Why lots when can less?
Why do?
Y?
perfectly fine
Debatable
How come EVERYONE in China learns Chinese when it's sooooo much harder than American???
Idk why Chinese people go through the effort of learning Chinese when the pre-built system for English works just fine
/uj Chinese grammar is surprisingly simple, like I am still early in my learning but I can say a wide range of things. Atp I just need vocab
To answer OOP: To troll the people learning them.
Happy cake day!
Why are so many people so unnecessarily stupid?
/uj it’d be a reasonable question if OP phrased it differently. If they asked why some languages are more complex than others with the same root, for example, without saying it’s unnecessary.
How do you measure the complexity of a language? I think the question fine as is to be honest. It's not the best phrasing possible, but it also shouldn't have to be, the root at the question is a reasonable thing to wonder about and also not that easy to answer.
i think it's the amount of "boxes" you have to check when making a sentence. "Should i use the accusative? Should i use a specific aspect? is the declension different because the thing I'm referring to is animate?"
and I'm talking about you, Russian
Here are a few better ways to ask about complexity:
Why purpose do certain features of a language? What would we lose by removing them? Would the languages be easier to quicker master as either a first language learner or a second language learner without them? Are some languages inherently more difficult to learn?
- genders
- measure words that add no semantic meaning
- tone sandhi
- multiple types of verb inflections/agglutinations
Tbh I speak a language with grammatical gender and I don't see any point to it. Why should a chair be feminine and a table masculine and a tree neuter? Especially since the gender does not carry over to other gendered languages.
Chavacano which is a philipino based creol spanish doesn't use a gendered article. It mainly uses "el" and that's it. Even though the Spanish lexifier uses gendered language heavily. Visayan is one of the contributing languages in chavacano, does not use gendered speech either. So that's atleast one group example of "yeeeeah we ain't doin that" however I'm sure they're were many areas that spoke "normal" Spanish in the surrounding areas until they didn't need to anymore due to the Spanish influence leaving the area.
Via Wikipedia-
Three possible functions of grammatical gender include:
In a language with explicit inflections for gender, it is easy to express gender distinctions in animate beings.
Grammatical gender "can be a valuable tool of disambiguation", rendering clarity about antecedents or homophones.
In literature, gender can be used to "animate and personify inanimate nouns".
Regarding point 2, gender allows Spanish to have "el papa" (the Pope) and "la papa" (the potato) mean two different things.
I appreciate this, BUT:
- It's easy to express gender in animate beings in languages without grammatical gender too. It's the inanimate objects with genders that get to me.
2. Fair point.
3. You can animate and personify without using gender as well. Case in point, English.
I would call #2 a very small benefit considering the hassle. I don't know how many words change gender like that, but from my basic Spanish knowledge, it's not really a lot. And would probably be just as easy to recognize from context, as in English. Plus there are still words that don't change gender and have more than one meaning.
My spanish-native husband and I get into arguments about the noun genders all the time. I like Spanish for being so phonetic and having similar grammar to English, but the gendered nouns do my head in. They're pointless, don't convey anything meaningful, just more to memorize. I think Spanish would be a great language without that crap. My husband argues back that they make the language more poetic. That they're a vital tool for poets. I cannot tell you how little I care if my language is poetic, especially if I'm just trying to order a sandwich or yell across the house that I need toilet paper.
He doesn't even read poetry.
Having some classifications that can be easily distinguished just aid with specificity when listening. In other languages animacy classes or any other set of binary/ternary distinctions do the same thing, some languages just happened to settle on “gender” as the distinction
I guess it's less useful when you have only two or three genders. But still better than one.
Because our ancestors are all jerks
Overcomplicate things, WHAT?!?!?😮 Languages without cases, noun genders and verb conjugations can have at least one of two major problems 1. Simple grammar is so boring, e.g. Esperanto🥱. or 2. The language will develop things like tones, clicks or consonant clusters; which are impossible for foreigners to pronounce. This is why most "YouTube polyglots" never even try to actually learn Cantonese, Georgian or Xhosa.
Why is every language not Indonesian?
English speakers tend to dislike the perceived complexity of gender conjugations and cases when beginning the language learning process. Can't outjerk that
OK don't shoot me but that's a good question. Like for example Latin was so hard even natives couldn't speak it properly so they came up with prepositions to get rid of the cases. Roman languages are a good example of how getting rid of overcomplicated grammar rules leaves you with a language that works just as well but it's easier to learn and use.
Like for example Latin was so hard even natives couldn't speak it properly so they came up with prepositions to get rid of the cases.
If this is /uj, then it's some /r/badlinguistics. But that sub is still basically on lock down in protest, so the super short explanation is:
It wasn't that people couldn't speak Latin "properly" because it was too complex or anything like that. After all, all those cases had to have come from somewhere in the first place. People simply don't start speaking in a way that's too complex to understand.
