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What ’easy’ language do you find hard? | ||
Tags: Difficulty | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : General discussion |  | |
| Stolan Senior Member United States Joined 3828 days ago 274 posts - 368 votes  Speaks: English* Studies: Thai, Lowland Scots Studies: Arabic (classical), Cantonese | Message 129 of 134 29 May 2014 at 6:15am | IP Logged | ||
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Forgive me, I typed some of those posts on my iphone. I tend to elaborate my speech with archaic and unusual features as a protest against the simplicity that the English language has underwent. I also rarely edit what I
write and write what I think as it comes out. But then I do come back and edit by usually adding more information when more thoughts come. I am not the most typical person. Edited by Stolan on 29 May 2014 at 6:18am 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| AlexTG Diglot Senior Member Australia Joined 4434 days ago 178 posts - 354 votes Speaks: English*, French Studies: Latin, German, Spanish, Japanese | Message 130 of 134 29 May 2014 at 8:30am | IP Logged | ||
Do you have an example of a phonological difficulty that you consider equal to tones for non-tonal language speakers? Nasal vowels in French come to mind, but since some native dialects don't use them, they can't be as essential as tonality in Mandarin. Japanese learning languages with an r/l distinction? In English atleast they can get by without the distinction... It seems to me the tonal equivilent of these difficulties is we non-tonal speakers learning Japanese. There are words which are distinguished by tone alone, but you can get by ignoring the distinction. Edited by AlexTG on 29 May 2014 at 8:35am 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| Medulin Tetraglot Senior Member Croatia Joined 4464 days ago 1199 posts - 2192 votes Speaks: Croatian*, English, Spanish, Portuguese Studies: Norwegian, Hindi, Nepali | Message 131 of 134 29 May 2014 at 5:03pm | IP Logged | ||
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I'd say tones are the easier part of Mandarin phonology.
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| Stolan Senior Member United States Joined 3828 days ago 274 posts - 368 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Thai, Lowland Scots Studies: Arabic (classical), Cantonese | Message 132 of 134 29 May 2014 at 6:04pm | IP Logged | ||
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To Medulin, I would like to hear your opinions on the evolution of East Asian languages.
As Wilhelm Von Humbolt (who was wrong about tons of stuff) explained, the Chinese grammar is a grammar of the mind and not the words. He was right about this one, but modern Chinese is moving away from the monosyllabic context based skeleton+strings and pulley language that numerous Southeast Asian languages still are (although Vietnamese is moving away too) and gaining organs and muscle. It is not that they lack inflection, but they lack techniques and distinctions. Chinese word order is currently based on pragmatics, a step up from strict SVO/SOV or free context based order which many other languages in that area are, yet other techniques such as a conditional mood may rely on discourse and social techniques to perform the same action. What may be the subjunctive is achieved not through inflection but knowing how to converse a certain way. Hence some Asian languages tend to have large personal pronoun and honorific inventories while other forms are at the minimum needed for communication. Chinese used to have a larger pronoun inventory in its past too. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Medulin Tetraglot Senior Member Croatia Joined 4464 days ago 1199 posts - 2192 votes Speaks: Croatian*, English, Spanish, Portuguese Studies: Norwegian, Hindi, Nepali | Message 133 of 134 30 May 2014 at 4:38pm | IP Logged | ||
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You're right, 75% of modern Mandarin words are 2-syllabic, sometimes their components can be separated (as in 孩子), sometimes they can't (as in 蝴蝶). Chinese script and scriptio continua worked beautifully for old Chinese (when all words were monosyllabic), but nowadays this approach would be tedious, thank God Chinese use much more , ; and - than European languages (so Mandarin is more comfortable to read than Thai). (Speaking of Thai and Lao I find their grammar too easy, to the point that expressing any complex idea requires some linguistic acrobatics, just like in Toki Pona.). Edited by Medulin on 30 May 2014 at 4:41pm 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Stolan Senior Member United States Joined 3828 days ago 274 posts - 368 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Thai, Lowland Scots Studies: Arabic (classical), Cantonese | Message 134 of 134 31 May 2014 at 1:49am | IP Logged | ||
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Lao word order is free and context and intonation are important. I suspect that the ancestor of Thai/Lao/Khmer/etc.
used to be heavily inflecting to the point that word boundaries didn't exist as much, we can see languages related to Tibetan that have as many as 10 ablaut stems for one verb and 8 cases and dual and plurals, they lost classifiers though (shame). Khmer has relatives that have huge amounts of derivational morphology and lexical aspect modification through infixes, I suspect they once were inflecting (they still have conjugation prefixes). Thus I think: Hypothesis (not theory): Things such as adjectives, prepositions, adverbs, possession, etc may have been contained in a single word. Sorta like Kabardian, Old Chinese didn't have tones but a large consonant inventory and permitted clusters often that seem impossible for a westerner to pronounce. Maybe if we go further back we find heavy inflection in these Asian languages. I imagine that their ancestors had to rely on so much affixing that when they dropped off and inflection left, things that are uninflected with complicated syntactical rules such adpositions, clitics, wh-words, preverbal devices, separate words for adjectives and adverbs, stuff like reflexive, phrasal, lexical aspect, and/or light verbs, etc. didn't exist yet and it would take a long time for them to evolve. Hence a huge lack of boundaries and mandatory rules (now in Chinese dialects, one must now use the correct aspect particle, but in Thai you can drop it if context permits) and a grammar based on discourse and social interaction would exist for a while. Many are gaining tonal morphology of sorts often with agreement rules (I don't get why Thai, Lao, and many more have no tonal sandhi, I understand Cantonese lacks it but it is much less conservative. Numerous Chinese dialects are evolving to have more complicated interactions) Btw Kabardian is a caucasian language that is agglutinating and has nearly no irregular stems yet undergoes numerous phonological processes that are regular yet very complicated. I am interested in it. Basically Finnish on steroids. Yet there are other related languages with even more complicated phonology. (I'm taking this example from google books) Ex: 0-y-a-y-ə-tə-a-aɣ-s' = " yayetaaɣs' "? no, it is roughly " yir,ritas' ". Gemination is taken into account. Edited by Stolan on 05 June 2014 at 3:25am 1 person has voted this message useful |
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