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Equal amount of grammar in all languages? | ||
Tags: Difficulty | Grammar | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : General discussion | ( Topic Closed) |  |
| Préposition Diglot Senior Member France aspectualpairs.wordp Joined 4900 days ago 186 posts - 283 votes  Speaks: French*, EnglishC1 Studies: Russian, Arabic (Written), Swedish, Arabic (Levantine) | Message 1 of 41 02 December 2010 at 7:36pm | IP Logged | ||
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I was listening to a lecture given by Nina Garett on the topic of second language acquisition, and the lecturer mentionned that "every language has the same amount of grammar, only in different ways."
Would you agree or disagree with the above statement? I'm tempted to disagree, simply because if I take the two languages I'm studying (Russian and Modern Standard Arabic), I feel that Arabic has a hell of a lot more grammar than Russian or even Italian do. What's your opinion? EDIT: I only just realised that there was a philology room where this topic would probably fit better! Edited by Préposition on 02 December 2010 at 7:47pm 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Emiliana Diglot Groupie Germany Joined 4900 days ago 81 posts - 98 votes Speaks: German*, English Studies: French, Arabic (classical) | Message 2 of 41 02 December 2010 at 7:47pm | IP Logged | ||
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I don't really understand what an "amount of grammer" is actually supposed to be but when it has something to do with the number of grammatical rules I would say: no, there are definitley languages with more or less grammer. Chinese for example has no grammer at all as far as I know. No conjugations, no genders, no cases, no times, nothing.
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| noriyuki_nomura Bilingual Octoglot Senior Member Switzerland Joined 5126 days ago 304 posts - 465 votes Speaks: English*, Mandarin*, Japanese, FrenchC2, GermanC2, ItalianC1, SpanishB2, DutchB1 Studies: TurkishA1, Korean | Message 3 of 41 02 December 2010 at 7:54pm | IP Logged | ||
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And if I am not wrong, Malay and Indonesian do not have much of a grammar too, no conjugations, no genders, no cases, no times...and even for plural nouns, just write two times the same word, eg. laki-laki, in comparison to German or Italian plural forms...
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| Arekkusu Hexaglot Senior Member Canada bit.ly/qc_10_lec Joined 5167 days ago 3971 posts - 7747 votes Speaks: English, French*, GermanC1, Spanish, Japanese, Esperanto Studies: Italian, Norwegian, Mandarin, Romanian, Estonian | Message 4 of 41 02 December 2010 at 8:07pm | IP Logged | ||
(Mandarin) Chinese has noun classifiers, some plurals, it expresses cases with prepositions, it has ways of expressing tenses, passive, etc. It most certainly DOES have grammar. 6 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| Emiliana Diglot Groupie Germany Joined 4900 days ago 81 posts - 98 votes Speaks: German*, English Studies: French, Arabic (classical) | Message 5 of 41 02 December 2010 at 8:11pm | IP Logged | ||
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@Arekkusu
Ok, sorry for my mistake. But I hope you agree, that it is very less grammar?! 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Arekkusu Hexaglot Senior Member Canada bit.ly/qc_10_lec Joined 5167 days ago 3971 posts - 7747 votes Speaks: English, French*, GermanC1, Spanish, Japanese, Esperanto Studies: Italian, Norwegian, Mandarin, Romanian, Estonian | Message 6 of 41 02 December 2010 at 8:30pm | IP Logged | ||
In principle, all languages allow a person to express virtually all concepts of number, time, aspect, etc. Therefore, each language has a predetermined way to express each of those, and this is essentially what constitutes its grammar. Because we know that children all learn their language is more or less the same amount of time, they must present an equal level of difficulty. That, at least, is the linguistic tenet. It's possible that certain languages with a longer written history have been able to maintain more irregularity than other languages, I'm not sure. Some may have maintained more irregularity in more common elements, others may display more irregularity in less common language. It's also possible that certain languages may indeed have less irregularity in grammar, but more complexity in its phonological structures and that this information occupies the same mental space. But grammar is not only verb conjugation, plural and gender. If the German gender system appears complex, there are also certain shortcuts available, and certain endings provide gender information. In Mandarin, each noun belongs to a noun class and will need a classifier. The type of object it is can provide you with a good idea of which classifier you will need, but there are irregularities as well. I don't know enough Mandarin to make further assumptions about aspects that could be more complex than in German. In Japanese, for instance, there is no grammatical gender, a somewhat simplified classifier system, essentially no plural, but there is a huge complexity in the vocabulary and usage based on the hierarchy of the speakers, something that is non-existant in German, for instance. There is no case system, but a delicate balance of postpositions to express the same relationships. In short, I understand your impression that some languages may display less complex grammar, but you'll need to quantify that in clear and unbiased terms before you can convince me of that. 7 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| Cainntear Pentaglot Senior Member Scotland linguafrankly.blogsp Joined 5797 days ago 4399 posts - 7687 votes Speaks: Lowland Scots, English*, French, Spanish, Scottish Gaelic Studies: Catalan, Italian, German, Irish, Welsh | Message 7 of 41 02 December 2010 at 8:40pm | IP Logged | ||
Grammar is how words interact. A language without grammar is a language without sentences. A language with an apparently complex grammar has a lot more freedom, because where there aren't any inflections for the words, devices have to be built into the sentence structure and the function words to encode the missing information. EG. English has almost no noun declension. This means that we need to use prepositions for what Latin would use declension for. But English prepositions are notoriously fuzzy. How many times does someone in an English class say "is it 'in', 'on' or 'at'" for a given phrase? That's a grammar problem. 6 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| Levi Pentaglot Senior Member United States Joined 5353 days ago 2268 posts - 3328 votes Speaks: English*, French, Esperanto, German, Spanish Studies: Russian, Dutch, Portuguese, Mandarin, Japanese, Italian | Message 8 of 41 02 December 2010 at 9:00pm | IP Logged | ||
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Disagree. Some languages have more complex grammars than others. The grammar of a highly fusional polysynthetic language with complicated rules for how the morphemes connect together is going to take much longer to master than the grammar of a much "simpler" (grammatically speaking) language like Tok Pisin.
The kernel of truth to that statement is that there is a trade-off in terms of grammatical complexity: the more grammar is incorporated into affixes rather than discrete words, the less grammar needs to be expressed by word order, and the less grammar is incorporated into affixes the more rules there are for word order. Edited by Levi on 02 December 2010 at 9:03pm 1 person has voted this message useful |
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