orientation. Some languages have a 'verbal' orientation. This may create an entirely different fundamental world view. This is hard to describe in English but here goes: A person walks down a narrow alley between two buildings. This is simple, right? A fixed creature moving between two fixed barriers. But some languages might view this more like a pelican gliding inches over the water between two waves. In other words, a verb moving through two other 'verbs'. That is a whole different world view.
A simplier example is red vs pink. Are they different colors or is pink just light red. Similarly Russian has two different words for what we call light blue and dark blue. Egyptian had only one word for what we call blue and green. The meaning of these different perceptions is worth exploring.

In Spanish we have two verbs for "to be": "ser" and "estar". It has a use similar to the example of Mandarin you said but with way more layers. For instance, one difference is "soy feliz" means "I'm happy" like in general im a happy person, its my lifestyle; while "estoy feliz" means "im happy" like in this moment, this is the emotion im feeling rn

Other than English I also speak Czech, Slovak, German, Dutch and Italian. English is by far the easiest language where everything is so so so simple. The grammar tenses are so chill and there is so few of them. In slavic languages every word has around 15 - 50 different forms with different endings you just have to know and learn. English is just simple and lovely.

I'm Indonesian. As a native speaker, I might say your pronunciation of the word "saya" is great, but in formal Indonesian and Bahasa Gaul (casual Indonesian), we don't say "saya-saya" but mostly we say "kami" or "kita" as a plural form of "saya." We do reduplicate words mostly to pluralize a noun, like "buku-buku" (books) and "foto-foto" (photos). Other than that, this video is great.
_If all of you want to argue about the dialects of Bahasa Gaul, just know that I don't want to make this comment too long to correct a single mistake._

I’m not a native english speaker but english is the easiest and fastest language i learned, i prefer it more than my 2 native languages because English is so precise and simple. The only thing i hate about english is that some words are not always exactly pronounced as how each letter sounds (just like Spanish, a language i’m learning, it’s so easy to pronounced words aslong as you know how to pronounce or know how each letter sounds on the spanish alphabet)

I studied Mandarin in high school and my teacher said that like in Spanish (because most of us also spoke Spanish) there was a formal and informal way to say “you” and I remember thinking wow English really doesn’t have that. Even knowing this, when I refer to someone in English where I feel I need to be respectful back I feel disrespectful referring to them just as “you” even though it isn’t considered rude.

Turkish has evidental too. (also Korean has it)
Withnessed past tense (-di suffix) and Heard past tense (miş suffix) are different in Turkish.
(I saw that ) A thief broke into the house. =eve hırsız girdi.
( I did not see but I heard or learned/realized it later) A thief broke into the house.=Eve hırsız girmiş.
(when you are back to your home, you see some objects are missing so you understand/realize that a theif stole them.
gir=come in
di=withnessed past tense
miş=heard/learned later/realized later

The lack of levels of formality in Engilsh is a blessing. Sometimes it's not clear cut which one to use so it just creates awkward moments and linguistically imposed hierarchies.

As a Turk most struggling part of English translation comes in translating he, she, you and past tense.
English "you" have no singular and plural distinction and its sometimes be very problematic for us.
Also Turkish have many time tenses if we include combined time tenses but as a main past tenses Turkish have two of them : "seen past" and "heared past". Ali koştu (Ali ran), Ali koşmuş (Ali ran but I did not see personally).
If you are seeing "he or she" "his or her" in a text its could be translated from Turkish because Turkish have no he/she/it distinction.

It’s quite interesting to see Swahili and Japanese have some sort of “language convergent evolution” with the word “Nani”.

I've been learning Vietnamese and one of the features it has that English doesn't came up in the video (just for a different language), it's simple, but I dunno, I like it as something that's simple, but pretty specific enough to avoid misunderstanding or needing extra information.
And that's "chúng tôi" and "chúng ta". "Chúng ta" is "we" including "you" and "chúng tôi" is "we" excluding "you".
I just think of a scenario in my head, you get a text from your dad that says "We're going to McDonalds for about 6" and you show up and your parents are like, "what are you doing here?"
And nobody made clear which 'we' was meant. It turns out the text was just so you'd know they'd be home later than expected.
Though I guess it could be funny if you use the wrong 'we' by mistake, like putting out Wedding invites says "We're getting married", when obviously you mean you and your spouse-to-be, but it sounds like you're getting married to everybody you've invited.

