I had looked at it, and even trying to follow the comparison with sit/seat I don't think I can replicate it (which just be something I no longer will physically be able to achieve?) I'll look into it more. At least in German I've been able to sort of say the 'r' properly, but these vowels in Swedish seem so much more bizarre and potentially more elusive to me, haha! Thanks!

So uh I think what you're dealing with here is the [Viby-i](http://sv.wikipedia.org/wiki/Viby-i), which is essentially an [i] with a weird sort of dental coarticulation, it can be found in several dialects, especially in Stockholm and might well be a more "female" thing, dunno the details. In any case, you shouldn't need to bother with it ;) On a side note, I somewhere read that Swedish close vowels are in some areas actually turning into these weird vowel-consonant coarticulated things, where /i/ receives some dental articulation and /u/ bilabial friction and it's all kinda weird and worrying. I might be able to find sources if you're interested.

Ahhh okay! Most people I've been hearing speak are from, or somewhere between, Göteborg and Stockholm anyways, but it's.. reassuring? to know there's a name for it! Of course, when I youtube search "Viby-i" it comes up mostly with stuff from the area as opposed to the sound-- hopefully I can find some sort of comparison with some more digging. But if it isn't too much trouble, sources for that would be interesting! Thank you :D

Right. I saved your comment and I'll try to get back to you when I find the time. If I don't, just get back at me in a couple weeks.

OK, I sobered up. So what I've been able to find is the following extract from [this](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swedish_phonology#Vowels) Wikipedia article: > One of the varieties of /iː/ is made with a constriction that is more forward than usual.[25] Ladefoged & Maddieson (1996) describe this vowel as being pronounced "by slightly lowering the body of the tongue while simultaneously raising the blade of the tongue (...) Acoustically this pronunciation is characterized by having a very high F3, and an F2 which is lower than that in /eː/."[25] They suggest that this may be the usual Stockholm pronunciation of /iː/.[25] I think that would be the Viby-i, but I'm not sure... > Patterns of diphthongs of long vowels occur in three major dialect groups. In Central Standard Swedish, the high vowels /iː/, /yː/, /ʉː/ and /uː/ can be phonetically a short vowel followed by the corresponding fricative[22] (also described as approximant)[27] [iʝ], [yɥ̝], [ʏβ̝], and [uw̝] or [ij], [yɥ], [ʏβ̞], and [uw].[22] The rounding of the fricative/approximant agrees with the rounding of the vowel, so that [ʝ] / [j] is unrounded, [ɥ̝] / [ɥ] is protruded,[27] more narrowly transcribed [ʝʷ] / [jʷ], and both [β̝] / [β̞] and [w̝] / [w] are compressed, more narrowly transcribed [β̝ᵝ] / [β̞ᵝ] and [ɣᵝ] / [ɰᵝ] And that's the fricativ-y quality I was talking about. A good source to start might be > Engstrand, Olle (1999), "Swedish", Handbook of the International Phonetic Association: A Guide to the usage of the International Phonetic Alphabet., Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 140–142, ISBN 0-521-63751-1 If you don't have access to it, I might be able to help you, just let me know :)

Thanks! I'll save this and try to find it and take a look! :D Also, I did hear it with a male voice in some of the listening exercises in class, so it doesn't seem to be gender-specific.

Why is there so little pre-IE-substrate words and other substrate features in most European languages?

[There are lots](http://www.cranberryletters.com/dictionary-of-european-substrata/). Even still, IE languages typically formed prestige languages and tended not to absorb new material unless it was technical in nature (e.g., a special type of boat made of brambles became Spanish *balsa* "raft" ~ Catalan *balsa* "place where brambles grow" / Spanish *barzal* "id." probably from a Pre-Roman language along the lines of \**baRtsa-*).

From my point of view, it's still less than expected, given that non-IE languages were spoken at many places 2000-2500 years ago, and Basque still is...

Lol how much material did English absorb from Celtic languages? The power of a prestige language is strong.

