7 ms·

A funny myth about Basque: “ An old myth says that since there weren't any Basques going to hell, the devil decided to learn Basque, so he could talk to them,

• mc32 4y ago
  One lingering question I have regarding linguistics is how did languages build complex grammars to then see their grammars simplify over time? Do we in modern times see languages with simple grammars develop complex grammars over time?
  • asherah 4y ago
    essentially no grammar change is a "simplification". every language has the same complexity in it's grammar, it mostly depends where that complexity lies you might just be confusing complexity with big words or large tables of grammatical affixes. over time, languages tend to either get more synthetic (closer to a 1=1 correspondence between words and morphemes) or agglutinative (many more morphemes per word), and it wraps around at the end - premium synthetic languages then start tacking words together, some start making other constructions, and suddenly you're on the agglutinative side!
    • mc32 4y ago
      Maybe... but some language requires more context for one to understand the utterance or sentence in order to give the statement the proper understanding. Why do some languages have a decrease in inflective grammatical cases (where English has now 3, whereas Hungarian retains 15 or more? And some languages are in the process of losing use of some cases; however, I'm unaware of languages gaining case complexity. Pidgins are simplified languages that allow communication between unintelligible languages. I would suggest they use simplified grammars.
      • giraffe_lady 4y ago
        Pidgins are almost a completely different thing. Since by their nature, every speaker of a pidgin is a fluent native speaker of at least one other language, the pidgin doesn't have to meet all of the communication needs of all of its speakers. Once they cross over into creoles eg have native speakers, they fall into the same structures as all other languages.
      • asherah 4y ago
        context is a part of language! pragmatics is essentially context as it relates to language, and pragmatics is a part of linguistics. languages gaining case complexity largely happens by affixation of prepositions - i can't think of any examples off the top of my head but you'll have to take my word on it occurring.
  • haroldp 4y ago
    One common pattern for this is the reason English has a comparatively simple grammar. English was learned in adulthood by a series of invaders (Vikings, Normans). Adults aren't very good at learning new languages so they tend to discard the harder parts. Indonesian (Bahasa) is easy to learn for similar reasons, while some of the indigenous tribal languages of Indonesia are among the most complex in the world.
  • jcranmer 4y ago
    There's a theory in linguistics that languages tend to complexify if they're used by a small, insular group, but tend to simplify if they're used as a trade languages. Evidence for this theory can be found in languages like English and Swahili, which are grammatically simpler than their Germanic and Bantu cousin languages. You can also see in Caucasian languages that the languages spoken by higher altitude speakers (who were more protected from the various waves of conquest in the area) being more complex than the lower altitude speakers.
    • ddalex 4y ago
      the relative simplicity of English is pretty much modern, if you go back to the way it was spoken ~200 years ago, I think you'll find it a lot more complicated in terms of expressions and artistic complications, pretty close to French actually
      • stevemethiew 4y ago
        [dead]
    • mc32 4y ago
      Maybe... Spanish and Portuguese ware used in trade a lot and they don't seem to have simplified much. On the other hand, like English Danish has simplified even further, but it was never a great trade language --it may have been a language of trade in the Baltic basin many centuries ago but not in the last half dozen centuries.
      • thaumasiotes 4y ago
        > Spanish and Portuguese ware used in trade a lot and they don't seem to have simplified much. Latin is another standard example of a language losing complexity due to being learned by large numbers of adults. Greek still has a system of noun cases. Spanish and Portuguese don't.
• AnimalMuppet 4y ago
  > In Linguistics the notion that a language is more difficult/complex than another is not accepted. Hmm. In computer science, can we say that one language is more complex than another based on the size of the BNF needed to describe the language? Even in linguistics, can't you say that one language has 8 cases, and another only has 4? Wouldn't that make the one with 8 more complex, in at least some sense?
