yudantaiteki wrote:

Why do you think the African and Native American languages have "very small" vocabularies?  These are languages used for communication by real people and communities so they have fairly developed vocabularies, actually.  They may lack some specialist words (which could easily be added to the languages if it was necessary), but for learners I doubt the vocabulary size would be very relevant.

Well they do. Sotho has around 20,000 words, Zulu and Xhosa have around 30,000, Yucatec Mayan has around 20,000, Nahuatl has around 27,000. Then there are some Creole and Australian languages that have less than 2,000 words.

How many words does an educated person fluent in English understand/recognize? Probably 30,000 or more. And if English (or Russian, Japanese, ...) has over 300,000 words, and around 30,000 are "common," I'm thinking you would need to know at least half less of that for the aforementioned languages to be considered "fluent."

howtwosavealif3 wrote:

Well u haven't gotten there but one day you'll realize that Korean grammar is more complicated than Japanese.

Well, I did notice it is a bit harder, but I guess I just haven't gotten far enough with the grammar yet to go into WTF mode. Definitely not far enough to see the point of learning hanja. Actually, unless I'd be studying some historical texts or whatever, I really don't see the point. I could as well add a comment with Japanese kanji for clarification to the vocabulary I'm studying, and potentially learn two words for two languages at the same time.

Last edited by toshiromiballza (2012 September 30, 11:24 am)

toshiromiballza wrote:

yudantaiteki wrote:

Why do you think the African and Native American languages have "very small" vocabularies?  These are languages used for communication by real people and communities so they have fairly developed vocabularies, actually.  They may lack some specialist words (which could easily be added to the languages if it was necessary), but for learners I doubt the vocabulary size would be very relevant.

Well they do. Sotho has around 20,000 words, Zulu and Xhosa have around 30,000, Yucatec Mayan has around 20,000, Nahuatl has around 27,000. Then there are some Creole and Australian languages that have less than 2,000 words.

How many words does an educated person fluent in English understand/recognize? Probably 30,000 or more. And if English (or Russian, Japanese, ...) has over 300,000 words, and around 30,000 are "common," I'm thinking you would need to know at least half less of that for the aforementioned languages to be considered "fluent."

Looks like it's time to throw in my favourite quote again, even though the subject isn't just English:

Wikipedia wrote:

Comparisons of the vocabulary size of English to that of other languages are generally not taken very seriously by linguists and lexicographers. Besides the fact that dictionaries will vary in their policies for including and counting entries, what is meant by a given language and what counts as a word do not have simple definitions. Also, a definition of word that works for one language may not work well in another, with differences in morphology and orthography making cross-linguistic definitions and word-counting difficult, and potentially giving very different results. Linguist Geoffrey K. Pullum has gone so far as to compare concerns over vocabulary size (and the notion that a supposedly larger lexicon leads to "greater richness and precision") to an obsession with penis length.

Last edited by vonPeterhof (2012 September 30, 11:22 am)

Okay then:

Wikipedia wrote:

Comparisons of the vocabulary size of [INSERT LANGUAGE HERE] to that of other languages are generally not taken very seriously by linguists and lexicographers. Besides the fact that dictionaries will vary in their policies for including and counting entries, what is meant by a given language and what counts as a word do not have simple definitions. Also, a definition of word that works for one language may not work well in another, with differences in morphology and orthography making cross-linguistic definitions and word-counting difficult, and potentially giving very different results. Linguist Geoffrey K. Pullum has gone so far as to compare concerns over vocabulary size (and the notion that a supposedly larger lexicon leads to "greater richness and precision") to an obsession with penis length.

Is the point clearer now?

EratiK wrote:

Knowing personally someone who speaks Yolŋu Matha, and knowing a bunch of French Creole speakers, this claim is ridiculous without further precisions.

Why is it ridiculous?

vonPeterhof wrote:

Is the point clearer now?

The point is, those languages have less words, and I doubt native speakers know all of them, much like we don't know all of ours, thus you need to learn less words to be considered fluent. Unless their minimalistic vocabulary consists entirely of essential/common words, which I highly doubt.

Edit: Included your edit.

Last edited by toshiromiballza (2012 September 30, 11:56 am)

First, I don't see any sources. And for every source should be examined how the words were counted.

