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The key features of a language...? | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : General discussion |  | |
| Cainntear Pentaglot Senior Member Scotland linguafrankly.blogsp Joined 5823 days ago 4399 posts - 7687 votes  Speaks: Lowland Scots, English*, French, Spanish, Scottish Gaelic Studies: Catalan, Italian, German, Irish, Welsh | Message 1 of 7 02 January 2012 at 2:06pm | IP Logged | ||
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A couple of times I've gone to Wikipedia looking for information on the basic characteristics of some language or other. But the only information consistently presented is the locations spoke in, the number of speakers, and the classification by language families.
If you were designing a quick reference about languages, what information would you include? To me the very basics are: Word-order: SVO, VSO, SOV etc Agglutinating, polysynthetic, synthetic, isolating Nominative-Accusative/Ergative-Absolutive/Tripartite What else would you guys want to know at first glance when checking out a new language? 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Cabaire Senior Member Germany Joined 5411 days ago 725 posts - 1352 votes | Message 2 of 7 02 January 2012 at 2:59pm | IP Logged | ||
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I am always looking first for phonology and the script, because these are the elements I try to learn right at the beginning, when I start a new language.
Word order by the way is a very minor point for me. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| jarm Newbie Australia Joined 4724 days ago 33 posts - 55 votes Speaks: English* | Message 3 of 7 02 January 2012 at 3:24pm | IP Logged | ||
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It sounds like you want something like WALS. It has the sort of information you want broken down for many different languages. Check it out, see what you think!
7 persons have voted this message useful | |||
 Iversen Super Polyglot Moderator Denmark berejst.dk Joined 6515 days ago 9078 posts - 16473 votes Speaks: Danish*, French, English, German, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, Dutch, Swedish, Esperanto, Romanian, Catalan Studies: Afrikaans, Greek, Norwegian, Russian, Serbian, Icelandic, Latin, Irish, Lowland Scots, Indonesian, Polish, Croatian Personal Language Map | Message 4 of 7 02 January 2012 at 3:28pm | IP Logged | ||
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The 'sociological' information about where (and by whom) a given language is used actively, widely taught or has some official role is definitely something I would retain in even a short profile, and the same applies to its place in a traditional tree structure. These informations may seem to be objective, but they not unproblematic. For instance you would believe that Low German was alive and well and occupied the Northern third of Germany if you trusted some maps - but go there and you will only hear High German with minor regional variations.
However I would also like to have the descriptive informations which Cainntear mention above, except that they have to be more detailed to be of any value. For instance the word order in Danish or German main and subordinate phrases follow totally different rules, and there are separate rules for questions. You have to resort to obscure assumptions about a hidden 'true' word order to make any language fit into either SVO, VSO, SOV or other similar categories. I would find it much more informative to have a description that gave me information at least about the most important cases - and afterwards we can see whether a single label can cover the harsh reality. Another case: it doesn't help me to know that a certain language has 17 different verbal forms (each divided according to person and number). I want to know whether there are two or one simple 'past' forms, and whether there are compound forms which fill more or less the same role. I also want to know whether some of those forms are moribund and shouldn't be used, because then it would be misleading to count them. I want to know whether there are some simple rules for the distribution of indicative versus subjunctive (if this distinction is relevant at all), and if a language in reality has a double set of verbal forms (like English with its continuous verbal forms based on the present participle) then I want to get this information. The classification in agglutinating, polysynthetic, synthetic and isolating languages is in my opinion close to valueless - not that there isn't a difference between a chain of one-syllable isolated words versus compound maxiwords, but most languages I know of have examples of both. For instance derivation is an important force in Danish, German, Russian etc., and derivation as actually an agglutinative mechanism in action. On the other hand these languages also have synthetic endings according to any relevant criterium. OK, then tell me where I find each tendency exemplified in the language under