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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'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.
- bradrn 6y ago
  This is something I happen to know a bit about, since a while ago I had a long conversation about this on a conlanging forum [0]. Unfortunately, I can give you no citation for this — quite the reverse! In fact, the general consensus seems to be that languages are not at all equally complex. My understanding is that statements to that effect are usually considered to be effectively a ‘lie-to-children’: not wrong as such, but certainly over-simplified. As Mark Rosenfelder says so eloquently in the linked thread: > [Saying that this statement is wrong] … seems to me to fundamentally misunderstand why Linguistics 101 books say things like this. … It's because non-linguists are obsessed with which languages are better than others, and complexity is part of that. They want to hear that French is more logical, Italian is more beautiful, Arabic is God's language, Phrygian is the first language, etc, etc. They want to hear that the standard languages are better than dialects. They want to hear that primitive cultures speak primitive languages … linguistics professors all run into it and get tired of it and throw in some stuff to combat the myths. Also, some linguists have put forward examples of genuinely simpler languages. Most famously, David Gil has suggested that Riau Indonesian is fundamentally simpler than other languages [1], but I’m sure there’s other examples. That being said, I have a dissenting opinion: I think the vast majority of languages are indeed at about the same level of complexity (with exceptional cases like Riau Indonesian and creoles). Again, you can find some intensive discussion of my claim in the linked thread, but basically, my claim is that a lack of sophistication in one part of the grammar tends to be balanced by increased complexity in another part. e.g. Turkish has lots of suffixes making its verbs very complicated; English doesn’t have this, but compensates by using lots of auxiliary verbs with intricate rules for ordering and combining. Kalam only has about 200 verbs in total, but compensates with detailed rules for combining those verbs to give different shades of meaning. And so on and so forth. [0] https://www.verduria.org/viewtopic.php?f=3&t=631 https://www.verduria.org/viewtopic.php?f=3&t=631 [1] https://git.rahona.be/luigi/sose2020/raw/commit/89acbd0429820316cf75d28ad81c82880aaa5c03/monography/eurocent.pdf https://git.rahona.be/luigi/sose2020/raw/commit/89acbd042982...

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.

bradrn 6y ago
This is something I happen to know a bit about, since a while ago I had a long conversation about this on a conlanging forum [0]. Unfortunately, I can give you no citation for this — quite the reverse! In fact, the general consensus seems to be that languages are not at all equally complex. My understanding is that statements to that effect are usually considered to be effectively a ‘lie-to-children’: not wrong as such, but certainly over-simplified. As Mark Rosenfelder says so eloquently in the linked thread: > [Saying that this statement is wrong] … seems to me to fundamentally misunderstand why Linguistics 101 books say things like this. … It's because non-linguists are obsessed with which languages are better than others, and complexity is part of that. They want to hear that French is more logical, Italian is more beautiful, Arabic is God's language, Phrygian is the first language, etc, etc. They want to hear that the standard languages are better than dialects. They want to hear that primitive cultures speak primitive languages … linguistics professors all run into it and get tired of it and throw in some stuff to combat the myths. Also, some linguists have put forward examples of genuinely simpler languages. Most famously, David Gil has suggested that Riau Indonesian is fundamentally simpler than other languages [1], but I’m sure there’s other examples. That being said, I have a dissenting opinion: I think the vast majority of languages are indeed at about the same level of complexity (with exceptional cases like Riau Indonesian and creoles). Again, you can find some intensive discussion of my claim in the linked thread, but basically, my claim is that a lack of sophistication in one part of the grammar tends to be balanced by increased complexity in another part. e.g. Turkish has lots of suffixes making its verbs very complicated; English doesn’t have this, but compensates by using lots of auxiliary verbs with intricate rules for ordering and combining. Kalam only has about 200 verbs in total, but compensates with detailed rules for combining those verbs to give different shades of meaning. And so on and so forth. [0] https://www.verduria.org/viewtopic.php?f=3&t=631 https://www.verduria.org/viewtopic.php?f=3&t=631 [1] https://git.rahona.be/luigi/sose2020/raw/commit/89acbd0429820316cf75d28ad81c82880aaa5c03/monography/eurocent.pdf https://git.rahona.be/luigi/sose2020/raw/commit/89acbd042982...