I am not a linguist, but I know enough about the subject to say that liberty3701 isn’t spouting nonsense here. The idea that all (spoken) human languages are of roughly equal complexity and sophistication is pretty well accepted. I don’t think I’ve ever even heard of a modern competing viewpoint, although there may be one.
If some languages really were significantly simpler than others, we could expect that children who grew up speaking these languages would reach adult fluency at an earlier age than children who grew up speaking other, more difficult languages. This is not the case. It would be rather surprising if it were, as a simpler language suggests a simple-minded people. There are, thankfully, not entire cultures of people with such limited mental capacity that they could not develop a complex language.
When it comes to learning a SECOND language other factors come into play, with a very big one being how similar the second language is to the learner’s first language. Languages that are similar to English seem easier to learn to native English speakers, but would not to say native Russian speakers.
I think liberty3701 and Lamia may be confusing the claim that all languages are of equal complexity with the claim that all have equivalent expressive power, i.e., anything you can say in one (real, workable) language you can say in any other. These are not the same. I think Rune’s argument about the possibility of throwing a bunch of extra, arbitrary rules into Esperanto effectively undermines the first claim (and it doesn’t have to be an artificial language like Esperanto - if English had declension of nouns and more elaborate conjugation of verbs it would still be a perfectly usable language, but more complex than it actually is). At the very least this shows that workable languages could differ in complexity, and if they could, why don’t they?
The second claim, I believe, is widely accepted by linguists (although I do wonder if that fact does not owe at least something to political correctness rather than empirical discovery). Of course, some languages do not have words for some things - there is no word for a transistor in Latin, for example - but I suppose the idea is that you could nevertheless build up some multi-word Latin expression to describe what a transistor is. If you wanted, you might then invent the new Latin word “transistorus” (or some-such) to be defined by that description. Languages add new words all the time, in this way and others.
Please elaborate then, because I’ve met A LOT of people who have learned both, both from knowing one natively and from more distant languages (I’m a bit of a language nerd and I guess I gravitate toward other language nerds.) I’m not fluent in Spanish but I’m working on it. It’s a question I ask everyone who knows both, and to a person, they have all said Spanish is much easier. I know a lot of people who have gone to spend a semester in Mexico and come back conversational, yet a lot of Mexicans move here and aren’t confident enough in their English to speak it for years.
Because they don’t. The fact that they don’t says something about the complexity of language and language universals.
Yes, because a bunch of scientists are really concerned with offending people. Seriously, the bug-a-boo of PCness in linguistics (or other things dealing with culture) really chaps my ass.
Did anyone say anything against that?
Lemme give you an example. English lost a lot of it’s complex morphology somewhere between Old English and Modern English. To counteract that, English now has a really strict word order (in other words, complex syntax) whereas before, the word order was looser because we knew what was an object or subject or whatever based on morphology. This strict word order is necessary to express what used to be expressed with affixes. Latin has a loose word order but complex morphology, like Old English. If you really want to learn more about this, I suggest the essay “Some Languages are Harder than Others” by Lars-Gunnar Andersson in the book Language Myths, edited by Laurie Bauer and Peter Trudgill.
Does this help at all? Because I’m really sick of talking about this. I was just responding to a pet peeve of mine, that some languages are “harder” to learn than others. They’re not. It’s relative. That’s all I wanted to say.
No he pretty clearly is not. He’s merely stating the accepted that to the extent its comparable, languages are all quite complicated. Complexity gets pushed off into different corners (syntax versus case versus… other stuff) but its there.
Your mistake is looking at what grammar you’re familiar with, and finding “complexity” in different forms.
Rune’s argument was utterly ignorant (and silly). Declension etc only seems complex because you’re not used to it (but are used to the work around English uses to convey the same kind of information).
Yes. liberty isn’t confusing things–it’s the others who are confusing things. They keep citing anecdotal cases of friends and such about people learning a language as an adult. Liberty isn’t talking about that. Liberty is talking about learning a first language (or languages) as a baby, and has made that clear. Science has pretty much concluded that the human animal is born with a brain predisposed to naturally learn how to speak (not write) any given language and be able to communicate in that language competently at a very early age (a few years). Cisco’s example of rough is not really relevant here. Decoding pronunciation from print is probably a much less frequent occurrence. Many people think of that as the fundamental nature of learning a language because they relate that experience to how they were taught other languages in high school and college. But most language learning mostly doesn’t happen by people looking at print and trying to figure out how something is pronounced. “Reading out loud” is an unnatural and relatively rare use of language, even though many language teachers persist in employing it in their classrooms. It’s pretty much limited to politicians, newscasters, and other people giving public speeches.
That said, though, a lingua franca is by definition something that is not learned as a child, and there will be people who encounter it only in print. So English orthography is probably more problematic than Spanish, and Chinese writing takes much longer to understand for people familiar only with the Roman alphabet.
doh. The argument was not for absolute complexity, but for relative complexity. Regardless what you are used to, all things equal, a language with more declensions is more complex than a language with less declensions. That all languages should be magically exactly equally complex smacks of ideology rather than facts. And how would you even make such comparisons for such an absolute statement to have any meaning? English and Danish grammar are quite close. But English has many more words than Danish. I find that quite natural since there are many times the number of English speakers than there are Danish speakers, so of course the many people all help evolve the English language in ways the Danish language isn’t. But all the many words also makes it harder for a person to master.
