Beautiful languages
In this post I'd like to discuss 'beautiful languages'. Everybody has a language which they consider extremely beautiful. But linguists tend to act like such a thing as a beautiful language does not exist, that all of them are equally beautiful or ugly, or that it's not really the point.
I believe it is the point. Saying what you like about a language helps you search in the right directions and defines you as a person, in some ways that is.
There I will now make a post about languages, and their beauty, or their plain uglyness. So you will get a feel of what I enjoy in a language.
First of all, I dislike the French language. I personally do not like the nasal sound to it, it's to quick, and word barriers often get taken out, even in writing. Besides that the spelling of the written form of French is a lot more complex and absolutely superfluous compared to it's spoken variant.
Also the more commonly used verbs are extremely irregular making it a frustrating language to learn. Thefore this languages is not the language of love, but confusion, it seems to've been created to confuse everybody. Not just a non-native (and bad) speaker like me, it even confuses French people themselves.
This goes for most European languages, although the more you travel east the more phonetic the writing becomes, which is a strong plus for me. Nevertheless a high level of irregularity stays.
The classical languages of the Indo-European language family are languages I consider beautiful. They are very regular, almost completely phonetically written (and completely for sanskrit), and the grammar is clear and unambiguous.
Another thing that fascinates me are extremely inflectional languages, like Basque, the Native-American languages and to a certain extent Japanese.
For example the Basque language the verb agrees to all grammatical objects of a sentence. Thus not only to the subject (like the European languages) but also to the direct object and indirect object.
An example:
nik zu maite zaitut
I-ergative you-absolutive love 2ndp.ABS-to be-1stp.ERG
'I love you'
So the auxiliary verb 'to be' agrees to both the Subject and the Direct object of the sentence, needless to say, it is not necessary to leave the pronouns in such a sentence and 'maite zaitut' will just do.
I think such huge amount of information fitted into such a small amount of sounds is beautiful, and I consider Basque one of the most beautiful languages ever.
Regularity is also a very important think for me in languages, I'm particulary fond of the Japanese grammar, which has 3 irregularities. 2 verbs (to come, and to do) and 1 adjective (good). Besides this, all case inflections are always the same, every verb is logically conjugated and there's no unneeded complexities, except for maybe the politeness levels. But this does not mean everything about Japanese is fantastic, for example the enormous influx of Chinese words has made Japanese vocabulary extremely diverse and difficult to understand due to it's enormous amount of homophones.
Besides this I think it's important the writing system fits the language. Some of the languages which don't fit their writing system at all are: Japanese and Arabic. Languages that do fit with their language are: Chinese, Hebrew and Latin.
First of all Japanese. Japanese is a highly inflectional language with a lot of polymorphemic words, besides that it's a Altaic language, and thus related to Turkish and Mongolian. Nevertheless the Japanese have adopted the Chinese writing system, which has clearly been designed for an Isolating(not-inflectional) language. This makes their often easy to understand words just from their sound, hard to ready, since there's no longer a complete phonetic representation of these words. It could be said that it's logical that they use Chinese characters due to the enormous amount of Chinese vocabulary which would've otheriwse become difficult to understand, but in my opinion they shouldn't have adopted Chinese vocabulary in the first place. Besides that Korean proves perfectly well that even a language with a lot of chinese vocabulary can still function with a full phonetic alphabet.
For Arabic I'd like to both discuss Arabic and Hebrew writing system at the same time. As you may know these two languages are related. In both languages vowels do not play a very important role in it's grammar, it is mostly dependent on Consonants, leaving the subtleties to the vowels.
Both of these languages use "abjads" or 'consonantal alphabets', but Arabic has a very cursive writing form where as Hebrew is a clear squared of script.
Most Arabic and Hebrew words are built up out of three main consonants, which have a certain meaing, and inflections then give depth to these three consonants.
For example K-T-B would mean something like 'to read' in both languages.
