|
 |
Why Germanic languages are generally... | ||
Tags: Germanic Languages | Pronunciation | ||
Share with:
| ||
 Language Learning Forum : General discussion |  | |
| 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 17 of 29 15 November 2014 at 10:54pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
I strongly disagree with this claim- I believe it is a tired fallacy. While it's true that most people have inaccurate intuitions about what constitutes complexity and regularity, since they perceive things similar to what they know as obvious, and different from what they know as complex, that doesn't mean that differences in complexity don't exist. Suppose you wanted to describe a language's grammar as a set of rules and exceptions to them. The rules and exceptions don't themselves exist, they are simply a way of concisely describing what is and isn't an acceptable utterance in the language. You could always eliminate rules by making every utterance a special case, or you could eliminate exceptions by adding rules about little details, but a good, concise explanation will probably have some rules with exceptions to them. Now, languages will of course vary in how many rules are required. We can obviously see that some languages have more phonemes than others, and some languages have more phonotactic rules than others, and some languages have many words in use that seem to go against their usual phonology, while others do not. This affects the size, complexity, and regularity of any description of how their phonetics work. The same thing can be done for grammar, except that linguists don't currently understand enough about grammar to do it very well. So in 2014, we are not very good at saying whether one language is more complex than another, except maybe when it comes to phonology (Danish phonology is definitely more complex than Hawaiian).
Details of Italian aside, I think chiara-sai's theory does a fantastic and straightforward job of answering the OP's question. It seems quite clear that, when languages go through a lot of sound change, they lose inflectional morphology, and their pronunciation and orthography diverge (assuming some orthography is already established). This happened more in Germanic languages than other European languages. If we want to speculate as to why those languages in particular went through more sound changes, stress-timing and language contact are excellent ideas. But I don't believe this is rigorously understood in a way that we can accurately predict what should happen in other families. There may be no straightforward reason why French and German go against the trend; they may be simply the tails of a distribution where some chance is involved in determining how one specific language changes. Edited by robarb on 15 November 2014 at 10:57pm 4 persons have voted this message useful | |||||||||
| tristano Tetraglot Senior Member Netherlands Joined 4046 days ago 905 posts - 1262 votes Speaks: Italian*, Spanish, French, English Studies: Dutch | Message 18 of 29 16 November 2014 at 2:00am | IP Logged | ||||||||
|
thanks @robarb. So, eventually, the phenomenon is too complex to provide a cause, but it has been observed that
the sound change ended to modify the grammar, whilst the standardised orthography is lazy to adapt. There isn't a simple cause but possibly a mix of many different causes that make the Germanic family change faster. Interestingly it is not the case of Icelandic and Faroese that being isolated countries had many interferences. Not surprisingly English is the one who changed the most. I personally find the story of languages very interesting. I was expecting explanations about invasions, religious movements, philosophers, writers and stuff like this (the story of Italian language is very fascinating in this sense) instead of scientific explanations, but hey, it has been interesting in any case. 1 person has 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 19 of 29 16 November 2014 at 12:30pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
The problem is that it will always be impossible to quantify grammar. How do you determine how complex a rule is? Is the fact that English strong verbs have a lexical past and a lexical past-participle a rule, or a set of rules (one per class, since most strong verbs can be groups in classes) or a large set of rules (one per verb)? At which point does something become grammar? Is the fact that German nouns have more-or-less arbitrary genders part of grammar? If so, in which form? In the form “each German noun has a gender which can be masculine, feminine or neutre”? Or should it be in the form “here is the list of all German nouns and their gender: […]”? In the first case, German nominal inflection is much simpler than Finnish, in the second it’s much more complex (as far as I know each Finnish noun only has two forms, while German nouns have a gender, a plural and for masculine nouns a choice between strong and weak paradigms). There is also some evidence, albeit weak, to support the idea that natural languages tend to have a more or less constant level of difficulty in that pidgins become more complex when they undergo creolisation, which suggests there is some equilibrium level of difficulty to which languages tend. There is also the fact that human brains have a limited capacity, which constitutes a ceiling to complexity, and that all human languages can express any concept (barring pragmatics and potential lack of vocabulary), which constitutes a floor to complexity. Now, I don’t think anyone knows how much room for variation there is between these two constraints, but they aren’t 0 and ∞, which is a start. All languages will need to achieve the same ends and if they can’t get there in one way they will come up with another way to do it (prepositions, postpositions, cases, internal flection, different verb classes, they all achieve the same result in different ways). Some of these are often not considered grammar, but why not? True, Finnish has more than a dozen of cases, but then English has more than a dozen prepositions, prepositions that often have different phonetic forms depending on their environment and that are selected by different verbs. There just isn’t a clear distinction between what is lexical and what is grammatical, and the lexicon can have any size and cannot be measured (different speakers of the same language have wildly different lexicons, so which one is the lexicon of the language? The maximal one? That seems unfair to languages that haven’t got a large corpus of literature). Then one must also consider what language is in the brain. Rules are just abstractions that help us understand language, but in the end language is just configurations of networks of neurones. Although some people probably have better language skills than others, I think it’d be hard to say if a language is more complex than another, because most languages have more than one speaker, and who do you choose to represent the language? An average of all speakers? When we describe language, we usually do it in a fashion that resembles computer code, and computer code be of various length. However the truth is that language is encoded in a network of ~90 billion neurones and ~100 trillion synapses, the configuration varies but the numbers remain similar, so can we really say that a language is more complex than another? And at this point it isn’t just the distinction between the lexicon and the grammar that becomes fuzzy, but also that between language and everything else that constitutes being human. Maybe answering “no” to the question “do some natural languages have more complex grammars than others?” is wrong, but I’m remain of the opinion that it is a less wrong answer than “yes”.