Learning Mandarin was amazing. It's such an intuitive language even if the writing is monstrously difficult

With Japanese, it's so easy to tell if someone is asking a question because of the question particle. and also words that would reflect a question. In English, I'll be asked something sometimes and be like, "Oh, your asking a question."

I had a german friend tell me that english is perfect for constructing jokes because it doesn't give away the punchline until the end of the sentence

I love how the english language sounds. Native english speakers use so many interesting sounds that no other language uses or at least they are rare. I learned most of them but they still fascinate me as someone who studied english as an adult

I started studying many languages a few years ago now, and though they were considered difficult to learn for English-native speakers, I found them relatively easy bc they made sense. If you had a question word, it simply acted as a place-holder for what was being questioned, just like you spoke of. "You go [where?]" or "your new friend is [who]?" none of this changing the word order and logic for no good reason.
AND THE MEANING OF YES AND NO!!! In so many other languages, yes or no simply means agree or disagree. But in English, if you ask the question say, "so you don't need a bag?" And the person answers with 'no', it makes 0 sense. 'No' as in correct, I DON'T need a bag or 'no' as in 'that's incorrect, I will need a bag'. Even though it's my first language and I was monolingual all the way up until my teens, I can confidently say English is the worst language I know so far.

This was very interesting. It was also interesting that in the discussion of politeness you didn't mention Japanese which goes waaaay beyond several words for you. I don't know if there are other languages that also have such an extensive polite language. But Japanese has what almost amounts to an entirely separate language to honor the the person in being spoken to and about AND one to humble the speaker.

Fun fact: Marathi, despite being very similar to Hindi, has clusivity while the latter does not. Further, "aapan", used for "we" as in "you and me", is also used for "you" when speaking to a stranger as mentioned in the video.

Actually, Italian does reduplication : "piccolo piccolo" to say "very small" for example. Turkish has question particles which can be put anywhere in the sentence to indicate which part you are questioning. Turkish also has evidentials : there are two different past tenses to distinguish hearsay from what you actually experienced. I don't know many languages (only six) and I don't know Turkish very well, but it seemed to me a very astute language. It uses suffixes to convey action and tense, thus making it possible to turn adjectives into verbs. Clever.

So you think English doesn’t have question particles at the end of phrases, eh?

Personally, as someone who lives in England and has grown up speaking English, I like the language quite a lot, especially since it’s grammer rules are quite lax.
For example, in quite a lot of languages, items have gender, or maybe there’s formal language and more casual language (like how there’s a formal ‘you’ and an informal ‘you’ whereas in English it’s all the same).
So yeah, quite like the language even if it’s a little vague sometimes.

One of the most unique things about English is zero derivation - nouns, verbs and adjectives can easily switch between categories without any changes to the word. In informal internet slang, you do see adjectives used as verbs sometimes, e.g. “she gonna weird”.

A huge one he didn’t discuss is word order and declension. English nouns do not decline and word order can be very fluidly changed, but this also means we rely heavily on connecting words like prepositions that other languages can omit.

Very interesting, as someone who also speaks Spanish from birth, I knew from the start you were going to bring up the polite and informal "you" from other languages. In Spanish it is "tu" ( informal ) and "usted" ( formal ).

Very interesting video and informative inasmuch as you point out the diverse manners of expression different languages have, but these things you say we can’t do it English (like differential plurals or evidential systems), we _can_ indeed express; a better way to compare these features might be not whether we can or can’t, but whether it’s obligatory or not. I speak two non-English (one of them not even European) competently, so I’ve experienced lots of “missing” English words and mode of expression (and their counterparts in the other languages I use) and know that the question should be _how_ rather than _whether_ concepts and sentiments can be expressed, and that factoids claiming one language can and another can’t are more an indication of mistaken assumptions based on inadequate data than linguistic fact.
FWIW, I think English itself is a bit of a creole, especially its local varieties, built on a still very strong Germanic substrate.

What English has that other languages don’t:
phonetical inconsistency

the one thing that I think is missing in English is the ability to easily construct various diminutive forms of words.
In Polish we use diminutives A LOT. In English, if you see a small dog, you can call it a "doggy" and that's basically it. In Polish you can use these words ("pies" means "dog"): piesek, pieseczek, piesuniek, piesulek, piesuleniek and many more - Polish word formation rules allow us to just have fun with it, there are so many ways to create a diminutive form of a word. Some of them are less official, but if you heard someone use them, you would know what they mean.
It's especially hard when I want to describe cute animals and I can't fully express the way I feel about them, haha, because all i can say is "what a cute little doggy", when in Polish i could say "jaki śliczny mały piesuleczek, słodki pieseniek, kochany piesiunio"!

