Re: Rating Languages

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On Saturday 22 September 2001 04:00, you wrote:
> Hey, I was wondering what you people think is the hardest language to learn
> (of the languages you know).  I've heard Hungarian is hard (of course I
> don't know any one who speaks Hungarian)?  Of course I would be wondering
> from an English point of view.
>
> Also- are Chinese languages hard?  Are there many similarities between
> Cantonese and Mandarin?  And some-what on the same topic, are East Indian
> languages hard or similar.  I know some Indians and they all know about
> four Indian languages  (Bengali, Panjabi, Telugu and Hindi I think) who say
> they are different, but when I hear them the words sound similar to me- of
> course I live in a town of 2,000 with about 80 people of color, so what can
> I say?

Well, it depends what the learner finds hard. If you can't
memorize paradigms, then surely Sanskrit must be hard. On
the other hand, if you can't memorize a few thousand characters
and are tone-deaf, then Chinese must be hard.

But (Mandarin) Chinese has a very simple grammatical structure
ans Sanskrit is easy to pronounce. The modern languages of north India
are closely related - just like the Romance languages of Europe.
Nepali and Hindi are different enough to be mutually inintelligible,
but once written down the correspondences are easy enough to spot.

If you want to find a real hard language you will have to
start looking in really unfamiliar language groups. The languages
of New Guinea are probably very hard just because they are so
alien - the same holds for the native languages of America. On
the other hand, the pronominalizing Kirinti languages of Eastern
Nepal stop being difficult once you master two concepts - a large
verb paradigm and the importance of verbal nouns.

If you want to make your own language very hard, I'd suggest combining
everything: large verb paradigms, lots of cases, lots of unfamiliar
sounds and perhaps a grammar inspired upon Dyirbal. And of course a
vocabularly that separates the semantic space in a novel way.

I think Nik Taylors Watakasi comes quite close to a hard conlang - and I
once translated a bit of a story from Watakasi to Denden. Denden is
an easy conlang - everyone can learn it.

- --

Boudewijn Rempt | http://www.valdyas.org

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