A very interesting article. I appreciate the submission, but wonder why you replaced the original title "Tongue twisters:
In search of the world’s hardest language," as I see that in the submitted article?
I’m not convinced there’s any absolute scale for how hard a language is. If a native English speaker would beat his or her head against the wall trying to learn Japanese, then a native Japanese speaker with comparable intelligence in comparable circumstances would be just as frustrated trying to learn English.
There are some language features that are just easier than their alternatives -- for example, written Finnish is phonetic. Compared to English, his has massive advantages both when first learning to read and when learning Finnish as a second language -- to learn to correctly pronounce Finnish, you need to learn 29 phonemes and their corresponding letters (One lacks a letter and is marked by ng/nk instead -- the guy who defined the written language missed it.), and the length of their long forms. After you've learned them, to correctly pronounce any Finnish word you just string together the sounds of the letters of the word.
That's not to say Finnish is an easier language than English -- even if our writing system is strictly superior, as a fenno-ugric language we've got boatloads of other crap that drags us down :).
There's plenty of interesting history in how Finnish got this way. In a nutshell, the protestant reformation hit Finland before there was a written Finnish language. Since everyone being able to read the bible on their own was kind of important for the Lutherans, this posed a problem for the clergy. So, to fix it, one particularly active scribe named Michael Agricola went and defined the basic form of written Finnish on his own. He wanted to make it easy to learn to read, and so made it very simple. However, as spoken Finnish was an old language, much of it didn't fit in the straightjacket of a language he had created. His solution? By then he had become the bishop of Turku, and could pretty much dictate anything church-related in Finland. He chose to simply ignore the parts of the language that didn't fit, and in a few decades spoken Finnish shed the features that couldn't be represented in writing. The end result is probably the simplest writing system anyone anywhere uses as their first language.
"to correctly pronounce any Finnish word you just string together the sounds of the letters of the word."
This is a lie-to-children that I too was taught in school, but it's not even remotely true. Consider:
herne(k)keitto
leu(v)an
rei(j)än
isän (=m)maa
sydäm(m)en
You'd sound like a robot if you just pronounced them "as written". Computer phonetic analysis of the language reveals even more patterns where the written language indisputably deviates from the spoken one, but these at least should be easy to verify without specialist knowledge or equipment.
I am a Turk who learned Finnish as an adult. A striking similar between Turks and Finns is that both think their language is phonetic/read-as-written. While Finnish performs definitely better than Turkish in this aspect, both are far from being perfectly phonetic.
As the other comment mentioned Finnish isn't that phonetic at all. Even the simple "tervetuloa" is actually pronounced as "tÄrvetuloa".
But out of all languages I've learned/tried to learn, Finnish definitely is relatively more rule-abiding. And it has a huge bonus of being very obscure as to be used as a secret language :)
There's relative difficulty, which is often a function of distance within the linguistic tree, e.g. Germanic to Sino-Tibetan, but there definitely is a character of language difficulty which is absolute.
For example, comparing English and German:
- English has simple plurals. In regular cases you add an s or es, and the number of exceptions is limited. Chair, chairs. Book, books. Jacket, jackets. In German plurals are, for all practical purposes, completely irregular: Stuhl, Stühle. Buch, Bücher. Jacke, Jacken.
- English does not generally have gendered nouns, nor an equivalently complex replacement.
- English does not have cases, nor an equivalently complex replacement.
- As a result of those two, the English words a and an correspond in German to ein, eine, einen, einem, einer and eines.
- English has almost the same tenses as German, but let's take the verb to run in the present tense: I run, you run, he runs, we run, they run. In German, laufen: Ich laufe, du läufst, er läuft, wir laufen, ihr lauft. Rather then two forms, there are five.
- English does not have formality encoded in its grammar.
It's pretty hard to say that German isn't objectively harder than English.
English does not have formality encoded in its grammar.
No, instead it's in the vocabulary. ;)
Many of the most basic words of English exist in more formal and less formal versions. Compare horseman and equestrian, or eat and dine, or smell and fragrance, or hug and embrace.
Many of these apparent redundancies derive from the period when Britain was ruled by native French speakers, who tended to use a lot of French- or Latin-derived words.
I certainly wouldn't claim that spoken English doesn't encode plenty of formality:
*Sir, would you care for an aperitif?*
*No, I ain't hungry.*
Though American culture tends to be deliberately sloppy about who speaks formally to whom, especially compared to what I know of German culture.