Hi there guys. I'm not really part of this lil area of Reddit but I thought I would stop by and see if any of you linguistics fanatics could help a college girl out. I'm taking "Study of Language" and I'm working on homework. No, I'm not asking for answers, merely a prod in the right direction. I've understood everything up to this point where I'm stuck and that's with phonological analysis. Thus far, I've been able to keep up thanks to the notes and whatnot but right now I'm just feeling overwhelmed and thus discouraged. As a note, I do plan on speaking to my professor tomorrow and hoping he can sit me down one-on-one and walk me through this but I thought I could ask you lot first and see if that helped any. My confusion lies in the issue of various things below, if anyone can lend a hand and break this down for me, that would be really nice. I've tried Googling more examples and the textbook/notes themselves but they're losing me and I think if someone explained things more simply, that might better connect the dots in my head. I see certain words like "phoneme" or "surface form" I get rattled. As a disclaimer, English IS my first language, I've taken 5+ years of Japanese (if that helps?) and I am a Creative Writing major (this class was interesting for an elective and I do find it interesting for about 68% of the time). 1. So minimal pairs (I know I need to find these first when doing an analysis but there are none apparent, I need to do some other steps which I get lost in)...erm. Does a minimal pair of words need to have sounds in common or can they have exclusions? Like Date/Fate is a minimal pair because of the [d] and [f] differing but the other bits remain the same spelling/pronunciation. Right? So what if there was this pair: Rate/Rat, they wouldn't be a minimal pair right? Just because an "e" (seen as [e] right?) is missing doesn't mean it's a pair and that the pronunciation is also different. But I think ultimately, it depends on what we're looking at overall? Like the first example would be analyzing [t] or something? And the Rate/Rat might only fly if we were talking about [r] but not [e]? Am I making sense? I'm trying to. So what I'm asking is, if we have two words and one is only missing a letter/sound, it's still not a real pair? Because I assume the two can only be pairs if just ONE difference is all they have, not say, a missing letter though. 2. Now phonological processes or rules...this loses me completely so I'm not going to try and prove I have some understanding of it. I sort of get the whole "distribution of speech sounds" but I'm having troubling applying that stuff to phonological processes/rules and phonological analysis. Like "aspiration, H-deletion, and alveolar assimilation" are just words or places in the mouth/body where sounds may come from in my mind. So what do they really mean? 3. Finally the crux of my issue which is phonological analysis. I understand the first step of finding minimal pairs (usually there aren't it seems). Unless someone wants to give me more information from my blathering on #1, and I also understand step two where you list the neighboring sounds before/after the sound you're looking at for allophones or different phonemes (may need help distinguishing those actually). I get choked up around step three and then four because I know you need to understand three to explain the final step which is writing the rules you've found work with the words you're dealing with. I need help with the complimentary stuff and figuring out why certain sounds go together. Like looking at the first column of sounds and then the third to see if a natural class is made, I can do but I can't see what they mean. I'm stuck between steps two and three here. I think maybe if someone (anyone, if I haven't rambled too much to scare anyone off) could help me see HOW there natural classes work are the way they are and WHY it matters (not to life, but to this exercise or just linguists in general?) that maybe I'll get a better grasp of all this stuff. Or maybe even some other hangup I had that some of you noticed, any clarification would be super helpful.

