|
 |
Are some languages more complex? Now/Then | ||
Tags: Linguistics | Grammar | ||
Share with:
| ||
 Language Learning Forum : General discussion |  | |
| Chung Diglot Senior Member Joined 7154 days ago 4228 posts - 8259 votes  20 sounds Speaks: English*, French Studies: Polish, Slovak, Uzbek, Turkish, Korean, Finnish | Message 9 of 29 22 October 2013 at 10:15pm | IP Logged | ||
|
On the strength of that line on complexity, let's not forget the locked thread "Most inefficient languages?"
4 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| ScottScheule Diglot Senior Member United States scheule.blogspot.com Joined 5226 days ago 645 posts - 1176 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish Studies: Latin, Hungarian, Biblical Hebrew, Old English, Russian, Swedish, German, Italian, French | Message 10 of 29 22 October 2013 at 10:23pm | IP Logged | ||
|
You seem to be conflating inflection with complexity. But inflection is only one means by which a language may be complex--there are others. For example, word order may be of paramount importance. That said, to answer your questions:
1. Yes, some languages are more complex. Holding everything else constant, a language with 50 irregular verbs is more complicated than one with 40. "Is the difficulty of inflection overrated and simply taught wrongly?" 2. Inflection can be difficult and it can be easy, depending on the language. I find it easy in Latin and difficult in Russian, and likely others have the opposite experience. Is its difficulty overrated, whatever it may be? Probably not, since (presuming we're speaking about English speakers) it's a strange and alien feature of a language and thus difficult. "Are European, Semetic, and tribal tongues simply unrivaled in complexity while Asian and Austronesian ones reflect lax intelligence?" 3. Don't Asians usually beat out (at least) Europeans in academic achievement? And how can any Asian or Austronesian language reflect lax intelligence, when any Asian or Austronesian infant brought up in a European/Semitic/tribal environment would just as surely pick up the local tongue there? "Are English and Chinese even simplified compared to something like Czech?" Without knowing much about Czech, the answer is probably yes. Why? Because languages that have encompassed a large amount of people, especially those learning the language as a second language, tend to undergo levelling, while isolated languages do not. The second language speaker is more likely to, for example, regularize verbs or disregard inflections or omit difficult sounds--whatever makes the language easier. Thus languages that come to be spoken by non-natives are simplified. Czech is isolated, comparatively. Edited by ScottScheule on 22 October 2013 at 10:37pm 6 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| Papashaw Newbie Australia Joined 4101 days ago 28 posts - 32 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Mandarin | Message 11 of 29 23 October 2013 at 9:07am | IP Logged | ||
|
Thank you for the replies, I have corrected myself and learned more. I suppose inflection is not as bad as it looks at
first. There are other methods for grammar, and I have forgotten them but wonder just how they feel. When referring to Asian languages I was referring to the non-agglutinative ones. As for my equating of inflection to difficulty: I have seen internet ESL learners being unkind to English; calling it the easiest to learn which is why it's used everywhere, having no exceptions, they can say things multiple ways in their tongue but only one way in English, it's a pidgin etc. Everything you can think of. I have always guessed this was due to English being the least inflected Indo-Euro language but this isn't even true! Afrikaans is more analytical. So far people on this forum seem to know what they are talking about, but who am I to judge them? I know so little. Edited by Papashaw on 23 October 2013 at 9:48am 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
 jeff_lindqvist Diglot Moderator SwedenRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 6907 days ago 4250 posts - 5711 votes Speaks: Swedish*, English Studies: German, Spanish, Russian, Dutch, Mandarin, Esperanto, Irish, French Personal Language Map | Message 12 of 29 23 October 2013 at 4:46pm | IP Logged | ||
Only one way? Just take basic expressions as "I ate", "I have eaten", "I had eaten", "I was eating", "I have been eating" and "I had been eating" (all implying a past tense)... I'm pretty sure that there are some speakers who merge all these into just one or two forms in their native language, but all of sudden they have to learn half a dozen. Well, maybe they don't, and they're the same ones saying it's easy. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Papashaw Newbie Australia Joined 4101 days ago 28 posts - 32 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Mandarin | Message 13 of 29 23 October 2013 at 7:26pm | IP Logged | ||
