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Biggest open mysteries of Human Language | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : General discussion |  | |
| Hampie Diglot Senior Member Sweden Joined 6657 days ago 625 posts - 1009 votes  Speaks: Swedish*, English Studies: Latin, German, Mandarin | Message 25 of 29 09 July 2015 at 5:38pm | IP Logged | ||
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I'd really like examples of the things you said about English. Not because I in any way disagree with you, but
merely out of curiosity! 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Serpent Octoglot Senior Member Russian Federation serpent-849.livejour Joined 6595 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 26 of 29 09 July 2015 at 9:53pm | IP Logged | ||
Source please? After 10 years of learning linguistics in some way or another and even more reading about it for fun, I don't feel qualified to make this kind of blanket statements. And even if your statement is true, please refrain from using words like nauseating and corrosion to describe languages and their development. No serious modern linguist speaks in these terms. Edited by Serpent on 09 July 2015 at 9:53pm 3 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 27 of 29 10 July 2015 at 7:31pm | IP Logged | ||
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Yeah, I found that post puzzling. It's true that IE probably has a unique combination of idiosyncracies, but that's probably true of any language family. If the point is that IE is uniquely full of irregularities or something, that may be true, but I've never heard any linguist make such a claim, so I'm skeptical it's the case. I'm just as skeptical of people who say IE language are uniquely complicated as of those who say they're uniquely uncomplicated.
The other point seems to be that the IE family has moved from synthetic to analytic in a way that other language families haven't. I imagine that's true, although it's hard to find information on language families beyond IE. Uralic did develop new cases after Proto-Uralic (but so did Tocharian, an IE tongue). But it also lost its dual, so these things are complicated. 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| Stolan Senior Member United States Joined 4030 days ago 274 posts - 368 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Thai, Lowland Scots Studies: Arabic (classical), Cantonese | Message 28 of 29 24 July 2015 at 6:04pm | IP Logged | ||
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To the fellow posters above:
https://books.google.com.hk/books?id=5ApM7jXrM88C&printsec=f rontcover#v=onepage&q&f=false Scroll to the section on (why am I using "on" instead of "about"? don't you all see the blemishes in English too?) prepositions. The issue is a non-compositional style inherent to the whole system, non-compositionality is where the individual components of a whole have no meaning on their own but depend on the final product. So imagine there is a compound word where "tie"+"shirt" means ="shovel"="tieshirt". That is an extreme example. Observe the link and scroll to prepositions: Look at the polysemous meanings, the verbs that take unique prepositions, the cases prepositions take based on the verb, how random the meanings are, and don't also forget there is a case system which is a morphological complexification with no unique purposes other than basic ones such as possession and indirect objects that could easily be done with an equivalent preposition and exist with certain words determined by collocation, nay, it is purely lexical overall. Certain verbs and constructions randomly take the genitive due to the inherent ablative meaning specifically for these words while others would take one of a dozen prepositions chosen purely on lexical grounds all implying the same ablative meaning but not with other verbs: Verb 1 + prep 3+Dative=Verb+ablative noun phrase Verb 2 + prep 3+Dative=Verb+instrumental noun phrase but Verb 1 + prep 2+Genitive=Verb+instrumental noun phrase Verb 2 + prep 2+Genitive (of declension class 9d to add!)=Verb+ablative noun phrase It goes for the derivation too, the overlap is gigantic, the meaning of the word is non-compositional. There are dozens of variants for one suffix and half a dozen suffixes whose meanings are only determined once added to the word! If one opens up a grammar book for Korean or Arabic, does one find sections as large as the Russian for prepostions, cases, verb governance, and so on? Not that they do not have quirky lexical features but are they as big? Remember, I have ignored the irregularity of the morphology in this post, but mentioning it would add to my point of IE exceptionality. The fact is that "grammar" where different components work together to form a sentence, morphological form, or new word is not so much used but "lexical-ism" where words or forms have little meaning outside the whole finished product. There exists a spectrum for this and conservative IE is on the far end of one side. What I've written is a bit all over, if I could compare one language with one IE one then I could paint a better picture. What more, It seems strange but I may be the only person who has ever criticised something like Russian so it comes as a shock, yet it's commonplace for English to be disparaged. Think about it. \ To Serpent: Your language is never a target for what it is, it's the equivalent of Sweden if it were it a country, free from any criticism or stereotyping and bashing, while English would be the USA. Russian is safe from being called poor, primitive, easy as ___, etc. only good can be said about it for its high difficulty and irregularity, like praising someone for how much they can drink. Nobody will ever make you feel bad for speaking it natively. It is in the popular crowd! Like being a Swedish Citizen. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Duke100782 Bilingual Diglot Senior Member Philippines https://talktagalog.Registered users can see my Skype Name Joined 4486 days ago 172 posts - 240 votes Speaks: English*, Tagalog* Studies: Spanish, Mandarin | Message 29 of 29 09 August 2015 at 10:04am | IP Logged | ||
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Great thought-compelling questions @outcast. I've often pondered over questions like these myself. Two
great books I can recommend to help tackle precisely these question, in at least part of their discourse, are The Language Instinct by Steven Pinker and The Third Chimpanzee by Jared Diamond. These two books are worth every single cent and have helped clarify my thoughts on these questions. 1 person has voted this message useful |
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