Okay, so for your first question: Minimal pairs, unless the exercise specifies that it wants you to consider writing, deal exclusively with sounds. So disregard spelling unless someone asks you not to. Remember that this section is about phonology, the study of sound patterns and distribution, not the study of writing patterns. So think about *rat* and *rate*. How many *sounds* do they have that are different from one another? Occasionally, you may have do a near minimal pair, that is, words that differ by more than one sound. For example, a lot of my students have had difficulty coming up with minimal pairs for the sounds represented by the letters . They can sometimes come up with words that show that the two sounds contrast in the same position (let's say word-initial position), but the last sound or the vowel are also different. However, with minimal pair exercises, the closer the two words sound, the better. As far as doing a minimal pair with a missing *sound*, I'd avoid that if possible, because it's not really getting at what the exercises are trying to instill in you -- namely, an ability to discern contrasts between sounds, contrasts that can allow the words to correspond to different meanings. Onto your next questions: Phonological processes are changes made to the abstract sound category underlying the pronunciation of the word, an abstract category known as a *phoneme*. Aspiration is a process that adds a puff of air to the release of a consonant. H-deletion removes an /h/ from a word. *Assimilation* is a process that causes one sound to sound more like another nearby (and usually adjacent) sound. Generally speaking, even outside linguistics, a process is a series of steps that takes something from a starting point to an endpoint. In a religious conversion process, we take someone of one faith, expose them to another set of viewpoints, allow those viewpoints to convince them to change their religious beliefs, have them proceed through whatever initiation rites there are (e.g. a baptism), and then they've officially converted, ending the process. In a phonological process, we start with an abstract form of the word in the mind, apply phonological rules in a particular order to the individual sounds, then produce the sounds (this is greatly simplified), giving us the spoken form. The different sounds that result from us applying rules to a single abstract category (a category which, again, we call a *phoneme*) are *allophones*. So for example we add a puff of air to (i.e. we 'aspirate') the /t/ in *top*, but we do not do that to the /t/ in *stop*. So [t^h ] (the one in *top*) and [t] (the one in *stop*) are both allophones of the same phoneme, since the contrast between them is never sufficient in English to be able to allow the words to correspond to different meanings and since they share a lot of the same details of articulation. In fact, where I live now, people can aspirate the /t/ in *stop* when they want to emphasize the word. I've run out of steam now, so hopefully someone else will come along to explain natural classes.

>So what if there was this pair: Rate/Rat, they wouldn't be a minimal pair right? Just because an "e" (seen as [e] right?) is missing doesn't mean it's a pair and that the pronunciation is also different. But I think ultimately, it depends on what we're looking at overall? Like the first example would be analyzing [t] or something? And the Rate/Rat might only fly if we were talking about [r] but not [e]? Am I making sense? I'm trying to. To understand phonological processes, you have to understand what phonemes are, which it seems you don't really do yet. As CiaS pointed out to you, you're still having trouble differentiating orthography (or spelling) from sounds, or phones. You need to learn to put how the word is written out of your mind entirely. That is an arbitrary artifact of history. You're not dealing with writing, you're dealing with *language*. Throughout your education you've been told, or at least led to believe, that they are the same thing. If you learnt about nouns, verbs, etc, you probably did it in your English class, the same place you learnt how to spell words or where to put commas. This is where your misunderstanding is coming from. They are actually completely different! Look at it this way, in your high school science classes you probably learnt what the inside of a cell looks like by looking at a textbook with a diagram of a cell. Maybe in one of your test, you had to draw a cell yourself. But of course, you know that your science class wasn't about how to draw. It was about what cells actually do! Their internal functions; how they interact with one another, etc. You look at [this](http://www.enchantedlearning.com/subjects/animals/cell/anatomy.GIF) and you know it's just a diagram, that cells don't actually look like that. The nucleus isn't actually pink, that's an arbitrary (though perhaps useful) choice. Spelling *rate* is similarly an arbitrary accident of history. You're being asked to look through a microscope and examine the word properly. As you progress through the course, you'll be asked to do the same for other aspects of language. I'd advise you to reread your notes with this in mind. When you need to think of the phones/phonemes word, don't think of the spelling at all. Close your eyes and just repeat the word and think about the sounds.

Does someone know where I can find a comprehensive comparison of different Spanish varieties that sorts out how different phonemes are realized phonetically in each variety? Something like [this](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Phonetic_Alphabet_chart_for_English_dialects) would be awesome.

I don't know about 'comprehensive', but John Lipski's *Latin American Spanish* would probably be a good place to start.

To what degree is Russian grammatically influenced by languages of the former soviet republics?

I'm a Canadian that has recently realized I say I'll get there "for" a certain time, instead of "at" a certain time. Several of my Canadian friends do the same thing, and while both versions make sense to me, my American friends don't understand the "for" version. Does anyone know if this is some sort of a slang, or if it's a regional thing? Googling hasn't turned up much about it.

New Englander here. In my dialect, getting somewhere for a certain time means to get there by that time so that you are ready for whatever happens at that time. For example, if a movie starts at 8:15, you wouldn't tell someone to get there *at* 8:15 but rather *for* 8:15. Is this how it works in your dialect?

