In at least some of his sentences, he tries to mix in words from different origins. From the article:
"To be fair, mongrel vocabularies are hardly uncommon worldwide, but English’s hybridity is high on the scale compared with most European languages. The previous sentence, for example, is a riot of words from Old English, Old Norse, French and Latin."
Also, this is not the first time I've heard someone on Hacker News say a literary article was hard to read. Even when they aren't trying to prove a point, people who swim in literature every day tend to sound like the literature that they read. They also sound like their colleagues, as they read a lot of their articles. They write differently than people who majored in one of the sciences, who in turn write differently than business majors --- naturally.
English majors delight in words and are at play when they write --- naturally. They majored in it, didn't they? So their writing will have a wider variety of words, they will inject subtle poetic traits even in prose (metaphor, alliteration, etc.) and they will choose and arrange words based on how it sounds. They remember that even when reading silently, you still hear all the words in your head. So they will try to make it sing. Some do it subtly and well. You don't notice anything but that it was a nice read. Other writers are more heavy-handed and obnoxious about it.
I was an English minor and feel at home reading this kind of stuff. I miss it, actually.
The history described in this article is fascinating, but it does nothing to prove the article's thesis that English is uniquely "not normal".
All it does is describe how it's different, principally, from continental languages in the German and Latin families. Which, you know, you might expect when it comes from a big island off the coast.
Only English has spelling bees? In Chinese you have to memorize thousands of characters -- much, much more work. English has no genders and less present-tense conjugations? Again, Chinese has no genders and no conjugations. English uses a weird word "do"? Chinese has a weird word "le".
I'm only using Chinese as an example because I took a few semesters of it in college... but the idea that English is somehow an "weird" outlier in the world of languages doesn't seem to have a shred of supporting evidence from this particular article.
This article struck me as ignorant enough that I gave up before it got to the history, which may have been interesting. Every language has things unique about it, otherwise it wouldn't be considered a different language. Picking a couple from English (some of which are really arbitrary, others not even true) proves nothing.
Yes, English has some unique features. But rather than every English speaker going around thinking their language is some massive exception, I'd like people to understand that English has been subject to essentially the same forces as every other language, and makes plenty of sense given the history of Britain. But I think many of us anglophones want to hold on to a sense of uniqueness rather than acknowledge our commonality with the rest of humanity.
That's nonsense. For a typical (phono-semantic) character, only one radical corresponds to meaning (which is really vague, such as "tree", "water", "man" and so on), and the rest correspond to another character that this character sounds like.
You misunderstood, I think... I'm saying if you know the 214 radicals and you see the character for e.g. house, you'll understand the character(s) and even sentences (sometimes).
If you know the radical ? and ?, then you can easily infer the meaning of ???. Even though the third character is not a radical, you can spot the radical for 'sickness' there. The other component looks a lot like the radical for 'skin'. So that last character's meaning is actually something like 'skin-disease' or 'disease of the skin'. The three characters combined basically means 'black death'. As in the plague.
Maybe you can guess some hand-picked examples, but that's it. Your analysis of ? is incorrect. It's a phono-semantic compound of ? (sickness) and ? (pronounced "bing"). From this you can deduce that ? is pronounced similar to "bing" (or used to, in ancient Chinese) and has sickness-related meaning.
Some characters actually do combine the meanings of several radicals, for example ? is a child carrying an elder on their back or something; it means "filial piety" (respect for elders). But there are not that many of them, and you have to know the final meaning anyway, otherwise it's hard to guess.
At least I was right about 'sickness', which was the vital clue here.
And I can "guess" a lot more than hand-picked examples, using this method I've understood everything from store signs and logos to large parts of children's stories. Granted, I've learned a lot of characters also.
There are many recommendations to learn Chinese this way.
Not to mention, English is way easier to learn and use than almost every other language. Simple English is competitive with Esperanto in terms of ease of learning.
To prove some of these:
In Russia, they teach the correct spelling up until grade 11. In fact, when graduating from high school, you are commonly required to take a test where you write down correctly a story that a speaker dictates to you. This is unheard of in English-speaking countries because it would be incredibly easy to do.
I started learning French and English at the same time in school and was not otherwise exposed to them. By the end of 6 years, I could speak English but not French.
Spanish/Portuguese for me is somewhere between English and French in terms of ease of learning.
Being a native English speaker, having taken a few years of Russian back in college, and having just recently been mutually trolled by some coworkers into completing the Duolingo course on Esperanto, this notion of simple English being easy strikes me as implausible.
First, I'd argue that simple English compares unfavorably to the expressiveness of Esperanto given a similar investment of effort. Due to the way that Esperanto uses prefixes and suffixes to form more complex ideas, it takes a ludicrously short amount of time to start playing with and bending the language in what I can only assume are entirely legit ways.
Second, Russian spelling is pretty darned regular / phonetic. I'll believe you that spelling is taught up until grade 11, but for the life of me I have no idea why. Given my extreme reliance on a spell checker to save me from embarrassment English, I'd posit that it's by no means because English is easier to spell—and my undergraduate major was journalism. Maybe in we in English speaking countries just give up on doing English sans spell checker earlier? My comprehension is pretty mediocre in Russian, but I can certainly sound out unfamiliar words and spell spoken words reliably...
