Most complex IE language (Morphologically)

Guest   Sat Sep 22, 2007 5:47 am GMT
<<Could irregularity be "measured" in this thread to say which is the most complex?>>

They have some sort of "index of synthesis" and "index of fusion" as measures of morphological complexity. I think a language gets more "index of fusion" points for irregular and unpredictable forms, but I have no idea how exact or reliable this is.
Xie   Mon Sep 24, 2007 12:46 am GMT
May I know how "difficult" synthetic and fusional languages are, compared to others (e.g. analytic)? Is the difficulty, which stems from more complicated morphology, just relative at all?

What about <<among>> the synthetic and fusional languages themselves? For example, would a language with 3/4 cases easier than one with 10 cases?
SJF   Tue Sep 25, 2007 3:21 am GMT
Hindi is not complex at all.
Sanskrit is the most complex language that I've learned.
Guest   Tue Sep 25, 2007 4:04 am GMT
<<Sanskrit is the most complex language that I've learned. >>

Anyone know if Lithuanian is more complex (morphologically) than Sanskrit?
suomalainen   Tue Sep 25, 2007 6:53 am GMT
I would say Icelandic. I have tried it and found the different declinations a really hard nut. A friend of mine who has lived on Iceland and knows the language very well says that only at about the age of 10 do Icelandic youngsters master the complicated declension system of the language.
Lithuanian has also a lot of declension; one difficult thing is the moving stress and three different types of stress (even many Slavic languages, like Russian, has moving stress).
ket   Tue Sep 25, 2007 9:38 am GMT
Guest:
>If it takes 7 years to really learn English, I wonder how long it takes to learn Gaelic, or Lithuanian (as a 2nd language)?

One reason it took so long for me to learn English is that I started when I was 0 or 1 years old.<
That depends on your native language. For me Latin, Russian or Hungarian are simpler to learn then English (my native language is highly inflectional)
Guest   Sat Sep 29, 2007 2:59 pm GMT
- most complex Slavic language: Russian, Lithuanian, ...?
Lithuanian is not a Slavic language! It belongs to the Baltic group together with Latvian!
Guest   Sat Sep 29, 2007 3:26 pm GMT
I can't stop laughing when I read or hear that Spanish is the easiest European language . Have you ever really learnt it?? Do you know what the subjunctive or the conditianal mood is?? Do you know how to use all spanish verbal moods and tenses??? Spanish grammar is pretty difficult compared with English, dutch, afrikaans or Scandinavian languages, this is a fact and every clever linguist should confirm this statement.
Guest   Sat Sep 29, 2007 5:09 pm GMT
Guest   Sat Sep 29, 2007 5:39 pm GMT
People who probably know nothing about linguistics
Guest   Sat Sep 29, 2007 7:47 pm GMT
yeah, people who learn the languages, if I tried to learn language A and it was easier than language B; doesn't matter if the linguists say that language B was easier, I'd know it wasn't, and the survey clearly showed how BY FAR most people accepted that Spanish was the easiet one.
Guest   Sun Sep 30, 2007 8:02 am GMT
English might be the easiest language to learn for an English speaking person ( I don't agree: Dutch, Afrikaans, Swedish are much easier) but what about an Arab, a Chinese or a Russian?? That survey only refers to English speaking people.
furrykef   Sun Sep 30, 2007 8:14 am GMT
<< I can't stop laughing when I read or hear that Spanish is the easiest European language . Have you ever really learnt it?? Do you know what the subjunctive or the conditianal mood is?? Do you know how to use all spanish verbal moods and tenses??? Spanish grammar is pretty difficult compared with English, dutch, afrikaans or Scandinavian languages, this is a fact and every clever linguist should confirm this statement. >>

Well, I'm not fluent in Spanish yet, but I'm pretty good with the conditional and subjunctive moods. Sometimes I don't apply the rules correctly, but I still know and understand most of them. (It's the same sort of situation as knowing that you must make adjectives agree in number and gender, but still forgetting to do it sometimes. Knowing and applying the rules are two different things... it just takes practice.) My main weakness right now is my vocabulary.

I do think Spanish isn't as easy as many people seem to think it is, but I think it's probably still easier than other foreign languages for an English speaker. It helps that Spanish and other Romance languages have more cognates with English than the other languages you mentioned. There are lots of words I can understand even though I haven't ever seen them before, but of course one must always be wary of false friends.

- Kef
Guest   Sun Sep 30, 2007 7:09 pm GMT
<<I can't stop laughing when I read or hear that Spanish is the easiest European language . Have you ever really learnt it?? Do you know what the subjunctive or the conditianal mood is?? Do you know how to use all spanish verbal moods and tenses??? Spanish grammar is pretty difficult compared with English, dutch, afrikaans or Scandinavian languages, this is a fact and every clever linguist should confirm this statement. >>

I think they usually say Spanish is the easiest, *after* English. Besides the verbs, what oppressive morphological complexity does Spanish have?

Of course, you have gender and adjectives that agree with their nouns (for the most part, anyway), but those are pretty common among European languages. Also, there's a big lexicon along with a vast number of idioms (but what language doesn't have these). You've also got enclitic pronouns, and those tricky suffixes like "-uche", "-ona", "-azo", etc. None of this seems overwhelming, though, unless you compare it to English.
Guest   Sun Sep 30, 2007 7:55 pm GMT
Well Germanic languages, except German and Icelendic, are much easier than Spanish from a grammatical point of view.