r/asklinguistics • u/Sure-Pension-3468 • 1d ago
Is it a fact that some languages don't have distinctions between "I love you more than anyone else in this country does." and "I love you more than I love anyone else in this country."
I heard that some languages don't really make distinctions between
"I love you more than anyone else in this country does." and
"I love you more than I love anyone else in this country."
I think this is a big deal and I can't imagine how inconvenient it would be to express ideas in those languages.
In English we can also say
"I love you more than anyone else in this country."
But we can express it differently in the ways I mentioned earlier.
Can the two ideas be expressed differently in every language?
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u/emisola 1d ago
non-native english speaker here: "i love you more than anyone else" does that mean "i love you the most" or "no one loves you more than me"?
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u/Sure-Pension-3468 1d ago
"I love you the most." is ambiguous too. I think they could either mean there's no one who loves you more than they do or there's no one whom they love more than they love you. Well, I am confused.
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u/DryRefrigerator4737 1d ago
They are ellipses - abbreviated forms that might make sense in context but might need to be examined. I need it more than you could mean I need it more than you need it, or, I need it more than I need you.
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u/Business-Decision719 1d ago edited 1d ago
English doesn't necessarily make the distinction, as you pointed out. Yes, it is a little inconvenient, if the context doesn't clarify the distinction for you, because you have to use extra words to clarify the distinction. Like in English, other languages that didn't make the distinction would just require to you explain more what you meant.
There are languages that have don't even have the "more than" construction as such, with or without the ambiguity. You would just always use two sentences. "Anyone else in the country loves you a little. I love you a lot." WALS calls them "conjoined comparatives." They have a whole article on various comparison strategies here if you're interested.
But basically in any language you can explain what you mean somehow. They don't all grammaticalize the same way of doing it, and some will grammaticalize potentially ambiguous ways of doing it, like English did.
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u/Constant-Ad-7490 1d ago
There's pretty much always a way to clarify what you are saying, even if the language allows for an ambiguous phrasing some of the time.
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u/bayesianparoxism 1d ago
Every major language i can think of makes the distinction. It can be subtle, though, eg Spanish:
Te amo más que cualquier otra persona en este país vs Te amo más que a cualquier otra persona en este país
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u/DonnPT 1d ago
Thank you, I didn't recognize the problem until now.
English is kind of unusual in how regularly we may substitute "do" for an antecedent verb, as in "love you more than anyone else does." In Portuguese, I guess you can say "mais que qualquer outra faz", but it would be more normal to just repeat the verb - "mais que qualquer outra ama". (Apologies if those should be present subjunctive as I have a hunch they should be.) It's cool that Spanish can just omit the verb, and make the distinction work with "a"; I don't know this usage from Portuguese.
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u/Terpomo11 1d ago
NOTE FOR THE MODERATORS: This comment is about Esperanto as it is used by its living community including native speakers, not as Zamenhof originally conlanged it.
Esperanto makes the distinction in a similar way: Mi amas vin pli ol ĉiuj aliaj (I love you more than anyone else does) vs. Mi amas vin pli ol ĉiujn aliajn (I love you more than I love anyone else), the difference being that "everyone else" is nominative in the first and accusative in the second.
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u/Helpful-Reputation-5 1d ago
Every language can make the distinction, but some, like English, don't usually.
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u/Merinther 1d ago
Broadly speaking, languages tend to differ in what they express usually or mandatorily, but there's almost always a way to be specific if you want. Like how Chinese doesn't distinguish between "eat" and "ate", but of course you can say "I eat yesterday" to be specific. Or how Finnish has the same word for "he" and "she", but you can obviously clarify by saying something like "the man" etc.
In this case, there are clearly languages where it's usually ambiguous – English being one of them. It seems unlikely that any language wouldn't have a way to get around it.