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Comment by ericras | Hacker News Reader

As an American who does this in pretty much every conversation I have, this is a difference I would never have thought of.

Semi-related: Do other countries have fragments of speech used as filler such as "like" and "you know"?

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Yes!

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Filler_%28linguistics%29#Filler...

I'm from Germany and it's absolutely the same here. There is no conversation without a lot of "uh"s, "yep"s, "nope"s, "nahh"s, "huh"s, and the ones that are actual German words but are really just fillers or shorthand for (dis)agreement such as "naja", "nun", "also", "aber", "klar", "schon" and so on. The equivalents of like (="irgendwie", "so", "halt") are used all the time and we have a few such constructs for you know ("schau", "nicht wahr", "es ist doch so, dass...").

I firmly believe all countries do this.

If you haven't read it, check Mark Twain's essay about the German language. You'll find that he agrees with you, especially with the 'also'.

You forgot "oder". The time I was living in Germany I found it very amusing that colleagues always finished some sentences with "or" (e.g., "I think we should add this format, or?") or the equivalent in german "oder" ("Ich glaube das is gut, oder?"

In Quebec's french, we will replace nearly any word by a swear word (criss/osti/tabarnak/caliss), which can be used as a noun, a verb, an adverb, and adjective, etc. Basically, like smurf-talk.

Also there's a one-to-one relationship between english's use of "like" as a filler by our use of "genre". In this case, "genre" means "similar to". So one could say "J'ai genre... mangé une criss de grosse poutine" in the same way an english speaker would say "I have like.. eaten a fucking huge cheese-and-gravy covered bowl of french-fries".

It's really interesting how all of the swear-words you mention are communion-related and how in France's French you'd be hard pressed to find any swearing other than somthing-Dieu that is religious in nature.

It's really telling of how religion has been removed from French culture during the Revolution.

All those swear are in violent reaction against the Catholic Church which was prominent at the beginning of the century. This is before, nowaday, people just use these words by habit and as a cultural identity. I'd say that a vast majority of young Quebecers are agressive atheist.

While the French are secular to the point they don't even need to be aggressive about it. :)

Gets annoying at time: in French, some people drop "tu vois" (you see), "j'veux dire" (I mean), "et tout" (and all that) everywhere. For some people it gets close to an actual speech disorder :)

I don't think we do this in Greek. Come to think of it, it's weird, when I talk in Greek I use no filler, but when I speak English I litter it with "like" and "you know" like a valley girl. At least I don't say "ohmigod"...

'ela, na su po kati....' roughly: 'hey, let me tell you something...' I hear this all the time in Greece.

That's not filler, though, it's just a way of starting a sentence, like "hey". "Na sou po, are you going to eat that?"

In Northern Somali dialects you can pretty much put "dee" between every other sentence. People do it sometimes to buy time while gathering thoughts. It vaguely means "therefore".

In the South it's "noo", and it vaguely means "why don't you?". Or "allore", from Italian allora.

We sure do. In Danish "ikke?", "ikke også", "du ved" among others. In Bulgarian I hear "бе", "така" and "такова".

In Polish you can hear "co nie", "e[e]", "a[a]", "czy nie", "czyż nie" and some others.

Absolutely. In Japanese, for example, you'll sometimes hear conversations littered with なんか (nanka) and かしら (kashira).

Do the Japanese really say "desu"?

Yes. For example, if you wanted to tell a stranger "that person is a police officer," the most natural translation is probably "ano hito wa keikan desu." In other contexts, you might replace "desu" with the informal "da" or the ultra-polite "de gozaimasu" (or "de gozaru" if you're a samurai). In practice you wouldn't say it too often. Other grammatical structures (like "-te iru") are more appropriate counterparts to maybe 75% of English sentences involving "to be."

It is nonetheless grammatically possible to contrive every sentence to end in "desu." This is an unusual habit, though. It's a little like beginning every utterance in English with "it seems" or "Simon says."

です？ Wikipedia says: "word used to grammatically link a subject and predicate, often translated into English using the verb "to be". And, yes they do use it. But what is strange about it? Do English really use "to be" (in its various conjugations)?

There's an anime character who ends every sentence with です (as I described above). GP is probably referring to a famous internet meme where that's the only word she knows.

Some context: http://knowyourmeme.com/memes/desu

Yup.

Never heard about it. Maybe I should come out from woodwork from time to time.

It means "is", so yes, they do. It's used for predication instead of existence (iru & aru are for existence), but that's probably the more common is in English as well.

If you want filler, it's when people are going え～と while trying to collect their thoughts.

When I did exchange I had one teacher who would say ええと (eeto) every second word.

Alltså we have typ that in Swedish as well änna.

schjooo (ljudet en norrlänning gör då hen håller med)

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