That’s all right, don’t mind me. sniff
Yeah. ALL natural languages have the same degree of complexity. So, it doesn’t matter if you say they’re equally simple or if you say they’re equally complex.
How likely is this degree of alteration in a language where an obviously educated writer of the early 21st century can’t get away with “thru” or “nite” because it upsets readers to the point where communication suffers?? :dubious:
Sorry. Thank you.
I’m just asking out of interest here, not trying to make any point at all:
What definition of “complexity” are you using there? Complexity in terms of what is expressible (which I guess I would think of as “richness”) or complexity in terms of what it takes to express a given concept? It seems as if there are some concepts expressible simply in one language that, while certainly expressible in others are nonetheless more complex to express. I’m thinking of things like “schadenfreude” from German or “saudade” from Portuguese; words for which there’s no immediate analogue in some other languages. I imagine this is just a matter of terminology, but I find the idea that all natural languages are equally “complex” to be unintuitive, and I’m interested.
(And yes, I know English has basically adopted “schadenfreude” but you see the point… :))
Wait 'til the first generation reaches adulthood that was brought up on text messaging and IM :). Having spent a while working as a moderator on some very large messageboards aimed at kids, I can assure you there’s quite a lot of young people around who communicate like that with no problems whatsoever. And it’s unsurprising; after all, online is where kids these days do an awful lot of their writing - more so than in class in a lot of cases, I would think.
Are there any languages (western or otherwise) in which something similar WOULDN’T work?
Hey, I’m rooting for you guys! Probably because I’m about to marry one, though…
“Away”?
Well, in truth the idea that all languages are equal in complexity is a bit of a dogma. The more accurate way of explaining it is that there’s no way to quantify “complexity” in languages and thus rank them.
Monty has been hinting at something important: there is a tendency for a language that is simple in one respect to be more complicated in others to make up for it. For example, a language with complex morphology - one that attaches lots of agreement markers, case markers, and so on to words - can afford to be freer with word order, since words are marked to match each other. So, for instance, in Latin, the major constituents of a sentence - Subject, Object, and Verb, can generally go in any order and the sentence is perfectly comprehensible; the roles of subject and object are indicated by endings on nouns. In, say, Chinese or English, those things are not marked; both languages have much simpler morphology, and so they tend to have more complex syntax. Word order is more strictly defined, and so changes in word order will substantially change a sentence’s meaning.
It’s easy to look at languages and say that some languages are more morphologically complex than others, and that’s usually what laypeople refer to when they describe a language as “complex”. English has relatively simple morphology - most verbs have five forms or fewer, nouns only inflect to indicate plurality (there is also the -'s affix to indicate possession, but that’s not always attached to the noun. At any rate, it’s a clitic and not an inflection, which explains its overall regularity.) But that’s far from the only aspect of what makes up a language. For instance, some languages have larger vocabularies than others (though counting the size of a language’s vocabulary is a non-trivial task in itself); while English has relatively simple morphology, it has an enormous vocabulary. Certainly it’s easy to see that some languages have larger vocabularies for certain terms than others - Chinese, for instance, tends to have several different terms for kinship relations that only have one term in English, so your father’s younger brother is different than his older brother, and your mother’s older and younger brothers are also different. But determining exactly what constitutes a language’s “everyday vocabulary”, the terms most people are expected to know (as opposed to obscure or specialized ones) is simply impossible. So while it’s likely that variation exists in that respect, no obvious tools exist to measure it.
So it’s hard to measure all those things. No method exists to weight different components of a language’s complexity. So how does one then decide that one language is more complicated than another? Trying to quantify and weight different bits of “complexity” is simply not a task you can reasonably attempt - there’s no empirical way to do so.
So instead you can examine the empirical data. For instance, look at the pace at which children acquire a native language. Children, on average, are about the same the world over - a child adopted into a community foreign to it will learn the language of its community just as well as a native child. So examining children’s ease in acquiring their native languages seems like a useful empirical tool. And doing that tells us, quite simply, that children acquire their native languages with the same ease worldwide, whatever language it happens to be. No language is so complicated that children take longer to learn it, which tells us that language acquisition is equally easy or difficult no matter what the language.
So in the absence of any objective way to decide whether a language is simple or complicated from a priori measurements, and given that language acquisition tends to go the same way all over the world, it’s fair to say that there is no evidence to decide that one language is more complicated than another. To whatever extent the question is meaningful, the answer is that all languages are equal in their complexity.
Similarly, since you touched on it, languages tend to be equal in their expressive power - or, at least, there is no evidence that they are not. While there are certainly words that exist in one language and don’t in another, it’s much harder to justify the idea that a particular concept can be expressed in one language but not in another. And when a language has some entity or idea that it needs to express, it will immediately invent or borrow a word for it, so the fact that a language might not have vocabulary for some specific purpose is of little relevance; if people need to talk about that in a language, they will come up with ways to do so.
