The Language Thread

[D26]

I know fluently Portuguese and I learned in school English and French, so I speak a "very good level" english and "not so well level" French and Spanish, and if counts I know some words/sentences in Italian, Japonese and German!

In the future I would like to learn Japonese and Russian.

 

[Vimana]

We spell it Japan.

 

[zabu of nΩd]

What if Asians are smarter because their languages are simpler? I've noticed that the most inflected languages are of people who are little over hunter gatherer in development, yet the societies that have been civilized the most have simple languages compared to most others. Maybe when one's native language is so simple that it does not directly convey most information in the words, the person has to rely on quick wit to even understand others. Maybe this gives the brain lots of exercise.

That's actually a rather interesting theory. You should try looking around online and seeing if there are any linguistics studies on that.

 

[Vimana]

I doubt any exist. It's a rather complex thing to assess since there are hundreds of language families, and weighing different complexities would be tough.

I do find it interesting to view how perceptions of concepts change over time based on the meanings of words, though. That would be fun enough to study.

An example: the Spanish word "rogar," which means "to pray," comes from the Latin "rogare," which means "to request" (according to wiktionary). It's something I'd love to point out to my Hispanic mother when she tells me prayer isn't asking for stuff.

 

[zabu of nΩd]

Yeah, can't say i find changes in the meanings of words over time that interesting. So what if there was a bit of "telephone" going on throughout history as different cultures clashed / grew apart?

 

[Vimana]

Well, this is relevant to the psychological idea that gods were made up to satisfy people.

 

[Blind Guardian]

What if Asians are smarter because their languages are simpler? I've noticed that the most inflected languages are of people who are little over hunter gatherer in development, yet the societies that have been civilized the most have simple languages compared to most others. Maybe when one's native language is so simple that it does not directly convey most information in the words, the person has to rely on quick wit to even understand others. Maybe this gives the brain lots of exercise.

I don't buy it. Here's an example of the opposite: Maori is analytic (morphologically "simple"), while German is agglutinative. Of course, for this to work you'd need to be a racist asshole and assume that Germans are smarter than the indigenous people(s) of New Zealand. Let's. :Spin:

Joking aside, I think it should be pretty obvious that language differences have nothing to do with development gaps between cultures. What a language lacks in one area it compensates for in another, so everything evens out *.

* An exception is "domain loss", but that is the result of culture affecting language rather than the opposite.

 

[Summerian]

 

[Morbus616]

I speak swedish (no shit) and english. I've tried to learn other languages, but it's hard.

 

[Zephyrus]

I can read for scholarly purposes all the language I need to know (Ancient Greek, Latin, German and French), though I might try to improve my Italian since plenty of classical scholarship's in that language too. Don't have much interest in any others though Classical Persian or even Classical Arabic could be useful.

 

[Vimana]

I don't buy it. Here's an example of the opposite: Maori is analytic (morphologically "simple"), while German is agglutinative. Of course, for this to work you'd need to be a racist asshole and assume that Germans are smarter than the indigenous people(s) of New Zealand. Let's. :Spin:

Joking aside, I think it should be pretty obvious that language differences have nothing to do with development gaps between cultures. What a language lacks in one area it compensates for in another, so everything evens out *.

* An exception is "domain loss", but that is the result of culture affecting language rather than the opposite.

I'll elaborate on the point I was making.

In English, the sentence "where are you going" contains the word "where," which asks about a place, "are" which is a conjugation of the verb "to be" that is either second person singular and plural, first person plural, or third person plural, and "you," which I don't need to explain, and "going" which is a form of "go" that contains an ending that illustrates an action in progress. There is so much specificity in the communication of the concepts that one does not need to think about the situation or anything to understand the sentence.