  • ftyers 4y ago
    Linguist here. In one sense yes, but there are many other senses, also maybe in one language the cases are regular but in the other they aren't. There is complexity from phonetics/phonology to pragmatics, and all languages distribute it differently. Basque cases for example are very regular, like Turkish or Hungarian, but Russian or Icelandic cases are less regular. So it's actually easier to pick up Basque at least the morphology than it is to pick up Russian or Icelandic.
    • ftyers 4y ago
      In terms of ease of learning, extralinguistic factors are generally more indicative. For example, availability of intensive courses, quality of those courses, availability of materials/cultural output, willingness of speakers to interact with learners (either for reasons of inability of communication otherwise or for reasons of ideology), similarity of culture or cultural concepts between the learner's culture and the one of the language they are learning. All of these have as much or more impact on ease of learning than any index of grammatical complexity. (Edit: Basque has excellent courses run through AEK and Basque speakers are usually very motivated to talk Basque, so if you want to learn a language I would highly recommend it, oh and there is a mass of culture like music and films).
  • asherah 4y ago
    more cases doesn't necessarily make a language more complex, cases are just one way to communicate a piece of information about a noun. it isn't necessarily more complex to have a separate locative case than to say "in/on/at X"!
  • 4y ago
• oersted 4y ago
  Basque native here, studied in the University of the Basque country (mentioned in the article) and most of my family teaches there, a few are linguists including my father. Let me know if you are curious about anything, I am happy to answer. I am obviously biased as a native speaker, but I am surprised it is considered the hardest language to learn. Yes sentences have an unusual order, and most pronouns and determinants are embedded as postfixes of other words, especially verbs. However, phonetically it is almost indistinguishable from Spanish at this point. The alphabet is latin and each letter directly corresponds to a single sound (except for silent h). Spelling is "as it sounds", very consistent and much simpler than other languages I have learned. The vocabulary includes large quantities of romance (from latin, mostly Spanish) loan words that will sound familiar to most Europeans. And the sentence structure and vocabulary are often (incorrectly) streered towards Spanish/French patterns in casual speech.
  • _glass 4y ago
    I know, I know the Vasconic substrate hypothesis is rejected by a lot of linguists, but I know some linguists that find it intriguing. What do you think? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vasconic_substrate_hypothesis https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vasconic_substrate_hypothesis
    • oersted 4y ago
      I don't have a strong opinion on the matter, evidence is very sparse. There is a strong consensus that Basque is not Indo-European. It is also seems likely that the Basque language (or an ancestor) was used in the surrounding area before the large Indo-European migration from the east, Basque doesn't seem to have been brought by a different migration from somewhere else, at least not after pre-history. The Vasconic Substrate Hypothesis suggests that Basque was a major language in Europe from prehistory or at least the neolithic, and that it influenced most modern European languages. That's rather a stretch, modern western European languages are mostly a mix between Indo-European variants and Latin, to a larger or smaller degree. Claiming another pre-indo-european layer under all that, I mean, sure, maybe, but it is diluted to an extent that makes it rather irrelevant. The evidence for that is very weak, it depends on how literally you interpret the theory. I think it is arrogant to suggest that those ancient languages were basque, rather modern basque has some distant roots in those pre-indo-european languages. In my opinion, the more correct way of expressing it would be that this proto-basque was part of a large family of related languages spoken in Europe during the neolithic. There is no proper evidence that proto-basque was widespread, it's just that it is the only preserved remnant from that linguistic era at large.
• germandiago 4y ago
  Yes, basque also has around 20,000 borrowings from spanish. Because it was reconstructed with political goals. I tell you this as the son of someone who used to work in the basque country (I am spanish). A vulgar basque was spoken in the rural areas only. They were desperate at the end of the 70s to find teachers for it. Nowadays there is a myth built on top of a language that, it is nice to not make things disappear, but it is basically a reconstruction. It is called "euskera batúa". I can say with confidence that we can speak more correct latin or catalan than basque when thinking about real language heritage. Basque is just a reconstruction.
