New CBB

Welcome!

One thing I seriously recommend is a critical mindset. Some people will claim things about linguistics that are bullshit, and even if these people come off as knowledgeable oldbies, they may very well be wrong. (That said, it is my opinion that the amount of wrong on this forum has notably reduced in recent years.)

There's a surprising number of myths about language that have been established in the public consciousness - one that is surprisingly common is that French is logical, another is that some languages have no grammar - and for a beginner, these may be natural assumptions to hold, as they've been touted by so many authors, journalists, teachers and possibly friends and family as well.

These myths might affect our thinking about more general things in linguistics in mistaken ways - e.g. leading us to think that certain constructions are more logical than others, or more efficient or more correct ... and overcoming this is an important thing if you want to really understand linguistics. Some of them, of course, tend to be rejected quite early by anyone learning linguistics - the etymological fallacy is one seldom fallen into by those interested in linguistics. (Well. I've seen exceptions to that.)

At first, separating the wheat from the chaff might not be easy - and even when one gets good at it, the occasional chaff will be accepted and the occasional kernel of wheat rejected. That's life and that's science, so no biggie. One just needs to be aware of this.
Every model purporting to explain something may be wrong - and even if the model itself isn't wrong, the chance that we misunderstand its implications or meaning is rather big as well.

However, if you learn - by reading scholarly papers, by reading scholarly books, by reading grammars, and by thinking critically, you'll do great.

What is that even supposed to mean?

_________________
任何事物的发展都是物极必反，否极泰来。

Isn't that an excellent question? I have heard that a lot. A lot of people have told me Chinese has no grammar. I am like 'huh? Yeah, it kind of extremely does.'

_________________
♀♥♀
Dotjen
Kotanese

Ah, maybe that's it...one of the students in my exchange program to China kept saying this, so finally I said but you are taking a Chinese class how can you think this, and it turned out by "grammar" he meant "inflection."

_________________
任何事物的发展都是物极必反，否极泰来。

Huh. So in the popular mind, inflection = grammar. Ew.

From what I understood from the people who told me this (mind you, they were not studying Chinese) is that apparently Chinese just throws words out there and somehow it all miraculously makes sense.

_________________
♀♥♀
Dotjen
Kotanese

I think some people who do know that grammar is more than inflections - that grammar does include, for instance, word order and such - fail to understand that all languages do have grammar.

First of all, of course, and this is a generalization of the "inflection = grammar" problem, is that they fail to appreciate just how many ways grammar can exist - inflections, word order, lexical hierarchies

Re: lexical hierarchies, a good example are languages where in a clause with two nouns and one verb, it is very likely in that nouns of higher animacy are subjects, and nouns of lower animacy are objects; even in languages of that kind, though, there may be contextual cues as to when that assumption is disregarded as well even without explicit marking. Now, all of that *is* grammar, but try explaining that to someone who likes thinking that, say, Africans or Aboriginals or Asians don't have grammar - first of all, you're off on so abstract and untangible things - hierarchies of nouns! - that have very little to do with what people associate with whatever grammar they've been exposed to in school. Such hierarchies of nouns aren't exclusive to isolating languages in far-off lands, though, you can find similar things acting in how Swedish speakers determine whether the order of a sentence has been inverted for emphasis. (There, definiteness also plays a role, not just animacy. Is my intuition, at least - so don't trust my claim entirely on that either.)

People don't generally understand that congruence also can exist for other things than gender, definiteness and case either - so the Chinese classifier system, which is a reasonably complex system with congruence and a bit of other things thrown in, probably won't register as grammar to lots of people, it's just words that tend to occur with words, a bit like how you'd say "on the roof" and not than "in the roof" when talking of someone who is standing on top of your house, isn't it?
Turns out even that is grammar, of course, but since these are things people don't get wrong (and some people of course do get annoyed if you get some preposition wrong, even in cases when there's ample precedent for both prepositions being used in that construction - heck, some people will try correcting you even if you use a construction correctly because it looks close enough to a construction they know people sometimes get wrong... - and so on) that often, it's not taught as grammar the same way that, say, Latin conjugation is.

