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1tomcatMurr
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/11/08/books/review/EParker-t.html?_r=1
Apart from the usual moaning about the decline of linguistic standards, which seems to be common to all languages, what interested me about this article was this:
What does it mean to have a language that is so complex that even highly educated users of it make frequent mistakes?
Apart from the usual moaning about the decline of linguistic standards, which seems to be common to all languages, what interested me about this article was this:
What does it mean to have a language that is so complex that even highly educated users of it make frequent mistakes?
2MeditationesMartini
Well, thank God for Haruki Murakami and his willingness to be the voice of reason on the "standards" issue.
The complexity thing, while not as much of a journalistic cliche, is a bit of a myth too, I think. I guess the first thing to assert is that just as we are not able to tell whether change is for "better" or "worse", so it's essentially impossible to develop any set of criteria that tell us whethewr one language is more or less "complicated" than another. The thing is that all languages perform the same tasks--conveying thoughts (often in the indicative mode--"I think he's going"), exerting control (classically in the imperative mode--"Go away!"), soliciting information (interrogative--"are they gone?"_, building emotional bonds (phatic--"wouldn't it be nice to go to Greece one day, baby?"), etc. All humans perform these operations, and all language arises in response to their needs. All language performs the same tasks, but not necessarily in the same ways--this just means the complexity is shunted down the road apiece to a different section of the language.Latin has a complicated morphology (word endings) to express, among other things, case information (broadly, who is doing what to whom and how). English does not use word endings to communicate this information, and has a much simpler morphology, but as a result has much richer periphrastic syntactic options than Latin (periphrasis=using particles to express case info, like saying "to me" where Latin would use a suffix after the equivalent of "me"). Similarly, Japanese has a much more complex set of formal rules for expressing politeness (for example), but that doesn't mean English doesn't have similar (albeit less conscious) conventions or that we are less able to tell when people are being rude in our cultural context than the Japanese are in theirs. It just gets shunted onto other parts of language, like word choice, prosody (stress and volume), tone, etc. It's not a perfect answer, because all language developed from grunts originally and so self-evidently languages do become more complex, and also because it's hard to draw clear boundaries (does body language count as language, and should it be considered as part of our "politeness" question? What about facial expressions?) between language and cultural practice generally--not that I think we should be drawing these boundaries.
But I think in practice it seems pretty safe to say that no language is more or less difficult than any other. The "difficulty" question with Japanese is complicated--it's relatively unique among world languages, but certainly a Ryukyuan speaker would find it easier to learn Japanese than English. Personally, I found it much, MUCH easier to learn Japanese than Chinese (which I am still utterly useless at). Chinese has complicated phonology but a simple grammar; Japanese, just the reverse. The difficulty of Japanese exists at the centre of an interesting cultural complex of ideas called nihonjinron, a sort of ideology of the uniqueness of the Japanese people. That is propped up by the idea that Japanese is "difficult" and as such incomprehensible to "outsiders".
This story is a bit different, though. I don't see anyone in the article suggesting that keitai novels are making the real spoken language simpler, much as textspeak in English has had minimal or zero effect on spoken English. But within the limited case of an orthography, which is limited in a way that language itself may not be (i.e. you can only communicate in writing through a limited set of conventional symbols--whereas in speech your combinations of vocabulary and phonemes and prosody and voice quality are so many as to make your toolbox functionally infinite), it's really easy to say one system is more complicated than another--Chinese hanzi are more complicated than Roman letters; Japanese kanji are more complicated than Chinese (although again, not in all ways--the relationship of symbol to meaning, for example, is simpler in Chinese than French writing, just as the relationship of symbol to sound is simpler in French). But, this has very little bearing on speech. I suspect English speakers make as many mistakes as Japanese speakers--in pronunciation, for example, we probably make way more, because our sound combinations are complicated and our spellings misleading. But is a reading mistake really a language mistake, or just the misreading of a symbol in a conventional code? Like, if I go to Japan and start driving around on the left side of the road, does it say bad things about my driving ability or just that I didn't know the convention? Although it doesn't surprise me to hear that they make more reading mistakes than we do.
The complexity thing, while not as much of a journalistic cliche, is a bit of a myth too, I think. I guess the first thing to assert is that just as we are not able to tell whether change is for "better" or "worse", so it's essentially impossible to develop any set of criteria that tell us whethewr one language is more or less "complicated" than another. The thing is that all languages perform the same tasks--conveying thoughts (often in the indicative mode--"I think he's going"), exerting control (classically in the imperative mode--"Go away!"), soliciting information (interrogative--"are they gone?"_, building emotional bonds (phatic--"wouldn't it be nice to go to Greece one day, baby?"), etc. All humans perform these operations, and all language arises in response to their needs. All language performs the same tasks, but not necessarily in the same ways--this just means the complexity is shunted down the road apiece to a different section of the language.Latin has a complicated morphology (word endings) to express, among other things, case information (broadly, who is doing what to whom and how). English does not use word endings to communicate this information, and has a much simpler morphology, but as a result has much richer periphrastic syntactic options than Latin (periphrasis=using particles to express case info, like saying "to me" where Latin would use a suffix after the equivalent of "me"). Similarly, Japanese has a much more complex set of formal rules for expressing politeness (for example), but that doesn't mean English doesn't have similar (albeit less conscious) conventions or that we are less able to tell when people are being rude in our cultural context than the Japanese are in theirs. It just gets shunted onto other parts of language, like word choice, prosody (stress and volume), tone, etc. It's not a perfect answer, because all language developed from grunts originally and so self-evidently languages do become more complex, and also because it's hard to draw clear boundaries (does body language count as language, and should it be considered as part of our "politeness" question? What about facial expressions?) between language and cultural practice generally--not that I think we should be drawing these boundaries.
But I think in practice it seems pretty safe to say that no language is more or less difficult than any other. The "difficulty" question with Japanese is complicated--it's relatively unique among world languages, but certainly a Ryukyuan speaker would find it easier to learn Japanese than English. Personally, I found it much, MUCH easier to learn Japanese than Chinese (which I am still utterly useless at). Chinese has complicated phonology but a simple grammar; Japanese, just the reverse. The difficulty of Japanese exists at the centre of an interesting cultural complex of ideas called nihonjinron, a sort of ideology of the uniqueness of the Japanese people. That is propped up by the idea that Japanese is "difficult" and as such incomprehensible to "outsiders".
This story is a bit different, though. I don't see anyone in the article suggesting that keitai novels are making the real spoken language simpler, much as textspeak in English has had minimal or zero effect on spoken English. But within the limited case of an orthography, which is limited in a way that language itself may not be (i.e. you can only communicate in writing through a limited set of conventional symbols--whereas in speech your combinations of vocabulary and phonemes and prosody and voice quality are so many as to make your toolbox functionally infinite), it's really easy to say one system is more complicated than another--Chinese hanzi are more complicated than Roman letters; Japanese kanji are more complicated than Chinese (although again, not in all ways--the relationship of symbol to meaning, for example, is simpler in Chinese than French writing, just as the relationship of symbol to sound is simpler in French). But, this has very little bearing on speech. I suspect English speakers make as many mistakes as Japanese speakers--in pronunciation, for example, we probably make way more, because our sound combinations are complicated and our spellings misleading. But is a reading mistake really a language mistake, or just the misreading of a symbol in a conventional code? Like, if I go to Japan and start driving around on the left side of the road, does it say bad things about my driving ability or just that I didn't know the convention? Although it doesn't surprise me to hear that they make more reading mistakes than we do.
