Are Classical languages harder?

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Nooj
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Are Classical languages harder?

Post by Nooj »

I don't know a lick of Classical Arabic but I was discussing with my friend who is learning and I said to her that I bet 80% of the difficulty of CA comes from the way they teach it, because they focus so much on grammar and don't know or ignore the communicative approach or heck the last 40 years of language teaching. Of course it would leave people discouraged. She replied that undoubtedly some of that has to do with it, but also because the language is inherently hard, a lot of the grammar like the plurals seem to not have any sense etc.

And that got me thinking. I studied Latin, Ancient Greek and Sanskrit in university - I still think a lot of it is just due to the teaching and the materials available (people learning French learn how to say where is the train station, Latin learners learn how to say the Carthaginians must be exterminated), but also because as classical languages, they are by definition literary languages, and I'm prettttty sure literature in whatever language tends to be harder to construct or understand than when it is spoken, because people strive for more complex syntactic structures or use archaic vocabulary...I'm not talking about ritualistic prayers (and they tend to be quite arcane as well), but like Cicero or Kalidasa who strive for polished language.

What do you reckon?

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Re: Are Classical languages harder?

Post by Arzena »

I think they can be harder. I'd say that the difficulty increases the greater the distance from everyday use. So for me, Classical Arabic is not that hard because I use its daughter languages on a near-daily basis and the Classical Language still is used alongside and greatly influences the prose and stylistics of the modern Arabics. The other classical languages that I have studied, Latin and Greek, feel harder.

So without further ado, Arzena's Humble Ranking of the Hardness of Classical Languages:

Classical Arabic > Latin > Ancient Greek

From my training in Modern Standard Arabic, I find myself being able to read texts from centuries ago (ie., an illuminated manuscript on alchemy from Abbasid Baghdad at the Getty Museum, Al-Farabi, Al-Mutanabbi, Al-Ma'ari, the Qur'an itself) with minimal difficulty, which mostly consists of vocab and different broken plural stems. Arabic is a Semitic language, but I felt that it wasn't that hard to break out of a Indo-European mindset to learn in the beginning (I started with Egyptian Arabic, moved to Modern Standard Arabic and hence, Classical).

Latin's verbal system has always annoyed the hell out of me. The declension system feels unwieldy at times. These two complaints, however, do not stop me from taking a stab at Latin every now and then. Also my latent Catholicism gives me that extra nudge.

I am scared of Ancient Greek. It's like the Basque monks got together and asked themselves, "What if we took everything people find challenging about Latin - irregular verbal paradigms, large nominal declension systems - and just made it more. And added reduplication for some reason."

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From what I have seen of Classical Chinese from Zompist's blog and Against Peace and Freedom.... whew boy
Last edited by Arzena on Sun Feb 26, 2017 12:13 pm, edited 1 time in total.
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Re: Are Classical languages harder?

Post by Frislander »

To answer your title question: no. The common perception that the so-called "classical" languages are more complicated/difficult comes from the general trend in Indo-European and in Arabic towards morphological simplification. Secondly, different methods of teaching work for different people: I myself much prefer grammar-focused teaching over the "teach phrases and pick-it-up naturally" strategy I seemed to be getting in the British education system. As for your point on literature inducing complexity, yes, there is quite a lot to it: studies have shown that formal written language (I think this applies generally, not just to English) uses more subordinating strategies and longer sentences overall. This isn't just a feature of "classical" languages.
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Re: Are Classical languages harder?

Post by linguoboy »

I'd say it depends what you find "hard". My listening comprehension has never been great and it's getting worse as I age so I've always preferred learning languages by reading rather than speaking. Yes, the syntactic structures can be more complicated, but you have as much time as you need to figure them out and aren't forced to unpack them in real time. And on the other hand, the nature of writing means you have to supply more explicit context since you can't easily go back an disambiguate something just uttered. So a lot of times it's much clearer than speech.