  • jhncls 4y ago
    You make it sound that at one point in time there was a true basque language. But isn't language an evolving matter? It is slightly different from one village to the next, changes continuously over time, words get a different feeling, mixes as family members marry someone from a different village, etc.
    • pessimizer 4y ago
      There are lots of actual reconstructions of nearly-lost languages, though. Language certainly evolves, but there are people, that you can name, that sat through committee meetings putting together and voting on some of these reconstructions; for example Modern Hebrew and Hindi (to name probably the largest ones.) Modern Greek also seems like a bit of a disaster of historical reconstruction committees arguing with farmer observation committees for ages. Even English got clumsily rebased onto Latin and Greek from the 16th century on as its spelling was being standardized by prescriptivists. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greek_language_question https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greek_language_question So regardless of whether there's a "true" Basque language, it certainly could have gone through a period of conscious, top-down reconstruction after some period when middle-class academics (and politicians, usually) who would be interested in either rediscovering or purifying the language, or just plain looking for a nationalist project to rally around couldn't find anyone left who spoke the language at all, spoke it purely enough for them, or even spoke it prettily enough for their image of what the language should be. I don't know that this happened to Basque, but it happens all the time.
• akolbe 4y ago
  There is actually a potential trace of an ergative system in Latin. A fundamental rule of Latin is that neuter nouns have the same endings in the nominative and accusative cases. For example, bellum is nominative and accusative singular, bella is nominative and accusative plural. This can be explained as a continuation of an old rule that said that only living beings (marked by endings such as -us, -a; -i, -ae) could be "active" subjects. A "thing" doesn't have agency; it can't "do" anything to something or someone else – in other words, it can't be the subject of a transitive verb. It can only be either the subject of an intransitive verb, or the object of a transitive verb – and thus in Latin takes the endings -um, -a in either event. Bonus amat bonum: The good (man) loves what is good. (Meaning 1) Bonus amat bonum: The good (man) loves the good (man). (Meaning 2) Bonum est bonum: What is (a) good (thing) is good. This is exactly the same pattern as in ergative grammar: the object of a transitive verb has the same case as a thing that is the subject of an intransitive verb.
  • bradrn 4y ago
    A nitpick, but this is known as ‘neutral’ alignment, rather than ergative alignment. Ergativity is specifically when the transitive subject (‘ergative’ argument) is treated differently to the transitive object/intransitive subject, which are treated the same way (‘absolutive’ argument). By contrast, in the Latin case, all three arguments are treated the same way — hence, ‘neutral’ alignment. Incidentally, English has a very similar pattern: most animate pronouns have nominative–accusative alignment, while nouns and inanimate pronoun have neutral alignment. It’s pretty common in Indo–European languages.
    • thaumasiotes 4y ago
      I was under the impression that the unification of nominative and accusative case for neuters in Indo-European languages was indeed felt to derive from an ergative-absolutive distinction in proto-Indo-European. The idea would be that neuters can't be agents and are therefore always absolutive.
      • bradrn 4y ago
• thaumasiotes 4y ago
  > In Linguistics the notion that a language is more difficult/complex than another is not accepted. This is not quite true; it is widely accepted that certain languages are less complex than most others. A few languages can't be less complex without most languages being more complex. Interestingly, among the examples of languages losing complexity due to real-world interactions are English and Mandarin Chinese, both of which endless people will be happy to tell you are uniquely difficult.
  • thylacine222 4y ago
    > This is not quite true; it is widely accepted that certain languages are less complex than most others. This is just false, it is not widely accepted.
    • thaumasiotes 4y ago
      It might be false, but it is in fact widely accepted. Where are you getting your information from? See e.g. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33629425 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33629425
      • thylacine222 4y ago
        I was saying that it is false that is is widely accepted. I am a linguist, that's where my knowledge of what is widely accepted in our field comes from.