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Languages: simplification or aggravation | ||
Tags: Easiness | Difficulty | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Philological Room |  | |
| Mauritz Octoglot Senior Member Sweden Joined 5068 days ago 223 posts - 325 votes  Speaks: Swedish*, EnglishC2, Italian, Spanish, Russian, Turkish, Esperanto, French Studies: Old English, Yiddish, Arabic (Written), Mandarin, Korean, Portuguese, Welsh, Icelandic, Afrikaans | Message 9 of 21 16 April 2012 at 2:18am | IP Logged | |||||
I disagree somewhat. Languages can be, are and have been controlled by different kinds of regulators. For example, a number of consciously made changes to Swedish have been made over the years. But you're still right, as this only applies to the standard language, but as it's often a prestige variety the new forms often obliterate the dialectal. Oh, and don't forget genetic engineering! ;) 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| Arekkusu Hexaglot Senior Member Canada bit.ly/qc_10_lec Joined 5381 days ago 3971 posts - 7747 votes Speaks: English, French*, GermanC1, Spanish, Japanese, Esperanto Studies: Italian, Norwegian, Mandarin, Romanian, Estonian | Message 10 of 21 16 April 2012 at 2:48am | IP Logged | |||||
It's like people. I prefer to watch them grow and appreciate the beauty found in their differences. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| jeronz Diglot Newbie New Zealand Joined 4858 days ago 37 posts - 79 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish Studies: French, Yiddish, Latin, German, Italian | Message 11 of 21 24 April 2012 at 12:35pm | IP Logged | |||||
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I thought I'd share the current thought in linguistics which is differs completely to
the the ideas expressed here To put it simply to avoid writing an essay, the evidence shows that in _isolation_ languages tend toward becoming increasing complex. However, once the group of speakers increases and/or others learn the language as _adults_ the language simplifies. It is completely incorrect to say that each language is as difficult as one another, although it may be politically correct to say so. The evolution of a language is like a lava lamp, continuously morphing and changing, much of the direction is affected by the above factors and others such as fundamental rules of human phonology. 2 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| Марк Senior Member Russian Federation Joined 5056 days ago 2096 posts - 2972 votes Speaks: Russian* | Message 12 of 21 24 April 2012 at 1:19pm | IP Logged | |||||
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What do you mean by simplification? For example, is modern English simpler than Old
English or more complex? 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| Mauritz Octoglot Senior Member Sweden Joined 5068 days ago 223 posts - 325 votes Speaks: Swedish*, EnglishC2, Italian, Spanish, Russian, Turkish, Esperanto, French Studies: Old English, Yiddish, Arabic (Written), Mandarin, Korean, Portuguese, Welsh, Icelandic, Afrikaans | Message 13 of 21 24 April 2012 at 7:46pm | IP Logged | |||||
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@jeronz: That is exacly what isn't really true. Yes, grammatical forms may become more
regular and so on, but does this mean that the language is simplified? As Марк touches on, Old English can in no way be said to be more complex than English. They had a lot of difficulties with translating books from Latin! I guess the problem with the discussion is that we define simplfication as different things. I mean that despite more regular morphology and so on, the nuances are still there. The language still has to be learned to the same degree. And about getting more complex and/or simpler: there is a cycle to which many languages adhere, i.e. isolating - agglutinative - fusional (and back to isolating). English is experiencing (and has almost passed) a change from a fusional language to an isolating language. In my opinion, this doesn't mean that English has become simpler during the last millennium. It's just easier for me to learn. 2 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| smallwhite Pentaglot Senior Member Australia Joined 5308 days ago 537 posts - 1045 votes Speaks: Cantonese*, English, Mandarin, French, Spanish | Message 14 of 21 24 April 2012 at 10:53pm | IP Logged | |||||
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Simplification or aggravation, whatever you like, just please remove those irregular verbs and those exceptions and I'm happy.
1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| Quinn Senior Member United States Joined 6323 days ago 134 posts - 186 votes Speaks: English* Studies: French, Italian, Spanish | Message 15 of 21 25 April 2012 at 12:48am | IP Logged | |||||
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A famous quote attributed to Einstein is "“Everything should be as simple as it can be, but not simpler.”
Whether or not those are truly his words, I agree with this sentiment. I'm not a linguist, but it seems to me that in language, as in science, there is a tradeoff between simplicity and precision. A very simple language would probably have less potential for expressing nuances and would perhaps be more ambiguous than a more complex one. On the other hand, an extremely difficult language would be harder to learn and probably more susceptible to deviations from "proper" usage, such as slang or pidgin dialects. As with most things, I think it comes down to striking the right balance between the two extremes. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| jeronz Diglot Newbie New Zealand Joined 4858 days ago 37 posts - 79 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish Studies: French, Yiddish, Latin, German, Italian | Message 16 of 21 29 April 2012 at 11:26am | IP Logged | |||||
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I believe that old English is grammatically certainly far more complex than Modern
English, I don't think anyone could argue with this if you have a passing familiarity with it. We used to have cases, proper conjugation, a far more elaborate pronoun system, plurals were a nightmare - practically every word had its own irregular plural form, amongst other complexities that have been lost and simplified. The further back you go with English's story the more complex it becomes, just compare Old English with Proto- Germanic and Proto-Germanic with Proto-Indo-European! Perhaps only vocabulary wise the language is more complex with more synonyms and so-on due to the influence of languages like French and Latin, and the way in which books have the tendency to prevent words from falling completely out of the accepted part of English. As for languages changing between morphological types - isolating, agglutinative, fusional etcetera I had thought this was more a hypothesis rather than something that actually had linguistic evidence to support the view. Edited by jeronz on 29 April 2012 at 11:29am 1 person has voted this message useful |
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