Re: New to the list (acquisition)

On Fri, 16 Jun 2000 00:35:33 -0400, Roger Mills <romilly@...> wrote:

<...>
> langs.
>with more complex phonologies (Russian I think, <...>
Heh? But actually Russian phonology is so simple and natural - compared
to English, at any rate ;D

<...>
>Our esteemed State Department used to have a list that classified langs.
>according to their difficulty.  The criteria were unstated, but you could
>pretty well figure them out; very generally 1. similarity to Engl-- lots
of
>cognate forms, relatively familiar phonology-- the W.Eur. langs.  2.
>non-similar either grammatically or phonologically, few cognates, but
Latin
>alphabet-- Albanian and Malay/Indonesian, Finnish, that I can recall.
>3.  ditto but with non-Latin writing systems (but alphabetic)-- Russian
and
>other Cyrillic, Arabic, Indic langs.  4-- REALLY difficult writing
systems,
>Chinese and Japanese.    Strikes me they were more concerned that the
>diplomats should be able to read the daily paper, than talk to the
natives. <...>

Also, strikingly much concern about scripts and phonology...

Long ago I tried to assess the complexity of morphology for some langs.
Funnily, my estimates showed that French is more difficult than Latin.
Still more funny, that corresponded to what I *felt*. I think I can
recall how I came to that result, if anybody is interested.


Basilius