All of these things are what you’d expect anyway. If a language happens not to be able to express something, its speakers will figure out how to. If a language is more complex than necessary, then speakers will give up on certain features. Things develop and disappear in languages when necessary.
As an example, Latin had no grammaticalized expression of formality; there were no special pronouns or verb forms for it. There are only two second person pronouns in the language, tu (singular) and vos (plural). But with social changes, the Romance languages developed special pronouns for formal purposes, and used them either with third person or plural forms of the verb. In French, the plural vous was extended for formal use in the singular. In Spanish, the same thing happened, and then changed again: the pronoun was replaced by the phrase vuestro merced (your mercy; ‘your’ being in the plural as an honorific), which shortened to usted (plural ustedes), used with third person pronouns. Portuguese developed a similar pronoun, você, and then innovated a third, even greater level of formality, using the phrases - which evolved into pronouns in their own right - o senhor (masculine) and a senhora (feminine).
And nowadays formal usages are slowly disappearing again. While the formal forms are alive and well in Spanish or French, they are gradually being confined to more and more specific circumstances and look to be disappearing completely. Already, the formal/informal distinction has wholly disappeared in the plural in Latin America, with only the originally formal form ustedes remaining. In Spain, by contrast, the formal plural is being confined to highly formal environments, with the informal plural vosotros replacing it most of the time. In Brazilian Portuguese, the most intimate pronoun, tu, is almost unused, and in many dialects, the intimate and the less formal of the formal pronouns are becoming mixed together (with você, originally formal, as the subject pronoun but te, originally informal, as the object pronoun.) It seems to be the case that this formality distinction is disappearing in modern, more egalitarian societies.
This is exactly what you’d expect language to do. People are not inclined to do unnecessary work; if a feature of a language is no longer useful, it will - given time - disappear. This sort of thing can be seen all the time in different languages. Which is one of the things that suggests that things that are complex and don’t immediately seem useful probably serve a purpose. Gender distinctions, for instance, strike many foreigners learning Spanish or French as archaic and unnecessary. But while both languages have lost the third, neuter, gender of Latin, the distinction between masculine and feminine remains strong. It’s not something that has to be taught in schools or that the uneducated or careless confuse; it’s a basic part of the language that no doubt serves a communicatory purpose, even if we can’t tell for certain what the purpose is (though in the case of grammatical gender, lots of reasons have been proposed to explain what it’s good for.)
Note that none of those things is true of writing systems, though. Plenty of evidence can be found to show that one writing system is more complicated than another. If basic literacy is impacted by English’s arcane spelling system (I don’t personally believe it is, but this is a what-if) then it would make sense to alter it. The Chinese government altered their writing system in the name of promoting literacy (and they succeeded greatly in increasing literacy substantially, though whether simplified characters are part of the reason or not is anybody’s guess.) It’s not a simple question to ask whether a writing system ought to be changed, or whether it would make learning to read and write substantially easier or solve any other problems - but it’s certainly not a ridiculous question, and it’s one well worth asking.
That’s why I said 20 or 30 years. While it may upset readers in general, I believe that “txtor” speak may actually become accepted in some corporate settings. Not that I am comfortable with that language-wise, but corporate culture does change as the next generation takes over, so to speak.
Witness the dotcom boom in the 1990’s when corporate HQ’s became “campuses” and employees started dressing in jeans and t-shirts, played Nerf ball, put all kinds of goofy shit in their cubes, lived on Jolt and pizza, and coded all night long.
Certainly not the uptight, staid IBM '60s thing.
I just think that when these kids start running things, they won’t really care about linguistic conventions, whether they are mandated (by whomever) or not.
Because they will have the bukz and the bling dude. 
Blimey. Cheers for that, Excalibre; that was really interesting. Yes, I find the ideas about morphology and syntax much more intuitively appealing than a generalised concept of “complexity”. That makes a lot more sense.
Ah, I knew I remembered reading something about a study of Chinese literacy rates, and the impact of their character set on it. IIRC it’s still quite a bit lower there than in comparable countries using the Latin alphabet, isn’t it?
Hmm. I would argue that top-down spelling reforms to date have either occurred in relatively limited contexts (e.g. Germany) or in countries with a vast command-and-control structure (i.e. China). Neither of these are particularly true for English, which is so widespread that it’s hard to see any one government having the influence to push through change, even if they did have the desire to do so. So I don’t see it happening without positively huge amounts of effort, for which the impetus just doesn’t seem to exist. But that’s just practicality.