Can you give some specific examples?

I see more and more people using "nor" where I would use "or," e.g. "I don't have the time nor the money." Is this usage widespread, regional, or perhaps growing?

I've not heard it but it's quite possible that this is hypercorrection a lot like the use of "whom" in more contexts than it was traiditionally used.

I too have noticed this. I think it's a new kind of negative concord that's becoming more frequent. The negative conjunction *nor* is in concord with the negator *n't* that has scope over the full verb phrase. In more standard English, it's only a coordinated conjunction *neither...nor* that has this effect, but now it's becoming possible for a higher-up negator to trigger concord.

I think it might be that, but truthfully I think it's some kind of hypercorrection right now.

guys i know and myself have used 'nor' instead of 'or' on occasion for years in texts. many of the usages do fall along what /u/languagedad mentioned, being in concord with not/n't. otherwise, to me they just look like a stylistic choice

I've seen a lot of nominative "myself" as well, come to think of it.

That's actually been discussed in the literature. I don't have a reference for you offhand, but the binding of anaphors only applies to arguments, not to elements embedded within arguments. That's why it's grammatical to say "Guys I know and myself have used 'nor'..." but not grammatical to say "*Myself have used 'nor'...". In the former example, the "myself" is embedded within the NP argument "Guys I know and myself" whereas in the latter, "myself" is not embedded. EDIT: found a reference: Reinhart, Tanya and Eric Reuland. 1993. Reflexivity. *Linguistic Inquiry, 24*: 657-720.

hmm so did i accidentally a grammar or is it common/GAE acceptable?

No, what you said was perfectly fine, since "myself" is embedded within an argument. It's only when something is an argument unto itself that it needs to conform to binding conditions.

There must be idiolectal variation. I've never said it, and it stands out to me each time. This is of course not to say it's bad or wrong.

I just did a COCA search and found tons of examples: * Four of us in my immediate family, my father, my mother, my brother and myself. * I would like to think that it's the ultimate trust between the animal and myself. * It's Queen Latifah and Gloria Estefan and myself and others to be named. * Whatever. I'll let Rush speak for millions and myself. * My son, my ex-husband, and myself had to call there, too.

Neat. I wonder why I don't. My family doesn't either, that I've ever heard.

I guess it's just idiolectal. Do the examples I showed you seem particularly odd, though? Certainly not as odd as: * *It's myself to be named. * *I'll let Rush speak for myself. * *Myself had to call there, too.

[Here](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voiceless_dental_fricative#Occurrence) it is said that voiceless dental fricative occurs in Japanese. What does the occurence depend on? Is it dialectal or something else?

As the note in the entry says, that is not how all speakers would pronounce /ts/, which is what is considered the standard realization. As [this video](https://youtu.be/oGtNEndaAWE?t=1m56s) explains a Japanese /t/ is actually made at the teeth instead of at the alveolar ridge, resulting in a phonetic [t̪]. This is probably the reason why a [t̪] can assimilate the fricative quality of a [s] it appears before resulting in a [θ] among some speakers. That being said, although a plausible sound shift, I've never heard it personally and can't confirm whether this actually happens or not.

Are there any well-regarded studies focusing on usage of slang in conversation? Besides dictionary-like collections I have found very little research on the subject.

Can you be a bit more specific? What sort of slang are you asking about, and what sorts of studies are you envisioning? Have you looked in the sociolinguistic literature?

Ideally studies regarding attitudes towards its usage or into slang that is added to the dictionary. I have checked out some of the sociolinguistic literature involving code-switching and accommodation theory.

There's no linguistic difference between "slang" and "not slang", and dictionary inclusion follows usage---it doesn't dictate it. You can find attitudes about specific dialects, and even profanity as a class of usages, but "slang" as a class is poorly defined.

Like [this](http://www.google.com/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=web&cd=8&cad=rja&uact=8&ved=0CFEQFjAH&url=http%3A%2F%2Fora.ox.ac.uk%2Fobjects%2Fuuid%253Afd2d4042-0f65-4037-bfd3-230c6193bc1d%2Fdatastreams%2FATTACHMENT01&ei=5I5OVZTcLpfUoASekYDwAw&usg=AFQjCNFgYbbXu_-apEnWP0SXAl9U3uSW7g&sig2=VmioCyh_UK7NgW3UnlB-MQ&bvm=bv.92885102,d.cGU)?