Also, a plug for the Duolingo Esperanto course: It's great fun, and is a very short path to getting a basic grasp on another language. Plus it has a baked in idealism that I love for the same reason I love Star Trek (see: https://www.currentaffairs.org/2017/03/the-regrettable-decli...)
Well, it's taught up until grade 11, because the vast majority of students cannot learn to write without major mistakes up until grade 11 of 3-4 days a week of 40 min Russian classes. This is purely Russian spelling - not Russian literature. Russian literature is a separate class.
To put it in perspective, that is the same amount of time you spend learning math and 2x more than you spend learning history, geography, physics, etc.
In fact, in the school where I went to where English is taught as a second language, after 7 years, English becomes English Literature. So I learned to write English without mistakes before learning to write Russian without mistakes being a native Russian speaker, regularly writing in Russian and never interacting with native English speakers.
Sounding out words is not the issue. The issue is writing correctly in ambiguous cases.
This deals with whether you put one letter ? or two in adjectives suffixes. Basically it depends on a lot of factors and there are many exceptions. There are also other suffixes each of which has specific rules based on a number of factors such as what the root of the word is, how it is formed, and the meaning of the word.
This one single issue is already more complex than anything in English.
There are a ton of other suffix and word conjugation issues you have to worry about.
The only rule in English that I can think of where you have to interpret a sentence in your head before saying it is "I" vs "me".
> "I" vs "me". Example: "He told Tom and me to get ready." vs "If John and I get married, we’ll have two kids."
For both those sentences, "me" and "I" are interchangeable. In the second, "me" is more common in speech. The "I" in the subject and "me" in the object rule is only hard-and-fast when it's the only word in the subject or object.
I think the uniqueness of English can kind of be quantified by its rate of divergence. That is what the author sort of gets to by saying that there are no mutually intelligible languages.
I think that if we could quantify that rate (by time) of divergence, we may see that English is pretty far on one end of the scale.
Consider that the fall of Rome and the Anglo-Saxon settlement of Britain occurred at roughly the same time (~500 CE). Then compare how far English has diverged from other Low German languages, to how far Spanish and French have diverged (also consider that those languages were already on their way diverging from Latin with a head start on English). English diverged a lot faster.
As to why English diverged faster, I don't think the author gives particularly good reasons. "Inter-linguistic" migration/settlement waves are not unique to Britain. Most of his arguments for English can be applied to French.
The Celtic Gauls were "invaded" by Latin speakers, and to some extent started adopting it as a second language. Then Germanic Franks (and others) started flowing into and settling into parts of what is today France, again adopting the language. Then waves of Norse speakers settled into Northern France and that had an effect on the language. But through all of that, French still isn't as divergent from Latin as English is from Old Low German. What is the difference?
I think the actual answer is probably largely due to geography/topography. English diverged faster because it was more isolated, and left more to its own devices without as much contact with its divergent siblings. I think the extent of contact with siblings is the force that keeps languages from diverging.
It's probably the same reason that Japanese is so divergent (from whatever it is that it diverged from). Similarly, it's why small "isolate" groups tend to cluster in mountainous regions. Basque/Georgian/Korean would probably not exist today if they had originally developed on some flat plains in the middle of Eurasia.
I went a bit long on this topic, but there was an argument for the author to make. I kind of wish he had made it.
> There is no other language, for example, that is close enough to English that we can get about half of what people are saying without training and the rest with only modest effort.
…uh, French? English has such a huge amount of French vocabulary that it does not take a huge amount of effort for an English speaker like me to, say, read a Wikipedia page in French, despite my limited knowledge of the language. Pronunciation is a different matter, however, that's true.
> it’s us who are odd: almost all European languages belong to one family – Indo-European – and of all of them, English is the only one that doesn’t assign genders that way.
Might be weird from an Indo-European perspective. But consider this: firstly, it's not like other IE languages' grammatical gender isn't being simplified. Maybe it hasn't been eliminated yet, but English is not a complete oddball here.
Second, lacking grammatical gender is hardly unusual once you go outside Indo-European!
> There is exactly one language on Earth whose present tense requires a special ending only in the third-person singular.
English has a small and not very expressive set of verb inflections, okay. It's not alone there. Yes, maybe other languages don't have inflections limited in that specific way, but that kind of specificity is far from unusual.
> English started out as, essentially, a kind of German.
Well… Germanic doesn't really mean German. Old English does look somewhat familiar to a German speaker, though.
> In linguistics circles it’s risky to call one language ‘easier’ than another one, for there is no single metric by which we can determine objective rankings. But even if there is no bright line between day and night, we’d never pretend there’s no difference between life at 10am and life at 10pm.
Languages are not “easier” or “harder” in isolation. What matters is how similar a language is to those already know. The author does nothing to refute this and comes up with the bizarre concept that “English is ‘easier’ than other Germanic languages”… how so? I could make a convincing argument that English is significantly harder than other Germanic languages, for instance.
> normal languages don’t dangle prepositions in this way
What's the author's idea of “normal” here? Latin?
