Wannabe,
That's dang interesting! I can believe that about Vietnamese. The tones are the bear, not the grammar.
That's dang interesting! I can believe that about Vietnamese. The tones are the bear, not the grammar.
Why Chinese Is So Damn Hard
The article that wannabe morphologist talked about concerning morphological complexity can be found at:
http://maxbane.com/wp-content/uploads/2007/09/bane-2007-quantifyingmeasuringmorphologicalcomplexity.pdf
Note: Not all major languages are tested--Vietnamese is there, but not Chinese, Japanese, or Indonesian.
http://maxbane.com/wp-content/uploads/2007/09/bane-2007-quantifyingmeasuringmorphologicalcomplexity.pdf
Note: Not all major languages are tested--Vietnamese is there, but not Chinese, Japanese, or Indonesian.
Thank-you, guest2! I enjoy it when we actually get some numbers into our discussions about languages.
<<What has morphology got to do with difficulty? >>
All other things being equal, isn't a language with more complex morphology harder than one with simple morphology.
All other things being equal, isn't a language with more complex morphology harder than one with simple morphology.
Here's a web page with a differernt metric for morphological complexity:
http://www.info.uta.fi/kurssit/clir/sisalto/clir8_language_typologies.htm
This one has Vietnamese at 1.06 and English at 1.68, but I don't see Spahish or French on the list.
Getting back to the point about Spanish vs English morphology, it appears that Spanish (at 0.275) is about 65% more complex than English (at 0.1688). Interestingly, French (at 0.2305) is only about 40% more complex than English, and German (at 0.204) in only about 20% more complex.
http://www.info.uta.fi/kurssit/clir/sisalto/clir8_language_typologies.htm
This one has Vietnamese at 1.06 and English at 1.68, but I don't see Spahish or French on the list.
Getting back to the point about Spanish vs English morphology, it appears that Spanish (at 0.275) is about 65% more complex than English (at 0.1688). Interestingly, French (at 0.2305) is only about 40% more complex than English, and German (at 0.204) in only about 20% more complex.
Ever tried to tell a Chinese from the mainland that "France" in Taiwan is pronounced 法国 Fa4Guo2 not as in China Fa3Guo2. They would strictly reject that and say that a character is a character and could only be pronounced in one way regardless of the place. on the other hand, the Taiwanese are always against the simplified characters because it lost the beauty of the original style and they prefer to keep writing/wasting more lines and strokes for the sake of beauty- ok, I know there might be some political reasons behind that, but still, people do think so.
Someone here suggested using the alphabetic writing instead of characters. That’s great, but to do so, the main obstacle would be the people themselves. If you say I have a brilliant new way to make the Chinese language more simplified, people, and all the people of China, will stand up and say that the idea is not practical even before they know what that new idea is.
Someone here suggested using the alphabetic writing instead of characters. That’s great, but to do so, the main obstacle would be the people themselves. If you say I have a brilliant new way to make the Chinese language more simplified, people, and all the people of China, will stand up and say that the idea is not practical even before they know what that new idea is.
<<All other things being equal, isn't a language with more complex morphology harder than one with simple morphology.>>
There's no such thing as 'all other things being equal', unless you're a feral child, and I don't know any to ask. All people have their native languages, so objectivity is impossible. My native language is Russian and I find heavy declining languages much easier than strict analytic languages.
There's no such thing as 'all other things being equal', unless you're a feral child, and I don't know any to ask. All people have their native languages, so objectivity is impossible. My native language is Russian and I find heavy declining languages much easier than strict analytic languages.
>>Xie, is "C'est du Chinois." offensive to you? In English we sometimes say the same thing, although we usually say "It's Greek to me." Omniglot, a beautifully done website, gives many similar examples.
I could probably contribute too by giving "chicken guts". The main thing is some people like thinking of lame excuses and this doesn't help anyone but discourage themselves.