The truth is, there simply has been a broad tendency in general for Indo-European languages to lose declension over time, but that hasn't always been true for all IE languages, and it's certainly not true of all languages in general. For instance, Latvian and Lithuanian actually gained new locative cases as a result of contact with Finnic languages, and those languages themselves have a complex system of locative cases that didn't exist in Proto-Uralic.
Furthermore, from what I hear, Colloquial Metropolitan French is actually in the process of adding something to their verbal system called polypersonal agreement, while Mandarin Chinese appears to be in the process of gaining conjugation for the first time in the entire written history of the language, all the way back to Old Chinese! In the very grand scheme of things, languages tend to gain inflections just as often as they lose them.
Wow, that ended up not being super short like I expected, lol.
Can you link to some info on Chinese gaining conjugation please? That's very interesting. I am currently learning Chinese.
So, I really am not the best person to ask about this, as I don't know all that much about Chinese linguistics, but from what I understand 了 (Pinyin: le) was once simply a verb that meant "to finish, to be completed", but nowadays speakers are using it like a suffix to mark the perfective aspect. It's not quite there yet, but if it were to become a fully grammaticalized suffix, to the point that it's no longer seen as an individual word, then it would be the first time in the history of Mandarin Chinese that it had any sort of conjugation!
So 了 and 过 added to the end of the verb aren't considered conjugations atm? I didn't know they were separate verbs, I always assumed it was past perfect and imperfect, interesting!
Bro I'm not talking about what happened in Latium when they came up with the language, I'm talking about what happened when the romans started colonizing other "countries" and forced people who already had languages that didn't use cases to start speaking a really complex language that used them. They just didn't, bc it was too hard and they didn't exactly have a robust education system. So normal people developed their own linguist tools to be able to speak and now that's why we have dozens of different romance languages that work perfectly.
Other parts of the world adding cases to their languages literally has nothing to do with the point. Good for them.
Many people colonised by the Romans, e.g. the Gauls, had languages with a case system not very different from Latin.
The Latin case system eventually collapsed largely because of phonetic shifts (e.g. [am] turned into [ã], which then merged with [a]), rather than any inherent difficulty of the grammatical system.
The Latin case system was not too different from modern Slavic and Baltic languages. Not that these grammatical systems aren’t somewhat complex, but native speakers use them every day without even noticing. And obviously, millions of people in Siberia, Central Asia, the Caucasus and elsewhere have successfully learnt Russian without somehow killing the case system.
Latin may be difficult if you’re learning it from a dusty grammar book. But that is not how people learnt languages for most of history. If you were surrounded by Latin speakers, listening to Latin songs and watching Latin movies all day long, all those scary cases would become second nature after a while.
Okay? Your point is still completely wrong and and ill-informed. Pretty much all of the Romance-speaking areas in Europe today had already been Latin-speaking for a long time by the time the Roman Empire collapsed. The people there had been speaking regular, "good" Latin. The reason that modern romance languages are analytic in comparison is in large part due to regular sound changes that caused a lot of case syncretism which put a lot of stress on Latin case and gender systems.
If your explanation is correct, we'd expect Italy, the heart of the Roman empire, to still have a relatively robust case system, but it's gone everywhere but the pronouns just like almost every other romance language. Do you know what the one exception is? Romanian. Do you know what language other than Romanian is spoken by many in Romania? Hungarian, which is super complex with 18 or 19 cases depending on how you count them. People in central Romania speak it because of Hungarian conquerers spreading their language. They don't speak some bastardized version of Hungarian, they speak Hungarian.
Humans are good at learning languages! We've done it all throughout history, and people throughout the Roman empire spoke good, perfectly normal Latin.
I'm sorry but if you honestly believe than like a sheeper from Hispania, who'd be considered a native Latin speaker, whose ancestors had spent hundreds of years speaking an euskera-like language could speak perfect classic Latin, even if he took it at school, I don't know what to tell you other than lmao.
TIL that being a shepherd makes you stupid and unable to speak languages properly.
And again, /r/badlinguistics
These are your own assumptions that are just false. If that hypothetical shepherd speaks Latin as his native language, then he's not "too uneducated to speak the language properly with cases, etc". Your argument might make sense if he's learning Latin as a foreign language. And his ancestors who spoke Germanic languages also had cases and gender, etc., it's not like they're mentally incapable of understanding Latin cases and grammar concepts because they're farmers or whatnot. If it's your native tongue, these are things you don't even have to think about consciously when you speak.
It's not like someone made up classical Latin. Languages with many cases and verb conjugations exist today and have many native speakers, why should Latin be too complicated even for native speakers?
The "classical Latin" they teach today was used in the Roman Empire only by highly educated writers and scribes and was supposedly the standard of language but normal people did not speak like that. Languages that still have cases and conjugations nowadays are still not as complex as Latin. Like people spend YEARS learning Latin and still aren't fluent and can only use it to read. It is very hard. On top of that kids didn't go to school until they were 18 like we do today in the Roman Empire either.
