Re: Rating Languages

On Sat, 22 Sep 2001, Thomas R. Wier wrote:

(I think it must be my new email app, kmail,
that makes people answer to me personally, instead
of the list - this is the second time, so I've
cc'd the conlang list.)

> This is certainly true, but to put it another way:
> it depends on the kind of language background that
> a given speaker has.  Difficulty is a matter of
> exposure and acculturation, given that babies are
> known to be able to articulate virtually any kind
> of sound that occurs in human languages, and only
> start finding them "hard" when they've stopped using
> those that are not present in the input language
> environment.
Not only that, but also some other kind of aptitude.
I mean, I've studied a lot of unfamiliar languages, and
some came quite easily, others were more difficult, even
though they were just as far apart from Dutch.

>
> > But (Mandarin) Chinese has a very simple grammatical structure
>
> Eh? Mandarin has a relatively simple *morphology*, inasmuch
> as there's not much there.  Mandarin syntax is quite complex,
> however.
>
I'd almost say 'au contraire' - from a historical point of view Chinese
morphology is extremely interesting. But the syntax of Mandarin is just
as complex as the syntax of English.  Perhaps even less so - once you
get the few constructs with things like yinwei and ruoshi clear, and
have grasped the essence of le, you're done. At least, that was
my experience when I learned Mandarin and wenyan, ten years ago.

> Having studied languages from both regions, I'm not sure I'd
> agree with that statement.  Korowai (spoken in Irian Jaya,
> just next door to PNG) has a rather normally complex phonology and
> morphosyntax more complicated than English but nothing spectacular.
Of course, Irian Jaya has the greatest number of language families per
square decimeter in the world - and consequently a great variety.
(Though it is a moot point whether the number of language families
wouldn't be reduced greatly if better descriptions were available.) My
source, by the way, is just Foley's The Papuan Languages of New Guinea.

> It is true that many languages in the Americas, though, have complex
> morphologies.  Of the three that I've looked at -- Onondaga, Atkan
> Aleut, and Mam -- the first two tend toward polysynthesis, but
> compensate by having syntax that's relatively less complex than,
> say, English.  Mam is a fairly thoroughly ergative language, with
> ergative syntax and all, but then about 1/4 of the world's languages
> (at least) show some ergative properties, so it's difficult to see
> how you could call that "hard" from a neutral perspective.  This
> again shows how  important background is in forming our notions
> of "difficulty" in language acquisition.
>
That's true of course - if your native tongue is Tibetan, you probably
would find English pretty hard. And I've read enough Japanese, and even
Indian English (am reviewing a book on pronominal systems of Indian
languages for Language just now) that I realize that English isn't the
epithome of natural easiness. So, hard is always relative to some
point, and for most people on this list that point will be an
Indo-European language.

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

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