liosama Wrote:

jajaaan Wrote:Though they probably would have hundreds of words for concepts we describe with only a few words like "rain" and "snake."

"hundreds"

lol

Well, they say that the Eskimos have a vast number of words for snow. Japanese make distinctions we don't make in their words for rice, and I understand that Polynesians have a lot of different words for island. Hell, I don't know much about the Amazon, but I do know it's full of snakes and it rains a lot... seems only natural.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eskimo_snow

yudantaiteki Wrote:Where are the punctuation errors? The Economist is a British magazine (or "newspaper") so the comma outside the quotation mark is not an error, but I didn't see anything else.

The Economist Wrote:“Crazy English”, by an American folk-linguist, Richard Lederer, asks “how is it that your nose can run and your feet can smell?”.

Crazy English is a book, so its title should be italicized. "Folk linguist" should not be hyphenated. The full stop is unnecessary. The sentence would be much better if it was rewritten as "American folk linguist Richard Lederer's book Crazy English asks, 'How is it that your nose can run and your feet can smell?'"

Quote:Bill Bryson’s “Mother Tongue: English and How It Got That Way” says that “English is full of booby traps for the unwary foreigner…Imagine being a foreigner and having to learn that in English one tells a lie but the truth.”

Again, a book's title has erroneously been put in quotation marks. There should also be a space after the ellipsis.

Quote:English spelling may be the most idiosyncratic, although French gives it a run for the money with 13 ways to spell the sound “o”: o, ot, ots, os, ocs, au, aux, aud, auds, eau, eaux, ho and ö.

All of the French spellings should either be in italics or in quotation marks.

Quote:“Ghoti,” as wordsmiths have noted, could be pronounced “fish”: gh as in “cough”, o as in “women” and ti as in “motion”.

"Gh," "o," and "ti" should all either be in italics or in quotation marks.

Quote:The uvular r’s of French and the fricative, glottal ch’s of German (and Scots) are essential to one’s imagination of these languages and their speakers.

An apostrophe should only be used to mark a contraction or the possessive case. To avoid confusion, the writer could have written "rs" or "Rs" and "chs." Using an apostrophe plus "s" to mark a noun as plural is grammatically incorrect.

Quote:Vowels, for example, go far beyond a, e, i, o and u, and sometimes y.

This sentence is correct as it is. Taking the mistakes from the previous sentence into account, however, "a," "e," "i," "o," "u," and "y" should all be italicized for consistency. There are several more instances of this, but I'll skip those.

Quote:Further research showed that adult !Xóõ-speakers had the same lump (children had not developed it yet).

The parenthesized part should be a separate sentence.

Quote:German has three genders, seemingly so random that Mark Twain wondered why “a young lady has no sex, but a turnip has”.

Quote:Linguists call this “aspect”, and English has it too, for example in the distinction between “I go” and “I am going.”

The writer is inconsistent in his choice of where to place the full stop for sentences that end with a quotation.

Quote:The English curiosity “antidisestablishmentarianism” has seven morphemes (“anti”, “dis”, “establish”, “-ment”, “-ari""-an” and “-ism”).

The morphemes "-ari" and "-an" should be separated by a space. There should also be a comma after "-ari."

Quote:This is unusual in English, whereas it is common in languages such as Turkish. Turks coin fanciful phrases such as “Çekoslovakyalilastiramadiklarimizdanmissiniz?”, meaning “Were you one of those people whom we could not make into a Czechoslovakian?”

There is no full stop after this sentence. This is inconsistent with the earlier sentence that ended with an interrogative quotation.

Quote:Some verb-endings even say where the action of the verb takes place relative to the speaker: gwerantena means “to place a large object in a low place nearby”.

"Verb endings" should not be hyphenated.

Some of those are British/American differences, others are just personal in-house style choices, and I think some of those are due to the online version and aren't present in the print one (the lack of spaces, for instance).

The AP style guide (among others) says "r's" is correct, other books say it's wrong (it's not "grammatically correct" since there's no issue of grammar here; r's vs. rs is purely an orthography concern).

A lot of issues of punctuation, spacing, italics, quotations, etc. are not set in stone, but differ based on which style guide you are using.

The writer should still at least have been consistent.

