parakkum

In his Language Construction Kit, Mark Rosenfelder tells us that to best build new languages, we should learn other languages outside our own group:

Looking at some non-Indo-European languages, such as Quechua, Chinese, Turkish, Arabic, or Swahili, can be eye-opening.

...and...

If you don't know another language well, you're pretty much doomed to produce ciphers of English. Checking out grammars (or this html file) can help you avoid duplicating English grammar, and give you some neat ideas to try out; but the real difficulty is in the lexicon. If all you know is English, you'll tend to duplicate the structure and idioms of the English vocabulary.

Korean definitely has some key structural differences from English, and they let you put together some cool sentences. Consider this statement in English (taken from my Korean language text):

"This picture is the one we took last year on Grandmother's birthday."

The Korean sentence works like this:

"This picture the last-year-during-Grandmother's-birthday-taken picture is."

So instead of having to hack everything onto the end of the sentence, we can apply the whole situational description as an adjective.

This brings up a second interesting point -- how the Korean text presents things. From my point of view, Korean adjectives are basically "descriptive verbs." Consider the color black (and apologies for my horrid transliteration here):

"to be black" (the infinitive) - kkamahda
"black dog" (more like an adjective in the English sense) - kkaman ke
"the dog is black" (more like a verb in the English sense) - kenun kkameyo

The textbook makes a sharp distinction between this case ("black dog") and the case above ("the at-Grandmother's-birthday-taken picture"). But from my perspective, they're the same situation -- a way of constructing a descriptive about a noun. The textbook is good overall, so I wonder if they tried different approaches and found that native English speakers become confused by the relative interchangeability of adjective-like and verb-like elements.