FWIW my first thought was “Spanish” because it puts the user in a better position to learn other languages (French, Italian, Portuguese maybe) than, say, learning English or German.
This isn’t an original thought (it was mentioned upthread) but it’s how I interpreted (heh) the question.
Yes. I see this kind of gross generalization quite often on this message board. Someone will say, “X language is more ______ than Y language,” and so on, based on one particular characteristic, compared across maybe a handful of languages.
The error is as you state it, Dr. Drake:
English does have a particularly large lexicon, but other languages find other ways to instantiate degrees of register.
When Paul Theroux met Jorge Luis Borges in Argentina, the expression “stolen the show” came up in their conversation. Theroux quoted Borges as exclaiming: “‘Stolen the show!’ You can’t say that in Spanish . That’s why Spanish literature is so dull.” The Old Patagonian Express: By Train Through the Americas - Paul Theroux - Google Books
If that is the opinion of Borges, that is good enough for me.
There are lots of things in Spanish you can’t do in English, too. Nava will explain better, but just off the top of my head you have diminutives. There’s a song I like, “Luna Lunera,” where the moon is addressed as “Ay lunita redondita.” English translation is “Oh small round moon,” which utterly fails to convey the sense of the original. “Ay” conveys a lot more than “oh,” and including a diminutive ending in the adjective conveys a level of emotional closeness that English simply cannot convey.
That doesn’t mean that Spanish is superior, but it does mean that it can do some things simply and economically that it quite difficult in English. And vice versa, which is the part that Borges noted.
Edit: and the widespread legend of La Llorona, “the wailing woman,” which also can’t be adequated translated.
What, then, is it that I “misunderstand”? I never implied that there were not “others”, I simply referenced one way in which I thought Engliish exceptional. And that English has a “larger vocabulary” is exactly the point I made in support of my opinion, that the larger vocabulary was an advantage. In fact, English retains the larger vocabulary, rather than let it die out, exactly because it does confer a communications advantage.
If you are going to agree with and support all that I have said, what is gained by saying I misunderstand?
With my apologies to Borges, like fuck you can’t. Comerse el teatro (theater), comerse la pantalla (movies). In English you steal the show, in Spanish we eat the space in which it takes place. Now, would it have been written like that by a newspaper critic back when Theroux and Borges met? No, as it is considered a pretty impolite expression; the critic would have searched for a way which conveyed the meaning without calling the actor a robaescenas (thief of scenes). They would have said something along the lines of “una vez más, Tommy Lee Jones lleva la mayor parte el peso de aquellas escenas en las que participa” (once again, TLJ carries most of the weight in those scenes in which he takes part). That doesn’t make either language superior; all it means is that both manage to convey the same meaning, with more or less convoluted phrasing depending on the speaker and on the situation.
Someone now knowing or being able to remember an expression for something does not mean it does not exist. I’ve been watching a lot of Netflix series and I’m struck by how often does people “sneer”. Someone exhales before taking a rifle shot? “Sneer”. Someone sighs? Sneer. Someone gets an elbow to the stomach and goes “oomph”? The subtitles still say sneer. That doesn’t mean all those are sneers, it means whomever wrote the subtitles needs a wider vocabulary.
In English, we also “chew the scenery”, perhaps derived from the Spanish phrase?
As for the OP, regarding difficulty or ease of learning, the only thing I can offer is to say that a language with cognates will likely be easier for an English speaker than something like Japanese, Chinese, Russian and other languages without Latin roots. I’ve had formal training in Portuguese, French and Spanish; the latter two were easier than the former, only because I learned Portuguese first and was familiar with constructions.
Or vice versa, those two languages aren’t exactly exotic to each other nowadays.
Thanks for the replies!
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As others have thoroughly debunked your assertion that in Spanish children and judges speak in the same way, I’ll go on to debunk your next ridiculous assertion about vocabulary sizes.
See here: The biggest vocabulary?
The case of inflections is obvious. Spanish has a huge variety of them, sometimes they combine together, and if your definition of a word is a unique combination of letters, then the full combinatorial expansion would be the size of an encyclopedia. Ditto for German, they make new words out of smaller words at a much higher rate than in English.
