It’s pretty useless if both items are the same gender. Also, in some languages (like French, for example) a possessive pronoun doesn’t take the gender of the possesser, but of the thing possessed, so it isn’t just a problem with articles.
Spanish verbs have a dozen conjugations, English verbs have three, with very few exceptions. Its nouns have two genders, English nouns have one. The genders affect definite articles and adjectives. To speak Spanish, you have to memorize all this stuff and be able to cough it up mid-sentence, which is a lot more than the stuff you have to memorize to speak English.
I have always found spelling easy, which I guess might have helped me with English, but I can’t see how anyone could look at the two languages and find English grammar more difficult and complex than Spanish grammar.
Now, if you want to talk difficult, let’s go to German (an entire language constructed solely out of exceptions) and Ancient Hebrew (a dozen times seven conjugations).
As for the Rune discussion, this is probably the first time I’ve agreed with him on anything, but come on now. It shouldn’t take two seconds to realize that a language with more declensions is in fact more complex than a language with fewer declensions, no matter what you’re used to. Swedish has two genders which are almost totally arbitrary, utterly useless, and a major barrier to learning the language. Natives screw it up often enough, so I pity the people who try to learn this as adults.
This bit I don’t even get. What meaning does the irregularity of irregular verbs convey? If none, why do irregular verbs exist, if all complexities exist to convey meaning?
I think some verbs are irregular because they are used so much and the irregular form is shorter or easier to voice. In English the ten most commonly used verbs are irregular. That doesn’t make it less complex, but might make the language more useful. However Wiki also informs me that “Most irregular verbs exist as remnants of historical conjugation systems. What is today an exception actually followed a set, normal rule long ago. When that rule fell into disuse, some verbs kept the old conjugation” – which seems very much like many are left over historical baggage which serve little purpose today.
It is, from what I’ve read, a less complex language. But it’s not a natural language. There is no community of Esperanto-only speakers. Technically, there are native speakers of Esperanto (people who grew up with the language), but they also grew up with other, natural languages as well. And of course, the majority of Esperanto speakers learned it as a second language.
Who’s to say what would happen if we played God and set up a community of native speakers who didn’t learn another language until high-school age? It’s possible that syntactic, morphological, or pragmatic idiosyncrasies (maybe all three) would slowly but surely work themselves into the language. It might be inevitable. From studies of language acquisition, it appears that all children pick up their native language at the same rate, regardless of what the native language is. The mention of “baby talk” is unfortunate, because language acquisition is by no means finished at the age of three of four. But we do see basic syntactic patterns already developing in every language. You won’t hear any normal kid at that age say “I toy!”, but you will hear “I want!” These basic patterns get established early, but total mastery of the local dialect doesn’t come for many more years.
If you want to learn more about this, I want to second the recommendation of the Language Myths book, and again the chapter on difficulty of languages. As was previously said, we have no reason to believe that any language is more difficult than any other. Sure, something like Esperanto appears to be simplified across the board, but that’s not a normal situation. The normal situation is complexities in some areas balanced by relative simplicity in other areas, which all together seem to sum to roughly the same amount of complexity regardless of language. There are, of course, differences in orthography (German spelling is simple, English spelling is difficult, and Chinese characters are fucking brutal), but writing is somewhat unnatural. It doesn’t reflect the inherent difficulty of the language.
It would be nice if we could judge from the difficulty of adult learners, but this just doesn’t seem possible. The ease of second language acquisition is directly dependent on how closely related the second language is to the native tongue. For the average native speaker of English, French is relatively easy. Russian less so. Japanese or Arabic are incredibly difficult. Esperanto’s simplicity does appear to make it fairly easy for Indo-European speakers, but it could in all likelihood be more difficult to learn for the native speaker of Mandarin, for whom Cantonese would likely be a much simpler task.
According to nominal values of GDP, that might still be true. But if you adjust for real purchasing power, China overtook them several years ago.
That is completely untrue. Grammar is much more than just declensions. Typically, it’s divided into syntax (word order) and morphology (the possible structures of individual words, which would include declensions). It would seem straightforward just to count the number of inflectional forms for adjectives, adverbs, nouns, verbs, and say “Hey, that’s how difficult the language is!” but there’s a helluva lot more going on under the surface. We’re left with a big, big question: How do you measure the complexity of rigid syntax?