Quite a few of these i can't tell if im happier without, but one thing i can say for certain is im glad we don't need to worry about 30 conjugations for each verb

There are three you's in Marathi:
तू (tu)
तुम्ही (tumhi)
आपण (aapan)
The first one is used for someone your age, like a friend. The second one is used for people elder than you, your parents and your teachers. And the third one is used for strangers or someone you do not know very well.

Hey, love the content. I'm wondering if you've across or would do videos on General Semantics of Count Alfred Korzybski & "English^2 or English Prime ?" As a guerrilla ontologist/maybe logician love to hear any takes on these and useage in all languages. Keep up the good content either way!
-AMKR/Shawn

I'd love to see some more stuff on oceanic pacific languages im so glad you talked about maori language. Myself I'm half samoan and wasn't rly taught my language that much (same as my cousins) so I'd love to see some more pacific Island stuff and your opinion on the languages

The correct way to address short people: "You don't tall."

English has no genders, but Spanish has 3.
▶️ The neutral one is used with adjectives/clauses. Article: _lo_ .
• _Lo importante_ es amar. /The important (thing) is to love.
• Ya he olvidado _lo que me dijiste_ . /I've already forgotten what you told me.
▶️ The feminine: mostly words ending in _a_ . Article: _la_ .
• _La casa_ es muy grande. / The house is quite big.
But no _a_ ending sometimes:
• _La canción_ es un éxito. /The song is a hit.
▶️ The masculine: mostly ending in _o_ . Article: _el_ .
• _El cielo_ está despejado. /The sky is clear.
But no _o_ ending sometimes:
• _El color_ es hermoso. /The colour is gorgeous.
▶️ Some words can use either gender, especially professions or agents:
• el panadero - la panadera /the he-baker - the she-baker.
• el asesino - la asesina /the murderer - the murderess
• el camarero - la camarera /the waiter - the waitress
▶️ Sometime gender pairs have a dramatic change in meaning:
• el puerto - la puerta /the harbour - the door
• el cigarro - la cigarra /the cigar - the cicada
• el cometa - la cometa /tje comet - the kite
▶️ Sometimes, _a_ ending is masculine; _o_ ending is feminine:
• el agua /the water
• la mano /the hand
▶️ Then you have a whole lot of words ending in _e_ . These can drive learners crazy.
• el príncipe/the prince
• la nieve /the snow
▶️ Some words admit both genders:
• el/la sartén /the frying pan
• el/la mar /the sea
▶️ Some are masculine in the singular, but feminine in the plural - or the other way round:
• el arte - las artes /the art/arts
• la lente - los lentes/ the glass/glasses
• el agua - las aguas /the water/waters
▶️ I'm not going to extensively mention anti linguistic sexism activists , who seem to hate the letter _o_ because words with that ending are 'masculine'. Here things can get even creepier.
• la cuerpa (instead of _el cuerpo_ when referring to the female _body_ ... yes, crazy!)
'Inclusive' speakers are a minority, and they believe that they will eradicate male-chauvinism when they convince 560 million people to do adopt a final _e_ for all masculine nouns and adjectives. Good luck.
♥️ But please, don't be discouraged. Spanish is the language of love and you'll fall in love learning it.

English does have reduplication; there are plenty of examples of repeated words which changes the meaning. Some examples fall into sarcasm, but many don’t, and sarcasm is fairly important in social interaction anyway.

What's pretty cool about this list is that American Sign Language grammar actually does do some of these!! For example, noun-verb pairs. The noun version of a word is usually two small movements, whereas the verb version is the same sign in one continuous motion. Question words also go at the end of the sentence !

Another feature English doesn't have is the masculine/feminine gender for nouns that require it. For example, I'm Italian and in my language (and in all romance languages, I guess?) you say "amici" for male friends and "amiche" for female friends and still "amici" for friends including both male and female persons.
You will also say "gatto" if it's a male cat and "gatta" if it's a female cat, and the list goes on. I often struggle with this missing feature in English because in Italian it's a main feature and I don't like the fact that I can't fully express a concept (like the gender of my friends for example). This is a huge missing in my opinion 🤔

A feature English is really missing (as in: I actually find it annoying I can't use it in this language) are diminutives. In Dutch we use it all the time, either because something is cute or smaller than average. The diminutive of the Dutch word "koek" is actually where the English word "cookie" comes from! I think Spanish has this as well.