As for the underlying debate, while the Yahoo article linked in the OP certainly doesn’t help the ALC’s case with its godawful rendering of “alternative” spellings, a quick perusal of the ALC’s website doesn’t suggest much more complex reasoning there. Theirs seems to be a dogmatic “literacy is low. This must be because of spelling” approach, which as you say is far from obviously true. I agree, it’s not an intrinsically silly debate, but it doesn’t seem like anyone proposing change is putting much serious study into what simplifications are necessary (as opposed to possible), or what benefits they will bring. In the absence of this, they will tend to get met with mockery.
They should certainly think twice about picketing spelling bees; seems somewhat silly to complain about spelling being difficult outside an event in which kids are kicking ass at it. 
Dead Badger:
There is also the simple fact that language is composed of far more than just morphology and syntax. There is, of course, the lexicon. Evidently, no living natural language has a closed lexicon; therefore, to say that one language is better or worse than another at expressing a particular concept denies that fact. Also, pragmatics comes into play for language. How one says what one says is just as important as what one says.
Oh, sure, I realise there’s much more to it than just those two, but the idea of the various tradeoffs in constituent parts’ necessary complexity makes a lot of sense. I was mainly having trouble what “complexity” meant in the context. As a computer scientist it’s interesting to see the parallels between this sort of thing and the tradeoffs existing in programming language design.
Point taken about the lexicon; I guess given the rapidity with which ideas get absorbed into a language it is daft to talk about what a language can express. Really the examples I was thinking of are ones where one language is more verbose at present in expressing a given idea. But as you say, there’s no reason intrinsic to the language why that happens; I suppose it’s more a case of saying, “English people don’t talk about X as much as (say) the Portuguese, so they’re not as snappy when they do.”
Theodore Roosevelt thought highly of it, and he was called lot of things but never a fool. We certainly need standardized spelling but that does not mean our current system of orthography is optimal. But a major practical obstacle is that a generation brought up to read simplified spelling would have trouble anything printed before the reform, unless it were in a transliterated tradition. Do we really want to make the last five centuries of English literature as inaccessible as Chaucer?
Better still is the International Phonetic Alphabet, which uses (mostly) Roman letters with modifications – entirely phonetically unambiguous and precise; there’s a character for every phoneme human vocal apparatus can produce, and each character has one and only one phonetic value.
OTOH, if we’re gonna go that far, why be content with a sloppy, irregular, natural language like English? Why not switch to Esperanto or Volapuk or Loglan? Or Klingon? 
I don’t know that I’ve heard that. It seems to me that it would be hard to find any “comparable country” to China, which is one of the largest countries in the world in terms of landmass, the largest in terms of population, and the general historical circumstances. When a substantial part of a country’s population is relatively isolated peasants, it’s hard for modernity to happen in an instant. So while I find it plausible that the use of Chinese characters has slowed down the growth of literacy, I wonder how much actual evidence there is of it.
Well, changes to German and French have been minor, it’s true. (And some of those attempts have not caught on well.) But there’s a fairly wide-ranging change in Portuguese which happened a few years back. It’s not a huge one, and it hasn’t happened exactly the same way in the entire Portuguese-speaking world. The most noticeable change is that consonant clusters in which only one consonant is actually pronounced were simplified to single consonants in Brazilian Portuguese, so óptimo in Continental Portuguese corresponds to ótimo in Brazilian Portuguese. (Those changes happened in Portugal as well - but they were changed back!) Portugal, Brazil, and other Portuguese-speaking countries have been working at unifying their spelling systems and removing those various silent letters. But substantial changes have happened in both countries, even if the process isn’t finished yet. And while people naturally predicted the end of the world as a result, it didn’t occur.
Japanese has also had government-led changes to its writing system. Changes much like the simplification of Chinese characters have happened - in many cases yielding the same forms in modern Japanese and simplified Chinese. Going back further in time, very large changes to French orthography have been promulgated by the French government at various points in history, though some have been more well-accepted than others. The modern French orthography would be very, very different had these changes not happened.
That’s just off the top of my head. Spelling reforms haven’t been easy, but they have occurred in a lot of countries. The English-speaking world strikes me as a bit unique in our opposition to change when compared with other countries. A ground-up reorganization of our writing system would likely be difficult, but smallish changes like losing extraneous vowels in colour or mediaeval has happened at times. I guess the bottom line, as far as I’m concerned, is that such a thing could be done. Writing reforms aren’t always successful but they’ve occurred in a lot of different languages at different times. The trouble for English is that its spelling has become so convoluted that very large changes would be necessary in order to accomplish anything. Changes of that magnitude happened in China, but you’re correct in saying that the Chinese government has a bit more ability to do such things than ours. But I don’t see any reason to think substantial changes to English spelling are impossible, and I certainly think a case could be made that there’s good reason to.
