French, it's rocket science?!

Shuimo   Mon Jun 01, 2009 5:11 pm GMT
Irregular verbs, rebellious participles, arbitrary genders - French is a fiendishly difficult language to master, all grammarians agree. And what if its very complexity explained the success of French mathematicians?

There are times when you have to laugh at grammarians. They describe French as a horribly difficult language, full of complicated knots that only a lace maker could pick apart. They make a living out of highlighting everything that is contradictory or uncertain in our beloved Gallic tongue, which is presented as a tissue of nutty expressions, replete with irregular verbs, rebellious participles that refuse to agree, uncontrollable adjectives, singular plurals and outmoded tenses. In short, if you believed their descriptions, you would think that French was a dog’s dinner.

Take genders for example. There is no doubt that French genders are completely arbitrary, whereas in Hungarian, there is no such thing as a ‘masculine’ or ‘feminine’ common noun, nor is there in English. Ooh Hungarian! Ooh English! Neuters of the world, come forth and unite! Well all right, there is no intelligent reason for “le bureau” and “la Rose,” or “le lys” — and if that bothers the Magyars, big deal!

I would like to counter these critics with a completely gratuitous supposition: what if this subtlety, this lace-like quality, was in fact a secret strength of the French language? Remember? “La Rose” and “Le lys”… Recently, I was quite taken with an assertion made by a young French mathematician who had the temerity to suggest that French researchers in pure mathematics have outdistanced their international rivals, because “they use French,” and not English, as they do in the other sciences. Perhaps there is more to this than meets the eye… What if the complexity of our language, with its endless uncertainties and vacillations, and its fundamentally unstable and grammatically irrational tangle of masculine and feminine genders actually nurtured mathematical ability? What if this lace-like language facilitated the mental juggling required to investigate a deep level of mathematics? Could it be that a mind nurtured by an “irrational” language is better able to cope with the absurd madness of research in a field where two plus two does not necessarily equal four? Oh là là! Where is this labyrinthine reason taking us? Suffice it to say that there is no reasonable reason, apart from age-old convention, for “le lys” to be masculine or “la rose” to be feminine. None whatsoever. But what if this absurdity on the level of language made French speakers more wary, or simply more alert? What if the ability to tread water in semantic quicksand actually fostered the development of a mathematical mind, and thereby explained the mysterious powers of French Francophone mathematicians that have enabled them to lay claim to the vanguard of international research? — But dear readers, I feel that you are still not convinced. Perhaps, you are given to doubt because you are French, because you have fallen into the habit of proceeding cautiously to avoid grammatical errors, which are an omnipresent threat.
http://www.presseurop.eu/en/content/article/9021-french-its-rocket-science

Shuimo dislikes French, which is a barbarian language with such useless stuff like rregular verbs, rebellious participles, arbitrary genders!
Shuimo   Mon Jun 01, 2009 5:22 pm GMT
Up!
guarro   Mon Jun 01, 2009 5:24 pm GMT
French is very easy. Verbs are easier than in other romance languages. Probably only Standard Brazilian is easier than Spoken French
cnalbumin   Mon Jun 01, 2009 5:27 pm GMT
Aren't there other Languages with far more complex grammar than French? -- like German, Sanskrit, Lithuanian, etc. The mathematicians in these countries ought to really shine.
pro German   Mon Jun 01, 2009 6:06 pm GMT
German is very even more complex.

Einstein, Schrödinger, Heisenberg...
user   Mon Jun 01, 2009 7:25 pm GMT
This theory is nonsense.
Invité d'honneur   Mon Jun 01, 2009 7:28 pm GMT
Well, that would be brilliant of course if the mere knowledge of my native language made me great at maths. I'd get to skip my statistics classes.

Maybe I should conduct an experiment? 4 groups, all students aged 20-25. Group A: 30 native French speakers with a litterary-oriented high-school diploma.
Group B: 30 native speakers of some other languages with a litterary-oriented high-school diploma.
Group C: 30 native French speakers with a sciences-oriented high-school diploma.
Group D: 30 native speakers of some other languages with a sciences-oriented high-school diploma.

All would have to solve mathematical problems with gradual difficulty ranging from pre-frosh level to fifth-year-in-college level. Of course their result should be highly correlated with their native lang...

Wait, what the hell am I talking about???
E1Ler   Mon Jun 01, 2009 10:10 pm GMT
<<Well, that would be brilliant of course if the mere knowledge of my native language made me great at maths. I'd get to skip my statistics classes.>>

I don't think that native French speakers automatically know a lot of math before they are exposed to it. Rather, the in-depth knowledge of French allows them to excel when they get around to studying it.

With your master of the fiendish lace-like complexities in French, you should be able to breeze right through your statistics class. On the other hand, with my background in the genderless, mind-dumbing, and pidgin-like English grammar, I always had a hard time with statistics and probability.
Almond Bread   Tue Jun 02, 2009 1:31 am GMT
I'm going to go stand in the Hungarian-and-English corner with Paul Erdős.
Invité d'honneur   Tue Jun 02, 2009 5:11 am GMT
E1Ler: «With your master of the fiendish lace-like complexities in French, you should be able to breeze right through your statistics class. On the other hand, with my background in the genderless, mind-dumbing, and pidgin-like English grammar, I always had a hard time with statistics and probability.»

That's limpid. I wonder why I even study people's problem-solving strategies in cognitive psychology when most of the answers lie in the simple equations:
French 1L = fiendish lace-like complexities = maths genius
English 1L = mind-dumbing, pidgin-like grammar = sucks at maths
American Power   Tue Jun 02, 2009 5:31 am GMT
E1Ler: «With your master of the fiendish lace-like complexities in French, you should be able to breeze right through your statistics class. On the other hand, with my background in the genderless, mind-dumbing, and pidgin-like English grammar, I always had a hard time with statistics and probability.»



Why does America lead the world in science then?
Shuimo   Tue Jun 02, 2009 6:38 am GMT
American Power Tue Jun 02, 2009 5:31 am GMT
E1Ler: «With your master of the fiendish lace-like complexities in French, you should be able to breeze right through your statistics class. On the other hand, with my background in the genderless, mind-dumbing, and pidgin-like English grammar, I always had a hard time with statistics and probability.»



Why does America lead the world in science then?
=========================
Simple!

America has ripped the best science geniuses of China and India and some other countries!
kamarou   Tue Jun 02, 2009 8:37 am GMT
You should've held onto to those science geniuses then. It's not America's fault they chose to defect. Maybe they were ideologically opposed to your country's regime?
Shuimo   Tue Jun 02, 2009 10:49 am GMT
kamarou Tue Jun 02, 2009 8:37 am GMT
You should've held onto to those science geniuses then. It's not America's fault they chose to defect. Maybe they were ideologically opposed to your country's regime?
==============================

Yes. They've chosen to sell themselves for some silver coins. Their souls will be burning in hell.
Hell or Hell-jung-Li?   Tue Jun 02, 2009 2:55 pm GMT
“Their souls will be burning in hell.”

Do the Chinese believe in hell?