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0 pointsHemospectrum1y ago0 comments

The complexity of natural human languages comes in different forms, but as a general rule, whenever you see something that's built into another language and "missing" from your own, you can express it by using more words. For example, PIE had a lot of noun cases that aren't in English, but you don't need the instrumental case to precisely express its purpose. You can say something like "by means of a forklift."

Some studies actually suggest that literacy systematically pressures languages to use longer, more complex sentences, thus disincentivizing complex inflection rules.

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gbuk20131y ago

I get that part - I speak both English and Russian and the latter is more concise and nuanced due to the more complex grammar.

It’s just interesting that the apparent trend is from complexity to simplification, like what I observed with English as grammar is not taught so much here in England anymore. It could well be (and likely is) an illusion stemming from my shallow knowledge of the subject of linguistics.

nkrisc1y ago

When I was learning Spanish in Central America, I met people there leaning English. As we would help each other learn, they always commented how lucky I was to be learning Spanish because all the tenses and general regularity made it easy to learn, but they thought English was so difficult to learn because of the seeming lack of rules and regularity.

In some regards English is simpler, but in other ways it is more complex in order to compensate for what’s lost in simplification elsewhere. English is simplified morphologically, but word order does a lot of heavy lifting instead, and it’s often apparent when speaking to someone who hasn’t yet mastered the language.

adastra221y ago

There is a relevancy bias here. From the perspective of a highly literate society we see fewer grammar rules as simpler. But is it, really? It is substituting one complexity for another. English has fewer noun cases, but a multitude of prepositional phrases that are really hard to keep straight.

The grammar of language tends swing back and forth on these factors, perhaps some guided by literacy and the rest a random walk, and what is “simpler” to us might be a subjective statement based on what we speak now.

gbuk20131y ago

That makes sense and “simpler” is probably not the right word to have used, as that is too positive. :)

To fall back on the reliable technology principle: it depends on your use case.

datameta1y ago

More concise and nuanced but interestingly with a lower information density.

trhway1y ago

>built into another language and "missing" from your own, you can express it by using more words. ... "by means of a forklift."

and that "more words" combination may be more precise, expressive and much simpler to handle in communication in some contexts (not necessary in all though) than say something like <prefix><word root><suffix 1><suffix2> with <suffix>-es being "juschij" and the likes (my past comment on that https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40244902 )

An example: "Petr kicked Ivan" and "Ivan kicked Petr" - 2 opposite things in English while in Russian i can use all 6 combinations of the "Petr", "kicked", "Ivan" words while still saying the same thing just by utilizing necessary suffixes to express the case, and by switching suffixes i can use the same 6 combinations to express opposite ("Ivana pnul Petr" and "Petr pnul Inava" and "Pnul Ivana Petr" and so on - all is the same thing while "Ivan pnul Petra", "Petra pnul Ivan",... is the opposite - great for writing poetry, while not that good for the contexts where concise and precise communication is at premium, like for example in the tech world)

gbuk20131y ago

This is an interesting and somewhat orthogonal conversation (and sadly not what HN comments are designed for).

The 3 examples you give in each case are not the same though - they have a different colour to them and would be “wrong” to use depending on the context. This is precisely the sort of nuance that I mentioned in one of the other comments and like you say it’s great for poetry but also for encoding additional context in fewer words. Incidentally, I recall my dad pointing this out as another similarity to Sanskrit.

As an example: I once spent some time trying to explain to my wife the difference between «какая-то фигня» and «фигня какая-то». Same words quite different meaning. :)

Taking it further, this difference can be used as a lens to see the fundamental difference between Western and Eastern philosophy and way of thinking but that’s a whole separate rabbit hole. (This is much more my subject of interest rather than linguistics.)

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gbuk20131y ago

I get that part - I speak both English and Russian and the latter is more concise and nuanced due to the more complex grammar.

nkrisc1y ago

adastra221y ago

gbuk20131y ago

That makes sense and “simpler” is probably not the right word to have used, as that is too positive. :)

To fall back on the reliable technology principle: it depends on your use case.

datameta1y ago

More concise and nuanced but interestingly with a lower information density.

trhway1y ago

>built into another language and "missing" from your own, you can express it by using more words. ... "by means of a forklift."

gbuk20131y ago

This is an interesting and somewhat orthogonal conversation (and sadly not what HN comments are designed for).

As an example: I once spent some time trying to explain to my wife the difference between «какая-то фигня» and «фигня какая-то». Same words quite different meaning. :)

j / k navigate · click thread line to collapse