I’ve actually just finished my undergraduate degree in Linguistics. In hindsight, I should probably have studied something more useful, but it is certainly a most fascinating subject! 3 persons have voted this message useful | |||||||||
| tristano Tetraglot Senior Member Netherlands Joined 4046 days ago 905 posts - 1262 votes Speaks: Italian*, Spanish, French, English Studies: Dutch | Message 20 of 29 16 November 2014 at 2:11pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
|
Woow. It is indeed fascinating!
Very interesting you explanation aboabout grammar complexity. I often hear that Mandarin has the simplest grammar in the world, or that German is more difficult than Dutch. We should therefore say "the grammar x requires more time to be learned than y" instead? I guess this is the main benchmark used by learners to define complexity. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||
| Serpent Octoglot Senior Member Russian Federation serpent-849.livejour Joined 6596 days ago 9753 posts - 15779 votes 4 sounds Speaks: Russian*, English, FinnishC1, Latin, German, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese Studies: Danish, Romanian, Polish, Belarusian, Ukrainian, Croatian, Slovenian, Catalan, Czech, Galician, Dutch, Swedish | Message 21 of 29 16 November 2014 at 7:12pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
For me Finnish was definitely much easier. Also the same endings for adjectives and nouns. 3 persons have voted this message useful | |||||||||
| Stolan Senior Member United States Joined 4031 days ago 274 posts - 368 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Thai, Lowland Scots Studies: Arabic (classical), Cantonese | Message 22 of 29 16 November 2014 at 10:28pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
|
It's all a mess, before anyone ties complex morphology to being more difficult due to irregularity, recall that its not
always the case, Classical Sanskrit is fusional but regular as hell while Georgian verbs are agglutinating yet are devilish. The cause of the irregularities have only 1/10th maybe 1/20th to do with sound change alone in IE (and some Caucasian languages), most sound change irregularities were aggravated by the other phenomena that would take too long to explain. But to sum it up without a long paragraph, it has to do with unpredictable alternants: An example is that Spanish has a dozen or so diminutive suffixes that are not always predictable yet German just has -chen, and sometimes -lein. Late PIE was uniquely filled to the brim with dozens of extensions with nearly no meaning at all for inflection and derivation for all word classes, they were just added to stems willy nilly, same with NE Caucasian (but inflection of nouns only). The only other non-IE language with as crazy a system I know of is Hungarian (derivation only) but that's explainable and recent. (I wouldn't wan't to take up too much space)
Mandarin doesn't, but it never gained what it's cousins have so its kind of reduced in a different way, "stunted" instead of "simplified". It seems so simple overall to European language speakers for the wrong reasons, I see it as straightforward due to being smoother all over compared to it's relatives, but most have come to expect random morphology and redundancies, but when a language just uses what is needed, it seems off. Languages in the rest of the world seldom have pages upon pages of irregular paradigms for more than one or two word categories, and when to does it's mostly due to just sound change. German is considered harder than Dutch due to more irregularity really, the rest of the reasons are individual. There is no reason for why Germanic languages are the way they are, there are causes, but no reasons. Edited by Stolan on 17 November 2014 at 4:37am 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 23 of 29 17 November 2014 at 10:17am | IP Logged | ||||||||
|
@chiara-sai,
Yeah, I see where you're coming from, and as a linguistics graduate, you clearly have reliable sources to back it up. It's true that it's impossible to precisely quantify how complex a language is. One reason is that it is arbitrary to decide what data you are trying to explain. The minimal rules required to produce something we'd recognize as "good English" are far less than the rules required to explain everything that's attested in English corpora. And quantifying complexity requires you to specify a model of grammar that you can apply to each individual language. Linguistics produces such models, but they are always simplifications of the real situation (otherwise, you would have to implement real speakers to use the model!), and therefore they will always have some assumptions built in, so it will always be possible to prefer an alternative model. And yes, there are no "primitive" languages that are simple in all ways, nor are there "super-complex" languages that have more features than a human could learn. There are some forces that prevent languages from getting too