In conclusion I think that the size of a language vocabulary is probably the same size across all languages, that is modern languages used in the modern world, used by people leading roughly the same lives, using the same things and experiencing the same emotions and expectations, is roughly the same.
See here for a neat video presentation of Zipfs law as it applies to languages (a classic Vsauce): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fCn8zs912OE
Either that, or it would fall out by nature or nurture. Either the most attractive and outgoing person would influence everyone else or the person who had the most kids would leave the most native speakers. I bet if you ran the experiment a thousand times, you’d get a thousand different results. Although some sort of creole is most likely.
The easiest to pick up is Pidgin, that is if you already speak one of the languages the particular form of Pidgin has incorporated. I think a recent version of Pidgin has arisen for teenagers to use with their little text devices that combines language elements from both English and gibberish.
[QUOTE=MyFootsZZZ;19456261
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?
.[/QUOTE]
The whole concept of gendered language seems much more significant in English, because it’s the exception, than in gendered languages, where it’s just normal. The word “god” is not gendered in English. In languages without gendered pronouns, the concept “God” is not gendered. In English, the gender of “God” is both stated and ambiguous.
Chinese characters (the characters adopted by the Japanese) are a written language (partially) independent of spoken language. You can use the same characters for Japanese! Or English. Easier to learn in the sense that you don’t have to learn any different sounds.
A constructed language would be easiest. Esperanto, Lojban, etc.
I’ve learned English, French, and Japanese. Japanese is the easiest spoken language of the three, but it’s also the hardest to read and write, followed by English, then French.
English is probably the hardest to speak. I was raised to it, but our language is not particularly consistent and we have an immense vocabulary.
Of the three, I’d say French, but that has the whole masculine/feminine thing, which requires a bunch of rote memorization and rules that aren’t very hard rules, to remember.
With a few thousand languages out there, I’m sure that there is one that is largely consistent, doesn’t have a large vocabulary, doesn’t cheat, doesn’t have a bunch of arbitrary distinguishment (like gender or relationship), and has a straightforward writing system.
Korea created their own writing system not too long ago as a fairly straightforward phonetic alphabet (sort of), so if the language is about as complex as Japanese is - as a spoken language - it might be a reasonable contender.
But, really, the answer will be a constructed language. I’ve been wanting to learn Lojban.
Different languages are easy or difficult in different ways. Let’s take Thai as an example. In some ways it’s easy:
[ul][li] Thai has an extremely simple grammar.[/li][li] Thai has a small easy-to-learn basic vocabulary.[/li][li] words retain a simple uninflected, non-elided form. (Something like the French monosyllabic question “D’où?” takes me by surprise.)[/ul][/li]In some ways it’s hard:
[ul][li] correct phonetics, e.g. tones, is difficult for a Westerner to produce or even hear.[/li][li] learning to read Thai is hard.[/li][li] learning to write Thai is very hard.[/ul][/li]
English allows one to express complicated temporal relationships:
“I would[SUP]1[/SUP] have[SUP]2[/SUP] been[SUP]3[/SUP] about[SUP]4[/SUP] to start[SUP]5[/SUP] singing.”
Here no less than five words intervene to detail the temporal relationship between I and sing. In Thai, OTOH, I’ve seen native speakers confuse each other with verb ambiguity, sometimes even confusing past and future!
English has only one social register for pronouns; French has two but only for 2nd person; Thai has several for 1st, 2nd and 3rd. My wife uses four different pronoun-pairs for the four close female friends she talks to most frequently by phone! (This is not an impediment to learning however, since using a wrong social register won’t affect comprehension. With a little care, the worst faux pas might be unintended flirtation.)
In that case, it would be the language of the person most refusing to speak another one. So, French.
Which ones? The ones directed to your question, or the ones where jtur88 gets thoroughly smacked down?
I may be misunderstanding you, but Chinese characters don’t have the same sounds in the various languages that use them for writing. And in the Japanese another complication is that various pronunciations are often associated with the same Chinese character in different words or contexts; words from the indigenous language (unrelated to Chinese) were attached to Chinese characters, alongside Chinese-language derived pronunciations. Native Japanese speakers can even be confused by this, especially when it comes to people’s names if only written in Chinese characters (not also parenthetically in hiragana to show the pronunciation), where there’s no other context indicating which pronunciation applies.