This is so far my favorite feature of the English language. Formal forms in the grammar are a relict of feudal type of thinking and in modern times they are not only redundant but also harmful. Need to choose between formal 'you' and informal 'you' leads to lots of awkward social situations. If you apply informal 'you' to someone older and who you don't know well it is usually a conversation breaker. If you use formal 'you' when speaking with a coeval it may look like you're patronizing him. Women sometimes get offended because they think you consider them older than they really are, and so on.
Also, when you start addressing someone using formal forms it is very hard to switch to informal 'you'. Using these forms affect human thinking and after you have already addressed someone formally (because it was in a professional situation for instance) you are not likely to become friends. In some cultures there is a special complex social protocol for switching from formal 'you' to informal one. This ceremony is sometimes called using a German word 'Bruderschaft' and for some peculiar reason it often involves kissing and drinking alcohol. This, rather unfortunate, photo captures such situation: http://imgur.com/pmf57.jpg
As I find it significantly easier to develop social relationships in English, I often wonder whether this lack of formal 'you' contributes to the economical prosperity of the English-speaking countries (and esp. the even less formal US).
> As I find it significantly easier to develop social
relationships in English, I often wonder whether this lack
of formal 'you' contributes to the economical prosperity
of the English-speaking countries
But then, the formal 'you' contributes to professional relationships. Think of it as a safeguard against overstepping an invisible line of proper conduct.
It is really more difficult to say "Sie Arschloch" than "Du Arschloch" because the formal 'you' clashes with vulgar language one would use around drinking buddies.
Do you know of any language where there are not formal and informal vocabularies? I don't.
The point is that in English the additional semantics do not require additional syntax. To make a programming analogy, this is like the difference between C++ having overloadable operators and Java using methods to achieve the same. C++'s grammar is more complicated than Java's, because C++ uses additional syntax to achieve the same semantic ends.
The dual French / Germanic roots to English vocabulary does however hint at one of its distinctively complicated features: English pronunciation and spelling is bewildering because of that lineage.
It's pretty hard to say that German isn't objectively harder than English.
I could say that in English and in Chinese, and with effort in German.
The participant here who submitted the article is dubious about any one language being harder than any other language. I was exposed to that doubt as part of the standard dogma of linguistics while studying linguistics, and I have observed difficult features in many of the languages I have studied.
and my educated guess would be that English (having spread around the world, and spoken in the country with the most native speakers, the United States, mostly by people whose traceable ancestors were NOT native speakers of English) might be a more koineized language than, say, Twi. So perhaps on a truly worldwide, pancultural basis, English is somewhat easier to learn to communicate with other speakers of English than most languages are to communicate with other speakers of those languages.
I've heard it argued that all Chinese dialects are in fact creoles, an artifact of the expanding and shrinking Chinese empire. ie, indigenous language + language of the court + several generations -> new dialect.
And if you can argue that for Chinese, you could argue it for the romance languages, for English after the Norman invasion, etc.
let's take the verb to run in the present tense: I run, you run, he runs, we run, they run
There’s also I do run, I did run, I will run, I shall run, I can run, I could run, I should run, I must run, I might run, I would run, I may run. And all their negations (“I shouldn’t run” is OK but “I mayn’t run” is not). And the special rules for conjugating them: the past tense of “I run” is “I ran”, but the past tense of “I can run” is “I could run”, not “I canned run” or “I can ran”.
These are not complex to native English speakers because we learned most of them without being formally taught, but an adult learning English as a foreign language is not so lucky.
(I see from Googling that German also has modal verbs; I don’t know if the whole set is easier or harder to learn than the English set, from the point of view of someone who knows neither.)
German's use of modal verbs is almost identical to English's, in fact most of its verb usage is, with the notable exception that English prominently features a romance-language-like gerund: "I am running."
The funny bit with your example? Despite the similar usage, German complicates things further by splitting the primary and auxiliary verbs, with the primary being transported to the end of the clause:
Ich sollte nach Hause laufen.
Literally:
I should to home run.
This is no coincidence, since English grammar is basically a simplified version of German grammar. There's a clear continuum from German to English via Frisian and Dutch where the grammar is continually simplified relative to its Germanic root. You can see the same sort of progression in the Romance languages. Modern Italian is pretty much uncontroversially simpler than Latin.
