this post was submitted on 10 Jul 2023
196 points (95.4% liked)
Asklemmy
43796 readers
748 users here now
A loosely moderated place to ask open-ended questions
If your post meets the following criteria, it's welcome here!
- Open-ended question
- Not offensive: at this point, we do not have the bandwidth to moderate overtly political discussions. Assume best intent and be excellent to each other.
- Not regarding using or support for Lemmy: context, see the list of support communities and tools for finding communities below
- Not ad nauseam inducing: please make sure it is a question that would be new to most members
- An actual topic of discussion
Looking for support?
Looking for a community?
- Lemmyverse: community search
- sub.rehab: maps old subreddits to fediverse options, marks official as such
- [email protected]: a community for finding communities
~Icon~ ~by~ ~@Double_[email protected]~
founded 5 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
This is basically just a trick to sound more natural with less grammar, so feel free to pick and choose when to use it. So far I think you've struck a pretty good balance!
Yes, both of these sentences sound very natural to me. I think you've gotten the hang of it
Japanese! I'm a mega-weaboo lol
Yeah, you might want to work on your hygiene... It's OK, though. We all have our circumstances and other people on the internet are rarely as perfect as they claim to be!
It's less about the pattern of the sentence and more about a grammatical concept called the "agent". The agent is the "doer" of the sentence. In English, the agent is usually (not always!) based on the sentence subject and native speakers will use one of several different tricks to shuffle the agent around when talking about an inanimate subject. I'll list a few additional ways of doing this below to help illustrate:
Unnatural: My shirt wrinkled
This is a normal type of sentence, so the agent is the subject ("my shirt"). An inanimate agent sounds unnatural, so try to avoid this
Natural: My shirt is wrinkled
In this sentence we've introduced a copula ("is") as the main verb of the sentence. Copula-based sentences like this one describe states of being and thus contain no action at all (e.g.: "My shirt is red" -- no action!). No action means no agent. No agent means no problem!
Natural: My shirt got wrinkled
This is a way of speaking called the "passive voice" which implies a hidden agent as the true doer of the action. Since the agent is hidden, it won't be based on the subject, so an inanimate subject can be used without sounding unnatural.
Natural: My shirt wrinkled itself
This is a way of speaking called the "reflexive voice" which you can use if the verb in question also has a transitive form (AKA: if it's a "labile verb"). In the reflexive voice, all agents automatically become animate. No inanimate agent means no problem!
Natural: The sun rose
Some non-living things are still considered to be animate. These are almost always things which appear to move of their own volition, such as celestial bodies ("The moon shone") or vehicles ("The boat sank"). There's no problem with using animate things as the agent!
Thanks again. I'm not Japanese, or know it, so I can't help you with that one, sorry. May I ask whether you're and english major? You say so much grammar so confidently, are you a teacher perhaps? The thing about agents I only heard once or twice in English class.
I'm Hungarian btw, and I know how hard our language is, so I figured I could be of great help. It's probably for the best as even I don't know how to speak this ~~shit~~ culture rich language correctly :/
Nah, I'm just a college dropout who has weird interests lol! It has been my sincere pleasure to help out another learner 😊
Greetings from across the ocean in Atlanta, GA!