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Most inefficient languages? | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Specific Languages | ( Topic Closed) |  |
| lloydkirk Diglot Senior Member United StatesRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 6411 days ago 429 posts - 452 votes  Speaks: English*, French Studies: Russian | Message 1 of 69 18 September 2007 at 6:44pm | IP Logged | ||
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Languages are constantly evolving, some quicker than others. English for example, is far removed from it's Chaucerian heritage, a period of roughly 600 years. English like many other languages has been greatly simplified. The languages that have preserved ancient characteristics are generally very difficult to grasp. Compare icelandic with it's sister languages in scandinavia. This linguistic evolution has generally lead to more efficient and practical communication. When German switched to the roman alphabet
it became a more practical language. What languages do you think today needs to 'mature' more to simplify the process of communication? Personally, I think mandarin needs to switch to the latin alphabet and the romance languages need to adapt a logical number system. Edited by lloydkirk on 19 September 2007 at 8:11pm 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| justinwilliams Diglot Senior Member Canada Joined 6687 days ago 321 posts - 327 votes 3 sounds Speaks: French*, EnglishC2 Studies: German, Italian | Message 2 of 69 18 September 2007 at 9:00pm | IP Logged | ||
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What do you mean by logical number system?
I don't conjugate nouns and adjectives when I speak in French. I don't say things like 'baux' or 'journaux' but rather 'bails' and 'journals' Maybe this'll help save French... 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| lloydkirk Diglot Senior Member United StatesRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 6411 days ago 429 posts - 452 votes Speaks: English*, French Studies: Russian | Message 3 of 69 18 September 2007 at 9:09pm | IP Logged | ||
For starters creating a word for 70,80 and 90 instead of saying soixant-dix, quatre-vingt and quatre vingt dix. Reading/writing out dates like 3489 BC is annoying in the least. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Darobat Diglot Senior Member Joined 7186 days ago 754 posts - 770 votes Speaks: English*, Russian Studies: Latin | Message 4 of 69 18 September 2007 at 9:24pm | IP Logged | ||
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Just, no. There is no such thing as a language being better than another, more evolved or even simpler. All languages are different, and that's about it. People say Russian is a difficult language with six cases, a "different" alphabet and some difficult sounds, but there are millions of people who get along just fine in Russian every day.
Languages are not crafted specifically to ease the learning process for prospective students. To a native speaker of Mandarin, their written language is just that: how they write the language. Suggesting Mandarin adopt the Latin alphabet is about as logical as suggesting we start writing English in a modified version of the Japanese kana. It's not how we write our language, and likewise, the Latin alphabet is not how Mandarin is written. The literacy rate in China is nearly 95% (this various source to source but it's pretty high in all of them), so obviously there is nothing wrong with the way they write. People everywhere look at the "chicken scratches" and learn about everything from the weather to astrophysics every day, so why should they need to change? Their writing system successfully accomplishes the task of conveying meaning. Similarly, a child who grew up speaking a romance language with a "difficult number system" doesn't seem to have any difficulty using numbers, so why do they need to change? Again, language is not designed to be easy for a foreigner to learn; it's simply there as a means of communicating. All languages do this differently, but none are wrong, inefficient, or in any other way inferior. You seem to be under the impression that some things are inherently easier to learn, but this is simply not true. I'm sure you've heard learners of English completely butcher the language, despite the fact that it is supposedly an easy language. It isn't. No language is easy or difficult per se, but rather all languages are different. We encounter difficulty in learning a language when it has features that are significantly different from those in languages we are familiar with. So even though we may find some things unnecessarily difficult, they are not less efficient. And language does not only evolve to become simpler; it tends to get more complex just as often. Just look at the evolution of English’s pronunciation. At one point in the past, English had a more or less one-to-one correspondence between what is written and what is spoken, but that’s clearly no longer the case. And English’s grammar isn’t only getting “simpler” either. Some time back, English lost the second person plural pronoun, simplifying the language a bit. But guess what! It’s coming back in the form of “y’all”. Features are constantly being destroyed, simplifying the language, but new features are appearing all the time as well. A centaury ago (probably less), English didn’t have this weird word “gonna” that could be used to mean “going to” but only in specific contexts (i.e., “I’m gonna eat lunch” is fine, but *“I’m gonna the store” isn’t). There is no linear progression that languages follow bringing them from more complex to less complex. So to answer your question, no language needs to change. All languages in their current state are able to accomplish the only task they have: to communicate. They may achieve this in radically different ways, but in the end they all do successfully accomplish their task. Why fix something that isn’t broken? 5 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| Chung Diglot Senior Member Joined 7154 days ago 4228 posts - 8259 votes 20 sounds Speaks: English*, French Studies: Polish, Slovak, Uzbek, Turkish, Korean, Finnish | Message 5 of 69 18 September 2007 at 10:09pm | IP Logged | ||
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Ahh... But the French method is a holdover of counting things by twenties. I think that the Celtic languages have a similar convention... In its own way, it's logical. However, since many people use languages that have a purely decimal convention, counting by twenties can seem a little odd.
