Achromalia wrote:
when i read the title, i thought it just ended at "i'm stuck in this toxic relationship" and i was sorta worried...
...and then i found out lol :p happy to see you!!
+ what do you mean when you describe yourself as a linguistics nerd? would that be more about the technical properties of communication (with terminology like "aspect", "tense", "pluperfect" and the way these features convey information?) or is it something like a matter of really liking different languages and cultures? would it happen to be both?
Here is a diagram that shows all the different levels of linguistics and while I find most of its levels interesting, I feel like the evolution of language sounds are an important matter. How people of close regions are able to communicate relatively well but the further you go is also interesting, the phenomenon of language continua that exist, which however, has been starting to fade with globalization and standardization of languages by either respectively flattening differences or strenghtening them.
As for tenses, they're a complex matter since they vary a lot in language families or even relatively close languages. Spanish, French and Portuguese for example, while similar enough, there are tenses and grammar points that don't exist in each other language, as well as the father language: Latin, retained quite a lot of grammar structures not seen in any modern romance language, most notably nominal cases (that is, what does the noun do in the sentence and how is it related to the verb), with the exception of Romanian but the latter just partially. As for Germanic languages, English, Dutch, German, Norwegian, Swedish and Danish for example each had its history which makes them distinguishable (English lacking nominal genders, German having nominal cases, Icelandic forbidding loanwords, etc.) although I am not an expert on these.