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From: ellis@spar.UUCP (Michael Ellis)
Newsgroups: net.nlang
Subject: Easy languages
Message-ID: <718@spar.UUCP>
Date: Tue, 24-Dec-85 04:52:31 EST
Article-I.D.: spar.718
Posted: Tue Dec 24 04:52:31 1985
Date-Received: Wed, 25-Dec-85 03:46:07 EST
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Reply-To: ellis@spar.UUCP (Michael Ellis)
Organization: Schlumberger Palo Alto Research, CA
Lines: 68

>>Seriously. The English language, which is considered one of the easiest
>>languages in the world... - Mike Maxwell
>Says who???  Seriously, how can you quantify that?  By making studies of 
>lots of native speakers of languages X1, X2, X3... trying to learn 
>languages Y1, Y2, Y3...English, where {X1, X2, X3...Y1, Y2, Y3...English} 
>are all unrelated languages?  I doubt whether anyone has ever done that.  
>(Same comment for those who say, as I have often heard said, that English 
>is a very hard language.) - Thomas Breuel

    I think there are many criteria by which a language can be judged `easy'
    or `difficult' to learn. Is the written representation logical?  If
    there are inflections, are there a large number of inflectional
    categories or only a few? Are there many exceptions?  Does the language
    carry `excess baggage', like grammatical gender, or nominal classifiers?
    Are logical relations transparently represented in the form of the
    language? 

    Artificial languages, like Loglan or Esperanto, for example, are
    genuinely `easy' languages according to all of the criteria above,
    although no doubt they seem more natural to europeans than they
    would to anyone else.
  
    Except for Chinese and (formal) Japanese, English is clearly one of the
    most difficult languages to write. Our spelling is quite abominable;
    in its defense, the orthography of the international european wordstock
    is preserved at the cost of uncertainty about pronunciation. This
    may provide some clue to the foreigner as to the meaning of new
    vocabulary. 
    
    However, I think that we must conclude spoken English IS easy with
    respect to most of the other criteria.

    English nouns are very simple indeed -- the vast majority are of a
    single type (plural in -s); we have neither gender, nor classifiers.
    
    Our verbs admit more complexity, but even the few irregular ones are
    still simpler with 3 stems {see(-s,-ing), saw, seen} than any 
    european language I know. Most astonishing is the huge number
    of aspects/moods/tenses that can be generated from the
    single Chomskian formula:

    	    VP => Tense + (Modal) + (HAVE + EN) + (BE + ING) + VERB

    We might also judge a difficulty of a language according to phonetic
    peculiarities relative to the world languages. For example, the central
    vowels in French or German are more likely to present difficulty than
    the 5 cardinal vowels in Japanese or Greek.  The opposition between
    palatized and nonpalatized consonants in Slavic or Gaelic are also
    likely to cause difficulties. The tones in Chinese or Thai can be a
    particularly difficult obstacle for those whose native languages lack
    such features.

    English, with 7 vowels, 7 diphthongs, a strong emphasis on the major
    syllable (with all others approaching schwa), and a propensity for
    closing open syllables, is a bit unusual. I suspect our initial and
    final consonant clusters (as in `strengths') are problematic for most
    newcomers, as are the initial sounds of {the, thin, at, up}. Nonetheless,
    I do not think these qualities are any more unusual than say, vowel
    harmony in Turkish.
    
    I have heard that the slavic languages are, in fact, particularly
    difficult for even native children to learn, requiring an extra year
    before children have to proficiency to enter public schools. I can
    testify as to the enormous difficulty of Russian/Polish nouns -- there
    are many different nominal inflexions and declensional categories! I
    found Latin and Greek nouns much simpler in contrast.

-michael