For instance, a common complaint about French-language instruction in the US is that "they teach you to speak like Balzac". And there's some truth it, because colloquial Parisian French (with its heavy use of colloquialisms, contractions, extraposition, etc.) is governed by rules that are more difficult for learners to get a handle on and is harder to comprehend. Quebecois is harder still. Balzac, by contrast, is difficult mainly due to the breadth of his vocabulary (my last husband used to joke about how many different terms for "carriage" he uses). But even that's not insuperable because it's actually in more formal registers that you see the most overlap between English and French (and Romance languages generally).

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Re: Are Classical languages harder?

Post by Nooj »

Arzena wrote:I think they can be harder. I'd say that the difficulty increases the greater the distance from everyday use. So for me, Classical Arabic is not that hard because I use its daughter languages on a near-daily basis and the Classical Language still is used alongside and greatly influences the prose and stylistics of the modern Arabics. The other classical languages that I have studied, Latin and Greek, feel harder.

So without further ado, Arzena's Humble Ranking of the Hardness of Classical Languages:

Classical Arabic > Latin > Ancient Greek

From my training in Modern Standard Arabic, I find myself being able to read texts from centuries ago (ie., an illuminated manuscript on alchemy from Abbasid Baghdad at the Getty Museum, Al-Farabi, Al-Mutanabbi, Al-Ma'ari, the Qur'an itself) with minimal difficulty, which mostly consists of vocab and different broken plural stems. Arabic is a Semitic language, but I felt that it wasn't that hard to break out of a Indo-European mindset to learn in the beginning (I started with Egyptian Arabic, moved to Modern Standard Arabic and hence, Classical).

Latin's verbal system has always annoyed the hell out of me. The declension system feels unwieldy at times. These two complaints, however, do not stop me from taking a stab at Latin every now and then. Also my latent Catholicism gives me that extra nudge.

I am scared of Ancient Greek. It's like the Basque monks got together and asked themselves, "What if we took everything people find challenging about Latin - irregular verbal paradigms, large nominal declension systems - and just made it more. And added reduplication for some reason."

*******
From what I have seen of Classical Chinese from Zompist's blog and Against Peace and Freedom.... whew boy
I'd say the reputation of ancient Greek as super hard may be unwarranted. Perhaps in the beginning harder to learn than Latin (optatives! new alphabet!) but much easier to read. I could hope to finish most of a Sophocles play in a day, whereas the Aeneid would stubbornly not go. Worth it.

BTW, any books you would recommend for someone looking to learn foS7a from the ground up? I feel frustratingly limited. I definitely DO NOT agree with people who say that it is not necessary and that you should only learn dialect, all the dialects draw upon MSA and switch back and forth. I'm learning foS7a verbs and nouns that have been incorporated into darija, just through osmosis, but I want to do it properly.

P.S. daughter languages? I thought Arabic linguists say that the Arabic dialects are sister languages of CA.

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Re: Are Classical languages harder?

Post by zompist »

Languages are harder if they're less like your native language, so in that sense Latin, Classical Greek, and Sanskrit are definitely harder.

If you started with Russian, which has a healthy declensional system, I imagine they'd be much easier.

But the hardest part of any language is the lexicon. You can pick up the most complicated morphology— or should— in your first two years.

FWIW I think the hardest thing for a beginning Sanskrit student is sandhi. It means that most of the words you see on the page won't be in the dictionary— not even if you comb it with your morphological paradigms at hand.

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Re: Are Classical languages harder?

Post by Yng »

Frislander wrote:To answer your title question: no. The common perception that the so-called "classical" languages are more complicated/difficult comes from the general trend in Indo-European and in Arabic towards morphological simplification.
This isn't even that true of Arabic - verbally most Arabic dialects have at least as much morphological complexity as CA imo, if not more, and it's far more unpredictable (it's true the case system, dual agreement etc are gone but most of this is marginal in CA anyway). Nonetheless, people are solidly convinced that Arabic dialects are much simpler and easier to learn (and 'have no grammar' lololol) than fuSHa.