Languages that still have cases and conjugations nowadays are still not as complex as Latin.
Lithuanian exists
Hungarian and Finnish checking in.
I'm actually learning Finnish right now. The declension is so complicated...
There are many times I find myself wishing that every noun and adjective ended with -nen and every verb was a type 2 verb.
I'm also learning Finnish <3 I'd personally do away with the KPT change, would only decline nouns and nothing else, and would stick to only one object ending :P
Polysynthetic languages like Cherokee checking in too
Aren't there basically two Chinese languages that a lot of people speak because one is too formal/complicated and the other is what "regular" people speak?!?!
If I'm understanding you correctly, then pretty much. The official language of the PRC is a standardized version of Mandarin based on the Beijing dialect, but there are many other Chinese languages spoken throughout China. For many Chinese people, especially in the south of China, they speak their own local variety at home, but Mandarin in other contexts. From what I understand, however, the government is really trying to stamp out linguistic diversity in China in favor of everyone spending standard Mandarin Chinese, which is really sad.
Thank you, I watched a video and the narrator touched on it but I wasn't sure what he meant and you have demystified it for me. That is really sad, that is history and culture being erased for the sake of...herding? That seems like the wrong word, but it's the one that sticks out.
It is really sad. Same thing happened in France a while back.
Like people spend YEARS learning Latin and still aren't fluent and can only use it to read.
People also spend YEARS learning English in Japan and China and still aren’t fluent but you wouldn’t say English is not actually spoken would you? The Classical Latin language is about as complex as Russian and a lot of people still speak Russian fine. Even the most uneducated drunkest gopniks will always follow proper declensions and conjugations.
ok explain why people still speak Finnish (which has 15 cases)
So, you're the idiot who wrote the OP?
That's a part of why English is such a popular language and no one but language enthusiasts think about it. English has easy conjugations that make it easy to learn, it's flexible because it is able to absorb many words from many other languages lolol breaking rules. That's also what makes it hard, English has an extreme amount of synonyms and antonyms and multiple definitions ...To the point that you can't really determine how a word is pronounced unless you already know it. Maybe there is a trade-off ? Please excuse my rambling.
That's a part of why English is such a popular language and no one but language enthusiasts think about it. English has easy conjugations that make it easy to learn
A lot of people say this, but it's not really the reason why English is dominant in today's world. The real reason why everyone learns English is simply due to the lingering effects of colonialism and the economic and cultural dominance of Anglophone countries. As a counterpoint to your point, Russian is still widely spoken throughout central Asia and the Caucasus, former areas of the USSR, despite Russian having very complex conjugation and declension schemes. On the other hand, Mandarin Chinese has no conjugation, no declension, and over a billion speakers, but it's not spoken much outside of China/Taiwan and diaspora communities.
Omgg you are going to make me read up on Mandarin and I'm already swamped in German lmao. I love it all.
Haha, to be fair, there are other aspects of Mandarin that do make it genuinely challenging, namely the writing system and the tones. However, any challenge can be defeated with enough time, effort, and patience. That being said, it is a really good idea to just stick to one language at a time, so I'd focus on German if I were you, at least until you got it up to a decent level.
Yes, I just wanted to kind of see the basics of a sentenxe. German is my palette cleanser from Italian and French, so I'm taking it slow and having fun instead of making strict goals.
/uj Even though my account history may implicate me I did not write this.
Rj/ yeah but have you seen Russian?
Ngl. I really do think that in my language there is some council (mostly filled with old ppl), who don't understand how I want to talk (in my opinion they are responsible for the words which get into dictionary). I literally cannot talk how I want to, and then these ppl complain about my usage of TOO MUCH foreign words (and yes, always they tell me that I should read more, but what? Why should I read stories about peasant life WHICH I DON'T LIVE NOR RELATE TO IT?). And yes I am native. I really do think that my native language is filled with too much strict and out dated words which need to change.
I think your language (and many thousands of other people frankly🤔) is really kool, tbh any language that has a vastly different written form is awesome. Variety makes the world way more colorful
The problem is not only in that, but also with some foreign words... they don't work. They may sound a bit vulgar for people who don't know what it is.
Yeah that's true, but I suppose creating equivalent ones that sounded purley native would be kinda difficult/tiring to a point
The real question is why old languages are more complicated than modern languages? English ist the most extreme example.
More complicated in what way? I truthfully think most languages are at about the same level of complexity. We don't have any evidence that children took longer to learn Old English than Modern English. The complexity is just encoded in different areas of the language. Modern English has simpler inflection, but more complex syntactical rules. Also, lots of seemingly superfluous words that you have to remember when and how to use, like the helping verbs "will" and "have". And lots of irregular verbs + suppletive verb forms.
Because Proto Indo European had a metric fuckton of declensions/conjugations and the only way it could go was down. If you look at the old varieties of non Indo European languages it's very hard to call them more complex than their modern forms (except Chinese).
1 missing reply
Why say many word when few word do trick?