> the has no specifically masculine form to match man […] strangeness
Arabic has no masculine form of “the”. Is it weird?
> English got hit by a firehose spray of words from yet more languages
As opposed to other languages, which never import possibly duplicative vocabulary en masse? Japanese has a lot of Chinese vocabulary alongside native words, for an easy example. And this is hardly unique to Japan.
> The very idea of etymology being a polyglot smorgasbord, each word a fascinating story of migration and exchange, seems everyday to us. But the roots of a great many languages are much duller.
But the roots of a great many other languages are similarly interesting!
----
This tells you various interesting (and correct!) facts about English's history which a student of historical linguistics could tell you, and maybe that's good, it could get more people interested in the subject! It utterly fails at proving its thesis though. English is a bit of an outlier, but it's not a unique one. Of course, you could argue that no other language has the same combination of weirdnesses, but that's because they're different languages!
> English has such a huge amount of French vocabulary that it does not take a huge amount of effort for an English speaker like me to, say, read a Wikipedia page in French, despite my limited knowledge of the language.
> > normal languages don’t dangle prepositions in this way
> What's the author's idea of “normal” here? Latin?
The article made that quite clear. On the subject of dangling prepositions, it said there were only 2 other languages besides English that allowed them (an indigenous language in Mexico and one in Siberia).
> Arabic has no masculine form of “the”. Is it weird?
The context of that sentence is the changes that Norse made to Old English. Prior to the Norse influence, the implication is that English had gendered articles. And more generally, Indo-European languages (of which Arabic is not one) have gendered nouns and articles, except for English.
It looks to me like you're cherry-picking sentences and trying to refute them, but by taking them out of context you're actually just turning them into straw men.
> The article made that quite clear. On the subject of dangling prepositions, it said there were only 2 other languages besides English that allowed them (an indigenous language in Mexico and one in Siberia).
Which is not the complete story, at all. English "dangling" prepositions are a direct lineage from Germanic separable verbs, which also still exist in at least German and Dutch.
Ich fahre jetzt ab. -- The "ab" is a preposition, just kind of hanging out at the end of the sentence. It is, in fact, part of the verb, where "ab·fahren" means "to leave". The example given, "Which town do you come from?", could be analyzed as exactly analogous, where the verb is actually "to come from".
I'm not sure what you mean by this, because "to come from" isn't a verb, and you can't simply declare that it is.
Also FWIW, upon re-reading the article, it says Danish actually also has this (more specifically, it said Old Norse allowed for this, "which Danish retains"). So I guess it's 4 languages, not 3. Not that that really makes any difference here, since the whole point is that dangling prepositions are rather exceptional and nearly all languages don't allow them.
> I'm not sure what you mean by this, because "to come from" isn't a verb, and you can't simply declare that it is.
"ab·fahren" is analyzed as a verb in German, even though it is clearly a verb with a detachable prepositional particle which modifies that verb.
Let's look at some English examples:
stand up, stand out, stand in, stand down, stand by, stand back, stand for
These all have drastically different meanings from both each other and from the verb "stand". I don't see any reason why they shouldn't be analyzed as individual verbs, same as the German ones. Do you have an actual reasoning behind not analyzing them in that way?
And this isn't just some strange idea that I, random internet person, am spouting either:
For all of your examples except "stand for", you have a verb and an adverbial particle. "stand for" (and "come from") is a verb and a preposition. So all of your examples except for "stand for" are already something different. For example, with "come from", "where did you come from?" is the same as "from where did you come?", but there's no equivalent with e.g. "stand up". And conversely, you can "screw things up", but you can't "come <object> from".
Anyway, simply put, they aren't verbs. They're "phrasal verbs". Or more specifically, most of them are particle phrasal verbs, and two (stand for and come from) are prepositional phrasal verbs. And you can't just pretend they're the same thing as normal verbs.
The Wikipedia page also says particle phrasal verbs (e.g. "stand in") are in the same general category as the separable verbs of other Germanic languages, the implication here being that prepositional phrasal verbs aren't. And in the link you provided, it explicitly says adverbial particles can be separated from the verb. So the point here is that ab·fahren is analogous to particle phrasal verbs in English, and not to prepositional phrasal verbs. So it's like "stand up", but it's not like "come from".
I think this is all your interpretation of how to analyze these entities. I mean, I could just as easily call German separable verbs "particle phrasal verbs", but they are still analyzed as a single lexical entity. I don't see how you can treat the English examples any differently, given that they are basically idiomatic combinations. And the defining point of an idiomatic expression is that it must be analyzed as a singular entity with its own distinct meaning.
> I mean, I could just as easily call German separable verbs "particle phrasal verbs"
Not really, because particle phrasal verbs exists primarily in English, with apparently a small handful of occurrences in some Romance languages (such as Lombard or Italian).
Your argument is basically "if I call this one thing by another name, I can pretend it's actually something else", but you can't actually do that because that's complete nonsense.
You lead me down a path, then expertly knock down the strawman. Read what you just wrote in comparison to my original statement, and you'll see they have nothing in common. Also, that's a bit rich considering that your argument basically consists of them obviously not being the same thing, because they have different names! Which is a bit like saying that physics and math obviously have nothing to share with each other, because they have different names...
