DOOM

[The Ratt]

Originally Posted By: Dantius

So other languages have a trade imbalance with English? Sweet! That makes us like the China of linguistics!

Yes! now when china tries to redeem all the debt that we owe them, we can get it all back from other languages that owe us words!

[Necris Omega]

Originally Posted By: Lt. Sullust

If you're looking for a simple language look at something like Japanese.

And yet, at least one source seems to put Japanese as the single most difficult language a native English speaker could possibly attempt to learn.

[Harehunter]

Originally Posted By: HOUSE of S

It doesn't really do that, though. English grammar hasn't changed significantly in a long time, and owes bits to relatives of Old French and nothing, really, to Latin or Greek, let alone Spanish or any other languages that English acquires words from. But the word-acquiring works in all directions, all languages do that, and indeed English probably provides other languages with vastly more loan-words than it receives.

English grammar has not been affected Latin or Greek, but its vocabulary has. Just take a quick tour of the medical dictionary, which is heavily populated by words manufactured from Greek root words. Other technologies manufacture words from Latin roots. BTW, the melding of adjectives to nouns to form new nouns is a characteristic of German, which loves to do that. As for words like rodeo, lariat, poncho, they are taken directly from Spanish.

The Norman French influence is evident from the perspective of food. To the Saxons who raised the livestock, it was called pig or cow. To the Normans, it was referred as pork or beouf, pork coming from Latin root word porcus into the French language, and beouf which came from Old French. Note that the transliteration of beouf to beef demonstrates my earlier point about the inconsistency of keeping the pronunciation and changing the spelling.

[ĐªгŦĦ Єяŋϊε]

gimmee some BEOUF!!!

[Dintiradan]

Originally Posted By: Necris Omega

Originally Posted By: Lt. Sullust

If you're looking for a simple language look at something like Japanese.

And yet, at least one source seems to put Japanese as the single most difficult language a native English speaker could possibly attempt to learn.

The big issue with languages like Japanese, at least according to people like Feynman, is that it's very context dependent and influenced by culture. I found that was also the case with Biblical Hebrew (and modern-day Hebrew is a Category IV, apparently). Not only are you dealing with a completely different language family, but to translate many passages you need to have an understanding of the culture at the time.

The other issue with Biblical Hebrew is that there's really one only text (unlike, say, Greek), and that text was written over the course of centuries by many different authors (unlike, say, the Quran). Perhaps millennia from now, the Norton Anthology of English Literature will be the primary text for studying Ancient English, which will cover all the way from Chaucer to Shakespeare to Milton to Pope to Wordsworth to Wilde.

[nikki.]

Originally Posted By: Dintiradan

. Perhaps millennia from now, the Norton Anthology of English Literature will be the primary text for studying Ancient English, which will cover all the way from Chaucer to Shakespeare to Milton to Pope to Wordsworth to Wilde.

Lets hope not - the paper they use to print the Norton on is ridiculously thin on the copies I've found.

[Randomizer]

Everything will be computerized, but the computers to access the information will no longer exist. Wait that's already happening and my program on a paper tape.

[A less presumptuous name.]

Originally Posted By: Necris Omega

Originally Posted By: Lt. Sullust

If you're looking for a simple language look at something like Japanese.

And yet, at least one source seems to put Japanese as the single most difficult language a native English speaker could possibly attempt to learn.

My brother started taking Japanese and continued it in college. He says that it's a very simple language, although it appears to me that he learns a lot of culture to go along with the language. Really, I think the difficulty in learning a language depends more on the student and the teacher rather than the language itself.

[Karoka]

Originally Posted By: Master1

Originally Posted By: Necris Omega

Originally Posted By: Lt. Sullust

If you're looking for a simple language look at something like Japanese.

And yet, at least one source seems to put Japanese as the single most difficult language a native English speaker could possibly attempt to learn.

My brother started taking Japanese and continued it in college. He says that it's a very simple language, although it appears to me that he learns a lot of culture to go along with the language. Really, I think the difficulty in learning a language depends more on the student and the teacher rather than the language itself.

Wait until you learn to write in Chinese.

[A less presumptuous name.]

The problem with learning to write in Chinese for me is the same as learning to write with a Latin alphabet for a Chinese person. It's a new alphabet. Learning the Chinese alphabet wouldn't be that much different than learning the Arabic alphabet, as far as I can see.

 

So perhaps there is one more factor in the ease of learning a language: similarities to your native language. It is probably easier for a Chinese person to learn Korean than it would be for me.

[Karoka]

I was trying to imply that China uses over 80,000 letters (you need at least 3,000 to read the newspaper). But I like your idea better.

[Alorael at Large]

China doesn't use "letters" because Chinese is non-alphabetic. The symbols used represent variously words or syllables, and yes, there are thousands. To be educated, you need several thousand. Comparatively, I imagine learning a mere 26 characters is easy, although learning the concept of graphemes representing phonemes isn't, and the way English links pronunciation to spelling is highly obtuse.

 

That said, the completely different grammar of Asian languages when compared to Romance or Germanic languages means there are plenty of barriers both ways.

 

—Alorael, who says this based on cursory linguistics and the commentary of friends studying English, Chinese, Japanese, and Korean. He sticks with his alphabet of choice and a smattering of Hebrew.

[Callie]

Letter is not the right term: letters form an alphabet. Character is what you're looking for.

 

Edit: Sniped by the sniper!

[Harehunter]

Originally Posted By: Randomizer

Everything will be computerized, but the computers to access the information will no longer exist. Wait that's already happening and my program on a paper tape.

Oh my aching eyeballs. I'll bet you can still read that tape without the machine, too.

[Slawbug]

It's certainly true that ease of learning depends on what languages you already know. However, when you study this, you can still find that certain languages are easier or harder to become fluent in even after accounting for differences in previously known languages, and natively spoken languages.

 

As an analytic language, meaning one that relies on word order rather than affixes for the bulk of its syntax, English is relatively easy to pick up as far as crude communication goes, but relatively difficult to become fluent in, because syntactic elements are not as cut-and-dry as they are when you can rely on affixes, so far more subtleties of use arise. English's unusually large vocabulary base also contributes to the difficulty.