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John McWhorter - The Language Hoax | ||
Tags: Linguistics | Book | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : General discussion | ( Topic Closed) |  |
| Serpent Octoglot Senior Member Russian Federation serpent-849.livejour Joined 6392 days ago 9753 posts - 15779 votes  4 sounds Speaks: Russian*, English, FinnishC1, Latin, German, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese Studies: Danish, Romanian, Polish, Belarusian, Ukrainian, Croatian, Slovenian, Catalan, Czech, Galician, Dutch, Swedish | Message 57 of 69 13 June 2014 at 8:03pm | IP Logged | |||||
On HTLAL you're pretty much the only one who does this. BTW I have no problems with those who dislike my native language or consider it difficult, but I do think HTLAL is not the right place to call any language or its features vomit-inducing. What confuses me most is your motivation. If you don't like a language, don't learn it and don't read about it. It's simple. And no, nobody will call you lazy or primitive for not learning this or that language. Learn whatever you want. Even very small progress will earn you more respect than the point you're trying to make here. 5 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| tarvos Super Polyglot Winner TAC 2012 Senior Member China likeapolyglot.wordpr Joined 4502 days ago 5310 posts - 9399 votes Speaks: Dutch*, English, Swedish, French, Russian, German, Italian, Norwegian, Mandarin, Romanian, Afrikaans Studies: Greek, Modern Hebrew, Spanish, Portuguese, Czech, Korean, Esperanto, Finnish | Message 58 of 69 13 June 2014 at 8:18pm | IP Logged | |||||
If you asked my father, a very learned human being, what Chechen, Lithuanian or Icelandic sounded like, he wouldn't have a clue. He would maybe know that Icelandic is a Germanic language (related to the Scandinavian ones), but what it looks like? Lithuanian is "a country that's formerly Russia" (because he grew up when the Soviet Union was still intact) and Chechen... he would assume those people spoke Russian because Chechnya is officially in Russia still. I doubt he even knows that there is such a thing as the Chechen language. I certainly don't think he would take any of these languages as examples of complexity (he might take Russian though, just to mock me). So I don't get it. I don't think anybody even cares. He speaks Dutch and English (and learned some German, Latin, Ancient Greek and French he never uses) and anything else doesn't really matter. English is not simple to him, although he speaks it excellently. So I don't get it. I really don't get where this comes from. Edited by tarvos on 13 June 2014 at 8:20pm 4 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| Josquin Heptaglot Senior Member Germany Joined 4639 days ago 2266 posts - 3992 votes Speaks: German*, English, French, Latin, Italian, Russian, Swedish Studies: Japanese, Irish, Portuguese, Persian | Message 59 of 69 13 June 2014 at 8:29pm | IP Logged | |||||
That must be the reason why all European teenagers think English is way cooler than their native language. 4 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| Stolan Senior Member United States Joined 3827 days ago 274 posts - 368 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Thai, Lowland Scots Studies: Arabic (classical), Cantonese | Message 60 of 69 13 June 2014 at 8:39pm | IP Logged | |||||
The European type of language creates a mindset of being surprised when so many languages in the rest of the world are not as complicated. I explained that. The irregularity is what makes a language like Icelandic so difficult. A language like Navajo has different demonstratives based on motion, distance, and animacy, it has 12 different words for handling an object based on the substance each with 3 distinct verbs based on whether an object is moved by handling, propelling, or free flight for a total of 36 verbs, and it distinguished a 4th person, indefinite, and spacial person in verb conjugation. (I guess you all know by now I love this language) But Icelandic, Chechen, Lithuanian, and Russian are just plain irregular, Russian has motion verbs as a unique feature, but other than that, the ones I listed don't necessarily display greater semantic or syntactical distinction as much as Navajo or greater than English for example, they are just more irregular and require more agreement between words that doesn't do much except exist.
I know man, we keep on hearing "I have more trouble with my native language than English, so making music in English is a better way to reach out" They'd be into Esperanto as well if it were as prevalent, some new code among the whole world, like Mcdonalds instead of Beef Burgandy. Edited by Stolan on 13 June 2014 at 8:46pm 3 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| Juаn Senior Member Colombia Joined 5140 days ago 727 posts - 1830 votes Speaks: Spanish* | Message 61 of 69 13 June 2014 at 9:14pm | IP Logged | |||||
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For me at least, the typological facts of a language is not what defines them; it is the concerns, thoughts and imaginations of the men and women to which they have given voice -culture- that infuse life into them. I don't study some still heavily inflected Proto-IE descendant, but the tongue of Dostoyevsky.