All I ever said is that the English use of these constructions is descended from Germanic, and can be analyzed in a similar way to the parallel constructions in modern German. And all I've ever said is that perhaps we can learn something by seeing how this other construction is analyzed. Much how physics and math heavily informed each other.
> All I ever said is that the English use of these constructions is descended from Germanic, and can be analyzed in a similar way to the parallel constructions in modern German.
You're saying that a prepositional phrasal verb is like a Germanic separable verb. But it's not. A particle phrasal verb is, but not a prepositional phrasal verb. You're deliberately trying to erase the difference in order to pretend that there is no difference.
> You're deliberately trying to erase the difference in order to pretend that there is no difference.
Well, here at least you are correct. However, it's not like I'm doing it willy-nilly. I am purposefully reanalyzing the construct, and coming to the conclusion that by doing so it makes a problem disappear. Oh, and at the same time, it also falls in line with these common constructions throughout at least West Germanic languages, of which English is one. So it makes a lot of sense on multiple levels, so why should it not be a valid analysis?
And so far the only argument you seem to have is that, no someone else beat me to the punch. This construct has already been analyzed and named and so I don't get to do that. Which seems like a pretty silly argument from this side of the table; that kind of stuff happens all the time. In science, in math, in engineering... I'm sure in other fields with which I am less familiar. There's always a process of refinement in studying the world, a constant improvement in methods of thinking and doing. That's how progress happens. Otherwise we'd all still be bashing rocks together, because rocks are used for bashing and that's been decided and I don't get to look at the situation and decide that hey, maybe this bronze stuff is better for bashing.
> And so far the only argument you seem to have is that, no someone else beat me to the punch.
No, the argument is that prepositional phrasal verbs and participle phrasal verbs are used differently and follow different grammatical rules. It's not just a matter of "oh someone declared it to be so", it's a matter of that's how the language actually works.
It occurs to me that maybe this more abstract approach I've been taking isn't working. So let me try again, with a concrete example. I'll use "stand for", which you seemed to have taken specific umbrage with. You state that you believe "stand for" is a verbal phrase ("stand") with a prepositional phrase ("for something"). Let's use a concrete sentence:
A rainbow flag stands for LGBT pride.
So, if I'm understanding you correctly, this is how you would analyze this sentence:
(A rainbow flag)subject (stands)verb (for LGBT pride)prepositional
I agree that, with this interpretation, the question form should be:
For what does a rainbow flag stand?
However, I don't agree with that interpretation. Here, the verb is simply "stand", with the prepositional phrase being the beneficiary of the standing. Well, a flag can't stand. And even if it could, I don't see how it could stand in benefit of LGBT pride, considering that it has no intrinsic motive.
I propose the sentence be analyzed as follows:
(A rainbow flag)subject (stands for)verb (LGBT pride)object
In this analysis, "stands for" is a discrete lexical entry, a transitive verb that just happens to be written as two words. A flag can't "stand", but it can "stand for". And since it's now a transitive verb with a direct object, it's perfectly acceptable to ask:
What does a rainbow flag (stand for)?
Because that is how you ask for the direct object of a verb. It's exactly the same construction as:
What does a lion (eat)?
And all this is directly in line with German prefixed verbs -- both separable and inseparable -- where the prefixed verbs are analyzed as distinct verbs from their unprefixed forms. And I doubt you would argue against "understand" being a different verb than "stand", which is an example of an English inseparable verb. So why the strong stance against the same type of analysis for English separated verbs?
You keep trying to say "what if we pretend that preopositional phrasal verbs are just regular verbs, then we can declare that they're the same as Germanic separable verbs". But the whole point is they're not the same thing. That's not how they're categorized.
How do you think they were categorized and named in the first place? They were named by someone studying the language, examining how it works, and making a decision. Well, I'm studying the language, examining how this construct works, and making a decision.
Did you know that there are some people that classify German as an SOV language? It actually makes a lot of sense in analysis; it drastically simplifies the otherwise complex rules around German verb placement. However, it takes the ability to step aside for a moment. To look at the common case (V2) and call it an exception.
Well, reformulating "stand for" as a transitive verb also simplifies the rules. It does even more; it takes a very common construction ("dangling preposition") and not only explains it, but makes it perfectly grammatical.
There's been a huge movement in linguistics away from what has been called "prescriptivism" towards "descriptivism". That is, that the users of a language are the ones who determine what is correct, and the best a linguist can do is take those constructs and describe them. Your approach to my comments so far has been extremely prescriptivist; that this construct has these words and therefore should be formed that way. And you do this in light of the fact that these types of constructions are extremely common and perfectly well understood.
So I ask you, is grammar meant to be a description of the way a language works, or is it meant to be a prescription of the way a language is supposed to work? Because all you've given me is the latter, while I'm attempting to show you the former. And if you believe the latter, then I already know that we will not come to terms because we are at philosophical odds with each other.