Native speakers? Of course not. But English wasn’t the lingua franca in 1880 or 1945 as it is today. The massive importance of English for non-native English speakers seems to coincide closely with the rise of US power. I don’t know what has been most important; US financial, military or cultural power. The Internet and computer revolution probably has also been very important.
The main thing English has in its favor is that it has become an international common language across social strata. French fluency was concentrated most among learned people in diplomacy, government, science, and the arts. Spanish fluency is mainly concentrated among poor former colonies of Spain. English, on the other hand, has a fairly solid grip on finance and trade, which crosses all social strata. Its rise was not due to US power but rather the British Empire of yesteryear, whose influence has waned in the 20th century, and its continuing popularity has less to do with US power than the sheer utility in having a global *lingua franca *that cuts across all industries and social strata.
It’s a incredibly useful cultural development for the entire world to have a common language, and nobody is going to shrug off such a useful investment. It could have been any language, but it happened to be English, which will probably be a lingua franca for centuries after both the US and England drop off the face of the earth.*
The only way I could see a rapid upheaval happening is if the entire middle classes of the UK, US, and Australia abruptly disappeared, leaving the Spanish-speaking countries intact, or a sudden decrease in global trade and travel. This would effectively constitute a new Dark Age (due to reasons that are as unlikely as they are horrifying to contemplate).
Note: This may not necessarily be British, US, or Australian English as we know it… contrary to what someone said upthread, non-native speakers do get to influence the language. There are dozens of international variants of English, many of which are spoken by people who consider it a native language. Do not be terribly surprised if the global English spoken in the future turns out to be Indian English.
Based on what standard? You’re merely making assertions.
Eh? ideology? Sounds rather like ideology is what is driving your assertions. It’s an observation driven by comparative linguistics.
And this is relevant to what?
This is pure bollocks. Mastering English is not an issue of total vocabulary (which even the native speaker never has need to master); you’re willy nilly mixing unrelated issues into an incoherent mishmash. Since you have what appears to be an a priori political opinion about the language issue I suspect there’s no arguing with you.
One phrase: World trade. To the extent the US was dominant in the reliberalisation of trade from the 1960s forward, that certainly must have helped, but I think your perception of English being less extent in the 1880s in trade needs to be check factually, I am rather unconvinced this is actually a historical case (all the more so your impressionistic assertions seem poorly grounded so far).
That’s because it is a bit of a strawman. We have circumstantial evidence that the complexities are roughly comparable combined with the failure to find real evidence of meaningful differences in complexity. Linguists don’t say that such differences can’t exist. They say that if you postulate such differences its up to you to back that up and they won’t hold their breath.
If China keeps up its financial growth, more and more Chinese trade will be internal to China and ordinary Chinese people may find learning a difficult foreign language less rewarding. Non Chinese people wishing to do business in China – and read about all the new scientific findings coming from China, get access to the latest technology, &tc which supposedly would follow – would have to learn Chinese. In a few generations this could rock the balance. The same evolution could be imagined for Spanish, if Spanish countries were to become increasingly more financial important.
Ordinary Chinese people already don’t speak English. Many of them are entirely illiterate. As far as internal Chinese trade damaging English hegemony, don’t count on it. Unless it causes people outside China to learn Mandarin, it will have no effect. Trading in China doesn’t require the entire corporation to speak to every Chinese consumer.
I don’t know if you’re old enough to remember the ‘gold rush’ of learning Japanese in the 1980’s… many people thought Japan was going to take over the world (it’s still the world’s 2nd largest economy IIRC), so they’d better learn Japanese. A generation later, Japan still hasn’t taken over the world, and there have a number of people in their 40’s and 50’s with marginally useful degrees in Japanese. Japan itself introduced aggressive programs to teach everyone English in the late 80’s. A generation later, most Japanese still cannot speak any English besides parroting trivial textbook phrases.
Short and even medium-term fluctuations in fortunes have essentially nothing to do with a language’s status as an international lingua franca. The fact that English attained the status that it does is not just a boon to English speakers, but an important worldwide technological development for the first time in history. Shifting it just for political considerations would be like reinventing the wheel, nobody’s going to do it.
I don’t want to hijack here,…I’m pretty darn liberal but even to me, my undergrad cultural anthropology class seemed like a P.C. boot camp. So it is definitely out there.
I would be curious to hear why you think there would be languages that are more complex than others but no more expressive. Why would a language develop that was needlessly complicated? Why would it contain elements that were not necessary to express some meaning?
All other things aren’t equal, though. Different languages have different features, and there aren’t two languages that are identical except for one having more declensions than the other.