Also Japanese will also often tell you their ‘kanji’ aren’t the same as Chinese ‘hanzi’ (though that itself gives lie to the claim, that’s obviously itself the same word as is ‘hanja’ in Korean) because the specific forms adopted post-WWII in Japan aren’t strictly the same as either ‘traditional’ (still used in Taiwan, Korea and often by overseas Chinese) or ‘simplified’ forms (used in the PRC mainly). And there are some ‘Chinese characters’ which only exist in Japanese. However your initial statement is basically true, considering the various forms of characters as just fonts (like Gothic v New Roman etc), and excepting a few Japanese invented ones. The characters are a way to largely understand one or another of the languages which use them without having specifically studied it much, as long as you know Chinese character meanings.
But you don’t know the sounds in the other language. I read Japanese passably for certain topics with which I’m already familiar, namely the Pacific War and other modern (post Meiji restoration) Japanese military topics. Partly that’s from practicing reading Japanese, which is necessary for both knowing kana used for grammatical particles and foreign words, as well as recognizing the modern Japanese forms of various characters v the traditional forms I learned in Korean, but a lot of them are the same (unlike PRC simplified characters which are mainly different from traditional and I don’t know well). But I mainly recognize the meanings of the characters or pairings of them also used in Korean (with different sounds), not the Japanese sounds. The character sounds in my head are the Korean ones. It would be a significant additional project for me to learn to speak Japanese.
The Korean alphabet was invented in the 15th century, which is not that long ago depending on relative scale, but the reason I mention it is that it wasn’t really commonly used till the late 19th century. And moreover the form of written Korean you generally see now, all in alphabet, wasn’t common till post WWII and not as dominant as now till more recently than that.
At one time it was common to see Korean written in a mix of hangul (alphabet) and Chinese characters used for the Chinese-derived words (~75% in a big dictionary, less in everyday speech), somewhat analogous to how Japanese is written (by and for educated adults) in a mix of Chinese characters and Japanese syllabary (kana). It’s still occasionally seen.
You can look up debates on why Korean and Japanese now differ in this respect (linguistic as well as political/cultural reasons), but it points to a big difficultly in reading Korean for non-native speakers. The alphabet is very easy to learn, but the lack of morphological tonality in Korean (which couldn’t be expressed in the alphabet anyway, and one theory says it was present but disappeared in part because of the alphabet) means it’s overrun by homophones among Chinese-derived words. Only written context tells you which one is intended. This can confuse even native speakers at the margin (sometimes you see Chinese characters written parenthetically to disambiguate). In spoken language there tends to be better context, and ‘big words’ aren’t used as much.
Also Korean has a large number of commonly used words in part because there’s a Chinese derived and an indigenous word for most things. And some consonant sounds are difficult for non-natives to say and hear distinctly, though again easy to write.
I love the Korean language (as a non-native speaker), but it’s not a reasonable candidate for the universal language IMO, even theoretically.
This is indeed a demonstration of why the fight against ignorance is lost.
Even if this claim, were true, which it’s not, the difference between the levels of formality in English pales compared to Japanese. A sports analogy would be a junior high school flag football team compared to the NFL.
The entire language is structured around formality with completely different sets of vocabulary depending on the relationship between the speaker and the listener.
Take the word to eat:
eat / drink
食べる taberu (eat)
飲む nomu (drink)
Respectful 召しあがる meshi-agaru
Humble 頂く itadaku
Polite 食べます／飲みます tabemasu / nomimasu
This is just the tip of the iceberg. There’s also kuu, a “crude” form which would only be used by men or boys not in the presence of women or girls and only by peers or a superior to an inferior. This doesn’t even touch formal court language, either.
You address people one year older than you entirely different than you would to a person one year younger. There’s a half a dozen words for “you” which demonstrate the relationship between us, and the formality required.
There are completely deparate words for “your child” and “my child” or “your wife” and “my wife.” Not to mention the differences in “your wife” depending on how formal you need to be.
“My daughter” is “musume” where "your daughter is “ojosan” or more formally “ojosama.”
Anyway, thanks for the laugh.