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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) |  |
| luhmann Senior Member Brazil Joined 5121 days ago 156 posts - 271 votes  Speaks: Portuguese* Studies: Mandarin, French, English, Italian, Spanish, Persian, Arabic (classical) | Message 33 of 41 04 December 2010 at 2:02am | IP Logged | ||||||||
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(answering the OP while ignoring all the ongoing discussion):
It is not that grammars don't differ in difficulty, but the the fact is that vocabulary learning is is so huge a task, that grammar will always look like nothing. Language A may have a gramar ten times harder than language B, but still 10*0 = 1*0, therefore the effort of learning grammar relative to your total learning will remain the same. (opinion of an adept of massive vocabulary memorisation prior to anything) Edited by luhmann on 04 December 2010 at 2:21am 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||
| Préposition Diglot Senior Member France aspectualpairs.wordp Joined 4902 days ago 186 posts - 283 votes Speaks: French*, EnglishC1 Studies: Russian, Arabic (Written), Swedish, Arabic (Levantine) | Message 34 of 41 04 December 2010 at 10:04am | IP Logged | ||||||||
Not my lecturer, she's a lecturer at Yale and had put her lectures on iTunes U. The rest of the lecture didn't really convince me, to be honest, but I was curious to see what people would think of such a statement.
That would imply that the level of language impacts on the quality of literature, which is not necessarily true. Pushkin is meant to be a god of Russian literature, yet he's one of the very few who started writing in a style that was closer to that of "plebeian" Russian as opposed to the posh version of it at the time. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||
| irrationale Tetraglot Senior Member China Joined 5838 days ago 669 posts - 1023 votes 2 sounds Speaks: English*, Spanish, Mandarin, Tagalog Studies: Ancient Greek, Japanese | Message 35 of 41 04 December 2010 at 2:49pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
Then according to this definition, what would a grammar where every idea is associated with a single unique symbol be? Infinitely complex or simple?
My point was is that if you assume that every human can have the same thoughts in all languages, and there is a unique sentence to express that thought, then there will be a correspondence between all sentences of all languages, meaning that no matter how many rules one languages has, in the end all it's sentences should have a unique equivalent (including tone of voice, etc) in another language. Even if a language has the most complexity possible, a 1 to 1 correspondence between a set of arbitrary symbols and all human ideas, it would still have the same expressive power as any other language. A counterexample I could see is ancient Chinese (文言文） where a single sentence could have multiple meanings based on your interpretation, or that the grammar is so "simple" that it has passed beyond the zone of practicality, and each sentence is now has to be understand based on the context and knowledge of the reader to add in the lost information. So it's set of sentences must be clearly smaller than the set of all human ideas. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||
| Cainntear Pentaglot Senior Member Scotland linguafrankly.blogsp Joined 5799 days ago 4399 posts - 7687 votes Speaks: Lowland Scots, English*, French, Spanish, Scottish Gaelic Studies: Catalan, Italian, German, Irish, Welsh | Message 36 of 41 04 December 2010 at 3:55pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
China, no. But then again, I only mentioned Japan. And that was with good reason. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||
| Cainntear Pentaglot Senior Member Scotland linguafrankly.blogsp Joined 5799 days ago 4399 posts - 7687 votes Speaks: Lowland Scots, English*, French, Spanish, Scottish Gaelic Studies: Catalan, Italian, German, Irish, Welsh | Message 37 of 41 04 December 2010 at 5:59pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
I didn't try to "prove" anything. But you want to call me an idiot? Fine, but read what I wrote first. Calling someone idiotic for saying something he didn't say, well that's just... well... idiotic.
