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How difficult are austronesian languages? | ||
Tags: Difficulty | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : General discussion |  | |
| hughes007 Diglot Newbie Spain Joined 5524 days ago 17 posts - 21 votes Speaks: Spanish*, Italian Studies: EnglishB2 | Message 1 of 6 19 December 2012 at 8:36pm | IP Logged | ||
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First off, I'm not interested in learning them. Nevertheless, I'm pretty curious about
them and I don't refuse the option of learning some notions of one austronesian language. The reasing why they entice my curiosity is because of their analytical grammar, something mostly unusual on other regions of the world. It is one of the reasons why I want to study and learn Mandarin Chinese but its writing system pushes me away at the moment. So, these languages (Hawaian, Maori, Tongan, etc...) not only don't inflect but also are written with Latin script. By the other hand, its vocabulary surely is pretty alien compared with western languages. Anyway, I don't think it is a hard task either just because I don't think they have a substantial vocabulary extension. I know their grammar have peculiarities that make harder its learning in other areas (noun classes, honorifics, dual-trial-paucal, etc...) so I'm pretty certain of the fact that many austronesian and southeast asian minor languages are as difficult as many indigenous american languages are (hardest languages from my point of view) but I also believe there are tons of languages with an esperanto-like or English-like difficulty at oceania. I know it is usually boring talking of subjective topics like language difficulty or language beauty. We all have however some clear ideas: inuktitut is more complicated than Spanish, for example. Therefore, at least from a Western point of view I'd like to know your thought about the "learnability" of austronesian languages. Resources and opinions on specific languages will be greatly welcomed. If I'm wrong and they are not easy at all, I would like to know why indigenous languages are, at a great extent, so difficult. PS: By the way, I can't understand why analytical languages are so "rare". Is it possible that the more developed a language is, the more inflected its grammar is a possible reason why analytical languages are so "weird"? However, this hypothesis doesn't kill my doubts, full-fledged languages like Vietnamese or all Chinese Languages are analytical too, languages with centuries of history. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| ling Diglot Groupie Taiwan Joined 4586 days ago 61 posts - 94 votes  Speaks: English*, Mandarin Studies: Indonesian, Thai | Message 2 of 6 19 December 2012 at 8:51pm | IP Logged | ||
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Indonesian is considered by many to be one of the easiest languages in the world. Tagalog
is considerably harder, with interesting features like so-called Austronesian alignment. Some of Taiwan's Aboriginal languages, like Atayal, are even more difficult. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Serpent Octoglot Senior Member Russian Federation serpent-849.livejour Joined 6597 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 3 of 6 19 December 2012 at 11:44pm | IP Logged | ||
Indonesian is fairly easy, yeah. For me the great thing about its vocabulary is that many words remind me on Finnish. typically 2-3 syllables, no consonant clusters, words mostly ending in vowels or only certain consonants like n, s, t. 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| alang Diglot Senior Member Canada Joined 7221 days ago 563 posts - 757 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish | Message 4 of 6 20 December 2012 at 12:36am | IP Logged | ||
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@hughes007, It depends on which Austronesian language. In your case the easier ones would be Indonesian, Bisaya and Tagalog. IMHO. This is on a vocabulary standpoint. If I recall, Indonesian has a lot of Portuguese loanwords. The amount of Spanish loanwords in Bisaya and Tagalog are significant in comprehension. Especially in Cebuano. There are a lot of English loanwords in them too. The younger generation just presumes the word is what they know it to be, and not from a different language family. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| tarvos Super Polyglot Winner TAC 2012 Senior Member China likeapolyglot.wordpr Joined 4707 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 5 of 6 20 December 2012 at 12:41am | IP Logged | ||
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Indonesian has a lot of Dutch loanwords, too, from the colonial era. Tagalog is
interesting. I might make it a dabbling project. Edited by tarvos on 20 December 2012 at 12:42am 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| viedums Hexaglot Senior Member Thailand Joined 4666 days ago 327 posts - 528 votes Speaks: Latvian, English*, German, Mandarin, Thai, French Studies: Vietnamese | Message 6 of 6 21 December 2012 at 6:03am | IP Logged | ||
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A language like Tagalog is very different from Mandarin. I don’t think it can be called “analytic”, even if the verbs don’t decline for person and nouns don’t have case endings.
I would divide the languages of Southeast Asia into two groups: mainland ones and island ones. The mainland ones belong to several families and could be called analytic. The island ones are Austronesian. As Serpent remarked, Austronesian roots very often have two syllables (like ‘sakit’, which means ‘sick’ in both Indonesian and Tagalog), whereas mainland SEA roots are monosyllabic. It can be hard, in my experience, to commit Austronesian vocabulary to memory if you’re used to the more concentrated, even over-determined semantic units of Chinese. I’m writing as someone who has a long-term interest in Chinese and the mainland SEA languages who is only just discovering the Austronesian family – I’ve been studying Tagalog for around six months now. Tagalog is not difficult overall, but interestingly different. When I read the example sentences in my large Tagalog dictionary, I generally have no trouble parsing them. The verb usually comes first, then other elements, one of which is marked as the “focus” depending on the verb form. One linguistic issue that comes up with Tagalog is how to differentiate nouns and verbs, often they seem interchangeable. This is even more of an issue, at least according to R. Dixon’s “Basic Linguistic Theory” vol 2, with Oceanic languages like Fijian. Dixon holds that distinguishing the basic word classes is always possible. I would be curious to hear from people who have studied Oceanic languages as to how difficult they are. A good general overview of this group, aimed at undergraduates rather than linguists, is “Pacific Languages” by John Lynch (Hawaii UP). It also covers Australian and Papuan languages. As I understand it, the Oceanic languages are also an interesting case study for historical linguists, partly because their island situation meant the history of sound changes etc is better preserved, with little or no mixing, contact, or Sprachbund-type interference. Terry Crowley’s intro book to historical linguistics has many examples from Oceanic. I enjoy studying Tagalog – the fact that it’s borrowed many words from Spanish and English makes it easier than it might be otherwise. “Basic Tagalog” by Aspillera covers the structures of the language with a lot of recorded example sentences but no dialogs. For really learning the language, I’ve been using “Elementary Tagalog” by Domigpe and Domingo (just published this year.) It’s intended for classroom use (the authors teach at US universities) and also lacks recorded dialogs (the vocab is recorded, though, along with some listening exercises). It seems very thorough and introduces the verb system in a leisurely fashion. Both of these are from Tuttle. 1 person has voted this message useful |
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