Hi all,

Quite regularly, one can find things as this:

"the most ancient languages for which we have written
texts - Sanskrit for example - are often far more intricate and complicated in their grammatical forms than many other contemporary languages."
(Suzette Elgin)

Or: "some languages are more complex than others".
(from +/- 1 mail in 10 on various e-forums about language)

I’ve got a lot of problems with this kind of things, but i also have problems phrasing those problems. So please allow me to think aloud for a bit and ask you all for some advice.

When reading this kind of stuff, it strikes me that people think that it’s posible to compare the ‘complexity’ of languages. After all those years, i still wonder how…
Quite often, though, with complexity one means morphological forms (which, okay, does have implications on the syntaxis etc.), but language is more than morphology alone, isn’t it?

Something else that i’m wondering about. I have the impression that this kind of statements are made solely from the point of view of second language learning.
Though i realise that it is difficult/impossible to compare languages and proficiency levels, i’m wondering if language X is more difficult to learn/acquire by children who grow up in an environment where language X is spoken, than language Y for kids growing up in a society where that language Y is spoken.
Is let’s say German, with its inflections (cases, conjugations) more difficult to acquire by its native speakers than let’s say English?
Or what about bilingual kids?

My point: IF it could be tested that language X is more difficult to learn by native speakers than language Y, then i’d think language X is more complex than language Y.
My "IF" is crucial here, because i don’t see any sound way or methodology for doing tests like that.

I am just thinking aloud, probably i’m overlooking a few things, and maybe this sounds like complete nonsense.
But anyway,does anybody have an opinion on these questions/issues?

Thanks in advance.

Frank

Frank,

I pretty much agree with the quote from Suzette Elgin. The most complicated languages are usually the oldest languages.  This would indicate that languages like Finnish, Hungarian, Eskimo (Innuit), Georgian and Basque are very old. This is not to say that they haven’t changed over the millenia. No language remains 100% static. However, these languages have resisted the kind of grammatical simplification that we see in Modern Norwegian, English, Persian and Chinese, or in the numerous Creole languages of the Caribbean and South Pacific islands.

It appears that when a language does simplify, it is because of contact with another language. For example, Manx is simpler than Irish and Scotch Gaelic because its speakers were in closer contact with speakers of Welsh, English and Norse than the more clanish and isolated
Scots and Irish. Polabian, an extinct  Slavic language, was simpler than Polish and Russian because it’s speakers were surrounded in their north German enclave by Dutch, German Danish and Swedish speakers.  :)

Hi Brian,

Thanks for the reply!

But i guess a fool asks more questions than a wise (wo)man can answer .

<<< I pretty much agree with the quote from Suzette Elgin. The most complicated languages are usually the oldest languages.<<<

What do you mean by complexity? Morphology? What about the other (interacting) stuff as syntaxis, phonology etc. And how do you measure it (all)?

And for example what’s the difference in complexity between
Farsi dar-am (have-I) and
English I have?

And i know it is an impossible (maybe even insane) question, but would Old English (more complex according to you) have been more difficult to learn for OE kids than Modern English for ME kids? Or is my problem that i equate complexity with difficulty?

And then what about:
"Apart from a few special cases such as creoles, all languages are equally ‘‘old’‘, and no language is ‘‘older’’ than any other. Languages do not have beginnings, and therefore they do not have ages."
(Larry Trask)
[Oops, i forgot the link. Since i discovered how to insert a link in a more elegant way, i grew fond of this function. Anyway, here’s the link to the page where i found the quote by Trask and where you van read the arguments for his statement.]

I find this a very interesting thought and it’s kept me busy for quite some time…

"On the other hand, Hindi, a major language of India, many centuries ago got rid of a large portion of its earlier grammatical endings and then invented a bunch of new ones"
(Idem)

The second quote—though i really don’t know a thing about Hindi and the history of Hindi, so i take the statement for granted—seems to suggest that languages can get and or loose ‘complexity’ over the ages.
Equally impossible(?) is the question whether languages oscillate between (morphologically) ‘complex’ and ‘not complex’? Which kind would of put complexity/age on a slope.