Make no mistake, English word order is stupendously intricate. But to quantify this intricacy into some objective system that could be compared? I just don’t know how you would go about doing that, and until you can think up a system despite the lack of success on the part of generations of linguists, it’s not really yours to say that English is easier just because you had an easier time with it. To relate to a point I made in my previous post: it’s worth noting that Swedish is, like English, a Germanic language. Spanish, in contrast, is a Romance language. It should come as little surprise if a native Swedish speaker is able to learn English more easily than Spanish. Similarly, one would expect an Italian or French speaker to pick up Spanish more easily than they’d pick up Swedish or Icelandic.
This has nothing to do with inherent difficulty (which, again, seems to be the same across every natural language). It’s just a matter of family relationships between languages.
Jeez. Add “all other things being equal”, then.
But it is not equal, I grew up with a language with free word order and I find English word ordering to make the proper meaning hard to master. It is very complicated if you come to it from a language which does not have this feature.
I learned languages across language families I am in agreement, it takes different perspectives, you notice “complicated” as things very different from your home language. What is the objective measure to this?
I don’t know if you resent that I keep doubting. Esperanto may be a good case precisely because it is constructed. It is an isolated, controlled case. If it is possible to construct a useful language that is less complex, why is it unimaginable that such an evolution could have taken place naturally in another of the 6,000+ languages around the globe? Perhaps the reason is that Esperanto, despite its small number of native speakers – which is actually higher than many natural languages - is not useful for an everyday language?
The reason the claim that all languages are more or less equally complex is hard to accept is that it is such a massive sweeping claim (every single last of them?) and that it flies against immediate personal observations. I can look at my own native language and see many elements, like gender and irregular words, which doesn’t seem to serve any purpose and which makes the language more complex. Meaning it could theoretically becomes less complex. And when such is the case I normally expect the evidence to be extraordinary. Baby talk and language mastery are terms that appear fraught with interpretations and way too elastic for them to qualify as extraordinary evidence. What is baby talk and when does it end? When has one mastered a language? I still make many errors in my native language. How do you measure language acquisition across languages and how do you isolate parenting practices and the myriad of other factors that could influence language acquisition from language complexity? Perhaps it is not correct to say that English is a comparatively easy language to learn, but on the other hand I don’t find the evidence presented that all languages are inherently more or less equally difficult very convincing.
Which is why I suggested using two whole different languages, like Finnish and Chinese, which are both very distant from English. Or perhaps better yet, Finnish and Estonian. Two languages very alien to English, but both related. Which one would university students learn the fastest? But that too would be circumstantial evidence.
Yes.
Fine, thank you! Never had any problem with Scottish accents at all (except for having required explanations about why Edinburgh is pronounced eENbrah), it’s 'em folks from Liverpool who drive me up a wall!
Scottish accents tend to pronounce vowels more like a Spaniard would than some other accents do; they have both the RR and the Spanish J (as I proved many years ago to a Glasgewian who’d been told Spanish was hard to pronounce). So, nae problem, mate!
So you found the word order in English difficult. And if it had had forty-six declensions, you would have found that difficult as well.
No-one is disputing that the ease with which you learn a new language is related to your native language. However, increased complexity (such as multiple declensions) make it more difficult no matter what your native language is. That’s my point, and I really can’t see how anyone can dispute it.
As for the Germanic/Romance thing someone mentioned: no dice. German is as Germanic as all get out, and that was even more difficult for me to learn than Spanish.
This is a subject of some interest to me, and I would actually be very happy to learn about any evidence that some natural human languages are inherently, objectively more difficult to learn than others. If your view is factually correct there should be plenty of scholarly books and articles that support it. I’ve never heard of any, and my search of several academic databases failed to turn up a single one, but this doesn’t mean they don’t exist. In my first post in this thread I allowed for the possibility that some modern linguists might unbeknownst to me advocate for such a position. If you know of any then I am quite eager to hear about it.