> Your approach to my comments so far has been extremely prescriptivist
Not at all correct. We're not talking about the correct way to form sentences. If I was saying "it's incorrect to have a dangling preposition" then I would be prescriptivist. But I'm not. What I am doing is telling you that you cannot simply reclassify one element of grammar as something else in order to pretend that there's no difference. Because there absolutely is a difference between prepositional phrasal verbs and particle phrasal verbs, both in how they're defined and how they're used. "stand up" and "stand for" are grammatically different, and pretending they're the same is simply wrong.
I don't understand why you keep ignoring this, since I've said it several times. And your attempt to paint this as prescriptivism vs descriptivism is a straw man.
That's not what a strawman is. I never said that such a view was wrong; I said that it was a philosophical point over which we would not be able to agree. Note that I was not directing the argument to something I could knock down; I was trying to identify a potentially terminal issue and "agree to disagree".
I was also communicating my view of what was happening. And I'm glad I did, because you are correct and it was a mistaken view. You never implied "dangling prepositions" as a problem; that was something I had in my head which you hadn't said.
In the end, I think we are stuck in a hole that Wikipedia actually summarizes quite nicely, so I'll just quote it here. The topic is the use of the terminology "phrasal verb", emphasis is all original:
"The value of this choice and its alternatives (including separable verb for Germanic languages) is debatable. In origin the concept is based on translation linguistics; as many single-word English and Latinate words are translatable by a phrasal verb complex in English, therefore the logic is that the phrasal verb complex must be a complete semantic unit in itself. One should consider in this regard that the actual term phrasal verb suggests that such constructions should form phrases. In most cases however, they clearly do not form phrases. Hence the very term phrasal verb is misleading and a source of confusion, which has motivated some to reject the term outright."
I think I'm sitting squarely in the latter camp described above. My analysis is that these are not phrasal at all, and so I think that's where this debate is actually sitting. (And conveniently, that quote also directly indicates Germanic separable verbs as alternative terminology.)
So, to summarize, I think this is one of those fine times (that seems to happen so often on the Internet) where we saw some sort of disagreement, but were really agreeing on everything but terminology.
It's a straw man because it wasn't actually my argument at all. You declared my argument to be something it wasn't, then said you disagree with the straw argument (which is another way to say you think it's wrong).
That said, the rest of your comment is quite reasonable and I'm content to let this be. I'm not entirely convinced that the only thing we disagree on is terminology, but it's certainly possible, and I don't think we need to waste any more air in figuring that out.
> It's a straw man because it wasn't actually my argument at all.
And I admitted as much.
I'm allowed to disagree with a certain philosophy or approach, while at the same time not discrediting it as an alternative approach nor as a basis for argument. And if I'm not attempting to discredit an argument, but rather saying that I simply don't think we will agree on an issue, then I'm not setting up a strawman.
Overdrawn. Nearly every language has certain features (or annoyances) that very few other languages have (except for closely related ones).
There's a "fat tail" of these weird-isms, basically, and English is just another dot on that fat tail. Yes it's a creole (and creoles are kind of weird), but it's not like it's unique that category either.
A very high proportion of loan words, along with significant differences in grammar, phonetics and orthography. That's why people think of it as more of creole (or hybrid) language.
You can go find a linguist to debate this if you want. My basic points are simply: (1) the author of the original article wasn't making much of a point, and (2) in regard to what you were saying, where exactly English sits on the spectrum of hybrid languages is a multi-faceted issue -- rather more complex issue than simply the proportion of loan words.
I'm not going to get into the fine-grained (and for the purpose of this discussion, basically persnickety) nuances of where English sits on the creole/pidgin/hybrid spectrum (especially since none of these terms have formal† definitions anyway).
Being as the basic facts of its lineage (a near head-on collision of German and French -- not just "contact in a few places"), and the fact that many of its annoyances (particular in regard to spelling and pronunciation) result directly from a watering-down of these two systems, are generally understood.
† Yes, there are widely accepted definitions for these terms, but they are more like conventions ("thought to arise from interactions between parents and children") rather than formal definitions, like e.g. SVO.
Creole is a scientific term, not a casual one. Creoles evolve from pidgins. English was never a pidgin, and it has a very clear history. No useful interpretation of the word "creole", formally defined or not, is broad enough to actually consider English to be a creole, and no good linguist will call it one. Whoever or whatever taught you that it can be considered one, it's wrong. The people who take the Middle English creole hypothesis seriously are crackpots.
I don't think you're precisely correct in all of what you're saying, above. But that's precisely the point I was trying to get across: for the purpose of this discussion, such distinctions are basically persnickety. And in terms of relevance to the original article under discussion, basically neither here nor there.
English spelling is horrible, but I feel that the number of English heteronyms is not notably high, especially considering the state of the spelling system.
I think heteronyms are bound to arise in most languages with Latin-based orthography, because they tend to borrow words from other Latin-alphabet-based languages without changing spelling. Some words are bound to collide with an existing word with the same spelling.
Lots of languages have them but their wikipedias don't have that article: French, Swedish, Arabic, Dutch, Turkish, Czech, Latin, Italian, Spanish. Surprisingly even languages with orthographic depth of 1 have them
I'm ESL and learning Spanish as the third language, also studied some French in school. Spanish grammar is extremely logical compared to English, French or Russian.
