Re: Easy and Interesting Languages -- Website

Chris Bates said:
> I was thinking of making a list of easy and interesting (from a
> linguistic point of view) languages for people who speak various
> languages to learn, if someone hasn't done it already, and putting it up

Sounds like a great idea for a webpage to me, and I have a few comments.

There are a number of different ways in which a language B can be "easy"
for native speakers of a language A. The most obvious dimension is perhaps
inherent simplicity vs. similarity. Spanish is easier than Lithuanian for
almost everybody, because the former is generally simpler. German is
easier for speakers of Dutch than it is for speakers of Tamil (other
things being equal) because of the similarity.

Also, there's a difference between "easy to learn" and "easy to use" --
although that may seem counterintuitive to some people. Strictly speaking,
of course, all languages are pretty much equally easy to *acquire* (in the
Krashen sense) and equally easy to "use" for those who are completely
fluent in the language. But what I'm talking about is the more practical
matter of getting up to speed in a language -- not the (highly unusual and
infrequent) case of becoming functionally bilingual or multilingual. In
this more practical sense, some languages are more *accessible* (yeah, I
think that's the word I'm looking for) than others when you're setting out
to learn them (that's the "ease of learning" dimension), and some
languages are more *demanding* (for want of a better term) on non-native
users who are attempting to read/understand or (against my advice)
write/speak the language.

The "accessibility" criterion could also be broken down into "intrinsic"
(Turkish is intrinsically accessible because most of the phenomena you
encounter are going to make sense quickly; Malay is intrinsically less
accessible because there is only one open morpheme class and syntax does
not even remotely follow the expected verb-valence frame pattern) and
"extrinsic" (Spanish is extrinsically accessible for Americans,
especiallly in San Antonio where English is a minority language -- lots of
speakers, lots of printed material, lots of learning aids; Rotokas is
extrinsically very inaccessible for everybody, because it's only spoken by
(IIRC) a few thousand on the island of Bougainville in the Solomons and
there's very little descriptive material available on the language).

So you may wish to break down your assessment of "easy languages" into
different dimensions such as these (simplicity, similarity, intrinsic
accessibility, extrinsic accessibility, "demandingness"), or others that
you might think of.

Besides "easy", you're also wanting to list languages that are
"interesting"  for speakers of some L1. One way you might consider putting
this together would be to list notable *features* for each language you're
including. Presumably, a language B will be more "interesting" to native
speakers of language A if B has more features that are not present in A.
This might be better than working from language pairs (i.e. "which
languages are interesting for speakers of Swedish") because most of us are
pretty familiar with (if not fluent in) more than just our L1.

Eastern Armenian might be interesting to somebody because it has
ejectives, but not to a native speaker of Georgian for that reason. Shona
might be interesting to somebody because it has both rounded and unrounded
sibilants in opposition. Nahuatl might be interesting to somebody because
there is classical literature written in it (most of which is lost, but
still). Vietnamese might be interesting to somebody because it lies very
near one end (isolating) of a typological dimension, but maybe not to
speakers of other very isolating languages. And so on.


> For English I guess:
>
> Relatively easy:
> Spanish
> French
> Frisian
inherent simplicity: simpler than German, less simple than Dutch

similarity: more similar to Old English than either Dutch or German, but
Old English is not particularly similar to Modern English, all things
considered

intrinsic accessibility: mixed (like most Germanic languages that have
been left in dialectal free-fall)

extrinsic accessibility: excellent for West Frisian (an official regional
language in the Frisian-speaking part of the Netherlands), extremely poor
for East Frisian, rather challenging but doable for North Frisian


>  Also, if anyone is interested there's a stub but no entry under Trigger
> Languages (or Trigger System or something like that... there's a link on
> the Tagalog entry) at Wikipedia... I tried hard to write an article to
> add because I wanted to contribute, but I found that I couldn't describe
> what a Trigger Language was well, and I always ended up using language
> that'd just confuse someone who'd never read anything about linguistics
> before. *sigh* Everyone tells me I'm a good teacher, but I couldn't get
> it right.
I don't think I've ever seen a description that was both succinct and
correct, but I'm willing to give it a try.

(A "trigger language" is a language that has triggers. That's easy.

The hard part is describing what a trigger is. It's been discussed on this
list before, and there's been a native Tagalog speaker here off and on, so
you can probably find something in the archives.)

Triggers work in two parts: you use a  "trigger" morpheme to mark a clause
constituent (commonly a noun) as focused, and you mark the "role" (e.g.
agent, patient, location, etc.) of this triggered (focused) constituent
somewhere else in the clause. In Tagalog, the role is marked by affixes on
the verb. Note that triggers implement both a topic/focus function and a
valence assignment function.

-- Mark

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