5 ms·

"Angloexceptionalism" really gets on my nerves to no end, and the worst part of it is that it seems it's mainly anglophone monolinguals that are making these ou

"Angloexceptionalism" really gets on my nerves to no end, and the worst part of it is that it seems it's mainly anglophone monolinguals that are making these outrageous claims, like English being intrinsically superior to other languages or being exceptionally easy to learn. Sure, English is really damn useful, but the grand scheme of things it's no more fit to be the global lingua franca than say Mandarin or Hungarian.

bonoboTP 6y ago
As a Hungarian speaker who also knows other languages, I think there is indeed a difference. To construct even quite basic sentences in Hungarian you have to learn much more rules than to do the same for English. At a basic level English feels like just putting words next to one another. I mean basics like "I go in the house. You eat dinner." To say these in Hungarian as a beginner you'd have to either rote learn stuff or prepare to work through lots of rules and tables. In my experience English tends to be more "forgiving" and robust to non native mistakes for basic communication and the time to one's first fully correct sentence (self made) is shorter.
- WesolyKubeczek 6y ago
  As a learner of Hungarian: the Hungarian syntax feels like you take a sentence in English and then read it word by word backwards.
- ekianjo 6y ago
  Old english was a more complex language but evolved to more simple grammar over time. Languages are not static.
  - euroderf 6y ago
    If they had had the misfortune to invent movable type we might be stuck with it even today.
- soldehierro 6y ago
  I'll admit my ignorance of the grammatical complexities of Hungarian beyond the fact that it's highly declined and has a really interesting case system, though I will remark that the modern lingustics community generally ascribes to the theory that all languages are equal in complexity. (This isn't necessarily an established, of course, as complexity is something that will likely never be fully quantified). Ultimately though, learning languages is kind of a paradox in the sense it's both fairly easy and extremely difficult at the same time.
  - bonoboTP 6y ago
    > the modern lingustics community generally ascribes to the theory that all languages are equal in complexity That doesn't mean the complexity has to be evenly distributed along the learner's path. Also, I'm not saying one is better than the other. But it's certainly something people experience. When I learned German, it took longer to craft correct sentences because there are more rules to pay attention to. You have to get the cases and its interactions with the genders right in every sentence for example. Same with conjugations. There is no "simple subset" of the language where you can avoid this. While there is a simple English that you can resort to and use almost perfectly with little study. To build even a simple Hungarian sentence you need to understand vowel harmony, definite and indefinite conjugation, nuanced word order rules etc. Also regarding this: > the modern lingustics community generally ascribes to the theory that all languages are equal in complexity It's very hard to quantify as you say and I don't think they'd be able to say otherwise even if it was otherwise due to fear of misinterpretation (i.e. they'd be accused of racism).
  - wwwwewwww 6y ago
    "that the modern lingustics community generally ascribes to the theory that all languages are equal in complexity." I would love to see a citation for this. It is easy to prove that an artificial language such as Esperanto has lower learning complexity than other languages. All you have to do is count the concepts a student has to learn. With the thousands of languages out there, I would be surprised that all of them have equal concept count - I would think it would follow a normal distribution of some sort and that there are outliers at both ends.
nullsense 6y ago
It's not easier to learn because of grammar or vocab, but simply due to network effects. If you want to learn it, whoever you are, and wherever you live and whatever your mother tongue is there is the highest possible chance on average that you can access people who speak English, find high quality reference materials, and find native media that interests you. If you run those considerations through all possible language pairs it's easy to see that these are the main factors that influence difficulty. Grammar, vocab, and pronunciation are a distant second.
- soldehierro 6y ago
  That was the point I was trying to get at, that liguistically there's nothing "special" about English, as many people, as you can see in this thread, would claim. That's not to say there isn't a huge disparity between English and pretty much ever other language on the face of this earth, but we can ascribe it all to factors of history rather than any lingusitic factor. Once you establish a lingua franca, it tends to self-reinforce its position.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
raverbashing 6y ago
> it's no more fit to be the global lingua franca than say Mandarin or Hungarian. Sounds like an outrageous claim done by a monolingual ;) These are the languages with the biggest barriers (tonal + alphabet in the case of Mandarin and weird case system in the case of Hungarian). So no, those are the worse examples you could have picked. French could work, or maybe Japanese with a romanicized alphabet could work. Heck, pick Latin, simplify the declensions, simplify the spelling towards ecclesiastical pronounciation and you might end up with something close to Italian.
- soldehierro 6y ago
  Grammatical complexity, in my opinion is overhyped as a barrier to language learning. In my own experience, after enough time and pratice you eventually internalize grammar structures without a problem. The real issue is learning enough vocabularly to express yourself not simply fluently, but eloquently, and to be able to make it through any text you find. Also, a few problems in your argument against Mandarin: tone really isn't a barrier. The writing system, which is not an alphabet, would actually present difficulties, but I wouldn't consider it an intrinsic part of the language - it could be changed. Writing English isn't much better, but similar complaints could be made for French. (It should be noted that Manadarin morphology, on the otherhand, seems to discourage borrowing words, and most things are imported as calques. This could be viewed as a either good thing or a bad thing.) Languages, in general, are around the same level of complexity. We can make comparisons and say that English inflection is massively simpler than Hungarian's , but we shouldn't concluded based on that assessment that English is simpler than Hungarian, but that this complexity is simply distributed differently. English has a lot of relative benefits: it's closely related to a lot of widely spoken languages. And a lot of people speak it. It's not even close, even as a speaker of Spanish, which has more native speakers than English, it feels like a Sisphysian effort to find content that's just as high quality as I have been accostumed to in English, and inn any type of quantity. But none of these advantages are intrinsic to English. My central thesis, after all, isn't that Mandarin or Hungarian, or even as easy to learn for most of the (IE speaking) world. It's that the supposed advantages of English aren't its grammar, and that English isn't a superior language by any means. History, not lingusitics, has allowed English to enjoy as much widespread diffusion and prestige as it does today.
globular-toast 6y ago
I disagree. I think English does have some inherent advantages. I can't say it's the "best", but it's certainly better than some alternatives. There are some specific things that make it "easier" to learn: Latin alphabet with no accents, no genders, small conjugation tables, few tenses, very "relaxed" grammar. In this way English is a subset of rules already understood by other speakers. What also needs to be mentioned, though, is its expressiveness. There are many objectively "easier" languages than English. For example: Afrikaans has a very simple grammar, being essentially a "stripped" Dutch; Spanish has a much smaller vocabulary. But all humans talk about the same things one way or another. A language being "simpler" means there must be other ways to communicate those more complex things. It's often done using very specific and nuanced rules based on context and culture. English, on the other hand, can be mostly learnt in a book. There's not much culture to learn as English culture has already been exported widely around the world. You're much less likely to end up in a situation where you have no idea at all how to express yourself using the rules you've learnt.
- ekianjo 6y ago
  There are definitely accents in English. They are just not written down which makes written English very confusing as nothing written has proper prononciation rules.

