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I'm a native English speaker. I studied a little French and speak (and can read/write) some German (with limited vocabulary). For the English speaker, German gr
by cletus 15y ago
I'm a native English speaker. I studied a little French and speak (and can read/write) some German (with limited vocabulary). For the English speaker, German grammar is painful enough (3 genders, agreement of nouns and adjectives by case, number and article, separable verbs, etc) but, based on what reading I've done, German is still "Latin lite".
A friend of mine (also native English speaker) lives in Taiwan and has learnt traditional Chinese (rather than simplified, as is now taught and used in China). The character memorization, to me at least, is horrifying. But the grammar is fairly simple (apart from tonal variation in words).
The evolution of languages (linguistics I guess) interests me greatly so first up, thanks for the post.
With all these different language systems, one has to wonder how they evolve.
Several events in history are of particular interest.
The first is what happened to English. English in the 10th century was basically the same language as German (Althochdeutsch or Old High German, to be precise). In 1066, the Normans conquered England, bringing French which became the official and court language of England for several centuries.
This had several important effects:
Firstly, many words migrated to English from French and Latin (although there were Latin words previously). Often the English form was "low brow" whereas the Latin/French version were "high brow".
Secondly, without a central authority enforcing a language standard, the language evolved hugely. Old English for Modern English speakers is basically unreadable. Middle English is mostly comprehensible. This was a massive change.
Along the way, English basically lost the concept of case (apart from pronouns), gender (again, apart from pronouns) and word agreement. Grammar was also greatly simplified (almost everything in English is done on word position rather than word ending like most Indo-European languages).
The TL:DR version of this is that there is a reasonable case to be made that a central authority actually stifles language "innovation". If true, one could argue that how arbitrary (rather than regular) a language is is a measure of the state control over that language during its history.
I don't presume to argue that this is true but it's an interesting idea.
The second interesting historical event was the switch in 1929 from the Arabic alphabet to a Latin alphabet for Turkish, which had a massive increase in literacy in the following years (since the alphabet is simple and phonetic).
The third interesting event is the rise of computers. I would argue that is was almost inevitable that this would happen in a country with either the Latin or Cyrilic alphabets. The reasons are:
1. Limited number of characters (think: keyboards and character sets); and
2. Limited variation in those characters (in English: uppercase and lowercase). Compare that to Arabic.
IMHO (1) is incredibly important. In Mandarin, if I want to tell you a new character I have to show you. There is no way to describe it. In English, a new word can be communicate verbally. I don't think you can overstate how important this distinction is.
Asian computer use has evolved a number of schemes to get around these issues, such as character combinations to represent certain characters (which, again, you have to learn) and, more recently, the use of graphics pads to draw characters.
The last thing I wanted to mention was this paper [1], which shows a mathematical relationship between languages becoming regular and the frequency with which words are used (the more a word is used, the longer it takes to become regular).
Anyway, enough rambling on my part.
[1[: http://www.physorg.com/news111241495.html http://www.physorg.com/news111241495.html
- tty 15y ago>English in the 10th century was basically the same language as German (Althochdeutsch or Old High German, to be precise). In 1066, the Normans conquered England, bringing French which became the official and court language of England for several centuries. Old English and Old High German being "basically the same language" is a very ignorant thing to say and categorically wrong. Old High German might have been much more close to Old English than modern standard German is to English but they weren't mutually intelligible and they were clearly different languages even at that time. Major differences between the two had arisen many centuries earlier. Take for example the High German consonant shift. Now, would you please explain why you would say that both were "basically the same language"?
- billswift 15y agoOld English (aka Anglo-Saxon) was a Low German dialect, closer to Dutch in many ways, and to Danish in others, than to High German. Which isn't surprising when you consider the Angles, Saxons, and Jutes came from the North Sea coast region from southern Denmark to the eastern Netherlands.
- anghyflawn 15y agoNo, it was not a Low German dialect. It was what is called an Ingvaeonic dialect, most closely related to Old Saxon and Old Frisian. Old High German is what is sometimes called Istvaeonic (and the Franconian dialects that were to become Dutch is also part of that group). There is a bunch of important differences between Ingvaeonic and Istvaeonic, and both are quite, quite different from North Germanic.
- Cushman 15y agoI don't know if it's completely true that English has less character variation than Arabic— as you say, in English there is a choice of upper or lower-case, with occasional changes in meaning. In Arabic, the form of a letter is completely determined by the letter it follows. It's purely a display difference, not a separate character set. There are the diacritics to think about, but outside of the Quran they are simply ignored. That's still a big problem for a universal language of the internet though, since written Arabic is highly non-phonetic.