complexity of languages

<<Franco's English IS actually terrible! You can tell that he's not a native by the way he often leaves out articles (which is weird if his original language is a romance one!) >>

I wouldn't go so far as to say it's terrible. In fact, it's amazingly good. It looks reasonably close (but not quite) quite native-like to me (maybe 90-95%?). There's no way I could ever dream of mastering any foreign language to his level of proficiency in English, even after years (decades?) of study.

To add to my list of complications in English, a lot of non-native speakers also make mistakes with questions involving words such as 'What' and 'Who', as whether or not the auxilliary verb 'do' has to be added depends on whether these refer to the subject or the object. For example:

'Who saw that?" (who is the subject)
'Who did you see?' (who is the object. Of course strictly speaking it should be 'whom', but few say that)

or

'What made that happen?' compared to 'What did you make happen?'

English has no cases, no gendered/neuter words.

What is difficult in English is that there are no rules of pronunciation at all. Example:

daugher
laughter

And ghoti spells FISH, heh. GH as in langhter, O as in women, and TI as in patience :)

English is seriously screwed up regarding that, but it is very VERY easy to speak. You can speak English badly and be understood. Word order is important in English.

Russian has 6 cases. I can hear people asking, "what is a case?" It's hard to explain to someone that has no cases in their language. German has a few cases and gendered words.

Cases are complex and really not necessary. Gendered words are nothing but a huge confusion that makes no sense anymore.

English is very parsimonious - and so is Chinese.

If you hear 20 different languages from babyhood on, you can learn 20 different languages - you will know them, speak them, understand them. Brain studies explain why this is the case. It is VERY hard for older people to learn another language - but being immersed in the language helps considerably.

People can surely learn other languages by immersing themselves in the langauge and studying very hard - but do they THINK in those languages or are they eg, thinking in English when they speak in German or Spanish?

Way more people in the world learn English - than English speaking people learn other languages.

English is the language of commerce, science and so forth (read medical journals - usually in English - always in English if they get published in the BIG journals) - and etc. It's even one of the official languages in India.

If you are taught another language, 20 other languages, from babyhood on, you will KNOW those languages - really know them. Too bad this was only recently discovered by neurologists.

Regarding travel someone mentioned - most European countries are about the size of small states in the USA. Being multi lingual might be something that was always a benefit in Europe - if the people were traveling sorts. Then again, many people in Europe lived in communities that generations of their families lived in and they never wanted to wander far from there.

Speaking English, however, was the only benefit in the USA (until the illegal alien problems started here and until some people who were here 10 years couldn't speak English). It used to be mandatory to speak English here. That law will probably resurface in the near future.

I've heard people say that English was a Germanic language. Is it? We have Norman words for many things that we have old Anglo words for, eg, chicken-poultry, menu-list, table-bench-chair - there are many examples of simple nouns like this. However, all the technical words in English are either Latin or Greek words: mathematics, theology, philosophy, medicine, infinite, geometry, etc. In some sense, English is a creole of a few languages, not just Anglo Saxon (Germanic).

The usual grammar is SVO, as someone else pointed out, but try reading Shakespeare! Not SVO. You can mess up English and be understood, you can mess it up as badly as heh, Shakespeare - and be understood (for some of us, with difficulty) - or "with difficulty Elizabethan English is understood by some of us," or "with difficulty by some of us is Elizabethan English understood." "Elizabethan English is understood with difficulty by some of us." Some of us understand Elizabethan English with difficulty. Sigh. All of these sentences are OK. They can be understood. And.... Elizabethan English with difficulty by some of us is understood. Heh. I can see a German messing it up that way. But it's understandable.

If you use the wrong case in Russian, then what you said is not quite what you intended to say. English has no cases, as I said before somewhere on here, no gendered words. In that sense, English is very simple.

I'd like to know why people that only spoke Russian or Russian and a Turkish language, learned English well enough to get jobs here and make good in 1 year. While others, here for 10 years, can't seem to learn it. I assume that it is perhaps because they HAD to learn it or leave. Good incentive to learn.

I don't think having six cases or whatever makes a language harder. It's not really the cases themselves that are difficult, but declension systems can be difficult for other reasons... for instance, if some words have irregular or counterintuitive declensions, or if there are several declension classes, or if you have to decline the word in many ways at once. A language with 20 cases wouldn't scare me if it had only one declension class with no irregular nouns and the case markings were simple.

- Kef

To be clear, my above post was responding to this:

<< Russian has 6 cases. I can hear people asking, "what is a case?" It's hard to explain to someone that has no cases in their language. German has a few cases and gendered words.

Cases are complex and really not necessary. >>


In addition, I'd like to respond to this:

<< And ghoti spells FISH, heh. GH as in langhter, O as in women, and TI as in patience :) >>

Well, on the other hand, the very fact that we intuitively know that "ghoti" cannot be pronounced as "fish" indicates that there is *some* underlying logic to English spelling. It would be much better to pick out real examples such as pronouncing "colonel" as "kernel", or my favorite (but far less common and unheard of here in the U.S.), "Featherstonehaugh" as "Fanshaw".

- Kef

<<It used to be mandatory to speak English here.>>

It was?

<<That law will probably resurface in the near future.>>

Seems unlikely. I suppose English could become an "official language", but what does that really mean?

Moreover, a word such as "ghoti" completely violates English morphology. If you try to separate English orthography from English morphology, of course you'll end up with nonsense. ;)

- Kef

Well since English is such a "fucked up" language, nothing really surprices me anymore coming from English.