What seems “more complex” is also relative depending on how different it is from one’s native language. I used to teach English in Japan, and many of my students felt English was more complex than Japanese in that it has for instance plural nouns, countable and uncountable nouns, and a distinction between the definite and indefinite articles. I had one junior high boy tell me repeatedly that Japanese was much easier than English. From my perspective it was quite the opposite, of course.
*There isn’t anything magical about it. Do you question that people in all human cultures on average have brains that are of roughly equal complexity?
While we could hypothetically invent a language that was incredibly complicated, if people were using it in their daily lives then within a generation or two we could expect that elements not necessary to convey meaning would be changed or dropped from everyday speech.
How are YOU making such comparisons? I don’t see that you have anything other than your subjective opinion about what seems more difficult to learn. On the opposing side is again the fact that small children around the world master their different native languages with equal ease, and that people learning second languages generally have an easier time with languages that are structurally similar to their native tongue. There’s also been some very interesting research done on the development of creole languages, you can look into that if you’re interested in the subject.
Wadda ya mean what standard? The gold standard. The metric standard?
Did I say anything about “total vocabulary”? No I did not. I was thinking everyday usage. Though the problem is that the sweeping absolute statement thrown out, “all languages are equally difficult”, has not been followed up by any attempt to define what is meant by learning a language. Learning a language as a native speaker, as a second language, enough to be understood, enough to pass for a native speaker, enough to pass as a master, learning through immersion, learning through reading about it, etc. And absolutely every last human language on the face of the earth ever spoken by a humanoid being? Not one of them is more difficult than any other?
Well it’s not me that seem so emotionally invested in the question to find it necessary to jump in by throwing around things like “utterly ignorant”, “stupid”, “bollocks” and what not. But perhaps you’re just high-strung and not at all emotionally involved in the issue?
But apparently there is a great drive to try to teach them. So big in fact, that the number Chinese English speakers in a few years have been projected to be larger than the number English native speakers.
Yes. I remember. I wonder how Michael Crichton has it about his book “Rising Sun”. In fact I think I have a thread here some years back, about the puzzling lack of Japanese influence on English language. There is a sci-fi flick Code-46 which has such a world where all languages sort of have merged together. But for all of Japan’s financial strength, it seems to have had remarkable little influence on English. My scenario was based on the assumption that China would continue to grow and that growth would lead to other things, like increasing scientific, technological and cultural importance. But if China is going to sputter and stall like Japan then it’s another scenario and obviously something else is going to happen. I was trying to imagine a scenario which would lead to English being less import and which wasn’t an end-of-the-world thing.
Linguistics is not anthropology. Comparative linguistics is reasonably scientific in the sense of being based on rigourour and quantified data. Certainly not perfect, but far away different from cultural anthropology which is… anything but.
Seems like a fairly obvious question, what basis, what standard? Other than hand waving assertions obviously.
In short, making things up. I am unaware of any data indicating that “everyday usage” in English (by whom, when, and where one might ask) draws on more words than a comparable language. Would you have an actual proper citation, or may I assume you made that up?
Complex I believe was the statement, but in fact, you’re wrong, several posters have (although you seem intent on ignoring them) made specific reference to difference between learning as a young child and as a 2nd lang. learner, and the difference in perspective on “complexity” depending on whether the native language is close to the target language. Also whether one includes written form or merely spoken.
As has been pointed out to you multiple times, depends on the perspective. Of course also as already cited, the writing system (e.g. Chinese) may make acquisition of literacy rather harder, but that is merely the writing system, writing systems are not the same as the language.
Eh? High strung? Mate, I just noted your comment was bollocks (which it was), that’s all, fail to see the slightest emotion in that at all. Perhaps you got yourself excited in reading me comment, as you’re the one who raised out of nowhere this peculiar “ideology” angle and otherwise odd bits of ill-informed sarcasm in responses to others informed responses to an otherwise bland subject.
I don’t think it’ll be Mandarian Chinese. There’s no history of Chinese colonization that spread the language, it’s extremely difficult to learn compared to English (which is difficult as it is, with its exceptions, spelling and heavy use of idioms), and it’s less practical than a Roman alphabet-based language when it comes to alphabetization and data entry.
Spanish would be a good international language. The grammar and pronunciation is consistent, and it’s widely spoken. However, it’s not as widespread as English – Spanish colonization was limited to the Americas and small parts of Africa – and Spanish-speaking countries aren’t really economic powerhouses.
In my opinion, English will probably reign for a good, long time because:
Early spread throughout every continent (except South America) through colonization.
Based on the Roman alphabet.
Many first-world nations that use it as their primary language (United States, UK, Ireland, Australia, New Zealand, Canada)
Dominant secondary language in India and Africa.
Continued worldwide popularity of US/UK popular culture. (Even with the growing popularity of Bollywood, will teenagers in Sao Paolo and Oslo be flocking to Hindi classes?)
Easy to learn the basics, at least. (No gender, fairly simple grammar, Roman alphabet)
Extremely flexible.
It’s entrenched to a degree that other international lingua francas (French) never achieved.
