Languages...

[fajrdrako]

A few days ago I was talking about languages here and now found an article in The Economist about that very subject: whether some languages are more difficult than others to learn, and, if so, which ones. And the general question of comparing them. Tongue twisters: In search of the world’s hardest language. This goes a little beyond the Mario Pei

Comments

[msp_hacker]

I was thinking about the most difficult language, and I think it would be a language that's spoken in South America somewhere. It lacks a lot of things that people would consider basic vocabulary, like a word for finger, or numbers.

[fajrdrako]

It lacks a lot of things that people would consider basic vocabulary, like a word for finger

That seems strange. Do they call it "those things on our hands"?

or numbers

Like Trolls in Terry Pratchett: one, and another, and another...

[msp_hacker]

When pressed, the linguist wrote that they called them "finger sticks." They had to do a lot of pressing, however.

[fajrdrako]

Interesting. I wonder why they thought such a word was unnecessary. Sometimes you wonder if they aren't just teasing the foreigners.

[duncanmac]

I think that may be the language of the Brazilian Yanomamo tribe.

I should add that Tuyuca apparently *is* a South American Indian language. :-)

[msp_hacker]

That's not it. I think it starts with a "P"?

[fajrdrako]

I suspect you're thinking about Piraha - there was a flurry of talk about it a while back, when a book was published about it.

Priaha on Wikipedia. Excerpt:

Pirahã can be whistled, hummed, or encoded in music. In fact, Keren Everett believes that current research on the language misses much of its meaning by paying little attention to the musical aspect of it (prosody). Consonants and vowels may be omitted altogether and the meaning conveyed solely through variations in pitch, stress, and rhythm. She says that mothers teach their children the language through constantly singing the same musical patterns.

And this is interesting:
In his 2005 analysis, however, Everett claimed that Pirahã has no words for numerals at all, and that hói and hoí actually mean "small quantity" and "larger quantity". Frank et al. (2008) describes two experiments on four Pirahã speakers that were designed to test these two hypotheses. In one, ten batteries were placed on a table one at a time and the Pirahã were asked how many were there. All four speakers