But whether you like it or not, my original point stands: “The idea that all (spoken) human languages are of roughly equal complexity and sophistication is pretty well accepted [by linguists].” (I will readily admit that many laypeople believe otherwise.) liberty3701 already provided you with one cite, the book Language Myths, although you have chosen not to acknowledge this. For those who dismiss this notion as modern PC nonsense, I refer you to Charles F. Hockett’s 1958 text A Course in Modern Linguistics. This isn’t a new idea, it’s been around for decades. In 1981, Richard Hudson listed it as one of the “83 things linguists can agree about”, see point 2.2.d. (2.2.f is also of relevance to this thread.)
I’d be surprised if there weren’t any contrarian linguists out there who would disagree with this point, but as far as I can determine they are very much in the minority.
I agree with your points about the sheer effort that has gone into the English infrastructure in China, but you must be teaching at much better universities than I am. In a class of 60 freshmen, I’m lucky if 20 can understand things like “What did you buy at the supermarket yesterday?”, even spoken slowly.
In the universities I’ve taught at (admittedly 2nd and 3rd tier, but these outnumber 1st tier ones by a lot), it doesn’t get much better as they progress since the English curriculum is so awful. Non-English majors at one uni, in a class of 60 with wildly varying levels (they’re grouped according to their major, NOT by their ability!!), get 1 90-minute oral English class every week, and in second year, they get 1 90-minute oral English class every TWO weeks.
I’ve also taught groups of middle school English teachers who could not use the past tense in conversation at all. “Last week I go to my grandmother house because she very sick.” I cringe a little thinking about their students imitating their speech patterns!
Of course, it’s all getting better, and the people that actually need English for their jobs have the ability to learn it, but China has a long way to go before you can reasonably expect to have a decent English conversation with half the guys you meet on the street. However, this is good for those of us studying Mandarin. 
I’ll admit my standards for “speaks English well” are absurdly low. I spent the last two years trying to teach in Cameroon, where kids studied in classes of 150 with no textbooks at all and basically could barely greet you in the morning. I think my very best student in Cameroon could give a grammatically incorrect but at least understandable answer to “what did you do this weekend?”
So I’ve found my students here to be pretty refreshing. Of course there is a long way to go before a meaningful percentage of people can speak English anywhere near fluently, but still it’s a lot more than many countries (including our own) do to teach their people a second language.
It’s “unimaginable” because it’s never happened. We have a fantastic sample size, and yet the only examples of “simple” languages that we have are the result of an unnatural, deliberate construction to make them so. Every other language, created by the negotiation of meaning among the like-minded folks of a single society, has had to endure the pressure of continual and unrelenting semantic compromise. The result? Weird shit. It’s no surprise that this weird shit is a seemingly inevitable result of any natural language marked with years of cultural baggage. And cultural baggage, really, is just people living their lives.
Which gives us a compelling reason to believe that if Esperanto were actually put into a similar position, if it had a genuine population of native speakers (including poets, politicians, print editors, and other such people) it would develop the same historical baggage over time. Maybe it would take it a couple hundred years to do so, and maybe it would happen within a generation, but I am personally confident that it would happen. The same has happened with every other natural language without any apparent exception. I can already hear the hypothetical Esperanto prescriptivists bitching about the agonizing loss of the elegant simplicity of their original artificial construction. But I betcha this loss of simplicity is inevitable, as the haze of complex negotiated constructions catch fire and spread across the language population.
Immediately personal observation would also imply that the earth doesn’t move. It takes a certain amount of concentrated study to get past the point where we’re not misled by our impressions, which lets us be open to counter-intuitive truths. And the truth is that every language (every single last one of them, if we’re talking natural languages) appears to be equally difficult. They all have weird exceptions, idioms, syntactic peculiarities, and other such subtleties that result in a complex mess to an outside observer, and yet they are all more than adequately expressive for the native speakers themselves.
I’m not dogmatic on this equivalency, though. I doubt any real linguist is. If you can come up with a system that can measure language complexity objectively, and this despite the decades of failure on the part of professional linguists, then I promise you that will you become world-famous in the field. I will join the crowd in offering to lift you up to your proper pedestal. Until you come up with such a system, though, I’m just going to repeat what’s already been said: there are no apparent differences in difficulty. If they exist, they are much too subtle for us to perceive at this time.
