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Most logical languages | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : General discussion |  | |
| basica Senior Member Australia Joined 3538 days ago 157 posts - 269 votes  Studies: Serbian | Message 137 of 143 20 June 2015 at 12:14pm | IP Logged | ||
You seem to be new to the internet ;) 5 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| Monox D. I-Fly Senior Member Indonesia monoxdifly.iopc.us Joined 5137 days ago 762 posts - 664 votes Speaks: Indonesian* | Message 138 of 143 20 June 2015 at 2:06pm | IP Logged | ||
Yeah, you're right that it's just impossible to measure. That's why it's worth a discussion. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Retinend Triglot Senior Member SpainRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 4310 days ago 283 posts - 557 votes Speaks: English*, German, Spanish Studies: Arabic (Written), French | Message 139 of 143 20 June 2015 at 2:45pm | IP Logged | ||
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Do any languages have more logical concepts in the core vocabulary than others?
I've heard that words like affirmation, negation, ALL, NONE, SOME, IF, THEN are linguistic universals, but what about words like VALID CONJUNCT INDUCT DEDUCT and so on? I find it hard to believe that such things exist without an intellectual culture that progresses to analyze the meaning and implications of the more natural observations of completeness and incompleteness, "all of them" "some of them" "none of them." Where "if then" came from is a complete mystery - it could even be one of the keys to the whole human condition - but it exists in all languages. I don't see that a language could be more or less logical so long as this cornerstone is in place, which is the case with all. Are languages which have professional logicians amongst their ranks, e.g. most, "better" at logic than the ones which don't? Maybe, in a narrow sense, but not in a way that means every speaker of that language shares in the logical advances. It must be learned, generation by generation, and in fact most people abuse strict logical convention in everyday life like "imply" "valid statement" double negatives, "conversely", "contradictory" and so on. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Stolan Senior Member United States Joined 4034 days ago 274 posts - 368 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Thai, Lowland Scots Studies: Arabic (classical), Cantonese | Message 140 of 143 02 August 2015 at 6:51am | IP Logged | ||
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One thing I have noticed pertaining to "logic" is how "quirky" the assignment of objects is by a
particle/case, and the lack of compositionally of them in general is hard to ignore. In the realm of European languages, I have noticed they display some of the most non-compositional assignment if not the most within a single definable region. Examples include the usage of in/at/on for time and location such as "on Christmas" "at night" "in the morning" where the whole phrase must be memorised. Contrast this against Korean which uses one single marker for all three (and the absence of articles which further can create idiosyncrasies such as "at work" vs "at the store"). The combination with adjectives in phrases such as "proud of" "interested in" and so on also is a strange area. Let's use an extreme example which is Russian: There are 5 oblique cases, and 2 dozen basic prepositions with different assignments to case based on numerous difficulties such as: -Usage of case for syntactical purposes only for certain words. -Verbs requiring non-accusative objects whether it requires another case or preposition which then requires one of 2-3 potential cases based on the word which must be memorized. Languages like Korean or Japanese may have a few exceptions but otherwise do not do this. -Adjectives requiring the same as above. -Time phrases requiring the instrumental or a preposition that is not predictable. -An alternate locative case whose existence must be memorised for at least 150 masculine nouns when "na" or "v" are used. -Adverbial phrases built on nouns using idiosyncratic preposition/case combinations. A person who speaks Japanese knows how predictable the assignment of their postpositions are in comparison. -Different location assignments for cities based on their historical placement. -Differing cases used in combinations with the dozens or prepositions that are very lexical. A simpler way I could put it is to say: http://www.dartmouth.edu/~german/Grammatik/Prepositions/Prep ositions.html Look at this page, it shows how difficult German prepositions are because of their randomness at times and such, could you find an equivalent page for learners in the Japanese language? Korean? Turkish? Any non-european language? Realise that in a language like Russian, you would have two huge sections, one for using cases and their exceptions and one for using prepositions and their exceptions which is complicated twice over than German's by having a few more oblique cases. https://books.google.com.hk/books?id=5ApM7jXrM88C&printsec=f rontcover#v=onepage&q&f=false (The section on prepositions and syntax/cases) Can anyone find a grammar with sections this large and dedicated to these things in any non- european language? Can one find something like this for Japanese particles and locative nouns? Edited by Stolan on 02 August 2015 at 6:59am 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Serpent Octoglot Senior Member Russian Federation serpent-849.livejour Joined 6599 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 141 of 143 02 August 2015 at 2:35pm | IP Logged | ||
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To me the Finnish cases and prepositions/postpositions are more logical than Russian, German or Latin, but there are certainly pages like that.
