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Tonal vs. agglutinating languages | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Philological Room |  | |
| ChristopherB Triglot Senior Member New Zealand Joined 6317 days ago 851 posts - 1074 votes  2 sounds Speaks: English*, German, French | Message 1 of 24 02 November 2009 at 9:26am | IP Logged |
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For most Western language speakers, these two features are completely alien and tend to present quite a hurdle for many of us attempting take on a language with either of these characteristics. If you are a native English speaker, and have familiarity with both, I'm curious to know which you find more difficult to get the hang of: tones (Chinese, Vietnamese, Thai etc.) or agglutination (Korean, Japanese, Turkish etc.).
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| maaku Senior Member United States Joined 5575 days ago 359 posts - 562 votes Speaks: English* | Message 2 of 24 02 November 2009 at 9:42am | IP Logged |
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I'm sorry, but what's unusual about agglutination? English is an agglutinative language.
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 Jiwon Triglot Moderator Korea, South Joined 6437 days ago 1417 posts - 1500 votes Speaks: EnglishC2, Korean*, GermanC1 Studies: Hindi, Spanish Personal Language Map | Message 3 of 24 02 November 2009 at 9:57am | IP Logged |
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How on earth in English agglutinative? o_O
Anyway, I am not a native English speaker, so my answers aren't exactly what you are looking for. But as a person who's studied non-agglutinative languages from an agglutinative one, and since I've also studied Mandarin (tonal language) for a bit, I can tell you, that it's not that BIG a difference once you get used to it. To get tones you just have to tune your listening system, to get different grammatic structure, you just have to tune the order of your thinking system. Which one is easier? I don't know, but I found getting used to tones a lot easier, although non-agglutination never stopped me from learning English and German. 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| maaku Senior Member United States Joined 5575 days ago 359 posts - 562 votes Speaks: English* | Message 4 of 24 02 November 2009 at 10:17am | IP Logged |
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Noun formation. E.g: antidisestablishmentarianism. Edited by maaku on 02 November 2009 at 10:18am 1 person has voted this message useful | |
 Hencke Tetraglot Moderator Spain Joined 6895 days ago 2340 posts - 2444 votes Speaks: Swedish*, Finnish, EnglishC2, Spanish Studies: Mandarin Personal Language Map | Message 5 of 24 02 November 2009 at 10:49am | IP Logged |
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English has a certain amount of agglutination but so have most, if not all languages in existance.
AFAIU the term "agglutinative language" is used for languages that predominantly use agglutination for all, or most of their grammatical constructs. In an agglutinative language you tend to end up with long compound words with all the grammatical elements already built in, a little like a ham salad sandwich with onion and ketchup and a few assorted trimmings all wrapped up and served in a handy and tidy little bundle ready for consumption. There is very little need for prepositions or other stray grammatical building blocks and ingredients lying around messing up the floor of the sentence. Learning an agglutinative language is the art of developing a taste for that compound sandwich, sensitizing your grammatical taste buds to the subtle elements of meaning contributed by each of the trimmings and reconstruct the total meaning conveyed by the combination. PS. As for the original question, in my case tonal is much more challenging, but my input isn't really relevant, as I am closely familiar with an agglutinative language (Finnish) since early childhood. Edited by Hencke on 02 November 2009 at 10:55am 8 persons have voted this message useful | |
| Captain Haddock Diglot Senior Member Japan kanjicabinet.tumblr. Joined 6769 days ago 2282 posts - 2814 votes Speaks: English*, Japanese Studies: French, Korean, Ancient Greek | Message 6 of 24 02 November 2009 at 12:19pm | IP Logged |
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While English has some agglutination in noun construction (specifically, French, Latin, and Greek loanwords), nouns
and verbs do not decline through agglutination, so it's not considered an agglutinative language. As a proficient speaker of Japanese with basic Mandarin skills, I suppose tones are easier to master. They only take a few weeks of practice to learn, while internalizing Japanese grammar took quite a bit longer. However, now that I know Japanese, I think I would find a new agglutinative language easier to learn than a new fusional language like Latin. Edited by Captain Haddock on 02 November 2009 at 12:20pm 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| Levi Pentaglot Senior Member United States Joined 5568 days ago 2268 posts - 3328 votes Speaks: English*, French, Esperanto, German, Spanish Studies: Russian, Dutch, Portuguese, Mandarin, Japanese, Italian | Message 7 of 24 02 November 2009 at 12:41pm | IP Logged |
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Well, the only agglutinating language I'm really familiar with is Esperanto, and I never really had much trouble with its agglutination, though that may be partly because it's deliberately constructed to be simpler than agglutination usually is in natural languages. The concept itself never presented much difficulty though, and I don't have any trouble parsing or creating words with many morphemes.
So I would say tones are more difficult, but even then it depends on which tone system you're talking about. I find that Mandarin actually has a pretty simple tone system, with just four pretty distinct tones, compared to something like Cantonese or Vietnamese. It doesn't take long to learn how to say them correctly, but learning how to understand and produce them in fast speech can be difficult. 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| Gusutafu Senior Member Sweden Joined 5522 days ago 655 posts - 1039 votes Speaks: Swedish* | Message 8 of 24 02 November 2009 at 1:00pm | IP Logged |
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This is really apples and oranges, but I have to agree that tonality in itself shouldn't really be a problem. It is rather a feature of pronunciation than grammar or syntax. Most languages have some form of tonality, often not on the syllable level perhaps, and most people have some kind of musical ear, so it shouldn't prove an insurmountable problem.
Agglutination on the other hand can be messy, especially if you approach it the wrong way. In a sense it is not very different from inflection (I would even argue that IE case and verb endings probably result from fused postpositions, pronouns and similar elements) but it can certainly seem scary. One effect of agglutination, and even more so perhaps of inflection, is that it's fairly difficult to produce even the simplest sentences - you need to get gender, case, number, tense, modality etc right just to produce a trivial utterance like "John buys apples". In some tonal languages, like Chinese, complexity arises from syntax rather than morphology, so basic statements are often absurdly simple - "John buy apple". Even at the next level of complexity, it's still simpler in Chinese than Japanese, to be specific: "John goes to the store to buy apples" can basically be rendered as "John go store buy apple" in Chinese, whereas in Japanese you would have to say "John [subject-marker] store [postposition TO] apple [object-marker] buy[special ending for PURPOSE] [postposition/conjunction (IN ORDER) TO] go". Remember that even the English version (and even more so in French, German etc) is in a sense more complex, there is more to consider. Edited by Gusutafu on 02 November 2009 at 8:54pm 8 persons have voted this message useful |
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