While I doubt that everything you perceive as superfluous is actually superfluous, I would agree that there are areas of every language that could theoretically be less complex. I don’t think anyone has denied that. But the “every language” stipulation is key here.
Things could be made simpler, sure. But that does not mean that there is some magical language out there that has somehow managed to actually achieve this simplicity that you seek. We haven’t seen it, and people have been looking for a long damn time. Make no mistake: it has been a huge goal of many linguists to find this unicorn. There was some hope that the Piraha, who live in the Amazon river basin in South America, might have just such a language. It would appear that they have no arithmetic abilities whatsoever, and their language has no numbers larger than two. But even the man who has studied them the most claims that they are not a stupid people, and that their language is not unsophisticated. It just has complex forms in other areas. Complexity always creeps in. It would seem that there is no way for any natural language to immunize itself against the cultural baggage that seems an inherent part of every human society.
I don’t see how that’s relevant. You’ve asserted that languages have different levels of complexity. Your evidence has been entirely lacking. We’ve asserted that we don’t perceive any difference in difficulty, which leads us to conclude that they’re more or less the same. Our evidence isn’t conclusive, but it does at least have some heft to it. It makes sense that languages are roughly similar if children learn them at the same rates. That doesn’t have to be the final word on the matter, but it’s good enough until someone comes up with a proper weighting system to properly balance the complexities of morphology, syntax, and pragmatics, etc. etc. etc.
If you want to believe that this evidence isn’t good enough, then you need to provide some backing for it. Linguists gave up chasing a rigorous definition of complexity because it turned into a chimera. It appears not to exist, because no one’s ever been able to find it. No one is going to keep looking just because you have a gut feeling about it.
This has, in fact, been studied. The most difficult languages to learn from English all take roughly the same amount of time to learn. I moved overseas and no longer have the book available, but there’s an interesting chart from Teaching Language in Context that covers the relative speeds at which native speakers of English pick up foreign languages. The most difficult languages, which are those farthest from English (e.g. Japanese, Chinese, Arabic) all take roughly the same amount of time to learn with respecting to speaking and listening comprehension.
Writing and reading, of course, are a totally separate issue.
No. This is not necessarily true.
Even if English had 46 inflectional forms for nouns and adjectives, and even if the morphological changes worked differently in English than in Ramira’s native language, they would have been an absolute piece of cake to learn if they corresponded exactly in meaning to the native language structures. The difficulty of declensions in second language acquisition doesn’t just lie in the number of them. The problem is predominantly the semantic information that these declensions are supposed to convey.
If you take away those declensions which convey similar meaning and replace them with syntactic requirements, then you have unquestionably made the language more difficult for a certain group of learners. More declensions means a more complex morphological structure, but the difficulty in learning is based on figuring out the semantic meaning conveyed by the structure. Most structures are relatively simple to learn, even if there are a lot of them. The problems almost always involve figuring out 1) what it’s supposed to mean when the original language doesn’t have an equivalent form, and 2) when it’s appropriate to use that form. Substituting foreign syntactic structures for relatively familiar morphological structures would always make things more difficult for someone who isn’t used to stringent word order requirements.
Well, see above. We dispute it because it’s not necessarily true. There’s much more to difficulty than just the complexity of inflectional forms.
Actually, German is quite different from Northern Germanic languages. It’s also notably different from English, even though English is considered West Germanic, too*. In other words, it’s quite understandable that you’d find German hard. English speakers find it harder than Spanish as well (for which I can once again reference the book Teaching Language in Context).
This makes German sort of an odd duck for the purposes of this discussion. Most of the other Northern family members changed a lot in similar ways because of all that Viking stuff. But the Germans themselves managed to hang on to a lot of old forms, and unfortunately these sorts of differences can’t always be sussed out from the names of the language families. I imagine the Dutch would find German easier than Spanish (unless maybe they have mandatory Latin in school), but there’s no super-compelling reason to believe that all Swedes or Norwegians would.