OH MY GOD - to the topic of two "with"s - in Russian we have the one "with" for "going with" and a whole instrumental case for "using with", which is even called somewhat like "creating case". I've never thought about it from this perspective, but now it appears so useful! It's so fascinating to think about cases not as those pure grammar rules you should just learn, but as the actual concepts used to represent certain relations between words.

AAVE (African-American Vernacular English) actually has this as a grammatical feature. It’s suspected to have carried over as a linguistic trait from various West African languages

But, in end effect, all languages can express the same things. They just use different means. Some find shortcuts for things (I love the evidential and the 2 with solutions, or the luueva/piove, or anything that was different to be honest), and English, French etc will have different shortcuts for other things. Now, why these particular shortcuts for this particular language is a really fascinating question. Is it cultural? I.e: a particular cultural reality resulted in a shortcut. I always think of the german "Schadenfreude". This shortcut does not exist in French or English. In French, we have a long phrase: "se rejouir (ou rire) du malheur des autres" and while some people do it, the general notion is that it is not socially acceptable at all and children are actively discouraged and reprimanded. I think that I have noticed that it is a lot more socially acceptable in German speaking Switzerland where I lived for 23 years. I also find that it is quite acceptable in England now, and it so happens that they have borrowed the word. I found it far less socially acceptable in Wales and Scotland, and I have not heard the word being borrowed there. But this is all anecdotal.

In the Philippines, we also have two words for the word "of"
In tagalog, its
Ng- referring to any abstract object, or a common noun
Ni-refering to a specific person.
Example
House of my friend- bahay NG kaibigan ko
House of Juan- bahay NI Juan

"Chu" is also used to form questions in Esperanto, though always at the beginning of a sentence. Officially, it translates as "whether."

The one thing English lacks that I love the most is the polite forms of "you". YOU can be used for anyone, regardless if they're family, young kids, strangers or presidents. In Romanian and other similar languages, it's considered rude and offensive to address someone with YOU if you don't know them or they're substantially older than you or if they're a higher rank in the Army, etc. It kind of instantly builds a trust barrier between 2 persons.

To me, the only really useful thing that's missing from modern English is two distinct pronouns for singular "you" and plural "you". I don't really miss any polite pronouns or other grammatical politeness markers, just an simple, non-awkward way of distinguishing between 2nd person sing. vs. pl.

I like how English has way more synonyms or near synonyms for adjectives. Like the word "huge" can be big, giant, hefty, ginormous, bulky, large, expansive and so on. Whereas, Hindi, a language that I speak, have very limited vocab in terms of adjective synonyms

If you translate 'Some of us agree' to Portuguese you'll get either 'Alguns de nós concordam' (which could include the speaker or not; often used to make it vague) or "Alguns de nós concordamos" (which includes the speaker). Just because of conjugation. But I'm sure there's a fancy name for that ;)

Another singularity in English is that they have only 10 fingers and 10 toes, while in many other European languages the fingers are 20 ( five for each hand and five for each foot) I always say to my English colleagues, "if you go to mainland Europe you'll gain ten fingers more" and someone answered "but you'll lose 10 toes" lol 😆...

About politeness: we Brazilians from São Paulo do the same as English, but in a weird way: we use the polite pronoun for you (você) 99% of the time. In fact, to us, the unpolite form sounds politer (you: tu). For example, the phrase "Do you go?", we usually say "você vai?" not "tu vais?". Therefore the conjugation of the verb "go" for the unpolite form sounds more erudite and therefore politer, since it is not common.

In Turkish we have a second past tense which has some special meanings like "I heard that it happened from someone else" or "It happened out of my intention" or "I wasn't aware of it while it was happening" or "Someone said it happened but i believe it is doubtfull"...
I love Turkish :)

Its so surprising you talked about politeness without mentioning japanese and its insane keigo....