I have the feeling that i’m missing something, that i’m overlooking something plain and simple, but i have no idea what.
So, for the time being it’s questions, questions, questions…

Frank

Frank,

Briefly, more " complex languges" usually have a lot of flexional luggage which less complex languages have discarded  like ablative and accusitive cases , dative and genitive cases, locutive, instrumental, vocative and even  causitive and  ergative cases (i.e. Eskimo) etc.  They have lots of tenses like the imperfective of Latin or the aorist of Ancient Greek.

This is something that Anders and Flaminius can probably through some more light on, and who knows, perhaps some other Agora readers.

Take Care,

—- Brian  ::) Tired and falling asleep.

On the other hand, Hindi, a major language of India, many centuries ago got rid of a large portion of its earlier grammatical endings and then invented a bunch of new ones

Hindi is one of my neglected languages, but this sounds interesting. Of course languages don’t invent themselves, so  were the inventors native speakers of Hindi, and how many centuries were involved in creating these new features?
I always assumed that there were two forces involved in language change, the slow process of sound-change which introduces irregularities (making the language easier to speak, and influencing the most common words mostly) and the more rapid process of grammatical change (making the language easier to learn, through language contact, creolization etc.)
There are differences in grammatical complexity between languages, which often have little relation to how easy they are to learn, by a non-native speaker. Native speakers don’t study grammar, they just repeat what they hear, and learn the irregularities first. I also think that languages have ‘age’, just a matter of how fast they have changed historically. English is a relatively new language, because we have written material that is unintelligible to the average reader.  Spanish could be considered older, because it has changed less during the historical period.

Hi Brian,

1. Thanks
2. Sleep well
3. See you later

4.
<<<Briefly, more " complex languages" usually have a lot of flexional luggage which less complex languages have discarded  like ablative and accusitive cases , dative and genitive cases, locutive, instrumental, vocative and even  causitive and  ergative cases (i.e. Eskimo) etc.<<<

And this is exactly where my doubt and questions start. I like to look upon the ‘flexional luggage’ as sometimes redundant but most of the time pretty handy stuff when listening and trying to understand. I mean, i’m, erm, looking at it from a more perceptive point of view.

For me, Chinese is ‘complex’ because the learner (speaker too?) has to interfere more than once in a while what exactly is meant, singular or plural, non-perfective and perfective (i hope these are the right terms in English), etc. or have to look for other clues (context, measure words, particles, etc.).
A few examples, all of them very simply put:
- Dutch wij hebben gives two clues, while Afrikaans ons het gives only one clue about the plural.
- English I and me is much more clear than Farsi, which uses man in both cases.
- I find it more easy to express politeness in French or Korean than in English, on the other hand, politeness is expressed in English, but in a completely different (and what i’m concerned, a complex) way.

Although in the three cases above, it’s indeed easier to learn a grammar book on Afrikaans and English.

<<<They have lots of tenses like the imperfective of Latin or the aorist of Ancient Greek.<<<  

K, but other languages can express the same stuff in other ways, without having grammaticalized these things.

Groetjes,

Frank

Brian:
<<< I pretty much agree with the quote from Suzette Elgin. The most complicated languages are usually the oldest languages.  This would indicate that languages like Finnish, Hungarian, Eskimo (Innuit), Georgian and Basque are very old.<<<

I’m sorry, but i don’t see a relation between complexity and age.
In Hungarian the current ‘complex’ forms, e.g. the locative case suffixes, are probably attached postpositions.
Also -ly in English and lijk in Dutch came from the attached noun "lic".

Frank

Groetjes, konchiwa, guten Tag and shalom `aleikhem.  Welcome to the world of theoretical linguistics.

Every human language is based on universal grammar.  If some languages are more complex than others, this would mean, in terms of theoretical linguistics, that the former uses more features of linguistic universals than the latter, languages.  This seems impossible to me.  The final answer, however, remains  ungiven until the whole extent of human language universals are revealed.

I would concede to admit that one language may be heavy on UG component A and light on component B whereas another language requires huge dosage of B.  Russian children are reported in one article I read to be slower than English children to attain morphological perfection in their respective mother tongue.  If contextual nuances are to be considered, I conjecture that Japanese kids are the slowest to master every signification of words and constructions that are current in the adult speech.

