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

[kelticbanshee]

Interesting :) Makes me feel lucky I never tried to learn anything more exotic than English...

[fajrdrako]

As long as you don't need to, or want to, learn the more exotic languages, it's lucky. Yes. But I am fascinated by these difference: clicks, tonality, backwards formations, different uses of temporal markers, different modes of speech depending who you are and who you are addressing.... All those amazing complexities. It's a wonder anyone can talk. And yet they might well wonder how we can talk, with our rigid word order and odd uses of modifiers.

I don't feel much desire to learn Tuyuca, but I love knowing about it.

[kelticbanshee]

Oh, yeah, I find it fascinating that something as common as language can be so vastly different across the world... Always makes me wonder how we manage to translate from one language to another - when some languages lack the nuances others have...

[fajrdrako]

It makes me really mistrust translations. And so I should!

[idiotgrrl]

"Take 'we'. In Kwaio, spoken in the Solomon Islands, 'we' has two forms: “me and you” and 'me and someone else (but not you)'. And Kwaio has not just singular and plural, but dual and paucal too. While English gets by with just 'we', Kwaio has 'we two', 'we few' and 'we many'. [Presumably each taking a different verb in each conjugation?] Each of these has two forms, one inclusive ('we including you') and one exclusive."

In Old English we have the dual form as well as the plural. I, you-&-I, and we, throughout its many cases.

[fajrdrako]

Sanskrit also has the dual. I rather like the concept.

[duncanmac]

Classical Greek also had the dual, but Latin did not.

[fajrdrako]

I find it interesting the way such languages change for no apparent reason. These languages were related. Here's the dual form - now you see it, now you don't.

I wonder if I can guess from this that Indo-European, or Proto-Indo-European, had the dual form? - Which got lost with time in certain or many branches of the language. Damn - I wish I knew something about Hindi.

[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.

[rosiespark]

English is a relatively simple language, absurdly spelled.

LOL.

Neat article - I now know that Maltese is an agglutinating langauge. It's one of the things that made it hard to learn as a second language, and I'm still fascinated by the complications of agglutinations and irregular verbs and gender. E.g. I gave it (m.) to him is tajtulu, I gave it (m.) to her is tajtulha, I gave it (m) to them is tajtulhom. He gave it (m) to me is tahuli, she gave it (f) to me is tathieli. And so on... Silent h throughout, and I'm not 100% sure of the spelling of everything - aaargh!

I've started learning Spanish again. So much easier!

[fajrdrako]

Maltese sounds fascinating. A little like Arabic in terms of how the vowels change, I think - though I am no sort of expert on Arabic grammar. I can barely read the letters, and then, not always!

Yeah, Spanish would be easier... Though I know very little Spanish. But I can often figure it out from the languages I do know.

[dewline]

You begin to get a sense of how difficult it is to invent languages from scratch from seeing stuff like this. Marc Okrand deserves Respect for his Klingon/thlingan Hol work!

[duncanmac]

Definitely agreed!

Let's not forget Ludwig (Ludovic) Zamenhof, who invented Esperanto! :-)

[fajrdrako]

I'm intrigued - and suddenly want to learn more about Klingon.