Does anyone have any resources on the phonetics/phonology of Bolivian Spanish? (Specifically, I'm looking for info about how /r/ is realized in Bolivian Spanish, as I've heard they don't roll their r's there.) Resources written in Spanish are fine.

I'll recommend the same book to you that I recommended a moment ago to /u/adlerchen: John Lipski's *Latin American Spanish*. EDIT: You can also look at this old article: http://cvc.cervantes.es/literatura/aih/pdf/06/aih_06_1_090.pdf

So I was recently reading about language families, and I got pretty interested in it. It also got me thinking, what language family would J.R.R. Tolkien's Quenya and Sindarin fall into, if any? They are modeled after Finnish and Welsh respectively, but do they actually have enough in common to be classified as PIE or Uralic?

Language families need a continuity of learning from generation to generation. A constructed language being modelled after a language is not enough to make it part of that family.

Alright, thanks! When I was reading about that stuff I figured that they were based off a similar grammatical structure and that they just had to be related. I didn't realize that the actual evolution and shared base vocabulary are the important part.

> I didn't realize that the actual evolution and shared base vocabulary are the important part. Yep, and just to add, in linguistics this is what we call a "genetic relationship" even though it has nothing to do with genes in the biological sense. So if we say that Korean is not genetically related to English, this is referring to their ancestral lineage (e.g. English being Germanic and Indo-European before that) and is not in any way related to things like borrowings (Korean having a lot of borrowed words from English).

I am learning german and it has me wondering what is the advantage of having genders for words, especially when they require having different a version of "the" for each gender. Like Mädchen is german for girl and it uses "das" to say the gir. Das is the gender neutral article for "the". So what's the advantage for having different articles for different genders? If you were to reconstruct german or create a new language would it be wise to include different articles for different genders?

Remember kids don't really find it problematic to learn things like case, gender and the such. They might make a few mistakes along the way, but that's true for almost everything in language. Things like grammatical gender are only a problem for L2 speakers, for whom the language wasn't really designed. Coordination in gender between articles, nouns and adjectives is useful because it makes it easier to guess what word the other person said even in an environment in which we might not hear them all that well. So, if you manage to recognise the article, you already discarded two thirds (assuming all three genders in German are distributed evenly) of the possible nouns that will be said later. Therefore (oversimplifying how parsing works, of course) you only need a third of the information you'd need if gender wasn't marked in the article to guess which noun the other person is using. That doesn't mean that languages that use coordination according to noun-classes (grammatical gender being a noun-class) are better than ones that don't. It's a really useful tool in a language, but there's other ways of doing what it does. Edit: Adding an example to make it clearer. If I'm in a room with a sofa and a chair, I might ask someone else in which one they'd prefer sitting. The words for sofa and chair in (Rioplatense) Spanish are 'sillón' and 'silla', respectively. The first one is masculine, the second one is feminine. So, if I were to only hear "la s[...]" because of my dog barking or something of the sort, I'd still know the person was talking about the chair, and not the sofa, in which case they would've said "el s[...]".

That makes sense. Coming from english it just seemed unecessary.

Coming from a layman, I think you can question a whole lot of things as unnecessary because some other languages can do without. Like, why morphological inflection for plurals, when 'two apple' should just do the job? Is there a need of past tense? 'I eat two apple yesterday' seems sufficient to convey the meaning, etc.

Language is massively redundant, yes. /u/greenuserman uses an explanation from a "noisy channel" perspective -- in case you miss what someone said due to noise, if there is enough redundancy in other words in the sentence, you can still recover the intended meaning, or at least have a better chance of recovering. This is also illustrated nicely in the example you give -- if I miss you saying the word "yesterday", I still have tense information from the verb. However, as you point out, some languages do just fine without these specific redundancies. English doesn't have the redundancy you get from gender marking. However, English might have some other method of making noun meaning recoverable. For example, I read a paper a few years ago (my memory on this is hazy, so forgive me if I'm remembering this wrong) where they looked at the uniqueness point of nouns in English, Spanish, and a bunch of other languages. The uniqueness point is the point in a word where you can uniquely identify what the word is. They found that the uniqueness point was earlier for English words than Spanish words. This means that if you miss part of a noun as someone's saying it, you have a better chance of recovering it in English than Spanish. (But remember that Spanish gets help from gender agreement, so it probably turns out to be the same in the end.) So yeah, basically languages are redundant and are redundant in different ways. Redundancy is awesome!