My feeling on Arabic specifically is that MSA is actually pretty easy as long as you're OK with grammar being a bit non-European and can cope with cases etc. Idiomatically etc MSA is generally pretty dry because whilst there is a huge corpus of metaphors etc they're classical and colloquial ones are impermissible, plus MSA was basically born out of the translation of European languages so most of the expressions you come across and the general structure of MSA echo European languages in ways the dialects don't (two examples that spring to mind are the usage of a calque on 'be called' and a calque on 'what about', neither of which exist in spoken language). Once you have a handle on MSA grammar, understanding CA texts is typically a matter of vocabulary and lots of structures which again often have direct equivalents in colloquial but are never used in MSA.

There are a few methodological problems that make studying classical languages harder - the cultural competence challenge presented by texts being from a different time is an obvious one but there's also problems like dated/inadequate dictionaries (this is a real problem for CA where the reference dictionary is from the 19th century), the changing of vocabulary over time ('classical' languages often cover a long period) the lack of a crutch provided by globalisation (shared metaphors, expressions and more vaguely ~understandings of the world~ that you find to a greater or lesser extent in all modern languages) and so on. There's also the fact that a lot of languages that are called 'classical' are cherry-picked elite literary sociolects which can lend themselves to obscurantism. But I don't think that learning Ancient Greek as a spoken language would have been any harder for a contemporary learner than many equivalents today.
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Re: Are Classical languages harder?

Post by Arzena »

Nooj wrote:P.S. daughter languages? I thought Arabic linguists say that the Arabic dialects are sister languages of CA.
That is my personal hot take on the situation of the Colloquial Arabics vis-a-vis CA and MSA. I am not convinced of the "dialect" argument anymore. After dialogues about language with friends who represent from Iraq, Syria, Egypt, Algeria, and Morocco, and after living for a year in Morocco itself (with simultaneous intensive exposure to Moroccan Arabic, Egyptian Arabic and MSA) I am convinced that there are many Arabic languages (on a dialect continuum from the Maghreb to Mesopotamia) which evolved from from the language of the Arabs of the Arabian Peninsula, that MSA is a robust auxlang (yall heard it here first folks), and that the realization of these two facts will foster a more nuanced understanding of the complexities of the "Arabic" language.

Naturally, I understand that these views encounter serious opposition. There's the pan-Arab ideal: 1) A friend who teaches middle school MSA told me that a Syrian immigrant student once said, rather seriously, that "The Arabic language is one; only its dialects differ." 2) Faisel el-Qassem, the host of "Opposing Viewpoint" on Al-Jazeera, has hosted several hand-ringings discussions on the Arabic language. In the introduction to this video he asks rhetorical questions like "Is the Arabic language a 'Salafi language' while English is a 'future' language?... of people who live in the past like dinosaurs?". Another time I remember one of his guests exclaim that to teach the everyday spoken varieties of Arabic - the dialects - would amount to a "new Sykes-Picot".

There's also the Islamist ideal. A relative of a Moroccan family who hosted me once gave the impromptu dinner table lecture that "Arabic was the oldest language in the world and should be preserved because no one less than God revealed Himself to the Prophet in that language." Because of this status, any effort to weaken the position of Arabic (see Faisel el-Qassem above) amounts to sacrilege in addition to an affront against Pan-Arabism.

Third. The old guard of Arabists flat out denied the existence of the Colloquial Arabics. One of my instructors, Dr. Kristen Brustad, related to me once that, while studying MSA in the 70s at Georgetown, she took a job at a Syrian restaurant to speak and practice Arabic. Once she started working there, however, she found that she couldn't communicate with the staff! She told me that this experience led her to design Arabic language pedagogy that incorporated the colloquial forms. When I met, in Morocco, other American students from universities that had not adopted her approach, and learned solely MSA, they struggled communicating on a personal level with people in their language due to the stilted and artificial nature of MSA. At the end of the day, however, Professor Brustad (unlike me) does not go so far as to say that there are 3arabiyyāt 'Arabics'.
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Re: Are Classical languages harder?