bonoboTP 6y ago

As a Hungarian speaker who also knows other languages, I think there is indeed a difference. To construct even quite basic sentences in Hungarian you have to learn much more rules than to do the same for English. At a basic level English feels like just putting words next to one another. I mean basics like "I go in the house. You eat dinner." To say these in Hungarian as a beginner you'd have to either rote learn stuff or prepare to work through lots of rules and tables. In my experience English tends to be more "forgiving" and robust to non native mistakes for basic communication and the time to one's first fully correct sentence (self made) is shorter.

WesolyKubeczek 6y ago
As a learner of Hungarian: the Hungarian syntax feels like you take a sentence in English and then read it word by word backwards.
ekianjo 6y ago
Old english was a more complex language but evolved to more simple grammar over time. Languages are not static.
- euroderf 6y ago
  If they had had the misfortune to invent movable type we might be stuck with it even today.
soldehierro 6y ago
I'll admit my ignorance of the grammatical complexities of Hungarian beyond the fact that it's highly declined and has a really interesting case system, though I will remark that the modern lingustics community generally ascribes to the theory that all languages are equal in complexity. (This isn't necessarily an established, of course, as complexity is something that will likely never be fully quantified). Ultimately though, learning languages is kind of a paradox in the sense it's both fairly easy and extremely difficult at the same time.
- bonoboTP 6y ago
  > the modern lingustics community generally ascribes to the theory that all languages are equal in complexity That doesn't mean the complexity has to be evenly distributed along the learner's path. Also, I'm not saying one is better than the other. But it's certainly something people experience. When I learned German, it took longer to craft correct sentences because there are more rules to pay attention to. You have to get the cases and its interactions with the genders right in every sentence for example. Same with conjugations. There is no "simple subset" of the language where you can avoid this. While there is a simple English that you can resort to and use almost perfectly with little study. To build even a simple Hungarian sentence you need to understand vowel harmony, definite and indefinite conjugation, nuanced word order rules etc. Also regarding this: > the modern lingustics community generally ascribes to the theory that all languages are equal in complexity It's very hard to quantify as you say and I don't think they'd be able to say otherwise even if it was otherwise due to fear of misinterpretation (i.e. they'd be accused of racism).
- wwwwewwww 6y ago
  "that the modern lingustics community generally ascribes to the theory that all languages are equal in complexity." I would love to see a citation for this. It is easy to prove that an artificial language such as Esperanto has lower learning complexity than other languages. All you have to do is count the concepts a student has to learn. With the thousands of languages out there, I would be surprised that all of them have equal concept count - I would think it would follow a normal distribution of some sort and that there are outliers at both ends.