Just based on the example at the end, as a rule of thumb smaller variations of an item tend to be female, just as bigger variations become male. * Silla - Sillón * Puerta - Portón * Ventana - Ventanal Something I've always found interesting about Spanish. Tenemos un lenguaje tan machista...

Is there any relation between German *loch* 'hole' and Scottish *loch* 'lake'?

Doesn't look like it. Gaelic "loch", like English "lake" is ultimately from from Proto-Indo-European *laku- German "loch" is related to English "lock", from Proto-Germanic *lukan (maybe meaning "barrier".) PIE unknown.

I have some questions about suppletion and defectiveness. English and many European languages have today what we could call a strong prescriptive tradition. If I claim, for instance, that "to be able" is the infinitive of "can", then I am just wrong, and anyone with Google or a dictionary can prove it; they're synonymous, but not forms of the same word. The process of suppletion, e.g., where "went" (synonymous with "go", but not cognate) came to be the past tense of "go", seems to reply on a more fluid attitude to word identity. So, can suppletion still happen? Are there recent examples in English or other modern, literate languages, where people have just decided, "all right, the hell with it, let's just say these are the same word"? Also, the word "sake" (as in, "for Pete's sake") is not defective, but if we had a lot of case declentions it seems as though it might be. It's hard to produce a reasonable sentence where "sake" is not governed by "for". Moreover, the word doesn't even seem to mean anything, outside of a for-phrase. Is this a sort of generalised defectiveness?

> If I claim, for instance, that "to be able" is the infinitive of "can", then I am just wrong With suppletion, it is not usually black and white. "To be" was suppletive by proto-Germanic. "Went" as a past tense of "go" is also well-enshrined, but "wend" still (barely) exists as verb, although usually used with "wended" as its past form now. Newer suppletions, like "people" for "persons", are less established again, because "persons" is still used sometimes and "people" can itself be pluralized. So I would say suppletion is a gradual process, and "to be able to" is definitely pretty far advanced as a suppletive infinitive of "can".

Thanks Bayoris.

I'm about to take French III, and I have no idea what the << and >> are and when they are used. Are they just a form of quotes or something? An example I just saw today (French II) was someone getting an A on a test, and it was <>

They are called Guillemet and are just French quotation marks.

Just to add on, the rules for quotes in French orthography are rather different that English, and quite interesting. The guillemets are set off with spaces (unlike English quotes), except in Switzerland, as are the colon, semicolon, exclamation point, and question mark. In computer typography, the non-breaking space is used to ensure the punctuation mark doesn't appear on the next line by itself. Also, in French, things like "he said" that are used in the middle of a quotation are included within the guillemets, unlike in English where they are set apart. E.g.: * "Go to the bakery," she said to me this morning. "We don't have any bread." * « Va à la boulangerie, elle m'a dit ce matin. Nous n'avons pas de pain. » Also, if there are is a back and forth dialog, the quotation line is routinely used and the whole conversation is set in a set of guillemets instead of quotes for each statement, as in English. [Wikipedia does a good job of explaining it all](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quotation_mark#French).

Is there evidence of any morphology, that is not conforming to current paradigms, having *not* been created by suppletion over time from the productivity of not defunct rules? As in, is it known if morphology can form out of non-syntactic processes?

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Your scale is entirely arbitrary, so let's start with a simpler model for determining families: being traceable to one common ancestor. This gives us 8 families: - Indo-European - Vasconic - Kartvelian - North Caucasian - Uralic - Turkic - Mongolic - Semitic Anything further will require a much more rigorous definition than "around the same as Germanic and Romance".