Besides inherent linguistic differences, considering your own native language, I don't think there's not much left about practical "difficulty". In some ways, I find it easier to copy notes in English than Chinese, and vice versa. There are quite a few instances when I find it easier to make up a word or phrase in either than another. For example, my usual joke is: since the Chinese don't really know what it means to be multilingual, we have no one-word translation for polyglottery. Rather, we must use a phrase to describe that, like "somebody can speak multiple-country-languages" or "somebody knows multiple languages". It's strictly an adjective or verb construction, and we have no noun for polyglottery. In similar ways, some simple one-character concepts in Chinese have to be translated into English using multiple words.
>>All other things being equal, isn't a language with more complex morphology harder than one with simple morphology.
What I'm not really into is "learning partialism", taking the (most) difficult parts of syntax and morphology (and even some others, like spelling) into account without considering others. I'm against the statement that there must be a language inherently more difficult than others.
Partialism is more used for "fetishism", a source of "happiness" for fetishists. But here, ironically, this is strictly masochism because thinking of difficulty kills your motivation. I would still have learnt the basics of German declension if I had kept on reading my old-fashioned textbook (though I don't hate it), but I did it much faster with organic materials instead of taking case endings out learning them in isolation. This is masochism because it means you are learning the abstract of a PART of the language (in this case, morphology) instead of the real thing of it.
>>My native language is Russian and I find heavy declining languages much easier than strict analytic languages.
Surprising! Why?
I think there is a lot more politics than pure learning partialism among children who refuse to learn languages. It just happens that many most economically significant languages are fairly analytic and in the Latin script, and many others are often not too popular, too difficult to write for some, too obscure and so on. Well, having said that, have I seen many kids who can learn something as popular as English well? Not really.
In the long run, syntax and morphology would be a piece of cake for the motivated, competent learner because s/he would be looking for meaning of words instead of the syntax and morphology s/he already knows. Partialists simply by my definition wouldn't be ever able to see that, and they are missing the chance of communicating with people who speak "morphologically difficult languages".
I could probably contribute too by giving "chicken guts". The main thing is some people like thinking of lame excuses and this doesn't help anyone but discourage themselves.
Besides inherent linguistic differences, considering your own native language, I don't think there's not much left about practical "difficulty". In some ways, I find it easier to copy notes in English than Chinese, and vice versa. There are quite a few instances when I find it easier to make up a word or phrase in either than another. For example, my usual joke is: since the Chinese don't really know what it means to be multilingual, we have no one-word translation for polyglottery. Rather, we must use a phrase to describe that, like "somebody can speak multiple-country-languages" or "somebody knows multiple languages". It's strictly an adjective or verb construction, and we have no noun for polyglottery. In similar ways, some simple one-character concepts in Chinese have to be translated into English using multiple words.
>>All other things being equal, isn't a language with more complex morphology harder than one with simple morphology.
What I'm not really into is "learning partialism", taking the (most) difficult parts of syntax and morphology (and even some others, like spelling) into account without considering others. I'm against the statement that there must be a language inherently more difficult than others.
Partialism is more used for "fetishism", a source of "happiness" for fetishists. But here, ironically, this is strictly masochism because thinking of difficulty kills your motivation. I would still have learnt the basics of German declension if I had kept on reading my old-fashioned textbook (though I don't hate it), but I did it much faster with organic materials instead of taking case endings out learning them in isolation. This is masochism because it means you are learning the abstract of a PART of the language (in this case, morphology) instead of the real thing of it.
>>My native language is Russian and I find heavy declining languages much easier than strict analytic languages.
Surprising! Why?
I think there is a lot more politics than pure learning partialism among children who refuse to learn languages. It just happens that many most economically significant languages are fairly analytic and in the Latin script, and many others are often not too popular, too difficult to write for some, too obscure and so on. Well, having said that, have I seen many kids who can learn something as popular as English well? Not really.
In the long run, syntax and morphology would be a piece of cake for the motivated, competent learner because s/he would be looking for meaning of words instead of the syntax and morphology s/he already knows. Partialists simply by my definition wouldn't be ever able to see that, and they are missing the chance of communicating with people who speak "morphologically difficult languages".
Les deux exemples de "mesure" de la "complexité" linguistique sont aisément discutables.
