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For sure there's a minimal necessary complexity but I don't think natural languages are anywhere close to it, and I don't think different natural languages have
by ajuc 3y ago
For sure there's a minimal necessary complexity but I don't think natural languages are anywhere close to it, and I don't think different natural languages have to be the same distance from it.
For example English is pretty simple in many aspects but it has absurdly complex spelling for no benefit. If not for historic reasons it could be simplified significantly without losing any expressive power whatsoever - simply by making the spelling regular.
- kaba0 3y agoAlso, English has very complex “implicit” rules about word order, as it relies on that much more than languages with more complex grammars, e.g. German. If you do encode more information into a given word by a suffix, you can more freely reorder them.
- ajuc 3y agoMy native language is Polish, you can pretty much reorder words as you please (almost all permutations are valid, but there's usually like 3 or 5 that are used most often - you put the noun that you want to highlight as the first or last word in the sentence basically, or you use the default SVO if you don't care). Any other order is usually a gimmick to make the song rhyme etc :) I'm not sure German is more free than English with its sentences structure tho. When I'm speaking German it feels like exercise in short-term memory and stack depth because you constantly need to move some words at the end of the sentence :) But I only know it very superficially. By the way, I never understood why English has rules about the order of the adjectives. Why is it always "good old times" and never "old good times"? I don't see what's the benefit here. Maybe error correction?