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Are some languages more complex? Now/Then | ||
Tags: Linguistics | Grammar | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : General discussion |  | |
| Papashaw Newbie Australia Joined 4104 days ago 28 posts - 32 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Mandarin | Message 1 of 29 22 October 2013 at 7:40pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
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This is a topic that has been dragged around and tossed back and forth for ages, but alas it is risen once again!
Why? To answer a nagging question in my head. So where do I begin? Let's take languages of olden days and look at them? Latin which is fusional, the conjugations are not agglutinating with changes in a vowel or different endings completely for a passive or subjunctive. Modern students have to learn through memorizing endings in front of a chart. Declensions and gender too. Ancient Greek, which has verb forms that look very irregular to the novice's eye but still having a pattern, yet different endings still must be learned. Nearly 300 different forms, and the declensions and gender too. Classical Chinese, now this is interesting! We can excuse the script as a manmade invention overlaying the natural tongue, but the grammar? It was analytic and tones did not exist then the way they do now. For an old language, which we imagine in our heads as full of charts containing hundreds of forms, this one looks so simple to a learner. The characters and reading are complex but the actual grammar isn't as frustrating for a student. But what can we use to excuse the huge discrepancies between western and eastern languages, and modern and ancient tongues? Perhaps the highly inflected forms of Greek and Latin were high register varieties. If we walked into a Greek or Roman village 500 BC and chatted up a random peasant, they may speak a much simpler vulgar varietye. But languages of tribes in these days (minus perhaps Austronesian groups) speak "complex" looking languages. As for Classical Chinese, maybe the writing system could not reflect their spoken grammar? It does seem so strange for them to coexist in the same times as the Ancient Greeks who had hundreds of ways to conjugate a verb and multitudes of declensions while the Chinese language's analytical grammar was not too different than the one today. Agglutinating languages such as Hungarian don't seem to bother me since they look much more regular and lack gender unlike something like Sanskrit or those languages with very few speakers. But for those with few speakers there are some that seem simple and others that seem very complicated. And even to this day I still scratch my head thinking how it could be that Polish or Navajo exists with all her inflections on one side of the globe yet something like Khmer or Mandarin, which is free of declensions, tenses, conjugations, cases, participles, gerunds, etc., also exists on another side. Is the difficulty of inflection overrated and simply taught wrongly? Are European, Semetic, and tribal tongues simply unrivaled in complexity while Asian and Austronesian ones reflect lax intelligence? Was Chinese simplified earlier on due to uniting in the Bronze age rather than later? Are English and Chinese even simplified compared to something like Czech? Please reply with some thoughts that would quell my thirst for answers. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||
| tastyonions Triglot Senior Member United States goo.gl/UIdChYRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 4666 days ago 1044 posts - 1823 votes  Speaks: English*, French, Spanish Studies: Italian | Message 2 of 29 22 October 2013 at 8:14pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
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"Asian" languages, even major ones, do not necessarily follow the generalizations you have made about them. Japanese, for example, is highly inflected and agglutinative, as is Korean. Edited by tastyonions on 22 October 2013 at 8:15pm 4 persons have voted this message useful | |||||||||
 emk Diglot Moderator United States Joined 5533 days ago 2615 posts - 8806 votes Speaks: English*, FrenchB2 Studies: Spanish, Ancient Egyptian Personal Language Map | Message 3 of 29 22 October 2013 at 8:22pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
It's easy to describe any language so that it sounds really hard. For example, written French actually has over 600 irregular verbs that fall into approximately 106 different categories, plus a verb tense which is used only in written narration (and almost never in speech), plus another handful of verb tenses like the imperfect subjunctive that are only used in literary registers. Gender marking is absolute mess, and doubly so in the presence of leading vowels. And French students frequently complain that when it comes to the rules of French grammar, even the exceptions have exceptions. But I could tell you the same story another way, and it would be obvious that French is actually pretty easy: Most of the verb forms are identical when spoken, you can almost always get by with the -er verbs and a handful of common irregular verbs, you can do a lot with just three tenses, and the pronunciation is 95% predictable. You can even fake the subjunctive quite well if you know a handful of verb forms and rules. And once you get beyond the most common 1,000 words, English speakers get at least 50% of their vocabulary for free. For anther example, Benny Lewis has a great post which argues that Chinese is actually pretty easy. You can write a post like that for almost any language. Or the opposite post, claiming that a given language is nearly impossible.
As you noticed, register doesn't have much to do with complexity. For example, African American Vernacular English is generally considered a casual register, but some regional dialects have an impressively complicated system of verb aspects for communicating fine distinctions that require adverbs in standard English.