nullsense 6y ago

It's not easier to learn because of grammar or vocab, but simply due to network effects. If you want to learn it, whoever you are, and wherever you live and whatever your mother tongue is there is the highest possible chance on average that you can access people who speak English, find high quality reference materials, and find native media that interests you. If you run those considerations through all possible language pairs it's easy to see that these are the main factors that influence difficulty. Grammar, vocab, and pronunciation are a distant second.

soldehierro 6y ago
That was the point I was trying to get at, that liguistically there's nothing "special" about English, as many people, as you can see in this thread, would claim. That's not to say there isn't a huge disparity between English and pretty much ever other language on the face of this earth, but we can ascribe it all to factors of history rather than any lingusitic factor. Once you establish a lingua franca, it tends to self-reinforce its position.

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

raverbashing 6y ago

> it's no more fit to be the global lingua franca than say Mandarin or Hungarian. Sounds like an outrageous claim done by a monolingual ;) These are the languages with the biggest barriers (tonal + alphabet in the case of Mandarin and weird case system in the case of Hungarian). So no, those are the worse examples you could have picked. French could work, or maybe Japanese with a romanicized alphabet could work. Heck, pick Latin, simplify the declensions, simplify the spelling towards ecclesiastical pronounciation and you might end up with something close to Italian.

soldehierro 6y ago
Grammatical complexity, in my opinion is overhyped as a barrier to language learning. In my own experience, after enough time and pratice you eventually internalize grammar structures without a problem. The real issue is learning enough vocabularly to express yourself not simply fluently, but eloquently, and to be able to make it through any text you find. Also, a few problems in your argument against Mandarin: tone really isn't a barrier. The writing system, which is not an alphabet, would actually present difficulties, but I wouldn't consider it an intrinsic part of the language - it could be changed. Writing English isn't much better, but similar complaints could be made for French. (It should be noted that Manadarin morphology, on the otherhand, seems to discourage borrowing words, and most things are imported as calques. This could be viewed as a either good thing or a bad thing.) Languages, in general, are around the same level of complexity. We can make comparisons and say that English inflection is massively simpler than Hungarian's , but we shouldn't concluded based on that assessment that English is simpler than Hungarian, but that this complexity is simply distributed differently. English has a lot of relative benefits: it's closely related to a lot of widely spoken languages. And a lot of people speak it. It's not even close, even as a speaker of Spanish, which has more native speakers than English, it feels like a Sisphysian effort to find content that's just as high quality as I have been accostumed to in English, and inn any type of quantity. But none of these advantages are intrinsic to English. My central thesis, after all, isn't that Mandarin or Hungarian, or even as easy to learn for most of the (IE speaking) world. It's that the supposed advantages of English aren't its grammar, and that English isn't a superior language by any means. History, not lingusitics, has allowed English to enjoy as much widespread diffusion and prestige as it does today.

globular-toast 6y ago

I disagree. I think English does have some inherent advantages. I can't say it's the "best", but it's certainly better than some alternatives. There are some specific things that make it "easier" to learn: Latin alphabet with no accents, no genders, small conjugation tables, few tenses, very "relaxed" grammar. In this way English is a subset of rules already understood by other speakers. What also needs to be mentioned, though, is its expressiveness. There are many objectively "easier" languages than English. For example: Afrikaans has a very simple grammar, being essentially a "stripped" Dutch; Spanish has a much smaller vocabulary. But all humans talk about the same things one way or another. A language being "simpler" means there must be other ways to communicate those more complex things. It's often done using very specific and nuanced rules based on context and culture. English, on the other hand, can be mostly learnt in a book. There's not much culture to learn as English culture has already been exported widely around the world. You're much less likely to end up in a situation where you have no idea at all how to express yourself using the rules you've learnt.

ekianjo 6y ago
There are definitely accents in English. They are just not written down which makes written English very confusing as nothing written has proper prononciation rules.