I know very little about different languages other than English, which I still suck at. Here’s some questions:
What languages are easiest to pick up if you’re being introduced to verbal and written language for the first time? I don’t mean, which is an easy second language to pick up, I mean, which is the most basic? Why?
What language is the best in conveying the most information? I don’t know much about Japanese language, but don’t the characters they use, (or the way they write them,) mean sometime that’s not common in the English Language? What about “gendered language”? Is that signifigent in any way?
What language is the best? And you know what I mean… Binary and L33t and music don’t count. Though sign lanuages do.
There can be no answer to the question. Best for what? In the current world, the best language to learn is English. If you are an English speaking American, the best second language is surely Spanish. If Canadian, then French (or English). For the future, the best might be Mandarin. A while ago, it looked like Japanese might be coming on strong. Maybe Arabic will turn out to be important. But which dialect of it?
Gender is important mainly in free word order language where it can be used to sort out which adjective modifies which noun. Are noun number and verb tense important? The Chinese languages get away without them.
English has a huge advantage over most, in that it has different tiers of formality. Spanish speaikng children at play use the same vocabulary words as Spanish court justice writing their briefs, because the language lacks a separate vocabulary of formality. So a speaker of English can set the tone of the communication by choice of words: Get out, or depart – soak up or absorb – take away or remove. Those English two-word verbs are uncommon or non-existent in most languages, but in English provide an opportunity for the speaker to set the tone of formality. I discussed this just the other day with a perfectly bilingual person, when I found a bilingual handbill that could use “kids” on the English side of the card, but could not escape from “ninos” on the Spanish side. She agreed that Spanish severely limits the chance to sound folksy.
English acquired this through the evolution of the language, beginning as a blend of Saxon and French, so the words of Saxon origin represented basic simplicity of the Germanic villagers, , and those of French court did the heavy lifting of formal documents. Modern German uses the two-word verbs, but spell them as one word: ausgehen (out-go), etc. But there is no German form different from that to enable a higher formality.
Most other languages have a great deal more slang than English, because slang is the only way to eschew the formality that is locked into all standard words. But the downside of slang is that it develops in small groups of people, either a geographical area or an age range. and thus fragments the population of speaker and leaves inconsistent intelligibility. Which militates against their utility as a language.
First of all, different registers of formality is a feature of most languages. It doesn’t have to be done with just vocabulary words. Take Welsh, for example (because I happen to know it):
“I am” can be dw i, rydw i, rwyf fi, rwyf, or yr wyf, depending on the level of formality (informal to formal). Additionally, you the following “I am” phrases have different nuances: dw innau
rwyf finnau
fi yw
minnau yw
myfi yw
etc.
English only has “I’m” and “I am.” I think you’d find it an uphill argument that Welsh has an advantage over English because of the complexity of its systems of formality.
Plus, of course, having complex systems of registers of formality would tend to make the language more difficult to learn.
“Which language is easiest to learn” has no simple answer, because the answer will in part depend on which languages you already speak. If you already have French and Spanish, you can make rapid progress learning Catalan or Italian, but if your existing languages are Finnish and Swedish you’ll be a lot slower.
You are talking about something completely different. There are many languages in which you need to address another person according his social rank. English has little or no provision for that kind of formality. But that has nothing to do with the “formality” I was referring to.
In English, an establishment can say “We have a kids play area”, but wold not post a sigh saying “Not responsible for injuries to unsupervised kids” – you’d say “children”. The diffeene is not “palpably nonsense”.
You seem to misunderstand. Lexical difference (difference in vocabulary) is ONE way of communicating formality. There are others. The examples I gave have nothing to do with social rank. You’d use the different forms with the same people, but in different circumstances.
English has a larger vocabulary than most other languages, and a larger number of near-synonyms with completely different roots. Some of the differences are in formality: kids (originally “young goats”) is less formal than “children”. But other languges do the same thing using different techniques.
I’m not sure if I’m following you here. But if I am you’re mistaken. Spanish has formal and informal pronouns. Tú and usted both mean you but tú is how you would address a child while usted is how you would address a judge.
That has to be one of the most hilarious sentences I’ve ever read in the Dope, thank you for that. Lawyerspeak is absolutely its own dialect, as much in Spanish as in English.
Spanish normal person: oye, como hace sol, ¿por qué no salimos? (hey, since it’s sunny, why don’t we go out?)
Spanish lawyer and I don’t quite get it right since I’m an engineer: considerando que el astro rey se encuentra visible en las alturas celestiales, quizás sería conveniente abandonar temporalmente nuestra residencia y/o domicilio, situándonos en el exterior (considering that the monarch of all stars is visible upon the celestial heights, it might be convenient to take temporary leave of our home and/or address of record, placing ourselves outside).
And how being able to communicate formality by using specific words would be a significant advantage? Looks more like a flaw to me, by requiring people to learn to use several registers of language.
Assuming that being able to use different level of formality is a plus, why would it be a good thing to be able to use a different register when writing to your sister-in-law and when posting an official sign, while it would be unimportant to be able to use a different register when talking to your sister-in-law and when talking to the mayor? When posting on Facebook and when writing a novel?
If being able to use a formal language is important, why isn’t, say, Japanese superior to English?
Finally, I plainly dispute your assumption that there isn’t a formal register in other languages. “Tu étais là quand la personne a tiré?” vs “Etiez-vous présent lorsque l’individu ouvrit le feu?” are the same sentences in French, the first informal, the second formal. Not only the vocabulary is different : “personne” vs “individu”, “tirer” vs “ouvrir le feu”, but so is the word order : “tu étais” vs “étiez-vous”, the pronoun used : “vous” vs “tu”, and even the verb tense : informal “passé composé” vs formal “passé simple”. If that’s the basis of your argument, I just demonstated that French is superior to English since it has more differenciating features between informal and formal registers.
And as someone already mentioned, the easiest languages are going to be the artificial ones, like the well-known esperanto, since they have been designed for this purpose, with simple rules for grammar and pronounciation that suffer no exception.
They should be the easiest languages to learn (though even that will depend on the learner’s linguistic background). But they won’t necessarily be the “best”, and they have obvious drawbacks, such as not giving the user access to a large corpus of literature, or a wider cultural inheritance, or even a very large pool of speakers.
In college, a dorm mate and I found an obscure book in the library on Swahili and used to study together to learn it (kind of). We were the source of much amusement when we would dedicate one day each week where that was the only language we could use to communicate with each other. Funnier still, we never heard the language spoken by a native speaker.
Another language I learned in college, on a whim, was Sign Language. That was fun. Wish I would have kept current.
If we were reduced to one person from each language, then the first language that would evolve would surely be sign. When dealing with a person you don’t have a language in common with, you quite naturally resort to hand waving and I think this would evolve into a sign language. At the same time, a kind of mega-pidgin would form and the children (kids) would mold that into a creole.
I have a friend who is perfectly fluent in French, but when he wants a formal letter, he asks his brother-in-law (who had a classical education) who produces something that sounds like a supreme court decision. Whatever language evolved would quickly develop different registers.