In Korean, that sentence is two words: eodi kayo? (I don't know the different Romanizations, but phonetically, it's like "uh-dee kah-yo," though the k almost sounds like a g). eodi means "where" and "ka" means go (no tense specified), and "yo" is put at the end of the verb to make the sentence polite. To know that that sentence means "where are you going" you have to think about the situation. If you do that with everything whenever you speak, I can see how your thoughts can end up more in-depth habitually.

I can read for scholarly purposes all the language I need to know (Ancient Greek, Latin, German and French), though I might try to improve my Italian since plenty of classical scholarship's in that language too. Don't have much interest in any others though Classical Persian or even Classical Arabic could be useful.

Classical Persian would be a nice challenge for you, but you'd pick it up very quickly with your knowledge of Latin, Greek, and English. For example, the word for wolf is varka, which is a cognate of "warg," and past is "pasā." I can't remember any more words off the top of my head, but your biggest trouble might be the writing. They use an adopted form of cuneiform that is syllablary, and Persian has almost as many sounds as Sanskrit.

 

[Zephyrus]

Perhaps I'll give it a shot if my career leads me to focus on topics such as the Roman/Byzantine vs. Persian wars. But in that case it's Middle Persian that I'd be learning. Also, Syriac.


For now, I have a little project going on where I'm creating Ancient Greek Scrabble. I just had a programmer friend analyze the first book of Plato's Republic in Greek for its letter frequencies, and I'll take those to figure out the rough percentage each letter of the alphabet takes in order to assign point values. I plan to simply draw/paint Greek letters on the back of normal Scrabble tiles and play by the same rules. I've got plenty of grad students to test it out with.

 

[Vimana]

If I remember correctly, Middle Persian has about the simplicity of modern Romance languages. Also, are you going to incorporate accents into Ancient Greek Scrabble?

 

[Zephyrus]

Nope. Since normal scrabble is in all caps, so will this. Old school, since Ancient Greek was originally written in all caps with no accents or breathing marks.

 

[Vimana]

It was? Damn. The accents are the main thing that discouraged me. Breathing marks were easy. Rough opens right, and the other is by process of elimination.

 

[Zephyrus]

Soft breathing goes on any vowel (or second letter of a dipthong) that begins a word.

Yeah, accent rules are tricky. Even I haven't gotten them all down, but taking Greek Composition next semester will make them second nature at last.

If you ever looked at an Ancient Greek or Latin manuscript ITWOVLDLOOKLIKETHIS

 

[Vimana]

Oh, wow. It surprises me how long the refining process of the Latin script took. It's been around for millennia and has gone through some serious changes. Maybe it's because it's been used in multiple languages.

I think Hangul is still the same as it was when it was first created, and if I remember correctly, it was created in around a year by decree of an emperor. But it's only used in Korean, and it was made for the Korean language because writing in Chinese made literacy rates too low.

On a similar note: I think learning Chinese characters helps with one's visual memory and ability to pick up details. There was a study that said that when a person who grew up writing in Chinese looks at a picture, they look at the background and foreground equally, whereas someone writing in the Roman alphabet looks at the foreground first.

 

[Zephyrus]

That makes the same sense as the difference between playing Chess and playing Go. The former has more focus on the individual pieces, while the latter concentrates on the whole picture much more (since all the stones are the same). That such a West/East dichotomy exists even in the writing system is no mystery.

But yes, they were all caps (and of course they didn't refer to them as caps; we did that later because the word "capital" is an adjective referring to "caput" (head)), with no spaces between words. This was very economical as you could fit more on a papyrus scroll. It also means that they ancients were much more sensitive to syntax and style to convey meaning than we give credit for in inflected languages.

Accents in Greek came in with the Byzantine period, since the vulgate pronunciation had by then strayed so far from Homeric and Attic that they needed some notation put in there to allow one to pronounce classical poetry correctly.

 

[Master_Yoda77]

I'm thinking about casually taking up Italian. Ever since Latin and now Ancient Greek I just love learning languages.

 

[challenge_everything]

Currently learning Spanish in Guatemala.