[HN Gopher] The Hardest Natural Languages (1979) [pdf]
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The Hardest Natural Languages (1979) [pdf]
Author : Tomte
Score : 37 points
Date : 2022-09-12 11:37 UTC (11 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (people.cs.umass.edu)
(TXT) w3m dump (people.cs.umass.edu)
| amilios wrote:
| It's interesting, because through my readings in linguistics, I
| got the sense that no language is "objectively" harder than any
| other, that everything is relative to the other languages you
| know. A Dutch speaker will learn German potentially more easily
| than French compared to an English speaker, so how do you judge
| objectively which language is harder? Nevertheless, an
| entertaining read! I have heard a good candidate for the hardest
| natural language is Georgian, due to irregular grammar, long
| consonant clusters, and difficult script. Not sure how to
| reconcile the apparent objectively difficult features with the
| previous claim. I guess in the end difficulty might just be a
| direct result of number of (relatively) unique features compared
| to other languages (of which they say Georgian has many)
| jcranmer wrote:
| I think that there are some features which can be said to be
| objectively more difficult than others. For example, all other
| things being equal, a language that had a larger phonemic
| inventory than a second would be objectively harder. Now do
| note that many comparisons means that it is easier on one
| feature while being harder on another: for example, Chinese has
| fewer phonemes than English does, but Chinese is tonal whereas
| English is not, and this makes it difficult to say if Chinese
| is (at least in terms of phonetics) easier or harder than
| English.
|
| While it is probably possible to tease out some sense of an
| objective scale for the phonetics or orthography of a language,
| when it comes to the grammatical features of a language, I
| don't think there is a realistic hope of identifying any
| reasonable scale of easier/harder languages. What makes
| languages easier or harder with respect to grammar is going to
| be less driven by absolute metrics of the grammar has this
| difficult or easy feature and more by the relative metric of
| does it have grammatical features known or unknown to the
| listener.
| jiggawatts wrote:
| One objective metric is to see how difficult it is for an adult
| to pick up a language to near-native-speaker levels.
|
| For a point of comparison, I've never heard of anyone learning
| to speak Hungarian fluently as an adult. I've seen clips of
| people who think they have and... they try hard but no, they
| haven't.
|
| Similarly Navajo code talkers were used in WWII because the
| language was supposedly difficult to pick up.
| causi wrote:
| _It 's interesting, because through my readings in linguistics,
| I got the sense that no language is "objectively" harder than
| any other, that everything is relative to the other languages
| you know._
|
| Not really. A language's difficulty is often proportional to
| how much contact it has with outsiders, i.e., how many people
| are learning to speak it as adults instead of as children.
| Isolated groups can develop truly esoteric and labyrinthine
| languages. When a language is being learned a lot by adults the
| hard parts tend to get polished off.
| citrin_ru wrote:
| Simplification of languages learned by adults happened mostly
| before written text become widespread (with the invention of
| the printing press). Written languages resist to change more
| than spoken only.
| causi wrote:
| And? How is that relevant to whether or not some languages
| are harder to learn than others?
| Jensson wrote:
| Many Japanese adults can't read Japanese fluently since the
| rules for reading are so complex, I think that makes the
| language objectively hard to learn.
| UpstandingUser wrote:
| While I'm inclined to agree with your point and I do think
| that some languages really are just more difficult, I think
| it should be pointed out that something like 54% of adults in
| the USA read below a sixth grade level. Many of them (about
| half) are functionally illiterate.
|
| source:
|
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Literacy_in_the_United_State.
| ..
| chrisweekly wrote:
| Thankfully, while your first assertion is (sadly) accurate,
| your 2nd is not. From the wikipedia article you cited:
|
| > "Literacy in the United States was determined by the
| National Center for Education Statistics to be at a mid to
| high level in 2019, at 79%, with 21% of American adults
| categorized as having "low level English literacy,"
| including 4.1% classified as "functionally illiterate" and
| an additional 4% that could not participate.[1] According
| to the U.S. Department of Education, 54% of adults in the
| United States have prose literacy below the 6th-grade
| level."
|
| Functional illiteracy is more like 4-8%.
| UpstandingUser wrote:
| The second claim comes from something I heard mentioned
| the other day in relation to a New Yorker article about
| parents finding out during covid lockdowns that their
| elementary school kids couldn't read hardly at all. I
| guess they've changed the teaching styles so kids don't
| really learn like most millenials did.
