[Basic] Learning languages

[malloyd]

Originally Posted by Fred Brackin

That sounds to me like the rule for iambic pentameter (i.e. Shakespeare) and not poetry in general.

Iambs go the other way unstressed-stressed, pentameter means there are 5 of them in a line, which is a fairly popular format (though I wouldn't be to surprised if ballad meter with alternating iambic tetrameter and iambic trimeter lines is slightly more common). There are a bunch of other feet with different stress patterns - stressed-unstressed for example is a trochee rather than an iamb, but the majority if English verse forms do use iambs, it's a fairly natural stress pattern in English

If your English teachers didn't ever tell you that, they really should have.

The English rules are something of a combination of the old Germanic (which had fixed number of stresses per half-line) and Aristotelian (which distinguished syllables by short vs long instead of unstressed/stressed) rules, which is why they are a little odd.

Does Ukranian poetry use the short/long distinction or just the line syllable count?

[Rocket Man]

Originally Posted by Fred Brackin

That sounds to me like the rule for iambic pentameter (i.e. Shakespeare) and not poetry in general.

Originally Posted by malloyd

Iambs go the other way unstressed-stressed, pentameter means there are 5 of them in a line, which is a fairly popular format (though I wouldn't be to surprised if ballad meter with alternating iambic tetrameter and iambic trimeter lines is slightly more common). There are a bunch of other feet with different stress patterns - stressed-unstressed for example is a trochee rather than an iamb, but the majority if English verse forms do use iambs, it's a fairly natural stress pattern in English

If your English teachers didn't ever tell you that, they really should have.

Edgar Allen Poe is the classic trochee example, for the unfamiliar:

ONCE u-PON a MID-night DREA-ry ...

[Critical]

Originally Posted by cosmicfish

I disagree - I think the two issues are convolved. That is, a language may be technically more or less difficult, AND may be relatively easy or difficult based on how similar it is to one's mother tongue. But the fact that (for example) English is more closely related to German than to Chinese probably makes it an easier lanuage for Germans to learn than it is for the Chinese... but it is still a difficult language compared to most in the world (from what I have been told by a host of non-native speakers).

I would also note that saying "That's for native speakers of English" only indicates that the language difficulty should be based on native language, not that it should be eliminated. Excepting the rare individual who does not have (for example) native phonyms and such, we are all going to have biases. If you want to consider languages solely by relative difficulty, then create a rule that correlates the similarity of languages to their difficulty - because they will NOT be equal for any given person!

Those Foreign Services Institute guidelines specifically mention that their figures are for English speakers. A set of guidelines for a Thai speaker would look very different. I don't think there is sufficient evidence to support the theory that some languages are inherently more complex than others. Maybe there are different complexity levels; maybe not.

[Flyndaran]

Originally Posted by cosmicfish

It does include reading and writing, but the two grads I know said that the spoken section was far more important. And again, these are people for whom comparative languages is literally a matter of life and death!

People are lazy/efficient and complex languages would simplify to meet the needs of the average person. That leads to complex languages working only for peoples that are more linguistically adept/intelligent. Since we're all the same species, I don't see how that would work.

[vicky_molokh]

Originally Posted by Ketsuban

Numbers aren't language; the words for them are, sure, but those words are - where we know their origin at all - generally either loanwords or derived from the process of counting on fingers. In the absence of animal handling or trade which necessitate being able to count, you don't need many numbers beyond the ones I mentioned which map cleanly onto the division of number expressed on the verb - singular, paucal (or dual, since a lot of anatomical features come in pairs), plural. Very few languages have a trial (three).

Numbers aren't the same. Roman, Arabic, Chinese, Hexadecimal and Binary are very unlike each other. And every loanword has to come from somewhere; I have no idea how one derives the words 'man' (Japanese for 10,000) or pint (0.125) from finger-counting.

Whether you count numbers as language or not is a long argument, but either way, numbers and the non-numerical language are two sides of the same coin (or, rather, polyhedron).

Originally Posted by Ketsuban

Languagemaking is exactly as scientific as you want it to be. Just don't be fooled into thinking that there was ever a period in human prehistory where the species sat down and started deciding on grammatical forms - our best guess is that language developed as the species did. There was most likely no Proto-World other than in the evolutionary-science sense that past a certain point in history all language is the ancestor of either all languages or none.

