From New York City, this is Lexicon Valley, a podcast about language.

I'm John McWater, and today we're going to do something interesting, or at least I think

it's interesting, and we're going to start up in the clouds.

It all starts with how different languages are from one another.

And this is something I mention often, and I can't stress it more.

I think that even a lot of us who are language fans, we tend to think that other languages

are kind of like English, maybe a little harder, maybe different in some ways, and so maybe

the adjectives come after the nouns or something like that.

But you figure that a noun is a noun, and a verb is a verb, and an adjective is an adjective,

and learning another language is mostly going to be just a matter of learning what their

labels are for the things that we call fire or slip or red.

But no, no, part of the joy of language is that you never know how a language is going

to apply labels and not just labels, but action words and description words to this thing

we call reality.

We're living this life, and there's so many ways that a language can cut it up, and so

what to us seems so obviously an adjective like hot or big is very often going to be a

verb in some other language.

What to us seems so obviously an action in some other language will be handled by a noun,

and that's just the way it is you never know.

Or the softeners that I talked about.

How does a language soften?

All languages have softeners, but languages do it in different ways.

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