|
I hear your replies for modern languages, yet I look at Ancient Greek and wonder how it could have far more
irregular grammar than its Roman or Chinese contemporary at the time. This still is bothering me as we can sort some modern languages based on whether they're isolated or leveled as Scott says, but shouldn't something like Chinese, an analytical language, or even ancient varieties such as Old Chinese, develop some sort of natural irregularity anywhere as most languages do? I know inflection isn't necessarily difficult but it would be shocking for a Chinese person from 500 BC to be show just how irregular and exception filled a western language is compared to their own. Not the inflection or word end changing, but the irregularity would get him. It's just hard to believe these languages coexisted in the same era. To Jeff: You'd be surprised how common that view is all over the internet. So much satire and posting, surf the net for a day in German and see you will many joke about English being grammarless and used since it is simple enough for Americans to learn. Edited by Papashaw on 23 October 2013 at 7:44pm 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
 emk Diglot Moderator United States Joined 5530 days ago 2615 posts - 8806 votes Speaks: English*, FrenchB2 Studies: Spanish, Ancient Egyptian Personal Language Map | Message 14 of 29 23 October 2013 at 8:01pm | IP Logged | ||
Don't forget "I did eat" and "I used to eat"! :-) Highly analytic languages can still have really complicated tense systems. English, as you pointed out, has an excessive number of compound past tenses. And learning when to use each tense can be a nuisance. To give an example from French, the imperfect is quite easy to conjugate. There's a bunch of irregular stems, but who cares about that if the endings are completely consistent? But the French imperfect Je faisais is very subtly different from the English I was doing, and when I tried to treat them as interchangeable, I almost drowned in red ink over on Lang-8. Instead, I've had to build up a whole new set of distinctions in my head. Similarly, I just don't get the distinction between been done and done been in certain AAVE dialects, even though those two verb aspects are purely analytic. Or for one of my favorite examples, Middle Egyptian is one of the most analytic of the classic Afro-Asiatic languages, at least in its written form. But even though it doesn't have cases (or even copula verbs), it does pretty weird things with word order. For example s.t nfr.t (beautiful woman) is a modified noun, but nfr s.t (the woman is beautiful) is a complete sentence. The only inflection there is the extremely regular feminine marker .t, and the verb is implicit. But even though Egyptian is far less inflected than French, I find French grammar easier, because French word order is a lot closer to that of English, and I don't have to twist my thoughts so much. Also, I've been exposed to so much French that it seems pretty natural and obvious, and I don't notice how weird certain things are until I try to translate them to English. "Analytic" does not mean "easy." Quite often, it means, "Just wait until you see what fun things we're going to do with word order and helper verbs." 7 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| Josquin Heptaglot Senior Member Germany Joined 4842 days ago 2266 posts - 3992 votes Speaks: German*, English, French, Latin, Italian, Russian, Swedish Studies: Japanese, Irish, Portuguese, Persian | Message 15 of 29 23 October 2013 at 9:15pm | IP Logged | ||
Russian, Lithuanian, and Icelandic still coexist with Mandarin and other analytic languages. What's hard to believe about that? Heavily inflecting case and gender systems are typical for the Indo-European language family, while other language families never had them. That's just the way it is and has nothing to do with "now" and "then". 7 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| Henkkles Triglot Senior Member Finland Joined 4251 days ago 544 posts - 1141 votes Speaks: Finnish*, English, Swedish Studies: Russian | Message 16 of 29 24 October 2013 at 9:23am | IP Logged | ||
Uralic and Turkic languages (among others) would like to have a word with you ;) [note: I edited some things out of the post for this purpose] 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. |