|
| FWIW, here's what I was found on Google:
|
| > According to the National Center for Educational
| Statistics (NCES), 21 percent of adults in the United
| States (about 43 million) fall into the
| illiterate/functionally illiterate category.
| psychomugs wrote:
| The ambiguity of the one-to-many character-reading
| relationship may also affect its usability for objective
| diction, as in science. Quoting from Neil Postman's
| _Technopoly_ , Nobel Prize for Medicine laureate Susumu
| Tonegawa said that "the Japanese language does not foster
| clarity or effective understanding in scientific research"
| and recommends adopting English.
| niumensprong wrote:
| Do you have a study or article that references those
| findings? I'm just curious, since I've learned some Japanese
| and the most complex thing I've encountered while reading is
| not knowing certain kanji.
| Tangurena2 wrote:
| I also studied Japanese. Our teacher (who was a native
| Japanese person) admitted that one has to be of high school
| age before they know enough kanji to be able to read a
| newspaper. Those kanji are in standard lists and part of
| those lists are what year (of school) they are to be
| learned by.
|
| For me, the harder parts were Keigo - the politeness levels
| and how essential they are.
| frodetb wrote:
| This paper reads like a long-form-shitpost of the highest
| quality. Both made me laugh and taught me something interesting.
| Of course, which language another uses to explain that something
| sounds like gibberish does not tell you anything about which is
| harder. And, judging by their flimsy yet insistent and very
| eloquent justification of their methodology, the authors were
| well aware of that.
|
| It is very cool to see Chinese coming out on top. As for the
| Norwegian that they left blank, I'll be happy to add that we use
| Greek to express that something is unintelligible:
| Det er helt Gresk for meg.
| jjtheblunt wrote:
| We say that in English too...i think Shakespeare used it. I
| wonder if Europeans non-Greek have been saying that since Roman
| (Latin) times as a kind of fun description.
| kbutler wrote:
| https://grammarist.com/idiom/its-greek-to-me-and-its-all-
| gre...
|
| Popularized by Shakespeare, but predates him as a latin
| phrase used by scribes: Graecum est; non
| legitur, which means "It is Greek and therefore is impossible
| to read."
| frodetb wrote:
| You're right, that line from Shakespeare is even quoted in
| the paper. From the list of sayings they had collected from
| various languages, Greek seems like the most popular
| comparison, followed by Chinese. But since there's a Greek
| saying that uses Chinese in its comparison, it is Chinese
| that ends up at the end of the graph.
|
| Edit: I went back to check and that is not right. Chinese
| wins out by a lot. I simply misremembered.
| resist_futility wrote:
| https://faculty.georgetown.edu/jod/texts/twain.german.html
|
| The Awful German Language, Mark Twain
| s5ma6n wrote:
| This was a fantastic read! Seeing the German language, that is
| also foreign to me, and its learning process explained by a
| master writer, gave me a great new perspective and
| understanding. Many topics that I felt not completely
| understood just fits into the place now.
| keepquestioning wrote:
| How about Lithuanian?
| dvh wrote:
| First 5 languages are the hardest.
| jll29 wrote:
| Depends. Difficult is a binary relation in my experience:
| _something_ is difficult to _somebody_.
|
| Is Mandarin Chinese difficult for a smart 10-year old, whose
| parents are Chinese (the mother a lawyer and the father a
| university professor, saY)? No.
|
| Is English difficult for a dyslectic homeless U.S.-American
| citizen who got only minimal school education? Probably so.
|
| I know a lot of people who admire Latin for its "logical"
| structure; I can only say that they probably haven't studied
| Spanish, where -um doesn't mean one of gazillion different
| things. I have three linguistics-related degrees, and I have yet
| to see a study that defines an objective "language difficulty"
| metric.
| dieselgate wrote:
| Defining "smart" for a child in terms of language doesn't
| really make sense here - their parents' careers being seemingly
| irrelevant. Our brains are prewired for language acquisition so
| if any "healthy" individual is around and exposed to a language
| at a young age they'll learn it, regardless of parental status
| etc.
| psychomugs wrote:
| Relevant: a difficulty list relative to English according to the
| Foreign Services Institute: https://www.state.gov/foreign-
| language-training/
|
| Japanese and Arabic used to be on a special rung in the hardest
| category.
| maxFlow wrote:
| Fun read, seeing as how this paper is from the late 70's, it
| would be interesting to know what comments the author got as part
| of his RFC for Japanese, Norwegian and Swedish.
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