We've covered this before. No language is harder than any other language (the natives have no problems speaking them). Complexity in one area of a language usually causes simplicity in another.

One language can be harder than another for a native speaker of a certain language though, due to difference from their native language.

Ex: It's easier for a Spanish speaker to learn Portuguese than to learn Korean, but objectively Korean is no harder than Portuguese.

"World's languages most unfamiliar to native speakers of English" doesn't make as good of an article title I guess.

Quote:gwerantena means “to place a large object in a low place nearby”.

Why is the former harder than the latter? Adding information with affix/suffixes seems easier to me than having to encode it all grammatically.

hehe, An odd tangent, but... as usual with online articles, there's a couple minor errors, and little else that yudantaiteki didn't explain away--see also: http://www.economist.com/research/styleguide/ (esp. 'italics'/'titles'*/'inverted commas') or http://owl.english.purdue.edu/owl/resource/621/1 (forming plurals of lowercase letters)... It's pretty consistent, in my opinion. It just seems cluttered because of all the 'meta' language and examples (though you could argue this is precisely why a tinge of prescriptivism has entered the fray, because the clutter makes it more important to be more nitpicky or rather, for the editor to be especially attentive).

*Edit: My bad, that's just for people's titles--the bit about italicizing titles is at the bottom of the 'italics' section...

So, Shirokuro, would I be reading too much into your post if I'm getting that you're saying English should have been included as one of the world's hardest languages too?

Oh, then that's OK that they wrote the titles that way. Sorry. I hadn't meant for my comment to blow up like this. Melius fuerat non scribere. I just didn't think the article was very well-written in general, and I found the punctuation pretty jarring.

But even in the very first sentence of the article, the writer has not followed The Economist's style guide. Here's what the style guide says on the subject:

The Economist Wrote:For the relative placing of quotation marks and punctuation, follow Hart's rules. Thus, if an extract ends with a full stop or question-mark, put the punctuation before the closing inverted commas. His maxim was that “love follows laughter.” In this spirit came his opening gambit: “What's the difference between a buffalo and a bison?”

I also found this quotation from the site that nest0r linked to interesting:

The OWL Wrote:Apostrophes are used to form plurals of letters that appear in lowercase; here the rule appears to be more typographical than grammatical, e.g. "three ps" versus "three p's."

The implication here is that this usage is not technically grammatically correct, but has become accepted because it was (and continues to be) a widespread typographic practice.

I still also think consistency is really important, and I thought that the article contained a lot of inconsistencies.

Also, what did I point out that was just a difference between American and British usage?

jajaan Wrote:So, Shirokuro, would I be reading too much into your post if it looks like you're saying English should have been included as one of the world's hardest languages too?

I don't think any language could be called "the hardest language in the world." I agree with what Jarvik7 wrote, and actually wrote something pretty similar earlier in this thread.

Anyways, honestly, I'm normally not that picky about this sort of thing. English is a living language, and it is changing every day. I personally believe that how a language is actually used is more important than prescriptivist rules about its usage. For example, I actually consider pluralizing lowercase letters by adding an apostrophe and an "s" completely valid, although it still strikes me as grammatically nonsensical. For the same reason, I don't think there's anything wrong with the use of "they" or "them" as singular, and so on. I also consider all dialects, topolects, and languages equally legitimate, so that, for example, I believe that African American Vernacular English is in no way "inferior" to Standard American English. (And I don't consider myself a "grammar stickler" like Lynne Truss, or whatever it was she called herself.) I'm just being nitpicky because I didn't like the article.

Well, with your descriptivist ethic understood, I'll just add that I didn't find too many inconsistencies, nothing jarring, and even the end quotes/full stops are arguable in many cases--at the least they're not immediately obvious as wrong based on the extracts' original punctuation, rather than glaring errors. Likewise, I see and personally hyphenate words all the time that you could argue shouldn't be (ex: Google "folk-linguist"). As for the typographical vs. grammatical, honestly if it's a widespread, common practice, it's 'grammatically' valid, even if idiomatically so. Personally I would try to avoid lowercase + apostrophe, and instead use capitalized versions of the individual letters, but sometimes lowercase just feels better. ;p

That said, I didn't like the article much either, because it felt meandering and anecdotal, with the encapsulating statements about linguistics having the feel of secondhand transcriptions of Wikipedia statements that were themselves the kind of sentences that would have 'citation needed' in bracketed superscript.

