Relay-Version: version B 2.10 5/3/83; site utzoo.UUCP Posting-Version: version B 2.10.2 9/17/84; site bcsaic.UUCP Path: utzoo!watmath!clyde!burl!ulysses!mhuxr!mhuxt!houxm!vax135!cornell!uw-beaver!ssc-vax!bcsaic!michaelm From: michaelm@bcsaic.UUCP (michael b maxwell) Newsgroups: net.nlang Subject: Re: Easy languages Message-ID: <426@bcsaic.UUCP> Date: Tue, 7-Jan-86 18:04:34 EST Article-I.D.: bcsaic.426 Posted: Tue Jan 7 18:04:34 1986 Date-Received: Sat, 11-Jan-86 07:35:15 EST References: <1791@uwmacc.UUCP> <839@h-sc1.UUCP> <1809@uwmacc.UUCP> <842@h-sc1.UUCP> <418@bcsaic.UUCP> <718@spar.UUCP> Reply-To: michaelm@bcsaic.UUCP (michael b maxwell) Organization: Boeing Computer Services AI Center, Seattle Lines: 77 Summary: In article <718@spar.UUCP> ellis@spar.UUCP (Michael Ellis) writes: >>>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 !Please! You mixed us up. The *second* quote is mine (Maxwell), and (I assume) the first is Breuel's!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! > 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. [followed by a list of reasons why English, Chinese, Japanese, French, German, Slavic, Gaelic, Thai, Turkish, Russian, Polish, Latin, and Greek each present different difficulties wrt writing, pronunciation, irregularities, multiple conjugations and declensions, etc.] You're proving what I'm saying! Each language has its own peculiarities (and I fear I'm proving how peculiar English spelling is :-). Some of those pecularities may be problems for native speakers of some languages (e.g. tone), but not for speakers of others. That's why I said any study hoping to prove that language X was more difficult (for adult learners, which was what the original posting was about) than language Y would have to take large numbers of native speakers of languages A,B,C... and teach them X and Y under controlled conditions. I seriously doubt whether this has ever been done. Furthermore, who can say whether irregular verbs are more of a problem for native speakers of language A learning language X than unusual syntax? I find syntax and phonology easy in second language learning, irregularities more difficult, and vocabulary a drag. Other native speakers of English have different easy/hard ratings. At best you might come up with a statistical results: 43% of the speakers of A found X harder than Y, 37% found Y harder than X, and the rest found both equally hard. And that assumes you can come up with some kind of criteria for judging language acquisition that is equitable for both X and Y (not an easy task). As for such excess baggage as grammatical gender, one might make a case for the usefulness of such "baggage"--e.g. in disambiguating antecedents of pronouns, etc. You might say that this has no relationship to the difficulty of learning the language, and you might be right, but maybe not... What about the redundancy such "excesses" provide? And of course man-made languages are supposed to be easier, but as you say, this is likely to be true only for speakers of languages cognate to the native language(s) of the designers of the artificial language. A different question, and one you allude to, is the ease of first learning. Here again, I fear that most evidence for the relative difficulty of learning language X is anecdotal. What would be meant by the claim that children learn language X faster than children learning language Y? That they learn vocabulary, pronunciation, grammar, semantics, ...? They probably progress faster in language X in one area, and slower in another. How does that give you an index of accomplishment? My three-year old son handles relative clauses quite well in English, but insists that the first person singular nominative pronoun is "my." ("My wanna go to the store that my went to yesterday!") A mystery: can we really say that relative clauses are easier in English than getting case right on the subject pronoun? It's certainly more complex! Of course, we're wired to get syntax right... BTW, one of the early studies of language acquisition in older children was done by Carol Chomsky in the early '60s (yes, Noam's wife). And no, I don't believe she did any comparisons with children learning other languages; but you might be surprised what they didn't know... -- Mike Maxwell Boeing Artificial Intelligence Center ...uw-beaver!uw-june!bcsaic!michaelm