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5 Languages as a sample for the whole? | ||
Tags: Choosing a Language | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : General discussion |  | |
| epictetus Groupie Canada Joined 3881 days ago 54 posts - 87 votes  Speaks: English* Studies: Spanish | Message 1 of 9 15 February 2015 at 10:39pm | IP Logged | ||
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Apologies ahead of time if this has been discussed (relevant thread URL welcome) but I wasn't sure how to search for this.
Which five languages would you choose to represent as much of human language as is practicable? In statistical terms (but wholly subjective, of course) a semi-representative sample of the population of linguistic variety. In some languages there are tenses/moods/aspects that aren't possible in others, complex forms of speech in Korean (+ honourifics), agglutinative languages, and languages with clicks or without gender distinctions. There are so many interesting features in language that I thought it would be interesting to see what peculiarities are valued by people and how they might choose a 'Top 5'. 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| rdearman Senior Member United Kingdom rdearman.orgRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 5235 days ago 881 posts - 1812 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Italian, French, Mandarin | Message 2 of 9 15 February 2015 at 11:23pm | IP Logged | ||
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So are you asking for us to pick 5 languages that give you the ability to speak to the most people? Or are you asking which languages we find the most interesting?
1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| robarb Nonaglot Senior Member United States languagenpluson Joined 5058 days ago 361 posts - 921 votes Speaks: Portuguese, English*, German, Italian, Spanish, Dutch, Swedish, Esperanto, French Studies: Mandarin, Danish, Russian, Norwegian, Cantonese, Japanese, Korean, Polish, Greek, Latin, Nepali, Modern Hebrew | Message 3 of 9 15 February 2015 at 11:59pm | IP Logged | ||
Seems like neither-- the idea is to pick 5 languages that, collectively, cover the widest range of the features that are present in the world's languages, considering the "world's languages" to be weighted by the number of speakers and not the number of languages. From Wikipedia, we have here the distribution of population to language families. 
What jumps out is that over 80% of the population is covered by 5 language families. So as a first approximation, we could pick a typical Indo-European, Sino-Tibetan, Niger-Congo, Altaic, and Afro-Asiatic or Austronesian language. With specific choices being somewhat arbitrary, such a list could be: Portuguese, Mandarin, Yoruba, Turkish, and Egyptian Arabic. However, this is probably not the best possible solution, as the most populous families such as Indo-European might contain enough variability to justify picking two languages, while some pairs of families may be typologically similar enough that both shouldn't appear on the list. But I think the question is too poorly defined to construct an optimal solution. 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| epictetus Groupie Canada Joined 3881 days ago 54 posts - 87 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Spanish | Message 4 of 9 16 February 2015 at 12:55am | IP Logged | ||
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I'm not interested in the number of speakers nor the geographical distribution of languages. The use of the terms sample and
population was perhaps a poor choice of words. Forget I said it. What I meant was which languages would expose a person to the greatest variety of linguistic concepts. Re-using the second part of the post, I might select German (agglutinative), Korean (levels of speech), Spanish (gender! wow! so amazing haha), a Slavic language for a complex case system, and... Xhosa because it has clicks. I hope those choices have annoyed you and encourage you to suggest much more reasoned answers! Edit: A language can have more than one feature, of course, and some concepts can be assumed (gender, word order, etc.) I'm also aware that definitions of what constitutes a language or a dialect are flexible. Proto-languages would be excluded as they exist only abstractly. Edited by epictetus on 16 February 2015 at 1:01am 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| robarb Nonaglot Senior Member United States languagenpluson Joined 5058 days ago 361 posts - 921 votes Speaks: Portuguese, English*, German, Italian, Spanish, Dutch, Swedish, Esperanto, French Studies: Mandarin, Danish, Russian, Norwegian, Cantonese, Japanese, Korean, Polish, Greek, Latin, Nepali, Modern Hebrew | Message 5 of 9 16 February 2015 at 1:35am | IP Logged | ||
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My mistake, misreading "population" as human population. It's clear that you meant the statistical sense.
However, statistically speaking a good sample of the population would be to just pick 5 random languages, not 5 that are maximally diverse. In order to pick 5 languages that are maximally diverse typologically, one would have to know a lot more about obscure languages than I do. Here's an attempt though: Xhosa: Lots of uncommon consonants including clicks, 15 genders Cantonese: Logographic writing system, huge proportion of compound words, 6 tones Pirahã: Low number of phonemes; controversial claims that it lacks grammatical structures thought universal Papiamento: A creole that blends several source languages, mostly Portuguese-Spanish Inuktitut: Polysynthetic morphology, syllabic writing system I'm not sure that Xhosa and Inuktitut are different enough from each other, and maybe it would be better to switch one out for a language from one of the SVO, VSO, SOV type patterns not represented. 3 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| epictetus Groupie Canada Joined 3881 days ago 54 posts - 87 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Spanish | Message 6 of 9 16 February 2015 at 2:01am | IP Logged | ||
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That's exactly the type of answer I was hoping for. Thank you.
I'm sure there's a reason to justify including an Indo-European language, no? Edited by epictetus on 16 February 2015 at 2:02am 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| robarb Nonaglot Senior Member United States languagenpluson Joined 5058 days ago 361 posts - 921 votes Speaks: Portuguese, English*, German, Italian, Spanish, Dutch, Swedish, Esperanto, French Studies: Mandarin, Danish, Russian, Norwegian, Cantonese, Japanese, Korean, Polish, Greek, Latin, Nepali, Modern Hebrew | Message 7 of 9 16 February 2015 at 2:28am | IP Logged | ||
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I didn't include an Indo-European language because I wanted to include a creole, and I ended up choosing a creole
that's heavily based on Indo-European languages. An equally good solution would've been to choose a non-IE creole like Juba Arabic, which would've then excluded any Semitic languages as too similar. Maybe my first list is wrong for not having a language with fusional morphology. Also, it should really have a signed language. And actually, I could put an Indo-European language in and replace Papiamento with a language that is both a creole and a signed language! I feel much better about this list: Xhosa, Cantonese, Pirahã, French, Nicaraguan Sign Language. 4 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| chiara-sai Triglot Groupie United Kingdom Joined 3707 days ago 54 posts - 146 votes Speaks: Italian*, EnglishC2, French Studies: German, Japanese | Message 8 of 9 16 February 2015 at 8:23am | IP Logged | ||
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Ideally you’d want 5 languages that present:
• All the most common word orders: SOV, SVO, VSO, VOS and a non-configurational language. Also left-branching and right- branching. • All the most common morphosyntactic alignments: nominative-accusative, ergative-absolutive, direct, tripartite and Philippine alignment. • A language that has many consonants, a language that has many vowels, a language that has few of both, a tonal language and a click language. • An isolating language, a fusional language, an agglutinative language, a polysynthetic language. • Other features such as gender, verbal agreement, derivational and inflectional morphology… With this in mind, I would choose: • Greenlandic: polysynthetic, SOV, ergative. • Thai: tonal, back-unrounded vowels, isolating, right-branching SVO. • Turkish: front-rounded vowels, agglutinative, mildly non-configurational, nominative-accusative, left-branching SOV, both inflectional and derivational morphology. • Tagalog: fusional (maybe?), verb initial, Philippine alignment. • Khosa: tones, SVO, clicks, agglutinative, genders, many consonants. What I think I’ve missed is verbal agreement, direct alignment and tripartite alignment. 6 persons have voted this message useful |
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