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John McWhorter - The Language Hoax | ||
Tags: Linguistics | Book | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : General discussion | ( Topic Closed) |  |
| Jeffers Senior Member United Kingdom Joined 4705 days ago 2151 posts - 3960 votes  Speaks: English* Studies: Hindi, Ancient Greek, French, Sanskrit, German | Message 49 of 69 13 June 2014 at 8:25am | IP Logged | ||||||||
I just don't get this. Why get "riled" at a language? The best way to deal with languages that bully you is to ignore them. If you get mad at them, they just laugh at you. 8 persons have voted this message useful | |||||||||
| garyb Triglot Senior Member ScotlandRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 5003 days ago 1468 posts - 2413 votes Speaks: English*, Italian, French Studies: Spanish | Message 50 of 69 13 June 2014 at 11:28am | IP Logged | ||||||||
We already had Features of the TL that you can't stand which had some similarly strange anger about certain languages not working in the arbitrary way that the author thinks they should, and even 'easy' languages you find hard had some complaints along these lines. I also don't understand the whole thing of getting "riled", but maybe I'm not enough of a language nerd (I don't necessarily mean that pejoratively, more just different interests; I must admit that linguistics isn't my thing so this thread was hard to follow)! 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||||||||
| ScottScheule Diglot Senior Member United States scheule.blogspot.com Joined 5024 days ago 645 posts - 1176 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish Studies: Latin, Hungarian, Biblical Hebrew, Old English, Russian, Swedish, German, Italian, French | Message 51 of 69 13 June 2014 at 5:23pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
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At this point, I doubt the thread will get back on track. So here's some thoughts on this tiff.
1. Anybody's free to like or dislike a language. Some like chocolate and some like strawberry, and just so, some like agglutination and some like fusion. And everyone's free to express their dislike or like. 2. People should not take it personally when someone else doesn't like their native language or a language they're interested in. If I say, for instance, that I don't like Russian, that doesn't mean I dislike Russians, or Russian culture, or that I think Russian-speakers are in anyway inferior to others. It doesn't mean there's anything wrong with the Russian language--it's just not for me. 3. But sometimes Stolan seems to go beyond just expressing a preference: he seems to think there's something objectively wrong with some languages. There's nothing wrong with that. Some languages may be objectively better by some metric than others--I doubt I'd agree with such a judgement, but I'm happy to allow I might be wrong. 4. But it's not clear when Stolan crosses the line between subjective and objective appraisals. When he talks about how bad massive irregularity is, what does he mean by that? Does he mean that he just doesn't like all that irregularity? If so, that's a subjective rating, and he has every right to it. Personal preferences are not to be disputed. Or is he saying that such irregularity makes the language objectively worse in some fashion--it hinders communication, or ease of acquisition, or something? If that's the case, then that's an objective rating, and one we can discuss and determine if it's true or not. Some clarity here would help. Edited by ScottScheule on 13 June 2014 at 5:36pm 3 persons have 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 52 of 69 13 June 2014 at 5:48pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
Fine let me state it: Massive irregularity hinders ease of acquisition. Massive irregularity places morphology over other parts of a language. But the main reason is: Massive irregularity distorts linguistic knowledge. The main reason why Europeans and South Americans think English is a stupid pidgin-like inferior language is that they have come to think random gender and excessive morphology and irregularity is normal and English is the odd one out. That it is unimaginably mind numbingly simple, because "no conjugation stupid american loolllolololo" In the entire world, languages have some allotments here and some there in each and every feature. Navajo has a simple noun system and lacks subordination/non-finite verb form complexities yet has a rich system of aspect and affixing with animacy and rich derivation. Hmong has numerous classifiers, several tones, sandhi, and serial verbs, yet it lacks true adjectives, possibly prepositions, and complicated word order rules. Then there is georgian with very complicated and irregular verbs yet with no gender and straightforward nouns. But there is Chechen, Russian, Lithuanian, and Icelandic.....they have everything piled on more piled on more piled on more. They have irregular morphology in all areas, they have random gender and inconsistent agreement, phonological processes that are more complicated than any Asian tonal language, everything must agree even when the information is not needed, they have random morphological exceptions that do nothing except exist. I would let them be, they wouldn't do any bothering. But they are taken as examples of what languages across the world are like by Europeans, they think inflection is far more sophisticated by being more irregular and difficult. They mock English and set some standard for what a language should be like, for example, adjectives agreeing with nouns in gender, case, and number is not done in many highly inflecting language families, it is a redundant and difficult feature that exists just because yet English is an idiot of a language because adjectives don't need to be modified nor does it have random semantic-less gender. The European strawman I keep bring up is very real. The word primitive is used all the time. "English is a primitive language, we use it because it is the easiest and Americans are too stupid to learn other languages. Every other language is better" Edited by Stolan on 13 June 2014 at 6:02pm 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||||||||
| Bao Diglot Senior Member Germany tinyurl.com/pe4kqe5 Joined 5562 days ago 2256 posts - 4046 votes Speaks: German*, English Studies: French, Spanish, Japanese, Mandarin | Message 53 of 69 13 June 2014 at 6:15pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
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Who are those Europeans you are talking about, and why did I never meet them? Edited by Bao on 13 June 2014 at 6:17pm 7 persons have voted this message useful | |||||||||
| Retinend Triglot Senior Member SpainRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 4104 days ago 283 posts - 557 votes Speaks: English*, German, Spanish Studies: Arabic (Written), French | Message 54 of 69 13 June 2014 at 6:41pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
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"Massive irregularity distorts linguistic knowledge"
"Massive irregularity places morphology over other parts of a language. " Define your terms. Edited by Retinend on 13 June 2014 at 6:44pm 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||||||||
| Luso Hexaglot Senior Member Portugal Joined 5857 days ago 819 posts - 1812 votes Speaks: Portuguese*, French, EnglishC2, GermanB1, Italian, Spanish Studies: Sanskrit, Arabic (classical) | Message 55 of 69 13 June 2014 at 7:36pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
He lumped East Asians, why not Europeans? Just one stereotype after another... Edited by Luso on 13 June 2014 at 7:47pm 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||||||||
| ScottScheule Diglot Senior Member United States scheule.blogspot.com Joined 5024 days ago 645 posts - 1176 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish Studies: Latin, Hungarian, Biblical Hebrew, Old English, Russian, Swedish, German, Italian, French | Message 56 of 69 13 June 2014 at 7:47pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
Thanks, that helps. Do you mean early life or later life acquisition?
I really have no idea what this means.
Your complaint seems to be that people assume the features of their own language are more universal than they really are. It's weird to pin the blame for that on any particular language and any particular feature, since it likely applies to all languages and most speakers. People who speak Mandarin probably think tones are more common than they really are, and copy paste with Russians with inflections, Spanish with gender etc. Why, instead of attacking Caucasian languages or whatever, can't you just say: "Although you may be tempted to believe otherwise by just taking your own language as a guide, most languages are much less inflected than your own." Or something similar. Past that, you just seem to have a chip on your shoulder because (some) people think, wrongly, that English is exceptional in its simplicity. That may be true, but 1. most people on this board are smarter than that, and 2. again, that seems like a very strange reason to criticize other languages. I feel like I can distill everything you say down to: 1. Some languages are more irregular than others. 2. Some languages are more redundant than others. 3. Some people are ignorant of linguistic facts. 4. I don't like any of this. I don't think any of that's incorrect. You just have a damned confusing way of stating it. Edited by ScottScheule on 13 June 2014 at 7:54pm 4 persons have voted this message useful |
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