complexity of languages | Antimoon Forum

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

Try to translate a word like "Unglücksheldenmutter" into a Romance language or into English and you will get a feeling how powerful synthetic and inflective languages are in creating associations and combinations. The lack of this ability can be called poverty.

to be honest, that word just makes me wanna throw up.

I suspect there must be a way to translate that ugly word to English, so in the end both languages are equally "powerful", since languages are a tool to express ideas. You can express all the ideas you have in mind with both English and German, hence none of them are the most powerful of the two. Maybe you prefer a concise way to express your idea, that is, with a single long word, but another person may prefer an analitic language . Anyway, in English you can see some traces of the inflected and synthetic nature of old English. For example words like "house-tree" are quite common in English, while in Spanish it is translated to "la case del árbol" . Hence English is not as analitic as Spanish if we consider names only but more synthetic.

Sam II

>>Try to translate a word like "Unglücksheldenmutter" into a Romance language or into English and you will get a feeling how powerful synthetic and inflective languages are in creating associations and combinations. The lack of this ability can be called poverty<<

The long words that one finds in German haven't got much to do with the inflection in the language, have they? As far as I was aware it was more a case of German sticking words together while English uses spaces. I really don't think the grammar in German means it is any more expresive than English, in fact on the contrary, I would have thought English, with its greater vocabulary and number of subtle nuances, was more expressive. Also, is German grammar really much more complex than that of the Romance languages? While its noun morphology IS undoubtedly more complex, its verb morphology is less, with both fewer conjugations and tenses.

Anyway, I think you're just trying to wind up speakers of English and Romamce languages.

English also stick words together, though not as many as german does, e.i. "Weekend" in Spanish that'd be "Fin de Semana" it would be pretty wierd if we sticked them together like the germans "Findesemana".

Well, you can say "el finde", but I highly doubt this contraction is legal according to RAE

Yes, exactly, both English and German stick words together to get 'weekend' and 'Wochenende' respectively. However, there is no inflection involved in this. The additional 'n' in the German word is for ease of pronunciation, it doesn't signal any kind of case ending.

I guess German's lack of ability to express the progressive tense (apart from in very limited ways in a few dialects) can also be called a 'poverty'. It can really sound quite stunted to English ears.

>>I guess German's lack of ability to express the progressive tense (apart from in very limited ways in a few dialects) can also be called a 'poverty'. It can really sound quite stunted to English ears.<<

Mind you though that most uses of the progressive in English are of the present progressive, and with active verbs the present progressive in English directly maps to the present in German.

<<languages are a tool to express ideas. You can express all the ideas you have in mind with both English and German, hence none of them are the most powerful of the two<<

I second that.

>>English also stick words together, though not as many as german does, e.i. "Weekend" in Spanish that'd be "Fin de Semana" it would be pretty wierd if we sticked them together like the germans "Findesemana"<<

The equivalent would actually be 'Semanafin', that's the thing, both English and German do away with any need to express the genitive when they do this. Otherwise in English it would have to be 'Weeksend' or 'Endofweek'. Of course you can say 'End of the week' in English, although this implies Friday.

<<languages are a tool to express ideas. You can express all the ideas you have in mind with both English and German, hence none of them are the most powerful of the two>>

If you want to express simple ideas you might be right, but if thoughts are more complex, you will need a rich and powerful language in order to communicate it. Here some reference from Wikipedia:

<<<... the most distinctive characteristic of the Greek language is its powerful compound-constructing ability. The speaker is able to combine basic or derived terms in order to construct new, yet perfectly understandable compounds that express in one word what other languages would express in an entire clause, or even an entire sentence. This linguistic mobility is largely absent from Latin and its offspring languages. In the Homeric language, Thetis — the mother of Achilles, is described as "δυσαριστοτόκεια", dysaristotokeia, meaning "she, who to her own bad fortune, gave birth to the best", in pure Modern Greek — "πικρολεβεντομάνα", pikroleventomana. Some languages are able to express such a complex meaning naturally in one word, others have different mechanisms (but see polysynthetic languages for extreme examples). ......
It has been speculated by scholars that due to this specific flexibility, Greek and German have been the languages of philosophy, and that Plato's ideas had pre-existed in Greek, in the same way that Meister Eckhart's thoughts had in German.>>>

source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greek_language#_note-Friedell

"If you want to express simple ideas you might be right, but if thoughts are more complex, you will need a rich and powerful language in order to communicate it. Here some reference from Wikipedia: ..."

Do yo meant that with English and romace languages you can't express rich, complex ideas? Oh man, that hurts me.

Instead of building compound words Latin uses affixes to build up new words for new concepts. The flexibility of scientific terminology heavily relies on that property. Maybe this results in rendering different kinds of ideas, depending on the modifiers available, so some concept may be easily rendered in a Latin style way and not so easy in languages like German, English, while others may be easily rendered with German style compounds but not so easy with a limited set of bound modifiers.