Post by Yng »

Arzena wrote:
Nooj wrote:P.S. daughter languages? I thought Arabic linguists say that the Arabic dialects are sister languages of CA.
That is my personal hot take on the situation of the Colloquial Arabics vis-a-vis CA and MSA. I am not convinced of the "dialect" argument anymore.
I think Nooj was referring to the fact that scholarship generally holds that the colloquial Arabics are not descended from the variant represented by the Classical Arabic tradition but from a sister language. The reasons to believe this are varied, including large numbers of shared features that suggest a common origin but which are not shared with CA. One of the most prominent is the loss of the glottal stop, which is present in all dialects and which was probably also present in the Meccan dialect the Qur'an was originally written down in (which explains the spelling of the Hamza - if you take the Hamza diacritic away and look at the underlying spelling as if they were normal /j w a:/ etc you get something that looks very like a dialect that's lost glottal stops).

The general theory as I remember it is that there were various dialects of spoken Arabic around the beginning of the Islamic conquests within the Arabian peninsula (this is actually attested from contemporary sources); the western dialects (including Meccan) had lost the glottal stop and had some other phonetic features not shared with fuSHa; the literary standard was based on eastern dialects and was used for composing poetry (there is a well-established body of pre-Islamic poetry); and it was a combination of the (probably Aramaic-influenced) Meccan used in the Qur'an and the literary standard that birthed fuSHa. Meanwhile either Meccan or some kind of levelled spoken dialect with lots of local substrate influence was the ancestor of almost all of the modern dialects.
After dialogues about language with friends who represent from Iraq, Syria, Egypt, Algeria, and Morocco, and after living for a year in Morocco itself (with simultaneous intensive exposure to Moroccan Arabic, Egyptian Arabic and MSA) I am convinced that there are many Arabic languages (on a dialect continuum from the Maghreb to Mesopotamia) which evolved from from the language of the Arabs of the Arabian Peninsula, that MSA is a robust auxlang (yall heard it here first folks), and that the realization of these two facts will foster a more nuanced understanding of the complexities of the "Arabic" language.
This certainly isn't a new point - people are always saying the dialects are as separate from one another as different languages. I don't think that really means anything, though, since it's one of the first things you learn in linguistics that 'language' and 'dialect' are not very precise terms. The only consistent way we can really apply them is in an anthropological way (i.e. by asking what do people on the ground think) in which case Arabic is very much one language. If your point is that they're not mutually comprehensible, then I (and anyone who has encountered people from other areas) would agree although my feeling is that they seem much more incomprehensible to learners than they do to native speakers. The real barrier to comprehension is between the Maghreb (especially its more remote sections) and the Mashriq. Of course the less educated/exposed to other dialects people are the more difficult it is to understand, etc.

As for MSA being an auxlang - yeah, there's something to that. It's a bit more complicated than that though since something resembling MSA was once presumably natively spoken by people; according to your argument Church Latin was also an auxlang (inherited version of a literary sociolect of a once natively-spoken language complete with large substrate influences from the spoken languages of its users, who included). Maybe you're OK with that but it doesn't seem like the normal definition of auxlang.
Another time I remember one of his guests exclaim that to teach the everyday spoken varieties of Arabic - the dialects - would amount to a "new Sykes-Picot".
Yes, it's a sensitive issue. People get upset about it because MSA is one of the unifying things that holds together the different Arab countries. Turning colloquial into the literary/official language of countries was for a long time the project of localist territorial nationalists. And obviously also there's the whole religious value invested in Arabic (and cultural value, etc - when you seriously suggest making the colloquial languages into official languages you're threatening a cultural break with the entire literary tradition, etc).
Third. The old guard of Arabists flat out denied the existence of the Colloquial Arabics. One of my instructors, Dr. Kristen Brustad, related to me once that, while studying MSA in the 70s at Georgetown, she took a job at a Syrian restaurant to speak and practice Arabic. Once she started working there, however, she found that she couldn't communicate with the staff! She told me that this experience led her to design Arabic language pedagogy that incorporated the colloquial forms.
Yeah, Kristen Brustad has done some good work on dialects, although al-Kitaab is famously not very good and I don't think actually does a very good job of teaching dialect at all. I agree dialect should be taught alongside MSA; you need both to speak Arabic fluently and pretending otherwise is silly.
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Re: Are Classical languages harder?