At 02:55 as a Marathi speaking person which usually spoken on a moderate scale...I was like how proud I feel now to see and example of my language...and yes we say 'tu' which means you for a younger than us or of our age whereas, we say 'thumi' for the one older than us of at a higher status...thats true😇👍🏻🙏🏻

The function you mentioned that Lou has that English doesn’t is present in African American English. Just not in “standard” American English. I wonder if there’s a history that gave that feature to AAE speakers, or if it’s just coincidence.

As a natural brazilian portuguese speaker, I really love the english language for how simple it is and how it doesn't have a bunch of dumb rules that make no sense, and in my opinion, that's how all languages should be, make it simple cause it's just a way for us humans to comunicate, there's no point in making it overly complex

Love your vids! Friendly note, Malayalam (at 2:49) is pronounced muh-LAY-a-(L)am where the last L is formed further back on the soft palate (think of folding your tongue back on itself and saying an English L upside down).

I just love that the verb "to be" is separated in some Latin languages in to verbs "ser" and "estar" (Spanish and Portuguese), "essere" and "stare" (Italian)

as someone from holland, who studies english, italian, german and french, i still think english is the easiest language

One thing I like about English is that you can turn a verb into a noun and vice-versa with relative ease. I think it wouldn't be that easy in most other languages.

in spanish you can say “esta lloviendo” which is the exact equivalent of “it is raining”. spanish has very few exceptions; it’s literally english, in spanish! not sure if that makes sense but what i mean to say is that there is almost an exact translation between both languages. In fact I speak better english when i’m THINKING in spanish and translating to english, rather than just thinking in english. and I was raised in a mainly english speaking neighborhood, school and household. i’d say english is the lazier, less formal language of the two but they’re practically identical languages

Love that Spanish also differentiates between "be" something or someone, and "be" at somewhere and status

In Greek we do have some duplications too
Σιγά means slow σιγά σιγά means slowly.
I think that Greek actually fits the description for most characteristics that English doesn't have regardless haha
As a person that speaks Greek, English, Korean, Japanese, Chinese, French and Spanish (all at different levels of fluency, still learning) I really can't say that I've had difficulty in learning English. Definitely not as difficult as the rest of the languages I'm learning. And definitely not as hard as learning Greek would be if it wasn't my mother tongue (although Greek is difficult to speak even amongst natives)

Talking about formal and informal „you“: Japanese has COUNTLESS of ways to address people. As far as I know, the most common ones are *first name* -san, -kun (for boys), -chan (for girls or your boyfriend) and -sama (for someone with a higher rank than you, I believe). But there’s a lot more, which I don’t even know.
5:42 I can only speak for Spanish here, but it is common to just drop the pronoun in general, so it doesn’t have to be connected to „it“. E.g. instead of „Yo estoy bien“ („I am fine“), they just say: „Estoy bien.“ („Am fine.“). The conjugation of „estar“ already tells you that I’m talking about myself.

You missed the most obvious deficiency: the ability to make diminutives from nouns. A small cat is a kitten, a totally different word. Afrikaans: kat - katjie. Spanish: gato -gatito. A small car in English is a small car. Afrikaans: kar - karretjie. Spanish: carro - carrito. I'm told diminutives are easy in German, too. My proposal is to add ling. Duck - duckling. Cat - catling. Car - carling.

6:45 As I recall from my time in Idaho, the Shoshone language has those features as well.
5:55 Having different words for the instrumental and a comitative "with" would be helpful in scientific writing.

I am a Marathi native. As you said, we usually use "honorific plural" (आदरार्थी बहुवचन) when talking about stranger of unknown gender. It's very similar to the gender neutral "they" being pushed these days.
Also, Indian english uses reduplication the exact way saya-saya works. We will naturally say "We read three three books today" and I think it's beautiful 😂

Old English also used to have three grammatical genders for nouns with 4 - 5 cases for them and their corresponding articles for each of the three genders.
And OE even had a dualis form as well ( "we two" ).

I feel like the most polite way to address someone is indeed saying "you" cause people who use formal ways usually don't like the person they're being polite to and it's just fake, but with everyone saying you, there's no difference, we are all human, therefore we are all a you, getting upset over being called a person is plain dumb, we are all equal and just because someone is your boss or whatever saying you is the most honest way to address him.

The weather thing; in Bengali (and many other Indian languages) we call it "বৃষ্টি (rain) পড়ছে (is falling)". The weather elements of weather act as the subjects themselves. Even if it goes a bit further like "it's sunny", we'll say "সূর্য (sun) বেরিয়েছে (has come out)". But the problem arises if it's consistently sunny from a long time. We don't have an EXACT expression for that, although there are many spare expressions, some even non-grammatical, to get the job done.

