--- Greg Morrow <dr.elmo at whiterose.org> wrote: > 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. Thanks. > 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. The job, however, may depend on the culture--different people have different things to communicate. > 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). Hm, that would mean that Latin lost articles and the Romance languages reinvented them. Not that I'm arguing--that seems quite believable. Articles aren't unique to IE. Hebrew has a definite article but no indefinite, and I think the situation is the same in Arabic. Then again, the people who believe in such things believe that the IE and Afro-Asiatic (Semitic and Hamitic) language phyla are related. ... > >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 am *not* getting into this debate. For one thing, I don't have the expertise. Let me just say that some people disagree. For Navajo, the person I mentioned recommended _ Language and Art in the Navajo Universe_ by Gary Witherspoon, a non-Navajo anthropologist. > >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; I'd be amused if he did. > but I might expect him to repeat the > language folklore about the difference. He certainly might, but as your examples above point out, this folklore can exist between related languages, so Vlad's failure to mention it doesn't mean anything about how similar Fenarian and Dragaeran are. ... > >> 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. ... Actually, if we want to know what Dragaerans sound like, we should probably listen to interviews with NBA centers. In what little I've heard, I wouldn't have been able to tell the person was tall. Has any character ever known whether another character was Eastern or Dragaeran just from the voice? I guess we haven't encountered many eavesdropping or yelling-through-the-door situations. Jerry Friedman __________________________________ Do you Yahoo!? Yahoo! Small Business $15K Web Design Giveaway http://promotions.yahoo.com/design_giveaway/