Bane : « To begin exploring the empirical behavior of the metric proposed above, a total of twenty languages were selected for preliminary measurements. [...] Fourteen of the languages are represented by corpora consisting of translations of the Bible, as made
freely available on the internet. [...] The remaining six languages are creoles or pidgins for which biblical translations are not readily available,
and whose corpora were gathered from the web by Scannell’s (2007) automatic, language-targeting web-crawler. »
Risible. Depuis quand la bible sert-elle de base scientifique, même en linguistique ?
Bane : « At the risk of simplifying for our present purposes (see Goldsmith 2001 for more details), the models (descriptions) that Linguistica constructs are lexica consisting of stems, affixes, and what Goldsmith calls
“signatures,” which describe the possible distributions of affixes upon stems. Here are some example entries in a lexicon induced by Linguistica from a corpus of Standard French:
Stem — Suffixal Signature
a. accompli — .e.t.r.s.ssent.ssez
b. académi — cien.e.es.que
c. académicien — .s
Entry (a) indicates that the stem "accompli-" can take the suffixes "-Ø" (masculine past participle), "-e" (feminine past participle), "-t" (third person singular), "-r" (infinitive), "-s" (second person singular), "-ssent"
(third person plural), "-ssez" (second person plural). Thus the signature "Ø.e.t.r.s.ssent.ssez" corresponds to something like the inflectional category "verbs in -ir" in French. Similarly, (b) indicates that "académi-" is the stem of words like "académicien" (academician), "académie" (academy), "académies" (academies), "académique" (academic). Furthermore, "académicien" is itself a stem which can take singular "-Ø" and plural "-s", as shown in (c). »
Il est effrayant de constater que ces pseudolinguistes prétendent pérorer sur la "complexité morphologique" d'une langue en 1] ne définissant aucun terme (ni <complexité> ni <morphologie>) — 2] en limitant leur "étude" à une vision parcellaire de la langue écrite (la bible) — 3] en réduisant abusivement la morphologie à la morphologie écrite — 4] en exhibant leur profonde ignorance de la langue considérée (le français en l'occurrence).
2] Tout à fait contestable : la bible n'est pas l'étalon universel en matière de scriptolinguistique. C'est même le pire exemple qui se puisse choisir.
1] Bane élude lui-même à la question à laquelle il ne fournit aucune réponse satisfaisante : « There is of course no generally agreed on definition of grammatical complexity in linguistics [...] ».
4] La cuistrerie atteint des proportions ahurissantes quand Bane prétend inventorier la liste des scriptoaffixes du verbe <accomplir> en oubliant une scriptoterminaison majeure : celle de la première personne du pluriel → <accomplissons>.
Encore plus ridicule → « Thus the signature "Ø.e.t.r.s.ssent.ssez" corresponds to something like the inflectional category "verbs in -ir" in French ». Non, il manque dans la pseudo-"signature" de <accomplir> les éléments suivants : <-issons>, <-îmes>, <-îtes>, <-irent>, <-issais>, <-issait>, <-issions>, <-issiez>, <-issaient>, <-irai>, <-iras>, <-ira>, <-irons>, <-irez>, <-iront>, <-isse>, <-isses>, <-issent>, <-ît>, <-irais>, <-irait>, <-irions>, <-iriez>, <-iriont>. Autrement dit, sur les 31 éléments simples, 24 ont été oubliés, soit près de 80 %... Et il va sans dire que tous les verbes "en -<ir>" ne suivent pas le modèle de <accomplir>, contrairement à ce que Bane laisse entendre.
Même topo pour <académicien> : les féminins singulier et pluriel ont été purement et simplement oubliés. Pratique.
3] Mais le plus grave est la réduction de la morphologie à la scriptomorphologie. Ce qui signifie que l'oromorphologie est complètement négligée — un comble pour une langue !!! Surtout pour le français (que Bane ne craint pas citer en exemple...) où la distinction entre scriptomorphologie et oromorphologie est fondamentale.