This is funny: "Ms is permissible though ugly." (from the style guide)

nest0r Wrote:Likewise, I see and personally hyphenate words all the time that you could argue shouldn't be (ex: Google "folk-linguist").

You're not writing for The Economist, though.

Oh, and I found this quotation from the style guide's section on italics pretty funny:

The Economist Wrote:NEWSPAPERS AND PERIODICALS. Note that only The Economist has The italicised. Thus the Daily Telegraph, the New York Times, the Observer, the Spectator (but Le Monde, Die Welt, Die Zeit).

You've got to love double standards.

shirokuro Wrote:

nest0r Wrote:Likewise, I see and personally hyphenate words all the time that you could argue shouldn't be (ex: Google "folk-linguist").

You're not writing for The Economist, though.

Pfft, even if I was writing for something professional, I'd expect editors to consider how the hyphen contributes to the texture. Although in this case, I guess having it for 'folk linguist' is pretty arbitrary and needless. Also, my suggestion to Google 'folk-linguist' was a bad example, but the point stands, hehe.

nest0r Wrote:This is funny: "Ms is permissible though ugly." (from the style guide)

Hehe, I saw that and thought it was pretty funny, too. Also, the writer uses "Ms" in that article.

shirokuro Wrote:Oh, and I found this quotation from the style guide's section on italics pretty funny:

The Economist Wrote:NEWSPAPERS AND PERIODICALS. Note that only The Economist has The italicised. Thus the Daily Telegraph, the New York Times, the Observer, the Spectator (but Le Monde, Die Welt, Die Zeit).

Ironically, I consider The Economist to be more incorrect than The New York Times (I'm more familiar with the latter as a kind of brand or alternatively as an abbreviation, NYT), because for me it's more an internet site and my familiarity with the name stems from the URL, 'economist.com'--in fact, I think they should change their name so people don't accidentally type 'theeconomist.com' from memory (or vice versa change the URL). ^_^

nest0r Wrote:Pfft, even if I was writing for something professional, I'd expect editors to consider how the hyphen contributes to the texture.

Oh, for sure. But, like you said, "folk-linguist" doesn't really contribute anything to the texture or article as a whole. I don't think "verb-endings" does, either. Neither one is that bad, but they're not necessary and don't add anything, either. They also wouldn't be considered standard usage, so why write them? When it comes to writing, I usually think simpler is better. (But I don't always follow this principle myself. XD)

nest0r Wrote:Ironically, I consider The Economist to be more incorrect than The New York Times, because for me it's more an internet site and my familiarity with the name stems from the URL, 'economist.com'--in fact, I think they should change their name so people don't accidentally type 'theeconomist.com' from memory. ^_^

Ahahaha amazing. XD

Since the article was written in English, I think it is assumed that "World's hardest language" applies pretty much to English speakers.

That being said, French seems easy to me... English has a heavy base in French. Though French speakers seem to like to think that their language is difficult, apart from silent letters, the pronunciation is fairly rule-based and grammar more or less follows the rules.

The article seems to focus more on complexity than on difficulty. I think we could probably put together a ranking of languages based on their complexity. Or in other words, how many rules make up the language, how complex are the sounds in the language ( The English "R" is quite a complex sound, for example ) and how long does it take a child to be completely fluent in the language. This has to do with how rich the language is. English has so many permutations and a complex tense system. It has multiple and contradicting rules and is a very rich language ( due to its flexibility ).

A language's richness can be measured by the ease of translation, as well. For example, many times in the English translation of the bible, different words are used to express different meanings because a more "fancy" word expresses the meaning of the word. For example, english has the words tutor and teacher. In essence, these people do more or less the same thing and may be represented by one word in another language, but we can express a more precise translation if the language has sufficient depth.

Look at a language like Vietnamese and you will notice that they can't as easily express certain concepts or ideas in that language.

It's all very interesting, to me.