It's not a creole: it's a creolised language. There is a difference: a creole is a language descended from a pidgin (and thus has increased in complexity), whereas a creolised language is one that has drastically simplified/regularised due to contact. These are two different phenomena.
The author describes Hebrew as much easier to learn than Russian for a native English speaker. Can anyone comment on this? Is Hebrew particularly simple/rule-based with few exceptions, or is it just that Russian has a lot of complex/one-off rules?
Russian is a famously difficult language to speak at a fluent level. You can make yourself understood fairly easily, but the nuances of both the pronunciation and grammar are quite hard to get 100% correct.
In particular, its system of declension for nouns and adjectives (and some other noun-like things) tends to drive non-native speakers batty. Wikipedia gives a good overview:
"Nouns, pronouns, adjectives, demonstratives, most numerals and other particles are declined for two grammatical numbers (singular and plural), three grammatical genders (masculine, feminine and neuter) and six grammatical cases (see below). This gives dozens of spelling combinations for most of the words, which is needed for grammatical agreement within and (often) outside the proposition. Also, there are several paradigms for each declension with numerous irregular forms."
I was born in Russia, and moved to America when I was ten. After graduating college, I moved to another city, and took a Russian language 101-equivalent course to meet some people with common interests.
I would not have passed that class if I hadn't already been mostly fluent in the language.
My native tongue is of the Romance family, and yet I've always thought that Russian is not particularly hard to learn. Perhaps that's because I've been exposed to a variety of Slavic languages when I grew up.
I'll leave it to the native speakers to provide some examples.
But basically, Russian (along with a few other Eastern Slavic languages) has an entire system of verb organization (this business of "aspect") that has counterparts in only a handful of other languages (outside that family). It's totally pervasive in the language, and way more complex than, say, gendering for nouns or pronouns, or even most verb tense distinctions.
Thanks, I didn't know how is this called. For the native speakers only the perfect/imperfect aspect is noticed as the verb's "kind" (???) but there are indeed many more.
> ...that has counterparts in only a handful of other languages (outside that family)
Obligatory aspect marking is extremely common all around the world. While within the Indo-European family Russian might represent more hassles for the learner than certain other languages, it is not particularly unusual in this respect.
(Within the IE family, incidentally, combined aspect, deixis and path is marked on motion verbs also in Ossetian. I am sure there are some other IE languages that do it too.)
Obligatory aspect marking is extremely common all around the world.
Right, but usually (except in a few corner cases) this is done with separate helping words (e.g. in English: "to cook up" v. "to cook") which are usually pretty uniform and easy to pick up through osmosis. Such that it generally isn't even taught in grammar courses (and even educated English speakers most likely won't even be even consciously aware this is what they're doing).
Meanwhile in Russian it's a much bigger thing -- the markings are much more complex, and every grammar book and every dictionary addresses the subject.
> Right, but usually (except in a few corner cases) this is done with separate helping words (e.g. in English: "to cook up" v. "to cook")
No, there are a large number of languages around the world that mark aspect with affixes, apophony or root suppletism just like Russian. I can only assume your knowledge is limited to a small handful of probably mainly IE languages. I strongly recommend looking at an introduction to aspect whose examples are drawn from a wide range of linguistic typologies such as the Oxford Handbook of Tense and Aspect.
Your background knowledge is impressive, but this is way off topic.
Recall I was simply attempting to explain why Russian verbs are sometimes confusing to foreign speakers. My quantification of the distinctiveness of the Russian system may not have been quite correct -- but it was completely ancillary to the broader point I was making.
For example, intransitive "to go" (and "to be") take either of two prepositions "?/??" (in/on) depending on destination. You go in school but on class, you go in bedroom but on kitchen etc. I am not sure if there is a system for this. Different objects also use different verbs to stay in place. E.g. silverware lays on a table but a pan stays there.
Because Modern Hebrew has been learned by a significant amount of adult learners who speak languages from different families, it has undergone a great deal of simplification. Modern Hebrew reference grammars of the 1950s have a number of rules that are no longer observed.Sociolinguistically, too, Hebrew feels easier to learn because with a huge foreign-born population learning the language in adulthood, Israelis are perhaps more tolerant of mistakes than speakers of other languages.
> There is no other language, for example, that is close enough to English that we can get about half of what people are saying without training and the rest with only modest effort.
You mean like English as spoken in the American South, vs Australia, vs England? They are each very different from the English I speak, I can mostly understand each, but it takes effort and sometimes misunderstandings happen.
There's also Scots (not to be confused with Scottish English or Scottish Gaelic) which, while mostly relegated to “dialect” status these days, was previously considered a separate language. Here's the UN's Universal Declaration of Human Rights in Scots: http://www.ohchr.org/EN/UDHR/Pages/Language.aspx?LangID=sco
If Norwegian, Swedish, and Danish are considered separate languages, or Serbian and Croatian, then I can't see how Scots is not a separate language from English. I guess a lot of it comes down to politics.
On the opposite side, consider the many "dialects" of Chinese: Mandarin, Cantonese, Shanghainese, Taiwanese, etc. Someone who only understands one of these will be pretty much entirely unable to understand the others. Yet we give the Chinese a nod and let them consider all these different languages to be just dialects.