Dans le petit univers magique de Bane, les "signatures" de <ami> sont probablement {<-Ø> ; <-e>; <-s> ; <-es>}. Dans la réalité phonologique, il en est tout autrement :
/lə/ + /ami/ → /lami/
/la/ + /ami/ → /lami/
/le/ + /ami /→ /lezami/
/œ̃/ + /ami/ → /œ̃nami/ & /œnami/
/yn/ + /ami/ → /ynami/
/de/ + /ami /→ /dezami/
/mɔ̃/ + /ami/ → /mɔ̃nami/ & /mɔnami/
/ma/ + /ami/ → /mɔ̃nami/ & /mɔnami/
/tɔ̃/ + /ami/ → /tɔ̃nami/ & /tɔnami/
/ta/ + /ami/ → /tɔ̃nami/ & /tɔnami/
/sɔ̃/ + /ami/ → /sɔ̃nami/ & /sɔnami/
/sa/ + /ami/ → /sɔ̃nami/ & /sɔnami/
/no/ + /ami /→ /nozami/
/vo/ + /ami /→ /vozami/
/lœʁ/ + /ami /→ /lœʁzami/
/ɑ̃/+ /ami/ → /ɑ̃̃nami/
/ɑ̃sjɛ̃/ + /ami/ → /ɑ̃sjɛ̃nami/ & /ɑ̃sjɛnami/
/ɑ̃sjɛn/+ /ami/ → /ɑ̃sjɛnami/
/ɑ̃sjɛ̃/ + /ami/ → /ɑ̃sjɛ̃zami/
/ɑ̃sjɛn/+ /ami/ → /ɑ̃sjɛnzami/
(etc).
Il apparaît que /ami/ — à la différence de <ami> — est essentiellement invariable à droite : la variation morphologique est à gauche !...
'Guest' : « http://www.info.uta.fi/kurssit/clir/sisalto/clir8_language_typologies.htm ».
Tout aussi fumeux.
« For each case, the figures are calculated on the basis of 100 words of an unrestricted text sample. »
Encore des textes, toujours des textes... Mais les locuteurs ne parlent pas en textes : ils parlent avec des ***PHONÈMES*** → /(le)zami/ vs <(les) amies>.
Bane : « To begin exploring the empirical behavior of the metric proposed above, a total of twenty languages were selected for preliminary measurements. [...] Fourteen of the languages are represented by corpora consisting of translations of the Bible, as made
freely available on the internet. [...] The remaining six languages are creoles or pidgins for which biblical translations are not readily available,
and whose corpora were gathered from the web by Scannell’s (2007) automatic, language-targeting web-crawler. »
Risible. Depuis quand la bible sert-elle de base scientifique, même en linguistique ?
Bane : « At the risk of simplifying for our present purposes (see Goldsmith 2001 for more details), the models (descriptions) that Linguistica constructs are lexica consisting of stems, affixes, and what Goldsmith calls
“signatures,” which describe the possible distributions of affixes upon stems. Here are some example entries in a lexicon induced by Linguistica from a corpus of Standard French:
Stem — Suffixal Signature
a. accompli — .e.t.r.s.ssent.ssez
b. académi — cien.e.es.que
c. académicien — .s
Entry (a) indicates that the stem "accompli-" can take the suffixes "-Ø" (masculine past participle), "-e" (feminine past participle), "-t" (third person singular), "-r" (infinitive), "-s" (second person singular), "-ssent"
(third person plural), "-ssez" (second person plural). Thus the signature "Ø.e.t.r.s.ssent.ssez" corresponds to something like the inflectional category "verbs in -ir" in French. Similarly, (b) indicates that "académi-" is the stem of words like "académicien" (academician), "académie" (academy), "académies" (academies), "académique" (academic). Furthermore, "académicien" is itself a stem which can take singular "-Ø" and plural "-s", as shown in (c). »
Il est effrayant de constater que ces pseudolinguistes prétendent pérorer sur la "complexité morphologique" d'une langue en 1] ne définissant aucun terme (ni <complexité> ni <morphologie>) — 2] en limitant leur "étude" à une vision parcellaire de la langue écrite (la bible) — 3] en réduisant abusivement la morphologie à la morphologie écrite — 4] en exhibant leur profonde ignorance de la langue considérée (le français en l'occurrence).
