Jerry Friedman wondered aloud to the group:
>Hm. Are speakers of English lazier than speakers of Russian or,
>for that matter, Hungarian? (I think Hungarian has lots of noun
>inflections--but I've been wrong before.)
The web site I found says it does; from some brief examples, it looks as
strongly cased as Latin, and it incorporates number and person into the
verb like Spanish.
I tend to hew to a market principle in language, by which I mean that any
given language has a job to do--mediate human conversation--and will by the
equivalent of market principles, find equally efficient solutions to the
job, at least to within the degree perceivable to speakers. In other
words, every language and its speakers are going to be more or less
equivalent in laziness, efficiency, redundancy, etc.
There are some exceptions; for example, historical forces have driven
English to an unusually large number of words in the lexicon, and the size
of the lexicon has been preserved in part by the innovation of
writing/printing.
>> One of the most common errors I hear among ESL speakers
>> is the use of "the" where a native speaker would use a null article.
>
>Another place where we can be accused of industriousness. Russian
>has six cases, but no articles, and our articles seem like a lot of
>unnecessary effort to Russians.
Right. I'm not an expert, but I think that articles are a unique
innovation of IE languages (that Russian has secondarily lost, along with
the copula). Most languages get along fine without articles. Articles
shift a little bit of burden from context to the language itself, which is
an interesting idea, but not really a limit on or a boon to communication.
>I've had many conversations with native (and Native) speakers of
>American Indian languages, and the same applies--I've heard them
>say that you can say something in Navajo but not in English,
Most speakers have similar kinds of folklore about their native
language--Japanese of the Meiji era had an inferiority complex about the
written language, English speakers think that English has wretched
orthography, Russian speakers think that their language is more expressive
because it's fairly synthetic [1] (as IE languages go), etc.
I tend to think that languages are roughly equivalent in their ability to
express thought, i.e., that you think like a human, even if you talk like a
Welshmen or Quechuan.
>I never heard the Navajo speaker comment on the fact that English wasn't
>tonal.
True, and I certainly don't expect Vlad to say that Dragaeran is a topical
head-last uninflected language; but I might expect him to repeat the
language folklore about the difference.
> Another
>example is that sopranos are often pretty big--Joan Sutherland, for
>example, had no trouble with the high notes. I believe the throat,
>mouth, and sinuses are more important to sopranos' high notes than
>the trachea and chest.
Very true, but given the likely morphology of Dragaeran height (they're
beanpoles), I think that's like to result in longer air columns (lower base
frequency) particularly. The resonating cavities might not be too much
larger, though; that's a good point.
>> Dragaeran will probably also avoid the /i/ phoneme, which will
>>
>> give Dragaerans a pronounced accent when speaking Fenarian.
>
>Football players seem to be able to say /i/ as well as eight-year-
>olds.
I'm probably misremembering how we do frequency decomposition to do vowel
recognition, then. I was thinking that a species shift down in tone might
leave them unable to access the higher end cleanly enough for efficient
use, but in fact, with a larger air column but similar resonating chambers,
you probably end up with better frequency separation.
[1] I'm probably not using "synthetic" correctly; I mean, Russian speakers
tell me they can make up a lot of new words, presumably meaning that
they've got a large variety of morphemes to combine, like a souped-up
version of compounding in German. I'm using "synthetic" because word
synthesis like that sounds like the younger sister of polysynthesis.
--
"An archeologist is the best husband a woman can have; the older she gets, the
more interested he is in her."--Agatha Christie
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