Historical linguists would disagree. The problem here is (European) Portuguese phonology, which is a big part of what makes intelligibility between Portuguese and Spanish so asymmetric. The written languages are quite close for the most part (though there are obviously vocabulary, such as Portuguese having borrowed quite a bit of French vocabulary and Spanish having greater Mozarabic influences, and morphosyntactic differences, such as the Spanish a-accusative), those are pretty surmountable. It's phonology that messes things up, which the heavy reduction of unstressed vowels in EP and the palatalisation seen in BP make Portuguese a lot more difficult for Spanish speakers to understand than the other way around.
I know some BP and ES (though I'd never call myself remotely fluent in either), but I find EP quite difficult to follow, FWIW. I wouldn't be at all surprised if the mutual intelligibility of BP and Spanish is higher than EP and Spanish.
This is a circular argument. English is one language because it is one language. Spanish and Portuguese are two languages because they are two languages.
No. English is one language because the entire world considers it to be one language. Spanish and Portuguese are two languages because the entire world considers it to be two languages.
What defines a language? In the absence of context, I can't give you criteria for where the line is between a language or a dialect. But that doesn't matter, because the most important definition for "what's a language vs a dialect" is "how is it perceived by the world?". If the entire world thinks that Spanish and Portuguese are different languages, then they're different languages. It's that simple.
This isn't circular because I'm not saying "they're different languages because they're different languages". I'm saying "they're different languages because people say they're different languages".
No what the commenter was saying was that there are some pretty obvious differences between Spanish and Portuguese (not even remotely comparable to the differences between the mainline variants of English). See also:
That's not what the commenter was saying; he was saying that the different dialects of English are one language because they're all English (one language). This is ultimately circular. I agree with his conclusion, but the distinction between language and dialect is a hazy one and his answer shined no light.
Q: What's the difference between a language and a dialect?
A: A language has an army!
Examples: The Chinese government usually just talks about "Chinese". Mandarin is an English word to describe the Chinese language spoken in northern China--- but the Chinese government as political reasons to try to pretend that Cantonese is just a dialect.
Swedish, Danish and Norwegian are mutually intelligible, but each country has a government department dedicated to vetting books published in the language, and claim that what they speak are languages, not dialects.
I think the real answer is that taxonomy is difficult.
Mutual intelligibility between Danish and the other two Scandinavian languages has declined over the 20th century. Danish has undergone some striking phonological developments (compare modern pronunciation to that of reference works written before the war) that have made it extremely difficult for Norwegians and, even more, Swedes to understand Danish without prior experience with the language. Nina Grønnum's 2003 paper titled “Why are the Danes so hard to understand?" looks at some of these quirks in detail.
It is interesting to attend international events and watch the Scandinavians in their 60s or 70s speak among each other in their own languages with seemingly no problem, since their generation was pushed to overcome any hurdles to understanding the neighbours, while a group of younger Scandinavians that includes Danes is likely to switch to English because it just feels easier.
The 'Chinese' situation is more complicated than that, and partly because the term typically translated as 'dialect' is more aptly translated as 'topolect' (the language of an area). While the Chinese government's language policies are shitty, fangyán/topolect is, if anything a much more neutral term than 'dialect', which as a whole lot of extra baggage.
Well, no shit. What we today call English is a creole that emerged out of trade pidgins used by Angles, Saxons, and Normans to communicate. It doesn't look like other languages for the same reason Garnet looks like neither Ruby nor Sapphire.
Oh, God no. Bill Bryson is not a linguist and has no real grounding in the field, and "The Mother Tongue" has been criticized for decades for its abundance of factual errors, misunderstandings, and urban myths. There is a significant mistake on nearly every page of the book. Some of the reviews on the Amazon product listing that you link to discuss this in detail.
When I started learning Chinese I was like: Huh, this is basically English with a different vocabulary.
May it be that languages with a lot on non-native speakers (I assume Han was imposed on most of it speakers over the course of history, but I may be wrong) degrade to some kind of gramatically "neutral" pidgin?
That's the obvious part of it. One would except laguage spoken by non-native speakers to lose most of the complexity in inflection. But what about, for instance, how the same word can be used as distinct lexical categories. The extreme case of the phenomenon is to use proper name as a verb: Houdini yourself out of a situation. In Chinese I've seen a text describing how killers of king Wu were going to "wu" his minister.
This really is why being a stickler for English is really pointless, and maybe even counter-productive to the evolution of the language.
I also don't like it when people write "u" instead of "you", etc, but it's how languages move. If you're going to cling to the past, you may as well write in Ye Olde English -- because eventually that's what you'll sound like.
I get your drift, but it depends on the context. If you're communicating with Prince fans (or you are Prince), substitutions like U, 4, 2, etc might be appropriate. If you're applying for a job (even as Prince's sound engineer), maybe not so much.
The pronunciation is /ju/, so I would think that "you" is a closer rendition. The only reason "u" works is because we happen to pronounce the name of that letter exactly the same: /ju/. So it's being used as a non-traditional digraph.
