Easy languages

[Rui]

I suppose one could technically count Pirahã as an easy language owing to its tiny phoneme inventory and reportedly sparse grammar. Of course getting adequate learning materials would prove challenging.

Don't be retarded

NE: To be more specific, maybe you should read some shit on Piraha before saying lunatic things like this. Everett has always been extremely clear that Piraha is one of the most difficult and complicated languages he knows of, he just doesn't think it has **recursion**. It's really fucking complex in just about every other way imaginable.

also wtf does "sparse grammar" even mean? I'm guessing Eddy has fallen into the same "grammar=morphology" trap that anyone who has absolutely no knowledge of linguistics whatsoever falls into.

[Whimemsz]

that doesn't make sense though because Piraha has a really really complicated morphology!

more likely Eddy doesn't actually know anything about Piraha, except for what he's ""heard"", and he didn't even understand that anyway.

[Aurora Rossa]

Well excuse me for not having intimately studied Pirahã before making that comment. It's like tossing water into a pot of boiling grease or something.

[Drydic]

Well excuse me for not having intimately studied Pirahã before making that comment. It's like tossing water into a pot of boiling grease or something.

Where 'intimately studied' is actually 'read any half-decent description about'.

[Rui]

You don't need to have intimately studied it. The Wikipedia page details the complicated verbal system that it has, and if you had just skimmed that you probably would not have made such a claim that Piraha is "easy"...I don't know ANYTHING about Piraha, and just from glancing through it I could tell that your claim was completely false.

[Whimemsz]

Well excuse me for not having intimately studied Pirahã before making that comment. It's like tossing water into a pot of boiling grease or something.

The lesson is to look shit up before drawing conclusions about it or making claims about it. How have you still not learned this after all these years? It's at the root of our discussion in your Polysynthesis thread, of all Linguoboy's arguments with you about St. Louis, about your wrong claims about all sorts of ... everything. God. Just read about stuff. Before you talk about it or have opinions on it.

And yes, it is your fault. Don't try to shift your responsibility onto us. This is a board dedicated to (among other things) linguistics. If you make linguistic claims, you should actually know what you're fucking talking about. Especially when it takes almost no effort to look the thing in question up.

[linguoboy]

That reminds me of another difficulty about English that is often forgotten: the use of Latin roots for adjectives where the noun has a Germanic root.

This is the "lexical bar" that I referred to in my post. An educated speaker basically has to learn at least two (sometimes three or more) lexical roots for any basic concept.

I don't recall seeing a general list, but inventories of Latinate adjectives by subject area are common enough, e.g. this list for animals. (To be fair, I'm not sure I've encountred more than a dozen of these in actual use.)