Which brings us right back to the proposition that started this thread -- that all grammars are created equally and when morphology becomes simplified, syntax has to become more complicated to compensate. It's a fairly philosophical debate (as others have said there is no way to really measure the complexity of grammar) but many linguists and sociologists think that it is important to get this across for one reason only: to combat bigotry. Bigotry like:
Vocabulary is a total red herring. Our vocabulary is constantly changing due to environmental pressures, and every modern language is riddled with recent borrowings -- very few neologisms these days qualify as native. There is a word in the dictionary for a mature female cow that has never had a calf. I don't know what it is. I don't need it. The fact that a cattle farmer knows what it is doesn't make English any "richer". Literature is another red herring, as it is written in the existing language, it does not invent new language. Now, on the matter of the expressive power of a language. Most of my childhood it annoyed me that there wasn't a distinction in English between "we" (including you) and "we" (excluding you) so I'm glad you mention the South Sea Islands, because the Oceanic languages have an incredibly sophisticated and expressive system of grammatical persons. Verbs in the Oceanic languages not only conjugate for more numbers than European languages (singular, dual and plural) but they allow for all possible combinations of 1st, 2nd and 3rd person within that. The clearest example is the creole Bislama, spoken in Vanuatu, that takes its grammar from the Oceanic languages but its vocabulary from English. I'll not recreate the pronouns here, but point you to the page on Wikipedia. The racist language bigot starts out by saying primitive people have unexpressive languages, but when faced with an example like the above, will usually change tack and claim that these expressive languages are unweildy and overcomplex, with the result that it makes their speakers stupid by wasting their brainpower. This double standard is particularly easy to point out with regards to vocabulary. The size of the Oxford English Dictionary is often held up as proof of its richness, expressiveness and superiority. But then you have an article like this one (originally from the Wall Street Journal), that mocks Basque as a primitive and backward language for having "10 different words for shepherd, depending on the kind of animal. Astazain, for instance, is a donkey herder; urdain herds pigs. A cowpoke is behizain in Euskera." Hmm... let's look back at the OED, and we'll find that "shepherds" are "sheep herders", and our wonderful "rich" dictionary has such words as "swineherd" (for pigs), "cowherd" (for cows) and "goatherd" (for goats). And (just checking the OED now), yes, even "ass-herd" for a herder of donkeys. The article even makes a point of saying that "Airport, science, Renaissance, democracy, government, and independence, for example, are all newly minted words with no roots in traditional Euskera: aireportu, zientzia, errenazimentu, demokrazia, gobernu, independentzia," completely ignoring the fact that these are all words with no roots in traditional English either -- it's pretty ironic that he mocks Basque for borrowing words that English has also had to borrow. The goalposts keep moving in order to justify the belief that us "civilised" white European folk are superior to everyone else in the world. So crawl back into your hole and stop spouting your nonsense. Edited by Cainntear on 04 December 2010 at 6:02pm 9 persons have voted this message useful | |||||||||
| GREGORG4000 Diglot Senior Member United States Joined 5311 days ago 307 posts - 479 votes Speaks: English*, Finnish Studies: Japanese, Korean, Amharic, French | Message 38 of 41 04 December 2010 at 6:22pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
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I think that we're dealing with extremely vague definitions again.
1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||
| Raчraч Ŋuɲa Triglot Senior Member New Zealand Joined 5606 days ago 154 posts - 233 votes Speaks: Bikol languages*, Tagalog, EnglishC1 Studies: Spanish, Russian, Japanese | Message 39 of 41 04 December 2010 at 10:29pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
There are 2 scenarios to your response. Do you mean each unique symbol is a complete idea, such that there is no need to strung together little ideas to convey that single idea, and that these unique symbols exhaust all possible ideas? Then grammar can neither be infinitely complex nor simple, but non-existent (no rules exists) because no need to relate one idea to another. Each one is a complete sentence, with a complete thought, not necessitating any modification. This scenario is impossible, since a language will have infinite number of unique symbols. Or do you mean that polysemy, homonymy or metonymy do not exist for words that currently are in a language? In this case, grammar can't be infinitely complex nor simple either, since the number of morphemes in any language and the possible number of combining them is finite, but not simple. Morphemes are finite since they can fit inside a dictionary, and combinations are finite since we do not keep studying a language's grammar (vocabulary yes) once we fluently speaks a language. Even with language change from Latin to say Spanish, rules are just replaced but still finite. Although I think I got what you mean, that rule#1 imply rules increase with the number of morphemes. This can be improved to: 1. The number of types of bricks (morphemes), and rules 2-5 are modified based on #1. Edited by Raчraч Ŋuɲa on 04 December 2010 at 10:37pm 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||
| Gusutafu Senior Member Sweden Joined 5309 days ago 655 posts - 1039 votes Speaks: Swedish* | Message 40 of 41 04 December 2010 at 11:53pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
OK, so you agree that the statement about all grammars being equally complex is not even well defined, and that linguists keep saying it merely for political reasons? That's exactly my view, the difference between us is that I don't think political correctness should be the guiding principle in academic questions. Now you'll probably want to retort that it starts with disparaging so-called primitive languages and it ends with concentration camps, but I don't believe that either. What I do believe is that political correctness is like a giant wet blanket on all independent thinking and that it is killing off legitimate debate.
IF by bigot you mean "one who regards or treats the members of a group (as a racial or ethnic group) with hatred and intolerance" I don't think it's a fair label. What I am saying is that some languages are more expressive than other, would you really say that that this is hateful and intolerant? If you read your quote carefully, you'll notice that I wrote "could be" and "certain South Sea languages". I'm not saying that e.g. English is definitely richer than all such languages, I'm just open to the possibility, just as I don't dogmatically and a priori deny the possibility that there could be racial differences in intelligence, or differences in math abilities between the sexes, to take two controversial examples. To be frank, many academics and journalists today seem to suffer from some form of post-colonial backlash, there seems to be this uncontrollable urge to talk down everything that is associated with old Europe, whiteness, Christianity or even maleness. The new elite ritually kills off the old elite, what? Finally, I completely disagree that words like "heifer" don't make English a richer language, just because some urbanised academics don't know them. The word is there, people use it, so it's part of the language. 3 persons have voted this message useful |
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