Even in these specific areas of comparison exact conclusions are difficult to reach since we are yet to know what significance the compared features bear in the entirety of the compared languages.

BTW [edit: to Brian], as I said exactly a year ago (give or take up to two months) in the present Agora, English has a more complex tense-aspect organisation than Greek, Sanskrit or Latin.

Flam

Hi Melissa, all,

<<<Hindi is one of my neglected languages, but this sounds interesting. Of course languages don’t invent themselves, so  were the inventors native speakers of Hindi, and how many centuries were involved in creating these new features?<<<

Alas, i don’t have a clue. I normally don’t like to post things i don’t know a thing about or which i cannot double check, but here i plead guilty.

<<<I always assumed that there were two forces involved in language change, the slow process of sound-change which introduces irregularities (making the language easier to speak, and influencing the most common words mostly)<<<

A lot of sound changes (or do i need to say changes of sounds) have the result that paradigms are levelled, it is made more "logic". Other sound changes, e.g. Umlaut stuff in (some) Germanic language created "irregularities", quite a lot of which were leveled out later.

<<<and the more rapid process of grammatical change (making the language easier to learn, through language contact, creolization etc.)<<<

Technically, creolization is the next step after pidginisation. And creoles are "more complex" than pidgins.
But then again, we’re looking at it from a SL learner’s point of view…

<<<There are differences in grammatical complexity between languages, which often have little relation to how easy they are to learn, by a non-native speaker. Native speakers don’t study grammar, they just repeat what they hear, and learn the irregularities first.<<<

I can follow this until the last part. If i would have been repeating what i heard, i’d be speaking like "Franske koekse eten?", "Goelie goelie goelie". When sober, i don’t. I mean, if you look/hear at it, kids get the most inane (direct) input, the most silly parents’ talk", but, nevertheless, most of them kids end up speaking the language pretty well. If you’d say to one of my adult students  "jij tv kijken", then the whole class takes over this phrase and word order. I think language acquisition is more complex than merely repeating phrases.
Neither have i heard before that the irregularities are learned first. E.g. at least in Flanders kids make the common mistake "ik heb geloopt", "ik heb tv gekijkt" because this formation of the participle follows the regular pattern (it’s ik heb gelopen and ik heb tv gekeken).

<<<I also think that languages have ‘age’, just a matter of how fast they have changed historically. English is a relatively new language, because we have written material that is unintelligible to the average reader. Spanish could be considered older, because it has changed less during the historical period.<<<

I don’t think i can follow… Could you please explain what you mean here in relation to ‘age’?

Groetjes,

Frank

Flam:

Every human language is based on universal grammar.

...Shouldn’t you rather say that universal grammar can be applied to every human language?

-Tim

Yes, if you are talking in a heuristic or emperical term.  But from a theoretical or explanatory perspective, language universal hypothesis is the foundation for all the other hypotheses that attempt to account for the way human languages are acquired as they are today.

Flam

This is where the realist in me starts becoming jaded…  ;)

-Tim

Hi!

A lot of sound changes (or do i need to say changes of sounds) have the result that paradigms are levelled

You have to give me an example, I’m a little confused.  If you include grammatical change it makes sense, but in the case of a pure sound change, which usually depends on the surrounding sounds, I can’t think of any instances that don’t produce either grammatical irregularities or homonyms.

Technically, creolization is the next step after pidginisation. And creoles are "more complex" than pidgins.

True, but all the creoles I’ve looked at are also less irregular grammatically than non-creoles. I tend to use "complex" in relation to grammar, not in the sense that others have used it here. Creoles have achieved full complexity in that sense.

"Franske koekse eten?"

You got me there, I shouldn’t have said that native speakers just mimic, or that they have an easy time with irregularities. Everyone has an innate understanding of grammar, and follows it until they’re told not to. I guess what I meant was that there’s not a wide rage of difficulty  in learning your native language, compared to second-language learning.

Could you please explain what you mean here in relation to ‘age’?

Well, I don’t mean chronological age, because that would mean that languages that tend to resist change would be older. So maybe ‘age’ is the wrong word. When a language undergoes rapid change,  it separates itself from its past, and if not becoming a ‘new’ language, at least  is similar to new languages in some ways (by simplifying its grammar usually).

