07-14-2014, 01:16 PM | #11 | |
Join Date: Sep 2009
Location: Los Angeles
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Re: [Basic] Learning languages
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07-14-2014, 01:34 PM | #12 | |
Join Date: Jun 2008
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Re: [Basic] Learning languages
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Language isn't a technology - there's no progression to it. Sound change causes languages to go from isolating to agglutinating to inflecting and back to isolating again - independent words become affixes which then fuse together and wear away to be replaced by new independent words. |
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07-14-2014, 05:29 PM | #13 | ||
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Join Date: Mar 2006
Location: Kyïv, Ukraine
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Re: [Basic] Learning languages
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And while we're at it, there's no progression to numbers - decimal systems still have 10 numbers, duodecimal have 12 etc. But there's progression in math - as new procedures are invented, so are symbolical representations of them. And as people invent, say, new procedures in marketing, or discover new phenomena in sociology, so they also invent the symbolical representation for them, making the language richer, more advanced. It would be accurate to say that language-making is unscientific - just like boatmaking was unscientific before the invention of hydrodynamics and material science. But it would be strange to say that boatmaking was not a technology back then. |
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07-14-2014, 05:55 PM | #14 |
Join Date: Mar 2010
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Re: [Basic] Learning languages
The Defense Language Institute would disagree with this statement. They have roughly uniform (ha ha) expectations of fluency across all their "full-time" programs, but they divide languages into at least three catagories of difficulty, with the hardest getting only the "best" students and still taking about twice as long to learn!
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07-14-2014, 06:45 PM | #15 | |
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Join Date: Oct 2004
Location: Forest Grove, Beaverton, Oregon
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Re: [Basic] Learning languages
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__________________
Beware, poor communication skills. No offense intended. If offended, it just means that I failed my writing skill check. |
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07-14-2014, 06:48 PM | #16 | |
Join Date: Sep 2009
Location: Los Angeles
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Re: [Basic] Learning languages
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07-14-2014, 06:55 PM | #17 |
Join Date: Mar 2010
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Re: [Basic] Learning languages
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!
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07-14-2014, 07:03 PM | #18 | |
Join Date: Mar 2010
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Re: [Basic] Learning languages
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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! |
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07-14-2014, 07:54 PM | #19 | |
Join Date: Aug 2007
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Re: [Basic] Learning languages
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<shrug> I could be wrong. I'm terrible at picking up iambic pentameter in Shakespeare and I don't think I could write any to save my life. I suppose I could have missed it everywhere else but I don't think so. I am sure that no one in school told me that I had to alternate accented and unaccented syllables when writing poetry. Rhyme schemes, internal rhymes, euphony but not alternating syllable stress. Note that English poetry does not all descend from Shakespeare. It's as sprawling and unorganized as everything else in the language. Remember when you decided that English does not have a "literary" language form? What you may not have grasped was how much trouble you had explaining to us what one was and/or why we would want one. I couldn't explain it.
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Fred Brackin |
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07-14-2014, 08:02 PM | #20 | |
Join Date: Jun 2008
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Re: [Basic] Learning languages
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).
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Last edited by Ketsuban; 07-14-2014 at 08:07 PM. |
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