1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Stolan Senior Member United States Joined 4034 days ago 274 posts - 368 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Thai, Lowland Scots Studies: Arabic (classical), Cantonese | Message 142 of 143 02 August 2015 at 5:09pm | IP Logged | ||
Finnish falls near the area where idiosyncrasies in object marking exist, not directly within, but it does seem strange how with Russian or Czech, marking time and date seemed to have acquired such arbitrary assignment of case, prepositions, or both when it has not happened in other languages yet time and date keeping are not ancient aspects of our modern languages. This shows it is an areal feature, of course it is on a scale, some languages have as little as one preposition or postposition for every single situation with no cases of special techniques at all to compensate, zero, while others are like Russian at the extreme end of redundancy. To make the image more clear, know some languages have no words for numbers beyond 4 while on the other far end trying to figure how numeral systems (and everything else) such as the ones in Russian could evolve naturally is much much harder to understand or even believe than comprehending how the eye evolved in organisms through pure natural selection. "Logicality" in an area or everywhere clearly is a regional feature. Why is derivation and object marking so transparent (or weirdly nonexistant as in parts of Asia) here but not there? It is a regional thing. Can anyone find an equivalent list (or 3 extra huge ones out of them in the case of Russian) of all the rules and exceptions in a language like Japanese, Vietnamese, or Turkish? Even Chinese is "quirkier" in this area. edit: I asked a Korean friend about these things and he said that they do have quirkyness with motion verbs such as "entering the army" but "ascending a job" while the locative phrase is unmarked so "in the army" and "on (sic) a job" is not marked with different particles ever, as for the motion b I wouldn't be surprised if Russian already outdoes Korean in this area by at least 10 fold... Edited by Stolan on 03 August 2015 at 11:19am 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| OwlPanda Newbie United States Joined 3336 days ago 6 posts - 8 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Vietnamese | Message 143 of 143 19 October 2015 at 7:53pm | IP Logged | ||
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I see that some people don't think of measure words as logical, but I'm not sure I
agree. They aren't really arbitrary, even though they can sometimes be surprising (such as 'con dao' for 'knife' in Vietnamese, when 'con' is usually used for animals and children and other animate things). They make a nice distinction between something denumerable and non-denumerable. Now, Vietnamese and other isolating languages can be confusing because they use so few syntactical elements. In Vietnamese, you basically have word order and function words to work with. That's not so bad, especially if you don't mind sounding like a book. The problem comes in practice when you encounter sentences in which the underlying structure has the function words included and has the right word order but the actual utterance you're encountering has some function words dropped and some of the word order altered. This creates ambiguity for non-native speakers, where native speakers can pick out the correct underlying structure from context and from the way alternate resolutions of the ambiguity can be incorrect. In particular, relative clauses are a giant pain. Really, whenever functional words get dropped, I completely lose the plot. Korean seems a bit more straightforward, by which I mean that it's usually easy to parse something if you know the (many, many) rules. People much more knowledgeable than I am have already said a lot about Korean in this thread, so I'll defer to them. Of the others I've encountered, German and French aren't really contenders. German seems easier, but I studied German for longer, so of course it seems easier for me. 1 person has voted this message useful |
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