What’s wrong with “We read 3 books each” - this clarification is just as easy as adding to a word.

The simplicity of English is a blessing for those who have to learn it as a foreign language!

I'm Portuguese and I started to learn english, so something that I thought that it was real strange is the fact that there is no name for the feeling of missing something or someone or a time in your life because things are not the same or they are not around. In portuguese is "saudade" and I think is a beautiful word to explain this feeling and then I discovered that most language don't have that. xD (sorry my english, still learning)

There are some others u left out. For instance I’m Greek (and other languages) you can add “aki” to a word to make it small or cute. Pethi (child) pathaki (little child) agapi mou (my love) agapaki (my little love) etc
Also with the reduplication.. in Greek at least, u can also make things more intense version of themselves with -kata. So aspro (white) aspro kataspro (whitest white)

In my parents native language Sindhi, there is a specific word for each type of relationship. Example, paternal grandparents are Dado and Dadi while maternal grandparents are Nano and Nani. Same with grandchildren, cousins, in laws etc. A specific word indicated how one is related.

Back when I learned Norwegian sign language, I leraned that the signs for 'we' or 'us' (same thing) was highly different according to context. 'We' as in 'us two', two fingers rolling back and forth between I and the person I was talking about, whereas 'we' as in a group, could be specified differently. If there were a group of people around me, I'd signal that by drawing a smaller circle in the semicentre of that group - and so fourth. Then - if it were to be a talk about 'we' as in 'all of us', the circle drawn, would be above my head, and rather large. I'm not sure if this is specific to Norwegian sign language or how they do it in other sign language languages/dialects, but I'm quite sure it's about the same.
PS: Learning sign language is highly recommended - not just for including those that cannot hear to well, but perhaps most of all to see how rich that language family really is!

I'm alway shocked that there are no words for "the day after tomorrow" and "the deay before yesterday". 😵

I, for one, prefer to have to add a couple more words to the phrase to generate the same effect instead of having to deal with extremely complicated grammar stuff that might make some sentences shorter and wittier, but make the learning of the language way harder in general. I particularly have the German cases in mind while writing this.

I don't know about other latin languages, but in Spanish and Catalan the verb TO BE is divided into two (SER and ESTAR), wich are totally different concepts and can change the meaning of an entire sentence.
For instance:
In English you say to a girl: YOU ARE GOOD.
In Spanish you would translate that using SER as: TU ERES BUENA, meaning "you are a nice person".
But if you use ESTAR instead: TU ESTÁS BUENA, and that would mean "you are hot".

This is going to help me so much in learning other languages because I know what to focus on 😅

In Portuguese there is also a difference between being somewhere (estar) and being someone (ser), so I would say other European languages also have that.

As a native Malayalam speaker, the horror I felt when one of my friends (who had attended a boarding school abroad surrounded by non-malayalam speakers till college) used 'nnii' to address our professor was immeasurable. I thought she was gonna die then and there. And later I told her that she made a mistake and she asked me something along the lines of, 'Why? 'nnii' meant 'you' doesn't it?' And I was like yeah it does... But like friend 'you', people who know you 'you' not like professor 'you'. It was confusing, to say the least.

In England “there there” is used. To show somebody comfort and support when you don’t know what else to say to make them feel better. And it often comes with a pat on the back or maybe a hug

“I like him, but I don’t like like him” we have repeating words (and sounds too!) but they’re mostly used informally and speaking so you wouldn’t see them in a book. In addition you can use adjectives as verbs but, again, you don’t verbify nouns and adjectives in formal writing, just informal :)

I have started to study quite a few languages- never actually learned them tho- and English is by far the easiest next to Spanish (but that's just because I have latin in school)

4:50 Spanish also have a distinguition in the verb to be, "ser" (to be something) and "estar" (to be in a state or place)

Reduplication is especially dense in turkish. And sometimes we don't repeat the same exact word but change the first letter and then repeat. Like "Kaba saba". "Kaba" by itself means "Rude", but "Kaba saba" stands for something you do without giving much effort or attention. I don't think there is a word for it in english but the closest I can think of is "Scuffed". This reduplication thing has always been an interesting topic for me even though it is my own language. So I feel happy to see it mentioned in the video.