These are great suggestions. Adding these words to your own internal vocabulary is totally worth it for self-reflection.
Less seriously, a grammatical construction I wish we had in English is the Latin future passive participle, typically ending in -ndus, -nda, -ndum. It means that something needs/ought to be done.
For instance "Amanda" is "she who must be loved."
So if someone asks you why your feature isn't in production yet, you can say the pull request is reviewandum.
Or you can tell the kids that the trash is emptianda, or the dog is walkandus.
These are kind of lame examples, but once you get the idea you can find places where it'd be convenient several times a day.
Reminds me of one thing I loved about Esperanto. It has (almost) all the participles you could ever need: past, present, and future, in both passive and active voices. So "to love"/"ami" would have
# Passive
amita - to have been loved
amata - to be loved
amota - to be going to be loved
# Active
aminta - to have been loving
amanta - loving
amonta - to be going to be loving
Passive and active are only distinguished by "-t- / -nt-". Anyhow, all of these are effectively adjectives, and can be combined with "esti (to be)" in any tense to express a huge variety of meanings:
Li estis amita - He had been loved
Ŝi estas amanta - She is loving
Mi estos amota - I will be going to be loved
Notice that generally the vowels "i/a/o" map to past, present, and future respectively, both for tenses of verbs and participles.
You can create 9 combinations from these simple shapes (or 18 of you count passives), and if you draw them on a time-line they will correspond to distinct sub-sets.
There also some participles like "amanda/amindo/amenda" but I have simply forgotten what they each mean. I think one of them mean "worthy of being loved", another meaning "should be loved".
The construction works best with words of actual classical origin. When dealing with a supermarket delivery I do sometimes refer to the things that need to go into the fridge as the "refrigeranda".
(There are some fairly ordinary English words derived from this construction. The agenda is those things that need to be done. The legend (of a map, graph, etc.) is the stuff you need to read.)
On the subject of grammar, Greek grammar (ancient? I assume this one has carried into modernity) has a handy construction I like in the form of the particles μέν and δέ, used to highlight counterpoint/point through something closer to grammar than word semantics. You might see it translated as "on the one hand x, on the other hand y" or "while x, y" or "x, but y", in English, it loses a lot of its punch. Like the verbal act of holding your hands up to demonstrate in a gesture the balance of the ideas.
Yep, Ancient Greek has great particle game that English just can’t translate at all.
And as you say, they’re really like gesture words, which make so much sense, especially as text is now read/written without any human speaking behaviour at all.
Arguably emojis fill this need, but I’m unconvinced.
Coptic had these as loan words, although whether they were literary or used in daily discourse I don't know. Afaik modern Greek does not have these very handy little words sadly.
I never got too too far into the language, so I absolutely believe there are more layers and variances to the meaning than the basic glosses I learned! But that feels like it fits in the counterpoint/point kind of framework, I think? Just with an additional kind of "temporal" or "ordering" connotation.
They might be just removing "to be", that's what I love about English you can break and abuse it and it still mostly makes sense. You could even drop the
"the" and "-ed" from those phrases and most people would still understand what you mean by "dog needs walk".
yeah, they are just dropping "to be". But "dog needs walk" sounds wrong, whereas "the dog needs walked" sounds normal to the people who use it. I don't know whether there is a reason almost nobody says "dog needs walk", but I don't know much about linguistics :)
I've mentioned this before on HN, but one example of this I saw in the field was "abc_delenda" tables, which contain ids or records to be deleted. The naming appeared unnecessarily obscure to me at the time, but I find myself going back to it in subsequent jobs because it is a nice and concise way to express the intent.
"Must" can mean "required" or "to have an obligation to". Thus, for example, we are morally obligated to love our children. But "love" here is not meant in the desiring sense of love (eros, another Greek word) in which one desires something for one's own objective good, or even in the modern squishy sense of having fleeting pleasant or affectionate feelings for. Rather, something like agape (still another Greek word) is meant as parents raise their children primarily for the good and benefit of the children and the common good, not their own self-interest or their own pleasure, even if those elements are present or result secondarily (i.e., the pleasure of selfless acts is not the motive behind selfless acts for that would render them no longer selfless and the pleasure or liberty from self that could follow would not obtain).
Indeed. For a different angle on the nuance, you will often see the gerundive translated as "worthy of". Miranda, worthy of beholding. Amanda, worthy of love.
Some of those are contextual, but "ought to be done" is certainly future tense, it's referring to a future activity. It's a pretty apt example for future passive, juxtaposing the future active "will be done."
Or at least that's how I reason it. English is rather hard to analyze sometimes.
> "I am having a party next week." That's a present continuous sentence referring to a future activity.
What about "I will have a party next week" or "there will be a party next week"?
> Some argue that English doesn't even have a future tense.
I learned this as: There's no language feature that denotes future tense (like a suffix), but it's done via grammar (and context).
I have to acknowledge that I'm not the right person to be debating this. Like most native speakers, my grasp of the rules often boils down to whether something "sounds" right.
Less seriously, a grammatical construction I wish we had in English is the Latin future passive participle, typically ending in -ndus, -nda, -ndum. It means that something needs/ought to be done.
For instance "Amanda" is "she who must be loved."
So if someone asks you why your feature isn't in production yet, you can say the pull request is reviewandum.
Or you can tell the kids that the trash is emptianda, or the dog is walkandus.
These are kind of lame examples, but once you get the idea you can find places where it'd be convenient several times a day.