{"id":51013,"date":"2021-05-14T08:33:12","date_gmt":"2021-05-14T13:33:12","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu\/nll\/?p=51013"},"modified":"2021-05-14T12:44:43","modified_gmt":"2021-05-14T17:44:43","slug":"difficult-tongues","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu\/nll\/?p=51013","title":{"rendered":"Difficult tongues"},"content":{"rendered":"

Johnson, in the Economist (5\/7\/21), has an enjoyable article:\u00a0 \"Some languages are harder to learn than others — but not for the obvious reasons<\/a>\".<\/p>\r\n

Here's the first part of the article:<\/p>\r\n

When considering which foreign languages to study, some people shy away from those that use a different alphabet. Those random-looking squiggles seem to symbolise the impenetrability of the language, the difficulty of the task ahead.

So it can be surprising to hear devotees of Russian say the alphabet is the easiest part of the job. The Cyrillic script, like the Roman one, has its origins in the Greek alphabet. As a result, some letters look the same and are used near identically. Others look the same but have different pronunciations, like the p in Cyrillic, which stands for an r-sound. For Russian, that cuts the task down to only about 20 entirely new characters. These can comfortably be learned in a week, and soon mastered to the point that they present little trouble. An alphabet, in other words, is just an alphabet. A few tricks aside (such as the occasional omission of vowels), other versions do what the Roman one does: represent sounds.<\/p>\r\n

<\/p>\r\n

Foreign languages really become hard when they have features that do not appear in your own\u2014things you never imagined you would have to learn. Which is another way of saying that languages slice up the messy reality of experience in strikingly different ways.

This is easily illustrated with concrete vocabulary. Sometimes the meanings of foreign words and their English equivalents overlap but don\u2019t match exactly. Danish, for instance, does not have a word for \u201cwood\u201d; it just uses \u201ctree\u201d (trae). Or consider colours, which lie on a spectrum that different languages segment differently. In Japanese, ao traditionally refers to both green and blue. Some green items are covered by a different word, midori, but ao applies to some vegetables and green traffic lights (which, to make matters more confusing, are slightly blueish in Japan). As a result, ao is rather tricky to wield.

Life becomes tougher still when other languages make distinctions that yours ignores. Russian splits blue into light (goluboi) and dark (sinii); foreigners can be baffled by what to call, say, a mid-blue pair of jeans. Plenty of other \u201cbasic\u201d English words are similarly broken down in their foreign corollaries. \u201cWall\u201d and \u201ccorner\u201d seem like simple concepts, until you learn languages that sensibly distinguish between a city\u2019s walls and a bedroom\u2019s (German Mauer versus Wand), interior corners and street corners (Spanish rinc\u00f3n and esquina), and so on.<\/p>\r\n

These problems are tractable on their own; you don\u2019t often have to refer to a corner in casual conversation. But when other languages make structural distinctions missing from your native tongue\u2014often in the operation of verbs\u2014the mental effort seems never-ending. English has verbs-of-all-work that seem straightforward enough until you try to translate them. In languages like German, \u201cput\u201d is divided into verbs that signify hanging, laying something flat and placing something tall and thin. \u201cGo\u201d in Russian is a nightmare, with a suite of verbs distinguishing walking and travelling by vehicle, one-way and round trips, single and repeated journeys, and other niceties. You can specify all these things in English if you want to; the difference is that in Russian, you must.<\/p>\r\n

In the remainder of the article, the author addresses different types of verb systems (Italian, French, etc.) and \"evidential\" languages (Turkish, some Amazonian languages, Basque).\u00a0 If you're interested in these subjects, just click on the title of the article at the beginning of this post above.<\/p>\r\n

He concludes:<\/p>\r\n

In the end, the \u201chard\u201d languages to learn are not those that do what your own language does in a new way. They are the ones that make you constantly pay attention to distinctions in the world that yours blithely passes over. It is a bit like a personal trainer putting you through entirely new exercises. You might have thought yourself fit before, but the next day you will wake up sore in muscles you never knew you had.<\/p>\r\n

Mark Metcalf says that he liked the article so much that he sent the following letter to the editor:<\/p>\r\n

A Bug or a Feature<\/strong>

Johnson's column on language learning (\"Tongue-twisters\", May 8th) did a commendable job of cataloguing the types of foreign language characteristics that can present difficulties for English-speaking language students. However I take exception to the writer's characterization of the precision demanded when using Russian verbs as \"a nightmare.\" Unique verbs that, for example, allow a writer to distinguish between whether an aircraft is flying \"to\", \"from\", \"over\", \"into\", etc., and also indicate whether the action has been completed or is ongoing. While the 700+ pages of A dictionary of Russian Verbs<\/em> by Daum and Schenk attest to the scope of the challenge, the joy that one can experience from reading Russian literature in Russian affirm that accepting the challenge can certainly be worth it. Whether Russian verbs should be considered a bug or a feature is a determination best left to the reader.<\/p>\r\n

I don't know if it got published.<\/div>\r\n
\u00a0<\/div>\r\n

Selected readings<\/b><\/p>\r\n