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John McWhorter - The Language Hoax | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : General discussion | ( Topic Closed) |  |
| Serpent Octoglot Senior Member Russian Federation serpent-849.livejour Joined 6594 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 65 of 69 13 June 2014 at 10:48pm | IP Logged | |||||
The agreement allows for a more flexible word order. For learners this means that what you say can sound odd or emphasize the wrong thing (like intonation mistakes), but syntactical mistakes almost never impede comprehension, when they are even considered mistakes.
That's become a self-fulfilling prophecy or something. It's very natural that when most music in a given genre is in English, it's easier to write your own songs in English too (there are more than enough other difficulties when you start your own band). And the more people do this, the more existing music is in English. Edited by Serpent on 13 June 2014 at 10:51pm 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| Stolan Senior Member United States Joined 4029 days ago 274 posts - 368 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Thai, Lowland Scots Studies: Arabic (classical), Cantonese | Message 66 of 69 13 June 2014 at 11:25pm | IP Logged | |||||
outside Indo European complexity. They expect inflection to be natural for all languages with the ones without being odd. When I mentioned East Asian languages, the main point is not the lack of inflection but the lack of boundaries in words and the lack of grammaticalization as well. They bring what is just necessary to introduce new information, but like I said, mood, definiteness, plurality, and tense are matters of inference and conversation. Just having plurals for example means one must distinguish mass and countable nouns in speech for example. Transitivity and more are not there either etc. very little boundary in putting a sentence together. There is a hidden complexity. If you want the opposite, well: I never talked about Chechen/Ingush but its agreement and random gender are worse, and words change gender in plurals. One has to memorize if a verb or adjective must change for gender and whether a noun attaches the postposition to the bare stem or dative by heart. The noun system is like Icelandic and the verb system is like Navajo in irregularity. V2. word order and verbs require different cases for the subject even, split alignment etc. Semantic distinction is like having modal verbs, motion verbs, extra demonstratives, different persons, paucal vs plural etc. Its distinction in the grammar that is over specified in defining things where context would be used in languages without some of them. Syntactic is knowing that "I want him to go" involves a non finite verb following showing the previous word is an object in the sentence. Or knowing what triggers the subjunctive etc. Words can be stacked in East Asian languages without worrying about what is what in a sentence, and written works need extra brackets, hyphens, and punctuation. To Serpent, The irregularity and the fact there are different ways of modifying a word just to add basic information that is mandatory is the problem. Aspect pairs for example, why not an auxiliary or inflection? Nope, to explain differences one must memorize pairs of words since there is no method of getting one from the other that is consistent, which would be fine if the verbs weren't an open class. I used an example back of imaging a language with no negative adverb, one had to memorize the negative form of every single word in said language, and that there are 50 different ways a word could be modified. It is that there may be 8-20 different suffixes for forming the genitive, dative, and instrumental respectively with numerous morphological exception. Just stating that something belongs to someone else requires memorizing which form that word uses. The case system isn't folly though, as in something like Sanskrit where the endings are pretty much the same for every word except for regular sandhi and some exceptions, where the cases still have their original purpose instead of being extra places to store preposition agreement. Edited by Stolan on 13 June 2014 at 11:37pm 2 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| Retinend Triglot Senior Member SpainRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 4305 days ago 283 posts - 557 votes Speaks: English*, German, Spanish Studies: Arabic (Written), French | Message 67 of 69 14 June 2014 at 12:26am | IP Logged | |||||
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Can you give some linguistic evidence for what you say about east asian syntax? For
example, is there no linguistic distinction between "you pay me" and "I pay you", only contextual clues? 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| Cabaire Senior Member Germany Joined 5596 days ago 725 posts - 1352 votes | Message 68 of 69 14 June 2014 at 12:40am | IP Logged | |||||
Well, there is a language, which does these crazy things, when doing negation: deirim (I say) : ní abraím (I do not say) ghním (I make) : ní theánaim (I do not make) chuaigh mé (I went) : ní dheachaigh mé (I did not go) táim (I am) : nílim (I am not) Older forms of the language may have had a greater number of these variations. This does happen of course in an indo-european language :-)) Edited by Cabaire on 14 June 2014 at 12:42am 5 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
 meramarina Diglot Moderator United States Joined 5964 days ago 1341 posts - 2303 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish Studies: German, Italian, French Personal Language Map | Message 69 of 69 14 June 2014 at 3:45am | IP Logged | |||||
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This thread is being closed by request. It has gone too far off-topic, and while the discussion is largely excellent and informative, it's more helpful for all of us who read and write here to try to stay on track.
Discussions about linguistics, linguistic hypotheses and even controversies are welcome here, and can be continued in other threads. Language superiority/inferiority, however, has been very distracting and disruptive in the past here, and does not belong on this forum. 5 persons have voted this message useful |
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