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English & Afrikaans = More Advanced? | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : General discussion |  | |
| alexptrans Pentaglot Senior Member Israel Joined 6776 days ago 208 posts - 236 votes  Speaks: English, Modern Hebrew, Russian*, French, Arabic (Written) Studies: Icelandic | Message 25 of 39 02 December 2006 at 8:51am | IP Logged | ||
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Why don't we "fix" English and lose the articles (a/an/the)? There are plenty of languages out there that don't have articles (including Russian), so it should work just fine. Another silly redundancy of English, which does not exist in many other languages, is the requirement that each sentence must have a verb, even in sentences like "It is noon" or "I am a boy". In Russian, for example, these sentences would be "Noon" and "I boy", respectively. So English still has room for "improvement".
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| RogueRook Diglot Senior Member Germany N/A Joined 6843 days ago 174 posts - 177 votes 6 sounds Speaks: German*, English Studies: Hungarian, Turkish | Message 26 of 39 02 December 2006 at 10:26am | IP Logged | ||
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I don't think the articles are redundant.
Please compare: "A man was seen entering Greasy Gary's Diner around noon" "THE man was seen entering Greasy Gary's Diner around noon" There is some semantic difference here, wouldn't you agree? In the first case the man is undefined while the second sentence talks about a *certain* man, a man who is known or who has been described previously. Your other point is more valid, though ultimately missing the point. Hungarian and Turkish also don't need exestential verbs they way Englsih does: HA: A lány szőke. "the girl blond" TR: Bu kız sarı saçlı "this girl yellow hair-with" (Tr. lacking defnite article) I wouldn't call the inclusion of an existential verb as being the case with IE languages a silly redundancy. Here the focus is on the "being" while in HU and TR the focus is on the quality. A slight philosophical difference if you wish, simply a different way of seeing and describing the world. Now think about what you said. These difference make learning languages intruiging and worthwhile wouldn't you agree? BTW: You cannot fix a living language. Edited by RogueRook on 02 December 2006 at 10:30am 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| alexptrans Pentaglot Senior Member Israel Joined 6776 days ago 208 posts - 236 votes Speaks: English, Modern Hebrew, Russian*, French, Arabic (Written) Studies: Icelandic | Message 27 of 39 02 December 2006 at 11:36am | IP Logged | ||
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:-)
My whole post was (supposed to be) tongue-in-cheek. As some members on these boards already know, I am the first to agree that the differences between languages is what makes them absolutely fascinating. Sometimes, taking me seriously is not a good idea. Edited by alexptrans on 02 December 2006 at 11:40am 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Quackers Triglot Newbie United States Joined 6723 days ago 18 posts - 24 votes Speaks: English*, French, Mandarin Studies: Japanese, Bengali, Armenian, Italian, Russian | Message 28 of 39 05 December 2006 at 12:50pm | IP Logged | ||
My guess is that both English and Afrikaans were heavily influenced by non-native speakers of Old English and Dutch, respectively. In the case of English, you would have a powerful French-speaking stratum on the top of society that was unable to get the masses to adopt French. Since Norman French and Old English would not have had the same case systems and the same gender for the bulk of their words, I guess those two features dropped out of the English language. (Creoles, as a rule, tend to drop case systems and genders.) Similarly, the Cape Colony had German and French speakers as well. Furthermore, the majority of people in the colony were slaves, often from the East Indies or the Indian Subcontinent. Unlike the case in the American South - where the masters were generally English speakers - there was no one ethnic group to which the bulk of the slave masters belonged. It's thought that Afrikaans may have evolved from a creole which drew many of its features from Dutch - and, as noted elsewhere, creoles do tend to be "simpler" and "more logical" than other languages. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| ColdBlue Groupie Angola Joined 6584 days ago 40 posts - 41 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Russian | Message 29 of 39 06 December 2006 at 8:44pm | IP Logged | ||
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^ This sounds pretty good ^
I've been doing some research and it seems like Afrikaans evolved out of the kitchen, the nanny's (or slaves) would take care of the children, and thus Afrikaans came into being, but then the kids were also instructed to learn Dutch, and overtime people just stopped learning Dutch. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Serpent Octoglot Senior Member Russian Federation serpent-849.livejour Joined 6608 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 30 of 39 07 December 2006 at 2:19pm | IP Logged | ||
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The gender system also makes it clearer which object you mean if you refer to something from the sentence by a pronoun in the next sentence. Maybe it just seems logical to me, as my mother-tongue is Russian.
I think gender is a nice feature, even though this is the main reason of my problems with German. :( 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Captain Haddock Diglot Senior Member Japan kanjicabinet.tumblr. Joined 6779 days ago 2282 posts - 2814 votes Speaks: English*, Japanese Studies: French, Korean, Ancient Greek | Message 31 of 39 08 December 2006 at 1:35am | IP Logged | ||
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Gender inflection and agreement also makes it more obvious which words in a sentence are nouns and adjectives, respectively. This part-of-speech ambiguity must be solved other ways in English, and it might make the language harder for some.
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 Iversen Super Polyglot Moderator Denmark berejst.dk Joined 6714 days ago 9078 posts - 16473 votes Speaks: Danish*, French, English, German, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, Dutch, Swedish, Esperanto, Romanian, Catalan Studies: Afrikaans, Greek, Norwegian, Russian, Serbian, Icelandic, Latin, Irish, Lowland Scots, Indonesian, Polish, Croatian Personal Language Map | Message 32 of 39 08 December 2006 at 9:40am | IP Logged | ||
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As you go further and further back in the history of the Germanic languages you find more and more flexions and longer and longer word forms. English and Afrikaans are both very close to the point where they have lost their morphology and let a (loose and semantical) syntax take over. The Scandinavian languages and Dutch slightly less so, German and Icelandic have kept a large chunk of the grammar they had around the year 1000. And even those ancient languages were a result of phononological changes that almost always resulted in shorter words, followed by morphological changes that generally meant the loss of forms or even whole categories. It is hard not to see a direction in this, but on the other hand it is a fact that languages like German and Russian have proven that morphology rich languages can be perfectly useable in a turbulent and fast moving epoch. So even if it seems to be almost a law of nature that languages evolve towards simpler morphology and more diffuse and complicated syntax (or even idiomatics when the syntactic rules also break down) then it doesn't seem to happen because of any benefits, but rather as a result of historical clashes and ordinary human laziness.
Which leaves another question: how did the languages become so complicated in the first place? Did people several thousand years ago have too much free time on their hand plus a propensity for sitting in the long dark nights inventing more and more complicated ways of expressing themselves? Hardly likely. I'm not an expert on Indoeuropean, so the following may be guesswork, but it seems to me the the endings in the complicated morphological tables of for instance latin and Old Norse show clear signs of having been originally short free words that were cut down and standardized until at last they coalesced with longer and more meaningful words. For instance many synthetic passive forms seem to be made up of a verbal root and a form of the verb for "to be" or "to have" or another auxiliary verb. The problem is of course that these developments generally must have taken place before writing was introduced. But if the morphologic tables were created in this way they also would represent a tendency to simplify language even though this at a first glance seems to have resulted in something more complicated. Maybe somebody will sit in a 1000 years time and wonder how people long ago could survive with so little morphology and so much confused syntax and idiomatics. If we are ousted by androids I'm sure these would prefer languages with a good strict morphology to a bottomless unruly morass like modern English. Edited by Iversen on 08 December 2006 at 9:48am 1 person has voted this message useful |
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