Language Differences

In Through the Language Glass, Guy Deutscher looks at areas where languages differ. An area where culture dominates are the relationship words. Most Indian languages, for example, have different words for older/younger relatives and maternal/paternal side relatives. Not so with English. Why? Cultural differences.

 

Another area where there seems to be no pattern across languages is grammar. Word ordering is radically different across languages, the ordering of one can feel back-to-front in another.

 

A widespread belief is that the languages of “primitive” people must be as simple as their societies. Deutscher blames this misconception on the “sources”, i.e., “from Tintin to Westerns” where the natives speak in that rudimentary “me no come, Sahib” way. The problem of course is that the assessment is being made based on how they speak the language of the white man, a language with which natives have limited familiarity. Just check out how an English speaker talks in German – it will sound just like the “no money, no come” way of talking. From this, can one infer English is a primitive language?

 

In any case, there is no objective measure of language complexity. Should it be based on word count? Word structure? Sentence structure? In some languages, the same word takes on different forms to convey tense (write, wrote) while others have separate words to convey tense. English doesn’t convey the do-er (person doing the action) via the verb (you wrote, I wrote) whereas Arabic verbs convey both tense and do-er and Chinese verbs convey neither. Besides, anyone who tries to learn a new language will tell you that every language seems to have all kinds of unnecessary complexity that add little or no value to the ability to express ideas. Nor can you measure complexity by effort to learn because that is a function of how similar/dissimilar the language one knows is from the language one is trying to learn. Comparing languages then:

“It is even worse than apples and oranges, it is more like comparing apples and orangutans.”

 

Ok, so let’s stop chasing complexity then. How about other characteristics? The more widely a language is spoken, the more variation it will (inevitably) have. But people still want to be able to get each other, so word structure becomes simpler over time – the addition of prefixes, endings and alterations to words becomes commonplace. If the core/root word is the same, people find it easy to get what an unfamiliar variant of that word probably means. Second, once literacy increases, those languages reduce the speed at which they fuse words. Why? Because in writing, words need to be separated, and once separated, we think of them as distinct entities and (unconsciously) resist their fusion.

 

Lastly, the feature called subordination. It refers to the possibility that a clause can be embedded in another, thereby adding additional information. An example of nested subordination will make it clear why this is so powerful and useful:

“I must have told you about that seal

I must have told you about that seal [which was eyeing a fish]

I must have told you about that seal [which was eyeing a fish [that kept jumping in and out]]”

Sure, you could have broken this into separate sentences, but the point is that subordination makes it “possible to convey elaborate information in a compact way”. While all languages support subordination, the more complex a society, the greater the subordination capabilities of its language.