When it comes to Mandarin, there're a few romanization schemes such as Wade-Giles and pinyin but none has really taken off with the average student. Chinese and foreign students alike still use those pictographs and ideographs. We only see those romanization schemes in foreign sources that quote Chinese words or names without resorting to characters (which would mean nothing to us who don't know how to read in Chinese). At the risk of sounding a bit brusque, we native speakers of English shouldn't get carried away and try to shoehorn our preferences into foreign languages when our own language is riddled with oddities (think of our illogical orthography, and those maddeningly subtle variations between phrasal verbs.) Complexity in language is relative in most cases, and we just need to accept that some things just will take longer to grasp than others since those concepts aren't used in our native language. Put yourself in a Mongol's shoes for example, and by your reasoning, he or she would be justified in wondering why the rest of the world couldn't use the Cyrillic alphabet since Mongolian, some Turkic languages and the Eastern Slavonic languages already use that script. Given all of the languages that I've learned or dabbled in, I would say that languages are a bit like pubescent teenagers in that they develop in their own way and there's no really right or wrong way in the development. Darobat is right about linguistic evolution being an uneven process and that the needs of foreign learners are meaningless in how generations of native speakers use their native language over time. Perhaps "more elaborate" is preferable to "inefficient". By definition if something is inefficient in a language, the native speakers of the language will quickly start to find ways to use the language in a way that is more concise or less ambiguous but conveys virtually the same information. That's part of the process of linguistic evolution. 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| apparition Octoglot Senior Member United States Joined 6648 days ago 600 posts - 667 votes Speaks: English*, Arabic (Written), French, Arabic (Iraqi), Portuguese, German, Italian, Spanish Studies: Pashto | Message 6 of 69 18 September 2007 at 10:57pm | IP Logged | ||
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Didn't Mao try to change China's writing system back in the day? Never caught on, I guess...
And Ben Franklin once proposed a logical spelling system for English that was, alas, fruitless. Artificial changes are tough. How about that push for the metric system in the U.S. in the 70s? I do agree about German. I tried reading some old German texts and my eyes almost bled out. However, I do know that if I were raised to read it, I would be absolutely fine with it. Same with Chinese. Edited by apparition on 18 September 2007 at 11:01pm 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| FSI Senior Member United States Joined 6357 days ago 550 posts - 590 votes Speaks: English* | Message 7 of 69 18 September 2007 at 11:01pm | IP Logged | ||
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This thread reminds me of all those threads where people start out under the assumptions that certain languages are objectively easier than others. Once one starts down that train of thought, it's a short hop to implying certain languages are less "efficient" or "mature" or "advanced" or other appallingly relativistic (and culture-centric) terms; many of which are contained within this thread. Bad, bad idea. But it's the inevitable result of people going into this believing all languages (note I'm not talking about writing systems, but languages) are not equal in ability, variety, and difficulty. Of course, it begs the question of how a person can believe languages created by humans are unequal without simultaneously believing that humans can be placed along similar hierarchies, but perhaps this point is best illustrated in one of those seasonal political threads that pop up now and again.
1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| joan.carles Bilingual Pentaglot Senior Member Canada Joined 6331 days ago 332 posts - 342 votes Speaks: Spanish*, Catalan*, French, EnglishC1, EnglishC2, Mandarin Studies: Hungarian, Russian, Georgian | Message 8 of 69 19 September 2007 at 12:37am | IP Logged | ||
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I think that Darobat and FSI have already replied what I think myself about the question.
So no need for to add anything else but comment that
Do you really think that French (counting with soixante-dix, quatre-vingts...) or Basques (hogei ta amar = twenty-ten) or any other language with 'strange' ways of counting have more problems than you when it comes to counting? Do you think they can't count as fast as you or as efficiently as you? 1 person has voted this message useful |
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