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Lemme play devil's advocate for a minute.
Guy Deutscher, [i]Through the Language Glass[/i], p 99-105 wrote:Ask Joe the Plumber, Piers the Ploughman, or Tom the Piper's Son what sort of languages the half-naked tribes in the Amazonian rain forest speak, and they will undoubtedly tell you that "primitive people speak primitive languages." Ask professional linguists the same question, and they'll say something quite different. Actually, you don't even need to ask—they will tell you anyway: "All languages are equally complex." This battle cry is one of the most oft avowed doctrines of the modern discipline of linguistics. For decades, it has been professed from lecterns across the globe, proclaimed in introductory textbooks, and preached at any opportunity to the general public.

...[N]o language that has served for generations as the means of communication in a society can lack a certain minimum of complexity, but that does not imply that all languages are equally complex. What precludes the possibility, for instance, that languages of sophisticated civilizations might be more complex than those of simple societies? Or for that matter, how do we know that languages of advanced cultures are not perhaps less complex?

We know because linguists tell us so. And we must surely be on terra firma if the combined forces of an entire academic discipline pronounce from every available platform that something is the case. Indeed, equal complexity is often among the very first articles of faith that students read in their introductory course book. A typical example is the most popular Introduction to Language ever, the staple textbook by Victoria Fromkin and Robert Rodman on whose numerous editions generations of students in America and in other countries have been raised, ever since it first appeared in 1974. Under the auspicious title "What We Know about Language," the first chapter explains: "Investigations of linguists date back at least to 1600 B.C.E. in Mesopotamia. We have learned a great deal since that time. A number of facts pertaining to all languages can be stated." It then goes on to profess those twelve facts that any student should know at the outset. The first asserts that "wherever humans exist, language exists" and the second that "all languages are equally complex."

A student with an enquiring mind might quietly wonder when and where exactly it was—during this long history of investigations since 1600 BCE—that "we have learned" that all languages are equally complex. Who was it that made this spectacular discovery?

...[The student] may go on searching for years without finding the reference. I for one have been looking for fifteen years and still haven't encountered it. When it comes to the "central finding" about the equal complexity of all languages, linguists never bother to reveal where, when, or how the discovery was made. They are saying: "Just trust us, we know." Well, don't trust us. We have no idea!

As it happens, the dogma of equal complexity is based on no evidence whatsoever. No one has ever measured the overall complexity of even one single language, not to mention all of them. No one even has any idea how to measure the overall complexity of a language... The equal complexity slogan is just a myth, an urban legend that linguists repeat because they have heard other linguists repeat it before them, having in turn heard others repeat it earlier.
John McWhorter (who, for the record, also wrote a book rebutting the central thesis of Through the Language Glass) has also written that languages are not all equally complex-- specifically, how there is no evidence for any kind of "hydraulic" process whereby, if a language is lacking in complexity in one area (e.g. morphology), it automatically compensates by being more complex in another (e.g. syntax).

Even if he and Deutscher hadn't said so, in my opinion it still wouldn't take much to show that languages (at most) aren't equally complex or (at least) that we just don't know. Firstly: how do you measure complexity? Mathematicians can't even agree on what "complexity" is or how to measure it (Melanie Mitchell lists nine separate definitions in Complexity: A Guided Tour). Secondly: who's been doing the measuring? Linguoboy in another thread recently expressed skepticism that any language at all has ever been completely described. Thirdly: what are the chances that this measure would be the same for all languages? Either it would happen by chance (astronomically unlikely) or there would be some natural or statistical tendency pulling all languages toward one exactly-specified degree of complexity. Human cognitive capacity is one determining factor, but I have no idea how much that affects language complexity beyond just making it more complicated than animal communication.