As for Australians languages, a simple plant taxinomy (anywhere) is already 800-900 items (Lévi-Strauss, The Savage Mind). A basic mythology is roughly the same. Any clan as an initiatory vocabulary, so you may already double that. And I haven't mentionned usual verbs, animals, or terms of adress which are much more numerous than in our languages. Even a desert clan is likely to have more than 2000 words.

As for Creoles, they are first used in polyglot contexts. So a Creole has loan words from at least two languages, plus its own original words. Unless you only count these original words (which is artificial, since the loan words are also in use), I don't see how it's possible to come up with such a small number.

Last edited by EratiK (2012 September 30, 12:48 pm)

delta wrote:

Hungarian is certainly difficult for English speakers, but it can't be considered harder than Japanese which has such things as Kanji that can have multiple readings. Both Japanese and Hungarian are very different from English in terms of grammar rules, but which one is more different?. Well, Japanese is more isolated than Hungarian, which albeit belonging to a totally different branch of languages, is still a European language and cultural exchange has been present between its speakers and the rest of the world for a longer period of time than in Japanese. The same idea applies to Arabic, but I guess the FSI puts it in the top because of its writing script which is more complicated than say, the Greek or the cyrillic alphabet.

I've met people that became functional in Japanese, but I've never met anyone who was more than a beginner in Hungarian, even after years of living in a place where you encounter it on a daily basis. Not saying you can't learn Hungarian, but I find it far more difficult than Japanese. It's just that Japanese is scarier.

toshiromiballza wrote:

And again, I don't think any native Australian speaker knows all 10,000 words in his language, so vocabulary-wise, these should be the easiest languages to learn.

Wariness should be used when dealing with mainly oral cultures: the lesser the vocabulary, the more likely it is for a user to know it exhaustively. Your claim amounts to saying the average English user doesn't know the words he's already familiar with.

Last edited by EratiK (2012 September 30, 2:35 pm)

Does anyone have any information on native american languages being the hardest/most different to English?
I took it as gospel and never really questioned it. I would passionately argue for the idea before I started researching it.

I think the code talker idea http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Code_talker

lead me to believe it?

HonyakuJoshua wrote:

I think the code talker idea http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Code_talker

lead me to believe it?

Didn't the code talker concept mainly operate on the notion that the languages were obscure enough (and foreign enough) that the enemy had no idea what they were?  I have a feeling that the languages' difficulty wasn't the main factor.

HonyakuJoshua wrote:

Could you give me an academic source of where it says this?

I am usually a good judge of whether these things are right as you can see at the end of this thread?http://forum.koohii.com/viewtopic.php?id=9424&p=5

At whom is this comment directed?

toshiromiballza wrote:

EratiK wrote:

the lesser the vocabulary, the more likely it is for a user to know it exhaustively.

That's your opinion, and my opinion is that I don't think their entire vocabulary consists of only essential/basic words that are known by all. I'd say some 7,000 are "common" and the rest are words that their spiritual leaders (or whatever they're called) know, etc.

First, my quote isn't an opinion, it's just logics. If I have a lot of books, I'm more likely to forget the ones I've read. If I re-read the same books over and over, I know them by heart. What is the difficulty here?

Second "Blake 81" does not have a title on the site of the link you provided, so "It is estimated that each Aboriginal language comprises approximately 10 000 words" should be taken cautiously, it could be more, and even a lot more.

Lastly, when you don't have numbers, and apparently don't know about you are talking about -- anyone who knows even a little about anthropology knows the system of belief is at least as important as the everyday world and isn't the monopoly of spiritual leaders -- you don't make baseless claims.

Last edited by EratiK (2012 September 30, 4:05 pm)

@HonyakuJoshua Not sure what you're asking me to source. The spread of various linguistic features among languages and regions can be checked here (specifically, here are the maps for tone and number of genders or noun categories). As for the description of Navajo, the bit I quoted was first posted on TV Tropes (which isn't an even remotely academic source), but has since been deleted. Most of it seems to fit Wikipedia's description of Navajo grammar, although what I interpreted to be noun categories seem to be more like categories of verb inflections to be used with certain kinds of nouns.

Edit: And if you meant the "commonly cited as the most difficult language" bit, I wasn't talking of academic papers either, I just heard quite a few people express that subjective opinion. I guess "cited" wasn't the best word to use here.

Last edited by vonPeterhof (2012 September 30, 4:18 pm)