The authors of "Loom of Language" claim that most Aryan (i.e. Indoeuropean) languages are full of consonant clusters. English is no exception. However, Italian, they say has evolved phonetically more in the direction of Japanese and Hawaiian becoming full of vowel sounds. This makes it the most different language in the Indoeuropean family they say. Makes sense to a certain degree if we look at the following examples:

  1) Angela prese tre mele dalla fruttiera
      Angela picked up three apples from the (fruit) bowl

  2) Le spose romane si adomavano di spighe, non
      di fiori.
      Roman brides carried wheat sheaves, not flowers.

  3) I newyorkesi li piacciono le parate.  
      New Yorkers like parades.

  In all three sentences we see that consonant sounds and  consonant clusters dominate in English and vowel sounds dominate in Italian. German and Russian even surpass English in consonant sounds and clusters.

   There is another way to look at this question however, and that is by a language’s structure. If you consider that languages like Latvian, Lithuanian and Russian come the closest structurally to what the original Indoeuropean language 4,000 years ago was like then the most divergent indoeuropean languages are probably the Celtic tongues (Scots, Irish & Welsh) , Armenian and English. For example, none of the other Indoeuropean languages have ellipsis and epenthesis like the Celtic languages as seen in the following Irish example:

     
 Dá =Two (de) , Féar (fur)= Man,  Maith  (mai) = Good
 but…    
 Dhá Fhér Mhaitha = Two Good Men (Ghe ur wai-uh)      

     bád  (bodd) = boat  but
     Leis an mbád  = with the boat  (leshn’modd)

   These are weird features unique to Celtic.

      Finally, none of the of the other Indoeuropean languages turn nouns into verbs nearly to the extent that English does as in "I’m all COFFEED OUT now" or "Death toll in tsunami SKYROCKETS to 114,000."

     What is your opinion? Do you think that phonetics is a better way to measure a language’s diversity in a language family, or structure? Do you think that both are irrelevant or insignificant?  :)    

I wouldn’t take phonetics for a representative value of a language. [I]La langue -et pas la parole- doit toujours être le but de nos études…[/I]  Thus, I wouldn’t select such feature to build a system for studying differences and similarities.

What matters most in a language is the way of conveying the meaning through that language’s signs. That an adjective is put before a noun rather than after it seems much more relevant than having words with more vocalisation.

Of course, if one pleases, one may establish any measurable aspect of a language as reference and work on it to say which languages adhere to one or other type.

This is like the study of human beings. A century ago, the colour of skin was thought determinant and liable for many other characteristics of a person. Now, the melanine has been given a righter place in the knowledge of our species. Linguists, too, were obsessed with the outer appearence. Isidore of Seville tried to make an etymology that linked the meaning of words to their originary form…

Therefore, I think this is just a mere curiosity. Some kind of flahsback or maybe a wink to the old days.

Otherwise, I know very few IE tongues, but indeed Romanic languages don’t possess great number of clusters and that’s quite a big family within IE.

Regards,

        WS.

I totally agree with Wondering Spaniard, Romance languages don’t have many consonant clusters, that’s why Germanic languages (English inclusive) may sound a little hard on our ears (maybe also because of the inherent aspirations found in German and English k, p an t) while Romance languages (and to me also Slavic languages) sound more mellifluous.

Something I have noticed is the following (in descending order):

1.Italian - almost no word ends in a consonant, except a few prepositions, such as con, per, and in, which, being unstressed, lean on the following word (and that makes me thing there’s only one word instead of two, and that does not end in a consonant):  Vado in chiesa (I go to church) becomes Vado inchiesa (both words end in vowels).

2.Portuguese - the only consonants that can end a word are l, r, s, z, m, and x: azul (blue), calor (heat), almas (souls), também (too) and tórax (thorax).

3.Spanish - all the consonants above may end syllables (Portuguese m’s are normally n’s at the end of words) as well as d: ciudad (city).  There are a few others (c, j) but they are rare.

4.French - there’s a greater variety here.

Brazilian dude

I’ll start with an ad hominem argument, which I think fulfills all the requirements for this label.

If you read something in The Loom of Languages, it is either totally wrong or just stupid.

Or how could you judge a book otherwise, in which languages of India, modern Eastern IE languages, Balto-Slavonic languages, Celtic languages, Semitic languages and Chinese are treated in a chapter named "Diseases of language and writing"?

On to the topic, for a discussion on a quantification of (dis)similarities to be meaningful, the criteria must be agreed on in advance. Otherwise, it is all too easy to pick a feature of a language and name it "very different from others."

Regarding phonological differences, I might propose that Swedish is outstandingly different from other IE languages. In the first place, we’ve got 18 different vowel phonemes (not counting allophones, which would have given at least 23 vowels). We’ve even had to invent the letters å, ä and ö. I know of no other language anywhere which uses all three of those. German has ä and ö, but no å, Wallon has å but AFAIK neither ö nor ä.

Out of those, our long prononciation of the letter "u" is so unique that there is no really suitable IPA sign.

And then there is our very own set of sh- sounds. Really one sound, but, according to a source I read somewhere, with 17 spellings. Who will beat that? They range from simple ones, like sj, sk, ti, to the rather strange -xky-. For sh sounds, I would also like to mention the sound represented by the IPA sign hooktop heng, http://www.yourdictionary.com/cgi-bin/agora/agora.cgi?board=spell;action=display;num=1088780025;start=14#14.

You may recall my having written similar things before, but I persist: to me, words are less interesting than structure.

I’m not in a position to compare all IE languages, but I think that Albanian has at least a good a claim for the "Most Unique" title as Armenian has. Armenian has borrowed (?) so much from its neighbours that it used to be grouped with Iranian languages. Albanian has no connections with other modern IE languages.

Speaking of uniqueness, how many IE languages, present or past, exhibit four (4) grammatical genders?

Hey, it’s Swedish! We score one, here as well.

It can be argued that Lithuanian has preserved much in the declensions of nouns that can be traced very far back. They inflect nouns in, sometimes, seven cases, and the declension of nouns and adjectives beats even Latvian. Another item which counts for the originality of Lithuanian is that they use lots of diminutives, for example more than 40 different diminutive forms of motina ‘mother’.

Latvian has some curious traits, but I can’t quantify them or even relate them to other languages. How do you award points to the fact that prepositions may govern several cases in the singular, but only dative in the plural?

The best conclusion I can arrive at is that it is meaningless, and/or impossible, to say that a language is more or less unique than others, and that any reference to the "Loom of Language" immediately disqualifies subsequent statements.

Amen, anders!

I am sick to death of the discussion of "hard" or "easy" languages to learn!

Hard for you? Or, hard for who?

Really, get a grip, people!

Sitran

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Go away with your garbage.

And go back to our vagaries Luke ?

I guess, doug. Vikki must be away today: I reported this one. Not worth the effort.