People have a very vague notion of what grammar is. But they don't really have any use for a correct notion either, so it's not like we really can do anything about it.

In a way this also has to do with the notion of how complex different languages are. The problem really is there's no meaningful metric that will give a reasonable objective reading - how do you measure the intricateness of the noun class hierarchies involved in a language, and what if there are complications like, say, some noun being considered way lower in one number than in another? How does a complex noun inflection compare to changes that pop up in words in certain positions in sentences (e.g. the semitic pausal forms), how does having an almost completely unpredictable derivation used to derive the perfect aspect form from the imperfect (e.g. Russian and some other slavic languages) compare to a rather complex ruleset for which participants in a sentence can be topicalized and which cannot. It's impossible to come up with a metric that takes all of it into context. And hence, it's bullshit to even talk of it.

Popping more myths!

Hungarian does not have more or less completely free word order. While you can indeed move words around a lot, most of these changes change the tone of the sentence, and sometimes even the meaning of it. Mostly not much. Sometimes much. There are usually not many options that sound correct/natural to a native in any given context.

––

The Swedish sound /ɧ/ does exist, most definitely. Like every other native speaker, I am well aware that almost every immigrant or learner fails to pronounce this sound correctly, and that must mean that it is distinct from sounds native to speakers of a very wide range of languages. Often even our Scandinavian neighbours can't get it completely right!

I grew up using it, but trained it away a few years ago, since I don't like it, and there are at least two other options that are just as native to Swedish, and thus obviously have no trouble pronouncing it, but I don't know how well speakers not growing up with it can produce it, but since they should obviously get exposed to the sound a lot, early on, from television and whatnot, I'm supposing they can.

As for the Wikipedia sample of the sound, the guy recording it doesn't get it completely right (like I wrote on its discussion page, it's okay, but it sounds like he's blowing out an excess of air, which isn't correct). The sound does vary a bit around Sweden, too. It seems to be more retroflex in central Sweden than it is in southern Sweden, where I come from, but the recording doesn't match up perfectly with either of those realisations. I'm thinking of making my own recording some day.

It seems to be the same guy to have recorded most of Wikipedia's clips, and I've heard other sounds he hasn't been completely successful with either, so those need to be taken with a grain of salt, and only used to get the general idea of a sound. Read the description and try to reproduce it yourself. Don't read the description on /ɧ/, though. It's terrible. I usually say that it's like a harsher /h/ but a much softer /x/. That's a simplified explanation, but not too far off.

_________________
= | = | = | = | = | =
‹› · Ḿḿ Ńń Ĺĺ Śś Źź Ąą Ǫǫ Ųų Æ̨æ̨ Ǽǽ Œ̨œ̨ Œ́œ́ Ɣɣ Y̋y̋ Įį Şş Z̧z̧ θ
Āā Ēē Īī Ōō Ūū ↗ Ṭṭ C̣c̣ Łł Ḍḍ Ṣṣ Ẓẓ Ṇṇ Ŋŋ e˞ o˞ ʷ ʲ ʰ ə

And so, L'äss is pro-actively introduced to the CBB's rampant thread derailing in a most unsubtle manner. :p

_________________
I speak English and a touch of Gàidhlig.
I am creating a conworld, which I refer to as the Carrion Series, that will contain three languages, Iriex, Dvoen and Maxna.

Please learn linguistics.


What linguists generally mean when they say 'free word order' is a thing Hungarian is a good example of. Of course, when non-linguists hear of this, they tend to misunderstand the implications. Your debunking of a myth is not much better than the myth itself.


I doubt anyone ever claims /ɧ/ doesn't exist - however, [ɧ] probably does not exist. However, /ɧ/ is not exceptional when it comes to foreigners having trouble with it - almost in every language, you'll find someone claiming that foreign learners don't get our l, our s, our t, our v, our ch, our ... right. What oftentimes is fun, though, is you also get actual native variation in those sounds as well, and those immigrants might very well produce something some other native speakers do produce - yet you react to the other cues that give away that this is a foreigner, and then conclude that his realization of this-or-that phoneme wasn't quite right. This is quite a common subconscious way of interpreting cues.



And you have heard every acceptable variation of it ever, and hence can pronounce an informed judgment on it?