Almost certainly, at least in French. I very occasionally memorize a verb table, but mostly I just listen and read and try to pay attention to the details. And because I have so much comprehensible exposure, French grammar mostly makes sense, and I generally say, "Oh, so that's how that works!" It's hard to find something counter-intuitive if you've seen it a thousand times. Meanwhile I see students grinding away, memorizing the conjugations of irregular verbs that native speakers don't actually use all that much, or struggling to learn exceptions to exceptions to rules that they barely know how to apply in the first place. I think people would have a much easier time learning this stuff if French was a part of their day-to-day environment, and they heard and read it all the time. Pretty much everybody who joined the Super Challenge has made impressive advances over the last 17 months, and some of us have decidedly haphazard approaches to formal study. :-) Edited by emk on 22 October 2013 at 8:27pm 17 persons have voted this message useful | |||||||||
| Chung Diglot Senior Member Joined 7157 days ago 4228 posts - 8259 votes 20 sounds Speaks: English*, French Studies: Polish, Slovak, Uzbek, Turkish, Korean, Finnish | Message 4 of 29 22 October 2013 at 8:26pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
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See the following for related discussion:
Origin of Inflection/Gender Agglutinative to fusional to analytic... Would it be even possible to lose cases? Cases and language development 6 persons have voted this message useful | |||||||||
| Bao Diglot Senior Member Germany tinyurl.com/pe4kqe5 Joined 5767 days ago 2256 posts - 4046 votes Speaks: German*, English Studies: French, Spanish, Japanese, Mandarin | Message 5 of 29 22 October 2013 at 8:50pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
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Yay troll fodder.
Seriously. I have this idea, which is: A language is about as similar as the same language close by in history and distance as it needs to be, as happy to incorporate new features regarding vocabulary, grammar, phonemes as those seem spiffy, and as complex as it can get away with without people forgetting all the irregular stuff and simplifying it. And features, well. Features. You could, let's say, code important information as language and made sure you get your point across by using stress patterns, word order, redundancy, marker particles, different vocabulary, and surely there are many other ways I can't currently think of. You need at least one of these things to make sure the listener actually understands the important information, but you don't need all of them at once. But what you need is to have the listener understand not only the important information, but also that you are highlighting it as important information. So word order or specifically invented particles might not be the best choice in English. On the other hand, Spanish doesn't work to well with the kind of prosody change I do in German, because of the way stress works in either language. So, they use redundancy more than Germans do. Now, I recently listened to a description of Spanish features in Miami English, which could show some very interesting transgressions, as the timing of that variety of English is closer to Spanish. Sorry, I digress. I meant to say, who is to judge which feature or combination of features is better at solving a problem? And I suspect that people who compare the 'complexity of languages' and end up with straight answers, might compare an aspect in which one language uses a strategy using one or two features to solve a problem, and the other language uses several different strategies in a comparable situation. You could easily come to the conclusion that the second language is simpler, or that it is less logical. I don't seem much benefit in this kind of comparision. I want to know if languages use similar strategies or not, and which strategies they do use. Not whether somebody likes one strategy better than another one. Edited by Bao on 22 October 2013 at 8:51pm 3 persons have voted this message useful | |||||||||
| Maralol Nonaglot Newbie France Joined 5019 days ago 35 posts - 75 votes Speaks: Spanish, French*, English, German, Italian, Dutch, Swedish, Portuguese, Catalan Studies: Polish, Danish, Russian, Mandarin, Japanese | Message 6 of 29 22 October 2013 at 9:00pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
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I don't think languages become less complex. In my opinion it's the complexity that
evolves, for some languages cases are replaced by a stricter word order and more prepositions. The thing is, we're too used to this to notice it since most of us here speak English, Spanish, French, etc. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||
| tarvos Super Polyglot Winner TAC 2012 Senior Member China likeapolyglot.wordpr Joined 4708 days ago 5310 posts - 9399 votes Speaks: Dutch*, English, Swedish, French, Russian, German, Italian, Norwegian, Mandarin, Romanian, Afrikaans Studies: Greek, Modern Hebrew, Spanish, Portuguese, Czech, Korean, Esperanto, Finnish | Message 7 of 29 22 October 2013 at 9:36pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
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Every language has easy and hard bits, the only thing that varies is where you find 'em.
Difficulty is related to what you already know, not how hard a language is intrinsically. Many things about Latin are easy and predictable. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||
| emk Diglot Moderator United States Joined 5533 days ago 2615 posts - 8806 votes Speaks: English*, FrenchB2 Studies: Spanish, Ancient Egyptian Personal Language Map | Message 8 of 29 22 October 2013 at 10:00pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
Um. Wow. (awkward pause) I somehow missed this line when I read your post. If you think Asian languages reflect "lax intelligence", what exactly are you basing this on? I certainly wouldn't make such a claim without mastering a language to a high level. There's no such thing as an easy human language. Ask the poor programmers who work on Google Translate. Even the most ardent student of grammar will run out of grammar books long before reaching the actual, living complexity of any language. Languages only seem easy because they're familiar— either because they work like a language you already know, or because you've seen them so much that they're like an old friend. Edited by emk on 22 October 2013 at 11:00pm 13 persons have voted this message useful |
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