simple or too complex. But there is still some variation that could be measured, if imprecisely, under some assumptions. If our intuitions make any sense, then the "complex" languages would be the ones with a lot of verb tenses and aspects, a lot of noun cases, grammatical gender and number, and individual words would form their tenses, aspects, cases, gender or number in different ways. Maybe verbs can have 100+ forms and have to agree with multiple other words in the sentence, but the agreement morpheme looks different depending on the number and gender of the speaker and listener... that kind of thing. Linguists have done analyses where they defined a list of features that occurred across languages, where usually the presence of a distinction is interpreted as complexity, and the absence of a grammatical distinction is interpreted as lack of complexity. It is all a very crude process, but the point is that no matter what way of describing languages you use, you will find some variability, and -- if differences in language complexity are meaningful and real -- most good, reasonable models should be roughly consistent with each other in their rankings. I guess this isn't fully established, and while a claim that "all languages have exactly the same complexity" is implausible, it could still be the case that it is foolish to try to compare languages' complexity, and there are reasonable definitions of complexity that would give you any possible result. Of course, even without getting to that deep level, there's something measurable that makes people say that Latin grammar is complicated and Mandarin grammar is simple. Some languages form plurals by adding a constant morpheme. Some languages form plurals by adding one of 10+ morphemes, some of which change the sound of the root form, and can't be predicted based on the sounds of the root form. Some languages don't have plurals. People notice these differences, and sometimes the difficulty depends on the typology of the learner's native language, but other times it doesn't (I don't have data on this, but I wouldn't think it would be easier to learn a language with arbitrary gender of each word rather than one lacking gender just because your native language is that way too. It may be more difficult by a smaller margin, but not easier.)
Unfortunately, the time depends on the learner's native language structure, previous language experience, culture, motivation, and what learning materials are available. As a practical matter you can estimate how long it takes people to master a given language, but you can't claim that this is due to the properties of that language itself. Even if you estimated an average over the world's population, that would only tell you how hard a grammar is to learn, given the background factors the way they are in today's world. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||
| Cristianoo Triglot Senior Member Brazil https://projetopoligRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 4120 days ago 175 posts - 289 votes Speaks: Portuguese*, FrenchB2, English Studies: Russian | Message 24 of 29 17 November 2014 at 2:38pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
|
Well, I don't understand why a language cannot be mesured as more or less difficult to
learn. For me it's simple: How predictable it is and how much rules it require to master it's grammar. So, if a language has a huge but consistent grammar, it still can be complex (because it will take you a lot of time to learn the rules and you will probably forget most of them) And if a language has an easy but weak grammar with a lot of exceptions, then it is also complex, because the rules cannot be used to create words as you need when you still dont know them Therefore, what is simple and what is hard? Well... Its simple when there are few and consistent grammar rules, with few exceptions, making things predictable and enabling us to construt sentences whenever we want on- the-fly. Its hard when it has a lot of rules and most of them are weak (lots of exceptions) or require that you know another language to undestand them, making us crazy most of the time because we have to have everything in memory in order to speak. You guys may ask: what about alphabet or pronunciation? Those things are tricky, because what is difficult for me can be easy for you. For example, French pronunciation is easy for me but very hard for japanese people. So, they are too "private stuff" and can only be used to mesure how hard a language in comparison to another. bref... 1) We could mesure how hard a language is globally by it's complexity in terms of grammar 2) We could mesure how hard a language is comparing it to another in terms of pronunciation, writting system and lack of loan words/similar vocabulary. 1 person has voted this message useful |
|  | 
Printable version
|
| Copyright 2024 FX Micheloud - All rights reserved No part of this website may be copied by any means without my written authorization. |
