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"Economical" vs "Unconomical" Languages! | ||
Tags: Meaning of words | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : General discussion |  | |
| chiara-sai Triglot Groupie United Kingdom Joined 3707 days ago 54 posts - 146 votes  Speaks: Italian*, EnglishC2, French Studies: German, Japanese | Message 9 of 9 10 November 2014 at 9:33am | IP Logged |
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There are two competing forces at play. On one hand people keep shortening words (e.g. Latin ‘maturus’ -> French ‘mûr’), on
the other hand people don’t like it when words become too short and replace them with longer words or add suffixes to them (e.g. Mandarin speakers saying ‘chī-fàn’ instead of just ‘chī’, or Spanish speakers saying ‘corazon’ instead of ‘cor’). These two forces keep the language changing but prevent it from being eroded away in its entirety: words keep dropping parts, but new words or suffixes are added to compensate. I do get the impression that some languages use fewer syllables than others, but I have never really looked into that systematically. I suspect the prosody of the language affects the amount of shortening that takes place; a stress-timed language like English is probably subject to more shortening than a syllable-timed language such as Italian because of the higher variability in speech velocity (it’s not that English is spoken faster than Italian, but rather that in an Italian sentence syllables tend to all have the same duration, while in English unstressed words and syllables are pronounced much faster while stressed words and syllables are pronounced much slower). There is also a difference between orthographic length and spoken length: ‘dangereuse’ and ‘pericolosa’ are both 10 letters long, but the first is actually much shorter in pronunciation: [dɑ̃ʒ.ʀøz] vs [pe.ri.ko.lo.za], 6 phonemes vs 10, or 2 syllables vs 5. 5 persons have voted this message useful |
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