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| ScottScheule Diglot Senior Member United States scheule.blogspot.com Joined 5023 days ago 645 posts - 1176 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish Studies: Latin, Hungarian, Biblical Hebrew, Old English, Russian, Swedish, German, Italian, French | Message 62 of 69 13 June 2014 at 9:20pm | IP Logged | |||||
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It's worth pointing out that additional distinctions do not per se improve a language. For example, in Europe, most languages have a plural number and singular number. Some have a dual. Now we could easily imagine a language that had not only a dual, but a trial, quadral, quintal, sextal, septal, octal, nonal, etc.
But I imagine most of us would find such a language to have a few too many distinctions. There are values beyond precision. 3 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| Retinend Triglot Senior Member SpainRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 4103 days ago 283 posts - 557 votes Speaks: English*, German, Spanish Studies: Arabic (Written), French | Message 63 of 69 13 June 2014 at 9:25pm | IP Logged | |||||
Well on the one hand you want to use a lot of linguistic terms (and not usually incorrectly) but then you so often slip into impressionistic, quasi-poetic use of language at the drop of a hat (cf. your "antivirals and antibiotics"). First you use the phrase "linguistic knowledge" which, when it comes to linguists, is typically used to refer to the parts of cognition which pertain to language behaviour, and then you use "irregularity," which makes a linguist think of something like swim/swam/swum, rather than "irregularity" in the sense of "abnormality" (here, abnormality amongst the gamut of the world's languages, right?) But thanks for defining your terms. Now your points are a lot clearer. I agree that people place verbal morphology above all other aspects of language when deciding how difficult a language is holistically. This probably comes from a long history of teaching Latin grammar through practicing declension and parsing the case system. Lots of people are taking you to have been saying that you deem other languages to be "simplistic." If I now understand you more clearly, you are actually saying that it's exactly the obsession with verbal morphology in highly inflecting IE languages which distorts the criteria with which IE- speakers generally judge the "standard" of difficulty to be? And therefore we need some other, better metric for talking intelligibly about the complexity of language? I couldn't agree more. Only still I'm puzzled because, in your older posts, you definitely seemed to advocate a scale of complexity in which east- Asian languages are somewhere at the bottom. Lastly, why are you so critical of Whorf, claiming that his writings shouldn't "be allowed" to have any influence, when his short life's work was to provoke the linguistic establishment's complacent presumption that the IE group provided enough information to work out the nature of language with a capital L? One would think that he would be your hero, especially given that you also seem fascinated by implicit belief systems (e.g. animacy/nonanimacy, figure and ground) that are somehow engrained in grammar.
How can you quantify the amount in which languages "cleave the air" into semantic distinctions, in order to make the assertion that some language "displays greater semantic distinction"? What is an example of "syntactic distinction"? 3 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| Josquin Heptaglot Senior Member Germany Joined 4639 days ago 2266 posts - 3992 votes Speaks: German*, English, French, Latin, Italian, Russian, Swedish Studies: Japanese, Irish, Portuguese, Persian | Message 64 of 69 13 June 2014 at 9:33pm | IP Logged | |||||
The point being nobody thinks English is inferior to other languages. It's rather the other way round: English is a very prestigious language. Your private war against complex morphology seems to be rather pointless, by the way. There will always be people thinking their language is better or superior to others, but that's common human stupidity. People will always be stupid and it's useless to get upset about that. Think of all the prejudices and stereotypes that exist against people of other countries, races, coulours, sex, sexual orientations, and so on. The only thing one can do against that is not letting it affect you and convince people who think this way that they're wrong. On HTLAL, however, you're preaching to the choir. None of the regulars on this forum will think their language is superior to others. You're talking to intelligent people, who know a lot about languages, complaining about the prejudices of stupid people who maybe know their native language and English. You might have gathered from the answers here that nobody really disagrees with you. We're just astonished by the vehemence with which you keep repeating your mantra that complex morphology is useless. If Russian isn't better than English or Vietnamese, Navajo isn't better than Russian. So, why are you so upset? 3 persons have voted this message useful |
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