Hope that explained some of what I was trying to say ...

thanks,

melissa

Melissa
<<<You have to give me an example, I’m a little confused.  If you include grammatical change it makes sense, but in the case of a pure sound change, which usually depends on the surrounding sounds, I can’t think of any instances that don’t produce either grammatical irregularities or homonyms.<<<

You’re absolutely right, my way of phrasing things was pretty unhandy and rather unclear. I think we’re indeed both talking about the same. I was looking for a way in English to say that sometimes the results of  sound changes proper (e.g. Umlaut, hence depending upon surrounding sounds) are changed again (and here my unhandy change of sound pops up) to wipe out the irregularities in the paradigm. Damn, in Dutch it works .

<<<I guess what I meant was that there’s not a wide rage of difficulty  in learning your native language, compared to second-language learning.<<<

If i’m not wrong, the RosettaStone (R) series used to explicitily make a link between their method for F/SL learning and the way kids learn their native language. They still hinge at it (here), but seemingly less explicitely these days. I never tried (and never will), but was I curious about their Dutch course .

<<<When a language undergoes rapid change,  it separates itself from its past, and if not becoming a ‘new’ language, at least  is similar to new languages in some ways (by simplifying its grammar usually).
Hope that explained some of what I was trying to say ... <<<

K, i think i understand what you are saying.
Frank

[quote author=melissa link=board=translate;num=1120282440;start=0#12 date=07/03/05 at 03:50:03]Well, I don’t mean chronological age, because that would mean that languages that tend to resist change would be older. So maybe ‘age’ is the wrong word. When a language undergoes rapid change,  it separates itself from its past, and if not becoming a ‘new’ language, at least  is similar to new languages in some ways (by simplifying its grammar usually).

I sure agree that ‘age’ is a wrong word. I don’t want to try to find criteria for measuring it.

Another thing that I find impossible to measure is the ‘complexity’ of a language. The morphologies of Chinese and Afrikaans are refreshingly simple compared to 720 Sanskrit verb forms for one root. Syntax is a very neglected study field, but I think it is rather safe to say that much of what you gain when pruning out forms is lost in syntax. More grammatical forms gives much freedom in word order and the other way round.

"On the other hand, Hindi, a major language of India, many centuries ago got rid of a large portion of its earlier grammatical endings and then invented a bunch of new ones"

It is correct that Hindi is ‘a major language’, not just from an Indian perspective. It is spoken by more than 300 million people in India. Only Chinese and English exceed that number.

There was no Hindi before, say, 1200 C.E. So the rest of the quote, as it stands, is meaningless.

We can trace the origins of Hindi to ca. 1500 B.C.E. That language group, the Vedic Prakrits, had grammars and sound systems slightly simpler than Sanskrit. Simplification went on. Modern Indian IE languages are decendants of the Apabhramsha dialects of ca. 800 C.E. I have found nothing written on how and under what influences Hindi emerged.

To me, a ‘buch of’ suggests quite a few endings. Modern Hindi has two cases for nouns, and verb forms are very few and mostly regular. But the syntax is intricate, especially regarding verbs. Tense isn’t terribly important; the accent is on aspect (and/or Aktionsart) to pinpoint if the action is once only, recurring, continuing, sudden, deliberate… A sentence like ‘She used to work all day long’ or ‘We normally talk in Hindi’ ends with three verbs in Hindi: two uninflected participles and one form inflected for tense and gender.

Add ergativity in past tenses, and you’re welcome to suggest a complexity coefficient.

Okay, if we have a part of our brain already wired to accept any language spoken on earth, (because it’s a huge advantage to be competent in one’s native language, evolutionarily speaking) then what do we do with for instance: a language with simple grammar but complex phonetic exercise, or a language with a Chinese-like writing system? do they spill over into areas of our brains that would otherwise be used to process language, or to process other abilities? I’m thinking about how western painters (Kline for instance) have borrowed from oriental calligraphy without being trained in it. The question I’m asking is whether ‘language’ ability is confined or is redistributed to wherever it is needed most.