2] Tout à fait contestable : la bible n'est pas l'étalon universel en matière de scriptolinguistique. C'est même le pire exemple qui se puisse choisir.
1] Bane élude lui-même à la question à laquelle il ne fournit aucune réponse satisfaisante : « There is of course no generally agreed on definition of grammatical complexity in linguistics [...] ».
4] La cuistrerie atteint des proportions ahurissantes quand Bane prétend inventorier la liste des scriptoaffixes du verbe <accomplir> en oubliant une scriptoterminaison majeure : celle de la première personne du pluriel → <accomplissons>.
Encore plus ridicule → « Thus the signature "Ø.e.t.r.s.ssent.ssez" corresponds to something like the inflectional category "verbs in -ir" in French ». Non, il manque dans la pseudo-"signature" de <accomplir> les éléments suivants : <-issons>, <-îmes>, <-îtes>, <-irent>, <-issais>, <-issait>, <-issions>, <-issiez>, <-issaient>, <-irai>, <-iras>, <-ira>, <-irons>, <-irez>, <-iront>, <-isse>, <-isses>, <-issent>, <-ît>, <-irais>, <-irait>, <-irions>, <-iriez>, <-iriont>. Autrement dit, sur les 31 éléments simples, 24 ont été oubliés, soit près de 80 %... Et il va sans dire que tous les verbes "en -<ir>" ne suivent pas le modèle de <accomplir>, contrairement à ce que Bane laisse entendre.
Même topo pour <académicien> : les féminins singulier et pluriel ont été purement et simplement oubliés. Pratique.
3] Mais le plus grave est la réduction de la morphologie à la scriptomorphologie. Ce qui signifie que l'oromorphologie est complètement négligée — un comble pour une langue !!! Surtout pour le français (que Bane ne craint pas citer en exemple...) où la distinction entre scriptomorphologie et oromorphologie est fondamentale.
Dans le petit univers magique de Bane, les "signatures" de <ami> sont probablement {<-Ø> ; <-e>; <-s> ; <-es>}. Dans la réalité phonologique, il en est tout autrement :
/lə/ + /ami/ → /lami/
/la/ + /ami/ → /lami/
/le/ + /ami /→ /lezami/
/œ̃/ + /ami/ → /œ̃nami/ & /œnami/
/yn/ + /ami/ → /ynami/
/de/ + /ami /→ /dezami/
/mɔ̃/ + /ami/ → /mɔ̃nami/ & /mɔnami/
/ma/ + /ami/ → /mɔ̃nami/ & /mɔnami/
/tɔ̃/ + /ami/ → /tɔ̃nami/ & /tɔnami/
/ta/ + /ami/ → /tɔ̃nami/ & /tɔnami/
/sɔ̃/ + /ami/ → /sɔ̃nami/ & /sɔnami/
/sa/ + /ami/ → /sɔ̃nami/ & /sɔnami/
/no/ + /ami /→ /nozami/
/vo/ + /ami /→ /vozami/
/lœʁ/ + /ami /→ /lœʁzami/
/ɑ̃/+ /ami/ → /ɑ̃̃nami/
/ɑ̃sjɛ̃/ + /ami/ → /ɑ̃sjɛ̃nami/ & /ɑ̃sjɛnami/
/ɑ̃sjɛn/+ /ami/ → /ɑ̃sjɛnami/
/ɑ̃sjɛ̃/ + /ami/ → /ɑ̃sjɛ̃zami/
/ɑ̃sjɛn/+ /ami/ → /ɑ̃sjɛnzami/
(etc).
Il apparaît que /ami/ — à la différence de <ami> — est essentiellement invariable à droite : la variation morphologique est à gauche !...
'Guest' : « http://www.info.uta.fi/kurssit/clir/sisalto/clir8_language_typologies.htm ».
Tout aussi fumeux.
« For each case, the figures are calculated on the basis of 100 words of an unrestricted text sample. »
Encore des textes, toujours des textes... Mais les locuteurs ne parlent pas en textes : ils parlent avec des ***PHONÈMES*** → /(le)zami/ vs <(les) amies>.
