Re: Comparing languages
From: Nathan Sanders (nsanders.DIE.SPAM_at_wso.williams.edu)
Date: 07/14/04
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Date: Wed, 14 Jul 2004 04:17:22 GMT
In article <ccshds$7fp$1@news-reader4.wanadoo.fr>,
"pierre.levy" <pierre.levy11@wanadoo.fr> wrote:
> Nathan> Simply adding them up doesn't work, though. How many memorized
> words does it take to be equivalent to memorizing word order in questions?
> Is memorizing an affix the same as memorizing a root? Is memorizing
> three allomorphs of the same morpheme the same as memorizing three
> different morphemes? Is memorizing a pair of homophones more, less,
> or equally difficult than memorizing two different words?
>
> Nathan> Further, I'm not even sure it's possible to measure "a certain level
> of capacity" across two different languages. Does being "proficient"
> in English mean the same thing as it does for French? Are we looking
> at the spoken language only, the written language, both? Performance
> only, interpretation only, or both? Cultural references? Idioms?
> Jargon? Uncommon vocabulary? Archaic constructions?
>
> Petro: These objections are a bit more serious than those you made
> earlier.
These objections are just specific instantiations of my more general
objection, which is that you cannot compare human languages for
"simplicity" in any useful sense, because language is far too complex,
well beyond our current understanding.
> for it by yourself. As I already said, I am not a linguist, and
You don't have to be a linguist to realize that languages are made up
of much more than just lists of words.
Of maybe you do...The persitence of linguistic urban legends like
"Eskimo has 100 words for snow" shows that the average person is often
unwilling and/or unable to critically evaluate a human language as
anything other than a vocabulary list.
> I don't care what people like or hate, learn or don't want to
> learn.
Do you care what *you* like and want to learn? Because you seem very
resistant to learning very basic facts about human language if those
facts contradict some positive misunderstanding about a language you
like.
Comments on the article you quoted:
> The expressiveness of a language as a function of the thesaurus.
I'd have thought that the expressiveness would be based on, I dunno,
sentences and dialogue. What good is a word if you can't use it in a
sentence?
Not to mention that no one has ever shown any significant number of
"concepts" that are expressible in some languages but not in others.
Just because English doesn't have a single word for "taking pleasure
in other people's pain" doesn't mean we don't understand the concept
or that we can't express it.
In a worst case scenario, a language can just borrow the word they
need if multi-word expressions are too cumbersome (as English has done
with schmuck, croissant, and glasnost).
> The author turns his attention to the frequency of words.
If this is as far as the author goes, then the "research" is
meaningless. It's like comparing cars for simplicity based on their
weight or the number of number of screws used to build it.
> vorto (word, as composed of certain sounds or letters without regard to its
> meaning, e. g. child, children, give, gives, gave and given are six
> different words),
I'd like to know how they scientifically define "word" in a usable,
cross-linguistic sense. Professional linguists have a hard enough
time doing this. Somehow I doubt that a non-linguist with an agenda
has managed to do it.
> As all the
> words in Esperanto are only combinations of invariable elements, the study
> of the international language is the most simple case to begin with.
?!?!? This is certainly not true. You only need to look at the
prepositions to know this: <de> can mean "of", "from", or "possessed
by" (and lord knows what else!), while <al> can mean "at", "to", or
"towards", or can act as a marker for "indirect objects". Even the
affixes don't get off easy: <-n> can be a marker for the "direct
object" or for certain specialized meanings of prepositional objects.
How can anyone take this "research" seriously if the author is going
to lie in such an obviously biased way?
"I'm going to demonstrate that Esperanto is the simplest language.
First, I'll state as a fact that Esperanto is the simplest language..."
> The author develops a new method of the statistical research. On the basis
> of statistical lists or knowledge of the languages, a series of sets of
> clichés of different grades is formed.
The entire "research" is built around lists of words, and claiming
that knowing such a list represents "knowledge of the language"!
By this definition, I have a vast "knowledge" of Spanish (despite not
knowing how to conjugate verbs except for the first-person present
tense, or how to construct relative clauses, or how to do just about
anything that would actually make my vocabulary useful for anything
other than showing off to non-linguists).
> aforementioned table does not give definitive values to these constants,
> because the material of the different languages studied is not adequate
> in the sense mentioned above and needs additional research.
Oh. So the research hasn't even been done yet?
> 1) The new method of statistical research is much superior to the previous
> ones in speed and gives results with remarkably less effort than these.
"Gives results"? They don't have any yet! (see previous quote and
comment)
> 3) The mathematical expression of this law holds two constants, which
> vary from language to language, and are indicators of the ease of learning
> the considered language, or of the expressiveness of the same.
"Or"? So, for some languages the connstants indicate ease of
learning, and for others it represents expressiveness? How do we know
which constants go with which indication? Is this pre-determined by
the theory, or do we find out after the fact?
And how do they know this? Have they tested it? Have they defined
"easy to learn" and "expressiveness" and compared them with these
magical "constants" (which, by the way, aren't actually constant,
since they vary from language to language!)?
> 4) In spite of the fact that the resuits of this study are not exactly
> comparable because of the different bases in tihe statistics of different
> languages,
Wait...so in the end, languages aren't comparable? Wasn't the whole
point of this "research" to compare languages?
> they nevertheless show that the logical structure of a planned
> language, such as Esperanto, makes it much more expressive on the basis
> of a certain number of known clichés as any naturaily developed language.
It only shows this because the author asserts it! There's no
conclusion, just an assertation, a bunch of intermediate mumbo-jumbo
that's wrong and/or just plain stupid, and then a restatement of the
intial assertion under the guise of a proved conclusion.
I really hope that this is not what passes for science these days!
> 5) The author concludes, that these results may open a great field of
> research for the psycho-biology of human speech.
I think it just opens a great field of research for the psychos of
human speech...
If this is the best you can come up with as a scientific method for
comparing the simplicity of languages, then you've just proven my
point for me.
Nathan
-- Nathan Sanders Linguistics Program nsanders@wso.williams.edu Williams College http://wso.williams.edu/~nsanders Williamstown, MA 01267
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