The /ʃ/ sound itself is a good example of spelling irregularity, and can be spelled eleven different ways:
shirt, sugar, chute, action, issue, ocean, conscious, mansion, schwa, anxious, and special.

>>Regarding travel someone mentioned - most European countries are about the size of small states in the USA. Being multi lingual might be something that was always a benefit in Europe - if the people were traveling sorts. Then again, many people in Europe lived in communities that generations of their families lived in and they never wanted to wander far from there.<<

The matter is that the US as a whole, and particularly the western US, was settled very quickly, so there really has not been the chance for English dialects in the US to diverge like Low Latin dialects did in continental Europe. At the same time, it is clear that North American English dialects are diverging, and in cases actually relatively quickly. Consequently, it is only a matter of time, if many centuries, until North America is no longer so linguistically homogeneous.

>>Speaking English, however, was the only benefit in the USA (until the illegal alien problems started here and until some people who were here 10 years couldn't speak English). It used to be mandatory to speak English here. That law will probably resurface in the near future.<<

Umm, no. The closest thing to such that I know of is when the use of German was banned in some locales around the time of WW1, and the forcing of people to use English in things like Indian boarding schools. The US as a whole has never had an official language, you should remember...

>>I've heard people say that English was a Germanic language. Is it? We have Norman words for many things that we have old Anglo words for, eg, chicken-poultry, menu-list, table-bench-chair - there are many examples of simple nouns like this. However, all the technical words in English are either Latin or Greek words: mathematics, theology, philosophy, medicine, infinite, geometry, etc. In some sense, English is a creole of a few languages, not just Anglo Saxon (Germanic).<<

English is not a creole, as it retains much inflection that almost any creole would have lost such as strong verbs and irregular weak verbs, as creoles tend to be almost solely analytic and where they are not analytic they are generally agglutinative. Also, it has far too much morphology for even a creole with some morphology. Furthermore, English still has practically all the properties of a Germanic language aside from its having largely lost verb-second-ness; for instance, its phonology and syntax are almost purely Germanic in nature and really have no Romance features.

The only areas where Old Norman, French, Latin, and Greek have really influenced English much are in vocabulary and derivational morphology. Even then, much of that is primarily limited to literary and formal uses, with Germanic forms being often highly preferred in everyday speech. Even the number or extent of such loans is not all that impressive when compared with languages like Japanese, which has very large portions of its vocabulary borrowed from Middle Chinese including its number system. Consequently, it is really hard to call English a creole at all. Rather, it is just an aberrant Germanic language, whose differences from other Germanic languages are actually largely due to isolation rather than borrowing, which has acquired a good number of loanwords from Romance, Latin, and Greek.

it is true that English is not as far away from German or Old Saxon than French is from Classical Latin. Still both of them can be called "Creoles" or better "contact languages", since their structure, grammar etc. have been simplified by the close contact of long-time residents with foreigners/invaders. As it seems close and long lasting contact of Romans/French and Germanics lead to simplification (synthetic > analytic) rather than hybridization.

>>it is true that English is not as far away from German or Old Saxon than French is from Classical Latin. Still both of them can be called "Creoles" or better "contact languages", since their structure, grammar etc. have been simplified by the close contact of long-time residents with foreigners/invaders. As it seems close and long lasting contact of Romans/French and Germanics lead to simplification (synthetic > analytic) rather than hybridization.<<

Not really, since practically all Germanic languages save Icelandic, Faroese, and Elfdalian have gone under a significant shift from being synthetic to being analytic. Even German itself has had a significant loss in the complexity of its nominal inflection, with case being primarily expressed via determiners and adjectives today; furthermore, many German dialects have actually lost or severely limited the genitive case, and there are German dialects which have also merged the accusative and dative cases. I would not say that this is due to contact with Romance languages at all but rather is due to the heavy initial stress in most Germanic languages causing inflectional endings to be reduced over time.

Similarly, practically all Romance languages save some East Romance languages have completely lost the Latin nominal inflection system outside of number and gender, pronouns aside. And note that this was well on its way even before the fall of the Roman Empire. Somehow I doubt this was due to contact with Germanic languages either. However, one might guess that isolation combined with contact with the nominal inflection-heavy Slavic languages may have protected the East Romance languages to some extent here.

I wonder how it comes that Indo-Germanic languages became more and more simple (loss of synthetic character, loss of inflection etc.) during history. Why are ancient languages like Slavic, German, Greek and short-lived Latin so comlicated and rich, while modern languages like Romance and English are relatively simple and poor? Whould it not be more logical that the evolution of languages goes from simple/rural/poor/primitive to complicated/sophisticated/rich/powerful? As it seemi it is exactly the other way round.

Poor? A lot of people will strongly disagree with the classification of the Romance languages and English as "poor" and other languages as "powerful". In what way exactly does complexity equal power? For example, take Latin, which often used case endings instead of prepositions and word order. So you might say, "Aha, case endings gives you the liberty to use free word order! That's a powerful feature!" But what does it DO for you? Changing the word order mostly just emphasizes different elements of the sentence, sometimes in ways that aren't all that clear. The same thing can be done in English (sometimes even by changing word order in the same way). The two languages do it differently, and there isn't a 1:1 correspondence between the languages, but that has nothing to do with "power". Latin can often be more concise than English because of it, but how often do you see monosyllabic verbs in Latin?

In my opinion, the whole idea of a language being "poor" or "powerful" is nonsense.

- Kef