<<Risible. Depuis quand la bible sert-elle de base scientifique, même en linguistique ?>>
Let's hope they weren't using the King James Bible when they ran their program to compute the number for English.
Let's hope they weren't using the King James Bible when they ran their program to compute the number for English.
For example, my usual joke is: since the Chinese don't really know what it means to be multilingual, we have no one-word translation for polyglottery. Rather, we must use a phrase to describe that, like "somebody can speak multiple-country-languages" or "somebody knows multiple languages". It's strictly an adjective or verb-Xie
Yes, the Japanese seem to have the same problem. Sometimes Europeans slam Americans (as an example) because of our monolingualism, but honestly, it seems a little crazy for large groups of people to pursue languages that they will never use.
Yes, the Japanese seem to have the same problem. Sometimes Europeans slam Americans (as an example) because of our monolingualism, but honestly, it seems a little crazy for large groups of people to pursue languages that they will never use.
After studying Japanese in undergraduate school and being able to read and write I don't think Chinese so difficult because I can understand most of the characters (Some are trickier because they have been simplified) and vocabulary can be learned easily just by looking at the letters. Grammar is very simple and very similar to English in the fact that it uses SVO so "I love you" is 我爱你, "I study Chinese" is 我学习中文 and so on.The biggest difficulty might be the tones but that can be done with some effort.
Bottom line: No big deal at all!
I wish I had more motivation and opportunities to use (In Japan I barely meet any Chinese) and keep on learning this fascinating language.
There are several myths about difficult languages but I believe one should say that a "language is difficult" based on the native language of the student. Koreans and Japanese learn Chinese very easily because they know the Chinese characters, which have contributed with many words to their language.
再见！
Bottom line: No big deal at all!
I wish I had more motivation and opportunities to use (In Japan I barely meet any Chinese) and keep on learning this fascinating language.
There are several myths about difficult languages but I believe one should say that a "language is difficult" based on the native language of the student. Koreans and Japanese learn Chinese very easily because they know the Chinese characters, which have contributed with many words to their language.
再见！
>>>Sometimes Europeans slam Americans (as an example) because of our monolingualism, but honestly, it seems a little crazy for large groups of people to pursue languages that they will never use.
We don't usually slam others (or ourselves), since we understand it's all about culture. Many of us do confess to be very poor in English.
That said, I don't think advanced multilingualism is common at all. Even among foreigners I've met, it isn't usual to be well-versed in 2+ languages excluding their native, sometimes not even kids of mixed descent. The thing is: human knowledge has many facets - roughly, social, cultural, linguistic, and so on. When you are fully fluent in one language, chances are it is enough for your whole lifetime - and possibly more if possible - and very probably you wouldn't be as competent in the rest you would bother to learn. One is enough for getting by for a lifetime.
We don't usually slam others (or ourselves), since we understand it's all about culture. Many of us do confess to be very poor in English.
That said, I don't think advanced multilingualism is common at all. Even among foreigners I've met, it isn't usual to be well-versed in 2+ languages excluding their native, sometimes not even kids of mixed descent. The thing is: human knowledge has many facets - roughly, social, cultural, linguistic, and so on. When you are fully fluent in one language, chances are it is enough for your whole lifetime - and possibly more if possible - and very probably you wouldn't be as competent in the rest you would bother to learn. One is enough for getting by for a lifetime.
J. C.,
You may now enter the doors of the language club. You know some of the insider secrets, lol.
There are a lot of Chinese in Japan. I met several when I lived there. In Yokohama there is a Chinatown. I don't know what Chinese language you'll find there, though. Of course, not every speaker of a given language is a good teacher for that language...
Koreans used to study Chinese characters, but Koreans have told me recently that Koreans in their twenties no longer have that background and usually only know Hangul.
You may now enter the doors of the language club. You know some of the insider secrets, lol.
There are a lot of Chinese in Japan. I met several when I lived there. In Yokohama there is a Chinatown. I don't know what Chinese language you'll find there, though. Of course, not every speaker of a given language is a good teacher for that language...
Koreans used to study Chinese characters, but Koreans have told me recently that Koreans in their twenties no longer have that background and usually only know Hangul.