scrutiny. In short: a descriptive label is worthless unless it is accompanied by a certain amount of concrete information - if possible illustrated with concrete examples. If this means that you can't fit the profile into 2-3 lines then it would be better not to write it. You can't tell anybody anything worth knowing about something as complicated as the structure of a language in 2-3 lines. PS: I like WALS - although I guess it will cost me a lot of hours which could have been spent studying concrete languages. PS PS: and that's exactly what happened. The project is magnificent, precisely because it is detailed enough to see the errors. I have found at least a dozen places where something was overlooked in the languages I know,- such as the question particle "mon" (or "monstro") in Danish which may be traced back to an old defunct verb, but now is a close parallel to the examples quoted in article 116 about polar questions AND Latin num AND Esperanto ĉu: Kommer han? (word order) Mon han kommer? (question particle) Edited by Iversen on 03 January 2012 at 10:42am 4 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| Chung Diglot Senior Member Joined 6968 days ago 4228 posts - 8259 votes 20 sounds Speaks: English*, French Studies: Polish, Slovak, Uzbek, Turkish, Korean, Finnish | Message 5 of 7 02 January 2012 at 5:49pm | IP Logged | ||
In addition those three categories, I'd also like to get a couple of bits about the following before starting the course's first unit: - script - prosody (i.e. stress, intonation, rhythm) - variations (i.e. especially if it's pluricentric or not) - how aspect, case, gender, mood, number, person and tense manifest themselves in the prospective target language (the other grammatical categories are a little more complicated for me to think about when all that I want is a very rough impression of a prospective target language) Basically the list of characteristics for each language in the group profiles in "Collaborative Writing" are my ideal for a rough-and-ready reference guide for a language (i.e. a full descriptive sketch condensed to about a dozen facts). 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Cainntear Pentaglot Senior Member Scotland linguafrankly.blogsp Joined 5823 days ago 4399 posts - 7687 votes Speaks: Lowland Scots, English*, French, Spanish, Scottish Gaelic Studies: Catalan, Italian, German, Irish, Welsh | Message 6 of 7 02 January 2012 at 6:06pm | IP Logged | ||
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Ooh... WALS is great. Still, that's a lot of information, and I'm thinking something on the scale of a Wikipedia infobox. I suppose I'm curious as to how other people categorise languages at a high level. I knew Iversen would object to the classification by inflection, and I agree with him to a point, but as a rough guide I still think it's useful.
1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Serpent Octoglot Senior Member Russian Federation serpent-849.livejour Joined 6409 days ago 9753 posts - 15779 votes 4 sounds Speaks: Russian*, English, FinnishC1, Latin, German, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese Studies: Danish, Romanian, Polish, Belarusian, Ukrainian, Croatian, Slovenian, Catalan, Czech, Galician, Dutch, Swedish | Message 7 of 7 03 January 2012 at 8:18am | IP Logged | ||
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:O Nobody has mentioned articles yet? I'm sure that's because y'all have them in your native languages, lol.
I still remember how as a 12 year old I asked a girl who studied German how many tenses are there. Hehe. By now a more important question to a fellow learner is "what do you find difficult about language X?" The number of cases is not as important as how they are used and whether adjectives get the same endings as nouns or not. BTW when I first saw the Romanian profile here, I understood "it uses cases like a Slavic language" as "Romanian uses cases the way Slavic languages do", because I didn't yet know that the Latin cases were gone in other Romance languages. Oh and genders of course. Do I care too much about nouns? Another feature is, so to say, how regular it is? Picture Finnish vs Icelandic. From the list at WALS, the first feature that caught my attention was the politeness distinction. I've only recently started forcing myself to always use the appropriate forms in Finnish regardless of what I'd use in Russian, and that still makes me feel weird. Yes, when politeness is so closely tied to language, this can be an issue. (It makes me giggle that there's a "hand and arm" category XD i can imagine that the lack of a proper distinction is confusing for native speakers of languages that have it! But imo lexical distinctions, even in really common and basic words, are a very specific feature) That site seems like a great starting point for what the member doviende described, when you read a grammar just to find out which things are possible in the language and which aren't. 1 person has voted this message useful |
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