There was no period in prehistory where we sat down and started deciding on grammatical forms, but there was also no period where cavement set around a campfire and started calculating the optimal hydrodynamic shape for a canoe.

That something was not or is not a science does not make it a non-technology.

[vicky_molokh]

Originally Posted by malloyd

Does Ukranian poetry use the short/long distinction or just the line syllable count?

Not that I noticed, nor that I've been told explicitly while in school.
There's rhyming (almost exclusively word-ending and line-ending rhyming), and the rhyming patterns can be different, e.g. ABAB, AABB, ABCDABCD etc.

We don't have much in the way of distinguishing long and short syllables either. Overall patterns seem similar to Belarusian and Russian poetry, with the addition that we have semi-optional ability to replace consonants with vowels and vice versa on the beginning of a word, which allows slightly modifying the syllable count.

[sir_pudding]

Originally Posted by vicky_molokh

Not that I noticed, nor that I've been told explicitly while in school.
There's rhyming (almost exclusively word-ending and line-ending rhyming), and the rhyming patterns can be different, e.g. ABAB, AABB, ABCDABCD etc.

We don't have much in the way of distinguishing long and short syllables either. Overall patterns seem similar to Belarusian and Russian poetry, with the addition that we have semi-optional ability to replace consonants with vowels and vice versa on the beginning of a word, which allows slightly modifying the syllable count.

Russian and Ukrainian musical lyrics are often metrical, I suspect therefore that you have metrical poetic forms as well. I'm guessing that you just didn't study formal poetry in school or don't remember it if you did.

[vicky_molokh]

Originally Posted by sir_pudding

Russian and Ukrainian musical lyrics are often metrical, I suspect therefore that you have metrical poetic forms as well. I'm guessing that you just didn't study formal poetry in school or don't remember it if you did.

As far as I remember, metrical aspects of poetry were never given any mention during literature lessons (both Ukrainian and Foreign). OTOH, our school's teacher of music was apparently not very good at her job, and I wasn't any good at the subject either.
Maybe I'm missing something. But either way, I formally learned about meter from xkcd a few years ago.

[vicky_molokh]

Hmm. Random sample from Franco.
Vowels are е, є, у, ю, і, ї, о, и, а, я.

Веснянії пісні, // 3, 5 out of 6
Веснянії сни, // 3, 5 out of 5
Чом так безутішні, // 1, 2, 5 out of 6
Безвідрадні ви? // 3, 5 out of 5

Чи для вас немає // 1, 2, 3, 5 out of 6
Зелені в лісах, // 1, 5 out of 5
Чи для вас не сяє // 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 out of 6
Сонце в небесах? // 1, 5 out of 5

Чи для вас весела // 1, 2, 3, 5 out of 6
Квітка не цвіте, // 1, 3, 5 out of 5
Що лиш вбогі села, // 1, 2, 3, 5 out of 6
Людський біль здрите? // 2, 3, 5 out of 5
(And so on.)

--+-+-
--+-+
++--+-
--+-+

+++-+-
+---+
+++++-
+---+

+++-+-
+-+-+
+++-+-
-++-+

Doesn't seem like much of a pattern to me. Maybe I'm missing something. Then again, that's just one random sample.

[Ketsuban]

Originally Posted by vicky_molokh

Numbers aren't the same. Roman, Arabic, Chinese, Hexadecimal and Binary are very unlike each other. And every loanword has to come from somewhere; I have no idea how one derives the words 'man' (Japanese for 10,000) or pint (0.125) from finger-counting.

Hexadecimal and binary are abstract concepts; they're not used by any languages I know of. The languages (substituting "Latin" for "Roman") you mentioned all inherited their words, and in all three cases have no known analysis. (I did read a tentative attempt to derive the Indo-European numerals from other IE roots which were related to counting, but it was pretty speculative and I can't find it again now.) As for the specific examples:

• 万/萬 is borrowed from Chinese, and hence of Sino-Tibetan origin. Numbers higher than twenty are more likely to be derived either from numbers below twenty or from words describing enormity - an example is Greek myrios "infinite, countless, abundant" > "ten thousand".
• "Pint" is from Latin picta "painted" - you painted a mark on a vessel to indicate "this much". (Measurements don't indicate numbers, they indicate a quantity of something. A furlong was the length of a furrow; "acre" originally meant "field"; a poronkusema is how far a reindeer can go before it needs to ****.)