From what I understand peoples problem learning English relates to it lacking fixed rules for most issues. Spelling being the most obvious example. A Spelling Bee would be a far more trivial exercise in Spanish or German. Granted the 988,968 words in English http://www.slate.com/id/2139611/ have something to do with that. Although the total number of words in German is larger (In the modern scientific German vocabulary data base in Leipzig (since 1.7.2003) there are 9 million words) the core vocabulary is fairly small and consistent by comparison. EX: "glove" as "hand-shoe (Handschuh)
Emm, I think most English nouns are made plural by adding -s/-es", so I can at least try the regular approach if I'm not sure. German nouns have a lot different forms for plural :|
Interesting thoughts, but you shouldn't editorialize titles. The title of the article in this case, given by the author, is actually more accurate than the one you chose.
You shouldn't editorialize, but you are allowed to change titles.
The author specifically says he is talking about hard for english speakers, so the new title is correct.
Specifically:
"Languages tend to get “harder” the farther one moves from English and its relatives. Assessing how languages are tricky for English-speakers gives a guide to how the world’s languages differ overall."
and
"A truly boggling language is one that requires English speakers to think about things they otherwise ignore entirely."
I'm not sure if there's an absolute scale, but you can't deny that some languages have more complex grammar than others. Conjugating verbs is a good example: coming from a Latin language, English verbs are almost trivial, but I doubt that the reverse is true. If you wanted, you could put together a list of criteria, such as complexity of grammar rules, how common exceptions are (very common in English, for example), whether the writing is phonetic or not, etc. etc., which should give a rough basis to compare languages.
English has a comparatively simple grammar (at least in terms of things like verb tenses), but then is complex in other ways (size of vocabulary, modal verbs, noun affixes, idioms). We notice the complexity of other languages’ grammars because that’s the thing that stands out when we try to learn them, but people coming from other languages to learn English will be tripped up in other ways.
English is not my native language, and I agree completely - it's easy to pick up the basics (in terms of grammar and basic vocabulary, at least) but difficult to master (irregular pronunciation, idioms).
On the other hand, you might have a language with difficult basics, but relatively simple mastery once you have the basics down - I don't know enough languages to give an example, but it seems plausible.
So, yes, you'd likely get different results if you're comparing languages at different proficiency levels, but a rough comparison should still be possible.
"On the other hand, you might have a language with difficult basics, but relatively simple mastery once you have the basics down"
My impression, as a native English speaker who has learned German, is that German is much more like this than English. You have to know quite a bit to say fairly simple sentences. But once you know the basics, there are only a couple of advanced concepts to get you to mastery.
I'm not convinced by this. If you're just aiming to communicate in German, you can ignore noun gender, valency, many tenses, etc. It's all stuff you'll need to come back and learn later.
[maybe this depends on how you learn. My approach was, roughly, first learn to communicate, then learn to communicate correctly]
That's not the point. The point is that in order to communicate simple things correctly in German, you need to learn a lot more than to communicate simple things correctly in English. But to have correct mastery of German, it's not a large jump from there.
It seems like you're saying, once you've gone through 90% of the effort to learn a language, you've only got 10% left (as opposed to 10% for basics then 90% to master).
Yes, that's right, except for the important part. I'm sure the percentages are off, but here's the basic idea:
To correctly form simple German sentences you need to learn 90% of the non-vocabulary elements of the language. To get to mastery, you have to learn the other 10%.
To correctly form simple English sentences you need to learn 10% of the non-vocabulary elements of the language. To get to mastery, you have to learn the other 90%.
Sure you can deny it. You picked the classic example of something that seems hard to you because of your native speaker bias. What some languages resolve with conjugations and declensions, others resolve with combinations of prepositions and word order. English verb-preposition combinations are so brutally hard for foreign speakers to master that they publish "collocation dictionaries" to help. Latin's case system is much more predictable and regular, in some ways it's easier to learn.
Ranking human language complexity is a much more difficult task than you might imagine.
My native speaker bias for which language? :) I'm not a native English speaker, although I did learn it young, which I'm sure helped.
Still, my native language is Romanian, and I found English verbs easier to learn than French conjugation, even though French is very similar to Romanian in the first place.
Ha, I would have thought you were a native speaker, your English is excellent. :-) I think you make the same generalizations about Latin that native English speakers often do, though, in assuming rich nominal case = complexity. The issue is much more complex than that.
Having studied several languages, I think the biggest difference in difficulty is in how long it takes to acquire basic proficiency. For English speakers, it's obviously easier to ramp up in Spanish or German than Chinese or Korean, because there is much more vocabulary and syntax in common.
However I think putting a number on the difficulty of becoming a fluent, capable speaker of any foreign language is much more difficult. I'm not sure if it's any easier for an English speaker to become an idiomatic, witty, eloquent speaker of German than Chinese.