The Yahoo article was awful. I doubt those changes had anything to do with anyone’s proposal. I’m not sure what kind of news reporter decides “Hey, I’m covering spelling reform! So I’ll write my article in illegible goofy spellings to reflect my baseless guesses of what spelling reformers are calling for! It’s called responsible journalism, folks!”
Anyway, I’m hardly sold on the idea, but I think it’s worth discussing.
We might have to resort to the difficult task of reprinting some books. No one said it would be easy, folks.
The International Phonetic alphabet would probably be relatively suboptimal for this kind of thing.
:rolleyes: Has it still not occurred to you that we’re discussing writing systems and not making changes to a language?
HAMLET: Thought you I spoke of country matters?
As opposed to what?
BTW, both Japan (to a lesser degree) and China (to a disastrous degree) royally FUCT up their writing systems by trying to “simplify” them.
And I’m sure you have an extremely cogent analysis and lots of relevant data backing up this viewpoint . . .
Or else you might just be talking out of your ass. :rolleyes:
To me, it seems evident that attempting spelling reform on English would be a logistical disaster for the reasons already mentioned in this thread. It’s not the reason I’m against such a reform, though. Simply put, I don’t think the current English spelling ought to be changed because of aesthetics.
The spelling system we have is certainly not phonetic, nor is it 100% consistent, intuitive, or easy. But it is, in my opinion, beautiful. The more I think about it, right now as I’m typing out these words, the more I like it. I love that in the preposition has a single n but inn the noun has two. I love that the letter C, the first letter of my name, a letter someone described earlier as “totally useless,” can represent more than one sound. I love the amorphous vowels, the way they seem to melt into one another. I love homophones: to, the briefest, darting one, too, an additional o for a word meaning an addition, and two, the number, the unphonetic, with a central doublet of valleys representing its value. And I also love the digraph gh, the arch-nemesis of phonetic standardization. Going from right to rite may preserve an idealized pronunciation, but for me, that gh is there when I say it, if not on my tongue then in my mind.
Perhaps I’m getting a little bit too fluffy here. I truly believe, though, that written English is elegant, poised, and beautiful. To try to change what we have now would almost certainly destroy it, especially if the goal for such a change is to make the spelling easier, i.e. more phonetic. Writing systems developed as a way of encoding the sounds of a language. In a purely phonetic writing system, one sound has one and only one written representation. Anyone who made it through reading the article in the OP got a glimpse of what that would be like. You probably noticed a great deal of repetition of odd letter patterns, ones that represent quite well the way we speak but are written only seldom. Diphthongs sprouted all over the place to represent the myriad of vowel sounds that English has but manages to spell with only a few letters. Of course, all the words looked wrong to us, but that I imagine is simply because we are so used to seeing words spelled a particular way. What I’m trying to say here, though, is that the words didn’t just look wrong, they looked ugly.
Taking away the ability for a writing system to represent a single sound more than one way and to give multiple sounds to a single representation (I used to know the specific terms for these) would be robbing the system of its diversity, its bountiful variance. It would be like removing similar looking tones from a great work of art. Sure, Michaelangelo’s Last Supper won’t look as nice if it’s redone using just 64 colors, but think of how much easier it will be for others to copy!
Maybe that analogy is a bit overboard, but let me try to rephrase my point. Wood and would are two homophones that I think might be spelled identically under a phonetic spelling system. I honestly cannot imagine wanting this. Wood is a quick, short word, not quite phonetic, but close enough. It’s a simple word made from simple letters; those two o’s even look a little like lined up blocks of chopped logs. This is a good spelling for a hard, material object. Would is totally different. That silent l makes it seem so polite. Writing “wood you care for a drink?” makes the whole sentence feel rude. It makes saying the sentence feel rude to me, and even though the spelling of a word shouldn’t have an effect on what you feel when you say it, because writing and speaking are so entwined in our current system, I can’t help but feel it.
I admit that I am doing a little cherry-picking of my examples here, and of course the English spelling system was not designed with aesthetics in mind. But under a phonetic spelling reform, none of this subtlety even exists. Writing becomes just another form of recording and we might as well just learn stenography.
I am sure there are people out there who think that writing exists only as a tool for writing down sounds or communicating information, and thus that spelling should be as simple, consistent, and intuitive as humanly possible. I am content to let these people gaze upon their principles made real: text and instant messages. There we see spelling qua tool, with millions of disciples bowing before the harsh monarch of abbreviation. If this is what you are after, then by all means, embrace it. I will continue to write each and every gh.
Perhaps if spelling reform is actually implemented – though it will never be – there will be some new beauty to be found in the new spellings. But it will be a limited one, one painted with fewer colors than were possible before. I hope I don’t sound totally crazy thinking all of this, but there is such grace in the current system that I don’t see at all in any proposed phonetic alternative.