I take Zompist's point on dissimilarity from one's native language affecting learning difficulty, but if we're asking "Are Classical languages harder than non-Classical languages?" then I think that slightly dodges the point: does proximity to English affect whether Sanskrit is harder than Bengali? Ge'ez harder than Harari? Old Javanese harder than Modern Indonesian? Also, in my opinion Zompist's point about vocabulary being more important than grammar kind of denudes the influence of similarity. So substituting "complexity" in for "difficulty" doesn't seem unreasonable.

So I'm going to go out on a limb here and say that IN MY OPINION neither I nor anybody else knows whether classical languages are harder than non-classical languages. And therefore, maybe-- and this might be Velikovsky-level BS speculation-- but maybe there is some phenomenon we don't know about which has operated upon languages over the last three thousand years, making them more or less complex and thus, on average, more or less difficult over time. I find this intuitively unlikely, but, per the complexity measurement point, I don't think we can say with certainty that it is not the case.
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Re: Are Classical languages harder?

Post by zompist »

Deutscher is being rather disingenuous here. If he wants a scientific proof, he shouldn't be looking in "introductory textbooks". And if he wants a proof that all languages are equally complex, I'd like one that some languages are particularly complex. People have had a hundred years or so to make the equally "spectacular discovery" that language X really is the most difficult on earth. Where's the paper that shows that?

So far as I know, linguists make no claim that complexity has been reduced to some sort of metric that can easily be compared across languages. R.M.W. Dixon puts it this way: if such a metric existed, he would not be surprised if some language was twice as complex as another. But he would be surprised if some language was 10 times as complex as another. If Deutscher disagrees, perhaps he could point out which languages he's thinking about.

Way back on sci.lang, Jacques Guy used to like to argue about this too, and came up with a couple of Austronesian languages where he claimed one was more complex than another in each area of grammar. And maybe he was right, but from the examples he gave I don't think he was anywhere near Dixon's 10x difference.

I'm inclined to think there is a simple natural process that explains why language complexity should fall within a certain range: languages have to be taught to children in about a ten-year window between toddlerhood and adolescence. If a language takes more than that to learn-- well, young people who can't talk would be a huge liability, and in traditional societies you'd also have the risk that their parents will be dead before they finish teaching them.

I suspect what drives a lot of the non-acceptance of this particular linguistic heuristic is that laymen fixate on complex fusional morphology. They look at Greek verbs and "how can you possibly say that's not more complex!!!1!11!" And yet Greek children pick up the language just fine.

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Re: Are Classical languages harder?

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Deutscher is being rather disingenuous here. If he wants a scientific proof, he shouldn't be looking in "introductory textbooks".
Where on earth do you get the idea that he's only been looking in introductory textbooks? He's citing Fromkin/Rodman as an illustrative example of the meme he is trying to examine, not as the be-all-end-all of linguistic literature. Guy Deutscher is a real-life linguist with an honest-to-god doctorate degree and a career and everything... if he says he's never found something after over a decade of searching, I think he deserves a little more charity than to assume he checked a couple intro books then gave up.
People have had a hundred years or so to make the equally "spectacular discovery" that language X really is the most difficult on earth. Where's the paper that shows that?
If one person is asserting something without evidence, you do not need to provide proof of its opposite in order to point out that they are asserting something without evidence. Heck, the criticism is even still valid if the original assertion ends up being true anyway. I haven't read the full book, so I don't know what conclusion he ultimately comes to, but in the relevant pages I quoted the position he seems to be advocating is agnosticism: "Well, don't trust us. We have no idea!" And if they indeed have no idea, then he is entirely correct to castigate linguistics textbooks for telling students otherwise.