*English is included in the West Germanic group for historical reasons. If you follow the people who spoke the original form of “English”, they did come from West Germanic branches. But England suffered Scandinavian (i.e. North Germanic) invasions in the 8th and 9th centuries, and then of course the Norman invasion in the 11th century brought on a heavy Romance influence. So, yeah, English is Germanic if you trace the historical branches, but it’s still easier for Americans to learn French or Spanish than it is for them to learn German. Just a weird fact.
Historical linguistics is awesome, but insane.
No, they would not, because you still have to learn them.
Sorry, I gotta agree with Kendall here. What made the various (23 or so) noun cases hard for me to learn in Hungarian was the fact that some didn’t correspond to semantic notions in English. For the ones that did (eg direct object, until x) it was a piece of cake.
Moving-toward-on-top-of vs. moving-away-inside-of, WTF?
In my experience in learning language it is easy to learn things similar to your own mother tongue (or similar to a language you already know very good), but very hard when it gets different. You make little mistakes when they are similar since it is never same same, but it is not hard to memorise and understand like when a language has forms yours does not at all, and uses them very differently. To remember how the English word order works and all the unwritten rules, it was hard.
You keep assuming there is only one complexity, I have seen there are other complexities. You do not notice things in your language that are complex to someone who comes to it from very different forms. You focus on declensions as if they are hard, but if you are used to them, it is not hard (unless the way of approaching the idea is different I guess).
At the least, it seems that making easy statements about absolute language complexities is wrong.
Then why were German genders so damn hard for me to learn, when my own native language has genders?
No, you guys keep assuming that I assume that. I never have. There are many complexities and they all have one thing in common: they make the language more complex. Not less. More.
Yes I do, as I mentioned in post 82.
No, it’s because they don’t match the genders in your native language, I assume. In other words, they are different.
However, I found a bizarre similarity that helped me learn an otherwise difficult piece of Hungarian: it turns out that you drop the copula (the ‘to be’ verb) in (3rd person singular present tense) Hungarian in exactly the same situations when a Spanish speaker would use ‘Ser’ instead of ‘Estar.’ (They have 2 different copulas!). It was easier for me than for other Americans whose High School language was French, for example, since I basically already knew that rule, just not for Hungarian.
And I entirely agree. As I have repeatedly written, full of historical baggage, the “weird and very human idiosyncrasies and quirks of a natural language”. This part I think you should take up with Lamia, whom thinks – or I think she does - that natural language has no or only minimal superfluous elements. Esperanto, I meant as an example to show that other languages did have unnecessary historical baggage, since if Esperanto was simpler, they had not been reduced to their least complex state.
As I have written before, I’m sure it would. But why exactly to the same extend as all other languages? Why not less complex or more complex? What is this force that drives all languages to a more or less equal complexity? With so many different languages landing on the same level of complexity, this cannot be just by happenstance. The only way this makes sense is if language is hardwired to us. Of course this might very well be. But why hardwired to some seemingly random level of complexity above the most simple?
I can’t. And I doubt the circumstantial evidence of how fast children learn is such a precise measurement of this. Perhaps the examples you have with how fast adults learn it is more convincing.
I think that was what Lamia and perhaps wmfellows argued, but perhaps not.
I don’t look for a specific simple language. I have tried to use Esperanto as an example of different levels of complexity. But if we all agree natural languages contain complexities beyond what is necessary to convey meaning, we don’t have to stomp around this anymore.
I believe that when you have 6,000+ languages, different levels of complexity should be the default assumption. The assertion that they all are equal should be backed up by very convincing evidence. How children learn them doesn’t for the reasons I wrote, appear to me to be this convincing evidence to base such a sweeping an absolute assertion on.
No, that’s not the way it works. If I believe the evidence isn’t good enough, then others can disagree with me and say the evidence is perfectly fine or they can find some more convincing evidence. It would never land on my table to disprove a statement made by others. But I’m not much concerned with “winning” or “losing” the argument, as understand how it could be that all languages are equally complex and how it could come to pass. Do you find it is possible to make meaningful comparisons between how fast and well children learn languages across completely different cultures and this to be so compelling to say with such conviction that all languages are equally complex?
Btw. Icelandic which was mentioned before and Faroese are pretty difficult to learn for Danish and Swedish speakers. I think they may have more in common with German.