It's the same pattern as using "8" in examples like "g8 b8 m8 I r8 it 8/8". Here "8" is serving as a non-traditional trigraph /e?t/.
So here we have someone with English as their mother tongue speaking about how weird English is. I'd bet native speakers of just about any other language could write a similar article about theirs, too.
As a german: No. German is a little oddly rigid due to being more tied to legislation and has a few weird corners like "ei". However in the big picture and on the scale of fucked-up-ness it's not even in the same order of magnitude as english.
You have a german username so i guess you're german too. Try to point out what's as weird in german as having to wonder in english how to even write a word just from the sounds.
Good guess, but I'm Dutch :) Let's see what weirdness I can come up with.
A thing that's often noted about German and Dutch is how you can string words together without spaces (kindercarnavalsoptochtvoorbereidingswerkzaamhedenplan).
In Dutch we have the "g" or "sch" sound that almost noone else can pronounce. As you can see, "g" and "ch" are sometimes pronounced the same.
In Dutch it's quite a problem for some people to determine if the perfect tense of a verb should end with "d" or "t".
A common mistake (do mistakes count?) is to use the possessive "hun" (their) in places where you should say "hen" or "ze" (they).
Some articles online remark on the large number of consonants that can be grouped together in a single word (e.g. "angstschreeuw").
There are no clear rules on whether nouns should be preceded by "de" or "het" (the or it), for example you say "het huis" (it house) but "de fiets" (the bike). Confusing these is a hallmark of beginner speech.
Whether a word goes with "de" or "het" also determines how you should spell adjectives ("deze fiets" but "dit huis").
Another article (1) noted that the two parts of a separable verb can be very far apart in a sentence:
“I _want to go_ to the park tomorrow” becomes “Ik _wil_ morgen naar het park _gaan_“
> A thing that's often noted about German and Dutch is how you can string words together without spaces (kindercarnavalsoptochtvoorbereidingswerkzaamhedenplan).
You can do that in English, it's just that we choose not to and introduce spaces between the unbound morphemes. Imagine:
kinder carnavals optocht voorbereidings werkzaamheden plan
If Dutch were written more like English, that's what that word would look like.
The dutch 'g' isn't really all that strange. What's strange is how prevalent the sound is in the language.
English has phonological abominations like 'strengths', so can't really complain about complex consonant clusters. :-)
'de' and 'het' is just a historical thing: gender is just as difficult in other languages that have it, and it just happens that in the Romance languages, the sound changes have mostly conspired to leave pretty decent markers as to the grammatical genders in a lot of cases.
Your 'separable verb' example isn't: Dutch is a V2 language, meaning that there has to be a finite verb in the second slot in a sentence. 'wil' in this case is a finite (auxiliary) verb, where as 'gaan' is an infinitive, and thus goes at the end of the word. This whole thing is a consequence of the Germanic languages once having been verb final, but later the finite verb moved up to where it presently is in most of the Germanic languages. English is now a notable example of a Germanic language (mostly) without this, but you still get remnants of V2 word order here and there. The term 'separable verb' is more apt for the likes of 'aankomen'. English has these too, it's just that the separable bit is typically written afterwards as separate word rather than prefixed as in most other Germanic languages.
I would say that English has broadened the V2 transformation into a fully SVO language. While German is still SOV with an exception for V2. My reasoning being that this interpretation results in a smaller rule set than calling it V2 with exceptions for SOV. (But it's not like I would take a hard line on it has to be interpreted as SOV.)
How about verb placement? Second position! Oh, except for questions and commands, then it's first position! Oh, except if you have a question word, then it's second again. Oh, but it's last in subordinate phrases. And I haven't even touched modal constructions or separable prefixes yet! Let's just put pieces of the verb all over!
And, of course, ablaut preservation in strong verbs: "singen, sang, gesungen". English somehow managed to preserve this particular barrel of fun.
Gender and plurals? Does it really make a difference whether I have to memorize how a word is spelled vs memorizing which gender and plural pattern it uses?
Let's also talk about weak vs strong endings. "Ein gutes Bier" but "das gute Bier".
And, of course, Mark Twain famously took an attempt at this also:
Linguists of various origins talk between themselves, and can establish by consensus which language is more weird. Not to mention that he can study language groups and notice the special or unique ones.
I disagree. I think learning 10,000 pictograms is much harder than learning English spelling. Even just learning the 2000 needed for reading Japanese or 3000 to 4000 needed for Chinese is harder. Of course most Han pictograms are composed of a few hundred "letters" (e.g. ? is made up of a ?, a ?, and two ?s) but the correspondence between a "spelt" pictogram to the spoken word or meaning in Chinese or Japanese is far more variable than between the spelling of an English word and its pronunciation.
- Easy to learn so you can speak like Tarzan and being understood. Pronouns, articles, and verbs, for a basic grammar, is quite easy.
- Articles have no gender (e.g. "the moon" has an article that is not masculine nor feminine, which is a pain for learning Latin and German languages).
- Is the most universal language in the world.
And some drawbacks, too:
- To master English is very difficult, like mastering most advanced languages.
- Pronunciation vs writing is not 1:1 (e.g. Spanish and German are easier in that regard)
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