Also, "the most difficult language on earth" is a red herring. It should be obvious that one needn't present literally ~~TEH COMPLICATEDEDEST LANGAUGE EVAR~~ in order to disprove the meme, any more than one need find the tallest man on earth in order to prove that "height" exists.
R.M.W. Dixon puts it this way: if such a metric existed, he would not be surprised if some language was twice as complex as another. But he would be surprised if some language was 10 times as complex as another. If Deutscher disagrees, perhaps he could point out which languages he's thinking about.
I don't know whether Deutscher would disagree with that or not, mostly because in my opinion that claim is entirely meaningless. We don't have the method to measure language complexity, and thus we do not know whether such a method might have unintuitive and nonlinear scaling, the way e.g. luminosity does. A language being "10 times" more complex than another might be less remarkable than it sounds. Or it may not. Either way, Dixon is pulling that number out of his ass.
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Re: Are Classical languages harder?

Post by zompist »

I know Deutscher is a linguist, which is why I'm surprised that he's erecting a straw man. Looking up two introductory books on my shelf, here's David Crystal, The Cambridge Encyclopedia of Linguistics: "We do not know how to quantify language, so as to be able to say whether all languages have the same 'amounts' of grammar, phonology, or semantic structure.... There may indeed be important differences in the structural complexity of language, and this possibility needs to be investigated." Here's Lars-Gunnar Andersson in Language Myths: "In a fairly complicated way, and in certain respects, some languages are harder than others. Furthermore, there is no simple scale for measuring simplicity in language...." Neither is saying that "all languages are equally complex" or pretending that this is a "spectacular discovery" worthy of being put in a journal.

Linguists do want to put down the notion that there are "primitive languages"– an idea easily combatted by, say, giving a brief overview of Inuit or !Kung. And, as I've said, to point out that the real bugbear is lexicon. I'd agree that Fromkin & Rodman's assertion is too strong. I don't think they were trying to say what Deutscher thinks they were— they were rebutting a myth, not stating a dogma— but they came off as dogmatic, and teachers have to avoid making things sound more pat than they really are.

My main point, though, is that if Deutscher or someone else really wants to counter some form of the idea, then just being snarky isn't enough. Go make that gauge of complexity (in a way that doesn't beg the question**) and apply it to a couple hundred languages. Then if you make that "spectacular discovery" that the range of complexity is from 0.01 to 150.42, we'll have something to look at.

I don't know why you think Dixon's reformulation is "entirely meaningless". I've already given you an informal gauge of language complexity: how long it takes children to learn the language. All natural languages can be learned by puberty.* We can probably constrain it far more than that: no child masters their native language by 4; all are pretty darn fluent by 9.

It's hard to see why we'd see this pattern universally if Dixon were wrong. If language X is 12 times more complex than language Y, surely we'd have astonished reports from fieldworkers that children speaking Y are fluent at 3 years of age, while X speakers are still confused and halting till they're 36.

* (At a first approximation. We do keep learning during adolescence, and into adulthood. For the nth time, the complexity thing is an informal heuristic, not a theorem. When someone starts to treat the problem with scientific rigor, then second-guessing all the edge cases will be appropriate.)

** ((Edit:) E.g. by over-weighting fusional morphology so that Sanskrit ends up on top. In fact I doubt any rigorous methodology could simply give simple weights to phonology, morphology, syntax, etc., because those weights would themselves be arbitrary judgments. Which is why I am emphasizing time of acquisition: it already aggregates everything in an intuitive way.)

zompist
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Re: Are Classical languages harder?

Post by zompist »

BTW, the description of Deutscher's book sounds interesting. I liked his Unfolding of Language, and it sounds like he will be defending an updated Whorfianism. His discussion of geographic coordinates in Guugu Yimithirr in the NYT is eye-opening (and, i'll guess, makes an extended appearance in the book).

Richard W
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Re: Are Classical languages harder?

Post by Richard W »

zompist wrote:And yet Greek children pick up the language just fine.
Actually, they've made a complete mess of it over the centuries.

I think the ten year argument isn't quite right. What can't be learnt in the relevant learning period is simply lost. Complexity is bound by the time available to learn it - and not everyone learns equally well.

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