An introduction to reasoning about linguistic things is a relatively good introduction, though.

Hanzi is the perfect written form for all languages. Hanzi and Chu Nom are mutually comprehensible [well its true for a few characters but these tend to be basic such as fire and mountain].

Many people believe that the standard form of the language, the one in which books are written, is to be considered the one authentic and articulate form of a given language, the other mutually intelligible varieties being mere dialects, crude and dumb distortions of the true mother tongue.

Even beginning students of linguistics know what horse-hockey that is. All varieties of every natlang are equally capable of expressing what their respective speakers want to say. Complexity among the natlangs is like a pop-up toy; if some aspects of a given dialect are simple, other aspects pop up with complexities. A given dialect becomes a standard language for historical reasons, not logical or linguistic ones.

Be that as it may, I have come up with an infallible test that reveals the difference between the one true authentic form of a language and the mere dialects thereof. The standard language is the one that everyone says is deteriorating. Presumably, mere dialects remain healthy.

--Jim G.

_________________
“If they give you ruled paper, write the other way.” --Juan Ramon Jimenez

I've heard this myth about how certain languages are more difficult than others. For example, many people seem to believe German is more difficult than French, but then French is more difficult than Italian, and Italian is more difficult than Spanish and so-on-forever.

_________________
UNUS•ET•UNICUS

That can be true, at least in the case that certain languages may be easier for speakers of a certain L1 than others. Spanish might be easier for a French speaker to learn than Gaelic, for example.

_________________
I speak English and a touch of Gàidhlig.
I am creating a conworld, which I refer to as the Carrion Series, that will contain three languages, Iriex, Dvoen and Maxna.

Yes, but that does of course end up with a kind of linguistic relativism: your mileage depends on your starting point. But also, actually, on interest: if you're very eager to study the Talmud, learning Aramaic and Mishnaic Hebrew won't feel very daunting. If you would rather read Japanese comics, learning Japanese won't be impossible - but try learning Aramaic with that as your main interest!

Very true, I didn't mean to imply any form of absolute difficulty.

_________________
I speak English and a touch of Gàidhlig.
I am creating a conworld, which I refer to as the Carrion Series, that will contain three languages, Iriex, Dvoen and Maxna.

Sure, everything is relative. What I meant was that supposedly languages have some innate degree of easiness/difficulty.

_________________
UNUS•ET•UNICUS

I tell people all the time that such and such a language isn't 'hard', it is different.

_________________
♀♥♀
Dotjen
Kotanese

What is true, though, is that languages that are spoken by a large number of speakers and have a written standard (or several), will be require more work to master a large subset of it, because they will have more registers, more sublects (jargons related to various professions, jargons related to various social situations, etc etc), and learning enough of them to manage in that circumstance is not easy - to master enough of Russian to manage reasonably well in Russia, you'll need more registers than you'll need to manage reasonably well in a Piraha village. Literacy provides a vector for linguistic variation to increase; obviously, some non-written language may have more variation than some written one - this is just a general guideline as to what will probably occur.

A natlang that is typologically very similar to your L1 but genetically completely unrelated, will be easier for you to acquire as an L2, than another natlang that is closely related to your L1 but typologically rather different.

That's because if the L2 is typologically nearly the same as your L1, but genetically unrelated, it's as if all you have to learn is a completely new lexicon that sounds arbitrary to you (compared to your L1s lexicon). You almost don't have to learn a new grammar; the L2's grammar is almost the same as your L1's.

And that seems to be an easier thing to do, than learn a very distinct grammar, with a lexicon of very similar-sounding words with meanings closely related to the meanings of the similar-sounding words in your L1. In fact, the cognates may cause you difficulty instead of easing the burden, if it happens that semantic drift has occurred in one 'lang and not the other. (E.g. English's drifted "bless" vs. French's undrifted "blessure" (means "wound"; French uses "benisse" for English's "bless")).

So, in a relative way, one natlang might be harder to acquire as an L2 than another, for a particular learner; and it may be possible to predict that.

_________________
I am not responsible for the accuracy of my sources; they're responsible for their own mistakes, if any, and also responsible for defending their own statements if you disagree with them.