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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 |  | |
| Woodpecker Triglot Senior Member United States Joined 5813 days ago 351 posts - 590 votes  Speaks: English*, Arabic (Written), Arabic (Egyptian) Studies: Arabic (classical) | Message 9 of 9 16 February 2015 at 10:55am | IP Logged |
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This is a really interesting question! Three caveats to my answer.
First, I personally think it's most interesting if you limit yourself to relatively widely-used languages-- Pirahã to my mind is linguistically (and perhaps philosophically) fascinating, but so uncommon that it's more an outlier than a representative of a subset of human language. Second, my lists prioritizes morphology, then a set of factors including culture/function, phonology, and script, and then alignment. Third, I don't care about word order. I've dabbled in languages with all the usual suspects, and it's just not as noticeable a difference, to me, as it's often regarded as being. A purely OVS language would probably destroy my sanity, as occasional OVS clauses in Arabic are confusing enough, but dominantly OVS languages are outliers of the Pirahã sort to my mind. My list: - English (understood broadly): Perhaps a lame choice on face, but one thing I find most fascinating about language is adaptation and deployment for divergent uses, and forms of English are spoken by groups ranging from native-speaker professors to illiterate traders who use English as the basis for a pidgin market language. This may be cheating but I don't care. Also analytic-ish, which will otherwise be a hole in what follows. - Sanskrit: On the grammatical level, astoundingly complex synthetic-fusional + incorporates many scripts + partly reconstructed + liturgical language. - Xhosa: Phonology + synthetic-agglutinative. - Cantonese: Ideograms + isolating + (many) tones. - A native American language that I cannot make up my mind about, but definitely polysynthetic and ideally covering some of the bases I've missed in terms of alignment. Possible candidates include Navajo, Wasteco (for inversion, but that's possibly a feature too boutique to avoid my first caveat), Greenlandic. chiara-sai's list also works for me; I think it's better than mine in purely grammatical terms by quite a wide margin, particularly in its coverage of alignment, but as I've said, variety to me also means functions and culture, hence the inclusion of English and Sanskrit. Bottom line: five is not enough! 3 persons have voted this message useful |
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