This root word would look like this in these languages:
כ ת ב(Hebrew)
ك ت ب(Arabic)
Now if you would want to write the word 'to read' the letter sequence would be 'KTB' so:
כתב
كتب
As you can see the Hebrew root is still clearly visible, while the arabics has completely changed it's shape. Now let's take the word 'book'. KiTaAB (not the modern hebrew word is SeFeR, but I'm using this to illustrate my point)
כתאב
كتاب
In Hebrew you can still clearly see the three root letters, while in the Arabic version the main consonants have been obscured even more. Now if you'd want to say "she reads" you'd use the verb 'KaTBaH' in Hebrew and 'TaKTib'
כתבה
تكتب
Here you can once again see the Arabic root has been completely obscured by it's writing system, this shouldn't be allowed in a language so dependant on it's root letters.
One more illustration of the confusing Arabic script:
طائرة تطير
'The aeroplane flies'
Had you noticed that this is twice the same Root? I didn't at first.
The arabic script does have one thing going for it though, and that's that it looks extremely elegant and flowing, which I find visually appealing, but not very fit for the target language.
Last but not least, I want to discuss the Chinese writing, which I believe fits the language perfectly. Chinese is a very isolating language, every word has a distinct meaning, and some of these meanings will form new words wen put together, but also on their own they are in fact still words. Therefore it's all the more logical to make every word 'unique', so every character is one word, there are hardly any grammatical signs which would become usless on their own, and all words are really much 'one unit' and are thus represented that way. Ofcourse it makes it difficult because you'll have to learn more than 4000 characters to be able to read Chinese, but still it fits. Also because there are countless dialects which differ greatly in sound, but hardly in grammar it is perfect to have characters representing full words, this way interdialectal (and even interlingual) communication is possible by simply writing in your mother's tongue. This technique could also be applied on some tibetan languages, like Tibetan itself. And some languages even did, like Naxi, Yi and Tangut.
Now this post has become extremely big and incoherrent, and next time I will try to write a post which actually has some quality build up.
--PhoeniX
I believe it is the point. Saying what you like about a language helps you search in the right directions and defines you as a person, in some ways that is.
There I will now make a post about languages, and their beauty, or their plain uglyness. So you will get a feel of what I enjoy in a language.
First of all, I dislike the French language. I personally do not like the nasal sound to it, it's to quick, and word barriers often get taken out, even in writing. Besides that the spelling of the written form of French is a lot more complex and absolutely superfluous compared to it's spoken variant.
Also the more commonly used verbs are extremely irregular making it a frustrating language to learn. Thefore this languages is not the language of love, but confusion, it seems to've been created to confuse everybody. Not just a non-native (and bad) speaker like me, it even confuses French people themselves.
This goes for most European languages, although the more you travel east the more phonetic the writing becomes, which is a strong plus for me. Nevertheless a high level of irregularity stays.
The classical languages of the Indo-European language family are languages I consider beautiful. They are very regular, almost completely phonetically written (and completely for sanskrit), and the grammar is clear and unambiguous.
Another thing that fascinates me are extremely inflectional languages, like Basque, the Native-American languages and to a certain extent Japanese.
For example the Basque language the verb agrees to all grammatical objects of a sentence. Thus not only to the subject (like the European languages) but also to the direct object and indirect object.
An example:
nik zu maite zaitut
I-ergative you-absolutive love 2ndp.ABS-to be-1stp.ERG
'I love you'
So the auxiliary verb 'to be' agrees to both the Subject and the Direct object of the sentence, needless to say, it is not necessary to leave the pronouns in such a sentence and 'maite zaitut' will just do.
I think such huge amount of information fitted into such a small amount of sounds is beautiful, and I consider Basque one of the most beautiful languages ever.
