German also mixes it a fair bit. Following merc’s table in order:
hungry - ich habe Hunger / ich bin hungrig
angry - ich bin böse / ich bin wütend
cold - mir ist kalt
scared - ich habe Angst
brave - ich bin mutig
#4 uses haben (to have) + noun; #2 and #5 use sein (to be) + adjective.
For #1 you’ll typically see the noun + haben. Adjective + sein is perfectly viable, but a bit less common, and I feel like it leans towards metaphoric usage; e.g. «ich bin hungrig nach Liebe», literally “I’m hungry for love”.
#3 uses the dative instead, it’s roughly “it’s cold for me”. If you use “ich bin kalt”, you’ll convey that your temperature is low, not that you’re feeling cold.
Being the other main language behind the drunk hodgepodge that is English
That’s inaccurate.
To keep it short, the situation between English, Dutch and German is a lot like the situation between Romance languages: they have a common origin (West Germanic), one isn’t from the other. And while English got bits and bobs of vocab due to Norse and Norman influence, vocab is rather superficial, and most oddities of the language were born in the islands.
This table is a good example. English is basically adjectivising almost everything physiological and emotional, while both German and the Romance languages would use a mix of adjectives and nouns instead. (With the Romance languages typically preferring nouns, but that isn’t a hard rule.)
Do you know German? The “I am cold” one is interesting to me. “Mir” is German for “me” or “to me” roughly, right? So, would a rough literal translation be something like “to me it is cold”?
I tried to learn some German at some point, but I didn’t manage to learn enough to get comfortable with the various cases.
I’m pretty sure it’s called the dative experiencer, and many other languages also do something similar (sometimes using prepositions in absence of case, but the point being that the same grammar used to denote the indirect object of verbs like “give” is also used here)
I know some German but I’m not proficient with it.
It’s easier to analyse the sentence by including the subject, typically omitted: “es ist mir kalt” = “it is me cold”, or “it’s cold to me”. It’s a lot like saying “that’s blue to me”, you know? Like, it isn’t like you are cold or blue, it’s something else, but you’re experiencing it. (It’s a dative of relation, in both languages.)
“Mir” is German for “me” or “to me” roughly, right?
Roughly, yes. But that gets messy, there’s no good equivalent.
Think on it this way: you have a bunch of situations where you’d use the first person, right? English arbitrarily splits those situations between “me” and “I”; German does it between “ich”, “mich”, and “mir”.
That German dative is used in situations like:
if a verb demands two objects, one gets the dative; e.g. “er gibt mir das Buch” (he gives me the book).
if the preposition demands it; e.g. “er spricht mitmir” = “he speaks withme”
if you got a dative of relation (like the above), or benefaction (something done for another person), etc.
I tried to learn some German at some point, but I didn’t manage to learn enough to get comfortable with the various cases.
I got to thank Latin for that - by the time I started studying German, the cases felt intuitive.
But… really, when you’re dealing with Indo-European languages, you’re going to experience at least some grammatical hell: adpositions (English), cases (Latin), a mix of both (German), but never “neither”.
Speaking on Latin, it just clicked me it does something else than the languages you listed - those states/emotions get handled primarily by the verb:
That’s really interesting, thanks for the detailed answer. I never learned Latin. Instead I learned French and Spanish. So, I only know the descendants of Latin.
Also cool how Latin has a verb for “to be angry”, etc. English has “to anger” but that’s to make someone else angry. I wonder why languages lost that form, because it seems really useful to have a single verb for those.
I wonder why languages lost that form, because it seems really useful to have a single verb for those.
I am not sure, but I think it’s due to the changes in the passive. Latin had proper passive forms for plenty verbs, and a lot of those verbs handling states were either deponent (passive-looking with active meaning; like irascor) or relied on the passive for the state (like terreo “I terrify” → terreor “I’m terrified”). Somewhere down the road the Romance languages ditched it for the sake of the analytical passive, sum + participle.
I’m saying this because, while irascor died, the participle survived in e.g. Portuguese (Lat. iratum → Por. irado, “angered”). And it got even re-attached to a new verb (irar “to cause anger”).
German also mixes it a fair bit. Following merc’s table in order:
#4 uses haben (to have) + noun; #2 and #5 use sein (to be) + adjective.
For #1 you’ll typically see the noun + haben. Adjective + sein is perfectly viable, but a bit less common, and I feel like it leans towards metaphoric usage; e.g. «ich bin hungrig nach Liebe», literally “I’m hungry for love”.
#3 uses the dative instead, it’s roughly “it’s cold for me”. If you use “ich bin kalt”, you’ll convey that your temperature is low, not that you’re feeling cold.
That’s inaccurate.
To keep it short, the situation between English, Dutch and German is a lot like the situation between Romance languages: they have a common origin (West Germanic), one isn’t from the other. And while English got bits and bobs of vocab due to Norse and Norman influence, vocab is rather superficial, and most oddities of the language were born in the islands.
This table is a good example. English is basically adjectivising almost everything physiological and emotional, while both German and the Romance languages would use a mix of adjectives and nouns instead. (With the Romance languages typically preferring nouns, but that isn’t a hard rule.)
Do you know German? The “I am cold” one is interesting to me. “Mir” is German for “me” or “to me” roughly, right? So, would a rough literal translation be something like “to me it is cold”?
I tried to learn some German at some point, but I didn’t manage to learn enough to get comfortable with the various cases.
I’m pretty sure it’s called the dative experiencer, and many other languages also do something similar (sometimes using prepositions in absence of case, but the point being that the same grammar used to denote the indirect object of verbs like “give” is also used here)
I know some German but I’m not proficient with it.
It’s easier to analyse the sentence by including the subject, typically omitted: “es ist mir kalt” = “it is me cold”, or “it’s cold to me”. It’s a lot like saying “that’s blue to me”, you know? Like, it isn’t like you are cold or blue, it’s something else, but you’re experiencing it. (It’s a dative of relation, in both languages.)
Roughly, yes. But that gets messy, there’s no good equivalent.
Think on it this way: you have a bunch of situations where you’d use the first person, right? English arbitrarily splits those situations between “me” and “I”; German does it between “ich”, “mich”, and “mir”.
That German dative is used in situations like:
I got to thank Latin for that - by the time I started studying German, the cases felt intuitive.
But… really, when you’re dealing with Indo-European languages, you’re going to experience at least some grammatical hell: adpositions (English), cases (Latin), a mix of both (German), but never “neither”.
Speaking on Latin, it just clicked me it does something else than the languages you listed - those states/emotions get handled primarily by the verb:
That’s really interesting, thanks for the detailed answer. I never learned Latin. Instead I learned French and Spanish. So, I only know the descendants of Latin.
Also cool how Latin has a verb for “to be angry”, etc. English has “to anger” but that’s to make someone else angry. I wonder why languages lost that form, because it seems really useful to have a single verb for those.
I am not sure, but I think it’s due to the changes in the passive. Latin had proper passive forms for plenty verbs, and a lot of those verbs handling states were either deponent (passive-looking with active meaning; like irascor) or relied on the passive for the state (like terreo “I terrify” → terreor “I’m terrified”). Somewhere down the road the Romance languages ditched it for the sake of the analytical passive, sum + participle.
I’m saying this because, while irascor died, the participle survived in e.g. Portuguese (Lat. iratum → Por. irado, “angered”). And it got even re-attached to a new verb (irar “to cause anger”).