The most difficult language to learn would be the one you have the least interest in learning.
No matter how alien, if you are having fun in the process, it is not in the least bit difficult.
If my homeland were conquered by an invading army and I was forced to learn their language in order to gain employment in the new economy, though it may be a sister tongue, the process would be difficult.
Perhaps the term "difficult" would more accurately describe the intended meaning with "time consuming".

jajaaan Wrote:

liosama Wrote:

jajaaan Wrote:Though they probably would have hundreds of words for concepts we describe with only a few words like "rain" and "snake."

"hundreds"

lol

Well, they say that the Eskimos have a vast number of words for snow. Japanese make distinctions we don't make in their words for rice, .

and for mother, sister, father - depending on who says "mother" - my mother, your mother ...
:-)

atomiton Wrote:Since the article was written in English, I think it is assumed that "World's hardest language" applies pretty much to English speakers.

That being said, French seems easy to me... English has a heavy base in French. Though French speakers seem to like to think that their language is difficult, apart from silent letters, the pronunciation is fairly rule-based and grammar more or less follows the rules.

written french is so much more difficult than written english.
with all the accents here and there, terrible!

frlmarty Wrote:written french is so much more difficult than written english.
with all the accents here and there, terrible!

Not really. The accents are easy to place. They are not here and there. Pronouncing French is stupid though. Stupid as in stupid, not hard.

bodhisamaya Wrote:The most difficult language to learn would be the one you have the least interest in learning.
No matter how alien, if you are having fun in the process, it is not in the least bit difficult.
If my homeland were conquered by an invading army and I was forced to learn their language in order to gain employment in the new economy, though it may be a sister tongue, the process would be difficult.
Perhaps the term "difficult" would more accurately describe the intended meaning with "time consuming".

Agree. No interest makes things stupid difficult. Time required = difficulty.

bodhisamaya Wrote:The most difficult language to learn would be the one you have the least interest in learning.

I think that it's probably a combination of (at least) three factors: motivation, quality of available materials/resources, and similarity with your native language.

("Interest" has to be qualified as you said -- your interest has to be in *learning* the language, not just in using it. Someone may be interested in reading novels in Japanese but if that doesn't translate into interest or motivation to actually *study* the language, it won't help too much.)

kazelee Wrote:

frlmarty Wrote:written french is so much more difficult than written english.
with all the accents here and there, terrible!

Not really. The accents are easy to place. They are not here and there. Pronouncing French is stupid though. Stupid as in stupid, not hard.

Yeah. The accents in French are pretty logical.

What do you mean when you say that pronouncing French is stupid?

Edit: Actually, I think French would be a lot more confusing without accents.

Jarvik7 Wrote:We've covered this before. No language is harder than any other language (the natives have no problems speaking them). Complexity in one area of a language usually causes simplicity in another.

This is not entirely true, because natives sometimes do have problems in speaking them, especially the hard grammar structures. For instance in Dutch, you have some 'famous' 'grammar problems' that you hear wrong all the time. I guess Germans have problems with the cases sometimes aswell. And I don't know if every Japanese knows all the correct counters.
I don't know if errors of natives are any measure for complexity, because languages are a continuously moving concept, where common errors or simplifications will just become the rule at one point. However in the modern era, with grammar books and grammar organisations, these changes may be more difficult.

IceCream Wrote:yeah, i also watched a linguistics program once that said it isn't true. It said that languages with more complex grammar structures like some Native American languages take longer for native children to get a grasp on than native learners of languages like English. Apparently it takes them until around 9 - 11 to properly reach fluency, as opposed to 7 or so for European languages...

Oh, that's really interesting.

Also, there's more information on Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hardest_language

kame3 Wrote:This is not entirely true, because natives sometimes do have problems in speaking them, especially the hard grammar structures. For instance in Dutch, you have some 'famous' 'grammar problems' that you hear wrong all the time. I guess Germans have problems with the cases sometimes aswell. And I don't know if every Japanese knows all the correct counters.

I don't think that necessarily has anything to do with the complexity of the structures, it's just whether they are still being used in the current colloquial spoken language or not. Typically the prescriptive grammars that tell native speakers they are "wrong" are essentially just making up rules with no basis in actual usage, and so it's not that the rules are difficult, just that people didn't learn to talk that way.