Regularity is also a very important think for me in languages, I'm particulary fond of the Japanese grammar, which has 3 irregularities. 2 verbs (to come, and to do) and 1 adjective (good). Besides this, all case inflections are always the same, every verb is logically conjugated and there's no unneeded complexities, except for maybe the politeness levels. But this does not mean everything about Japanese is fantastic, for example the enormous influx of Chinese words has made Japanese vocabulary extremely diverse and difficult to understand due to it's enormous amount of homophones.
Besides this I think it's important the writing system fits the language. Some of the languages which don't fit their writing system at all are: Japanese and Arabic. Languages that do fit with their language are: Chinese, Hebrew and Latin.
First of all Japanese. Japanese is a highly inflectional language with a lot of polymorphemic words, besides that it's a Altaic language, and thus related to Turkish and Mongolian. Nevertheless the Japanese have adopted the Chinese writing system, which has clearly been designed for an Isolating(not-inflectional) language. This makes their often easy to understand words just from their sound, hard to ready, since there's no longer a complete phonetic representation of these words. It could be said that it's logical that they use Chinese characters due to the enormous amount of Chinese vocabulary which would've otheriwse become difficult to understand, but in my opinion they shouldn't have adopted Chinese vocabulary in the first place. Besides that Korean proves perfectly well that even a language with a lot of chinese vocabulary can still function with a full phonetic alphabet.
For Arabic I'd like to both discuss Arabic and Hebrew writing system at the same time. As you may know these two languages are related. In both languages vowels do not play a very important role in it's grammar, it is mostly dependent on Consonants, leaving the subtleties to the vowels.
Both of these languages use "abjads" or 'consonantal alphabets', but Arabic has a very cursive writing form where as Hebrew is a clear squared of script.
Most Arabic and Hebrew words are built up out of three main consonants, which have a certain meaing, and inflections then give depth to these three consonants.
For example K-T-B would mean something like 'to read' in both languages.
This root word would look like this in these languages:
כ ת ב(Hebrew)
ك ت ب(Arabic)
Now if you would want to write the word 'to read' the letter sequence would be 'KTB' so:
כתב
كتب
As you can see the Hebrew root is still clearly visible, while the arabics has completely changed it's shape. Now let's take the word 'book'. KiTaAB (not the modern hebrew word is SeFeR, but I'm using this to illustrate my point)
כתאב
كتاب
In Hebrew you can still clearly see the three root letters, while in the Arabic version the main consonants have been obscured even more. Now if you'd want to say "she reads" you'd use the verb 'KaTBaH' in Hebrew and 'TaKTib'
כתבה
تكتب
Here you can once again see the Arabic root has been completely obscured by it's writing system, this shouldn't be allowed in a language so dependant on it's root letters.
One more illustration of the confusing Arabic script:
طائرة تطير
'The aeroplane flies'
Had you noticed that this is twice the same Root? I didn't at first.
The arabic script does have one thing going for it though, and that's that it looks extremely elegant and flowing, which I find visually appealing, but not very fit for the target language.
Last but not least, I want to discuss the Chinese writing, which I believe fits the language perfectly. Chinese is a very isolating language, every word has a distinct meaning, and some of these meanings will form new words wen put together, but also on their own they are in fact still words. Therefore it's all the more logical to make every word 'unique', so every character is one word, there are hardly any grammatical signs which would become usless on their own, and all words are really much 'one unit' and are thus represented that way. Ofcourse it makes it difficult because you'll have to learn more than 4000 characters to be able to read Chinese, but still it fits. Also because there are countless dialects which differ greatly in sound, but hardly in grammar it is perfect to have characters representing full words, this way interdialectal (and even interlingual) communication is possible by simply writing in your mother's tongue. This technique could also be applied on some tibetan languages, like Tibetan itself. And some languages even did, like Naxi, Yi and Tangut.
Now this post has become extremely big and incoherrent, and next time I will try to write a post which actually has some quality build up.
--PhoeniX
posted by PhoeniX at 2:25 PM
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