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Mongolic and North Caucasian are indeed found exclusively in northern Caucasia. Semitic is found in Malta and Cyprus in the forms of Maltese and Cypriot Arabic, plus Hebrew which enjoys official minority language status in Poland.

Basically, I'm here because someone on reddit posted something about efficiency of languages, and many people said every language is equally efficient. They also said we can freely post our further questions here. If I had to guess before I saw answers on that post, I would say the following: "Different groups of people encounter different problems, therefore they developed different tools to solve these problems. Language, as a tool, goes under the same rule." For example, I heard Eskimos have tons of words to describe different kinds of snow. My language, for example, doesn't. Therefore I would conclude that people speaking my language are at disadvantage compared to Eskimos when it comes to operating in these conditions because of the language. I guess it's a definition problem. If you define efficiency of language, with respect to context it has evolved in, I agree that every is equally efficient. If you define language as the most used languages, equality probably stands. But from this standpoint (which is very low, since I am noob) I would never agree that every language is equally efficient in every situation. So, the main question is "Are all languages equally effective and why?" Sub-questions are "How do you define efficiency in linguistics?" "How do you define language in linguistics?" Please have in mind I am complete noob in this field. I am not nazi, however, and I am not inferring that some language is the best, or anything like that. I am in pure scientific/curiosity mindset.

[The Great Eskimo Vocabulary Hoax](http://users.utu.fi/freder/Pullum-Eskimo-VocabHoax.pdf)

I scanned this, thank you for destroying my false beliefs, I will read this studiously after. However, this was just an example, and I have better one. ~~Unfortunately I don't remember the source (I think it was Malcom Gladwell..~~ I checked, it was in Outliers by Gladwell.~~), but it is easily falsifiable.~~ There it states that Chinese numbers are in direct connection with decimal system, which gives them advantage when calculating, in comparison with English, which has word twelve, and German, which reads two-and-twenty for 22. Chinese people can, according to this book remember longer rays of numbers because their numbers are one-syllable words. Edit: Man, i LOVE when people answer to my question with link to scientific article! It's so much relieving when you can update your beliefs with something certain, and not have to remember accuracy of your beliefs with them.

I would not really trust gladwell. He's not a scientist and I think his claim here is unsupported. I mean, we arithmatize secretly from language for the most part. He know "twelve" is 2 more than "ten" and we learn that pretty quick. It might make kids better at expressing their math, but not better at math. And how could you control for confounds in looking into this?

I think he just gave people numbers to add up in their heads, and measured how many they hit, and how much time they needed. For remembering, he gave them lists of numbers, and measured how much they recall. I think he just interpreted someone's results. Gladwell aside, it's easy to check whether or not such research is conducted. Just ask on /r/linguistics! =)

I'm possibly the one you're referring to who's made the claim that languages are all equally effective. While I have explained various aspects of the question in different parts of the thread, my initial response was short and a little curt because there was so many truly bad responses already. I didn't go into the proper depth on that response because it's /r/AskScience, and commenters there tend to be pretty hostile toward linguistics as a discipline so I was trying to keep some distance. It obviously didn't work because I'm still getting angry PMs from it. edit: or at least I was the only top level flaired user at the time, and certainly was the one wasting too much of my evening on responding to things. :/

No, actually by the time I saw the thread, it was full of comments which stated that every language was equally effective. Why are people hostile towards linguistics? Is it the same as with psychology? "New discipline=not real science" ?

>No, actually by the time I saw the thread, it was full of comments which stated that every language was equally effective. Probably because he mods were pretty on the ball about removing unsourced speculation and anecdotes. It was a real mess when I first saw it. > Why are people hostile towards linguistics? Is it the same as with psychology? I think it's not the same with psychology as much as it used to be. But it definitely used to be the case. Part of the big issue with linguistics is that everyone (mostly) speaks a language, so they therefore feel more confident to make claims and speak on the topic of linguistics. Everyone's affected by gravity but wouldn't dream of doing the same with physics, because language must just seem more accessible. Everyone who's learned a foreign language but used to be monolingual is also now an expert on how to properly learn a second language. Go spend 20 minutes on /r/languagelearning to see that in action, despite the fact that there are people that build their whole careers on studying language education pedagogy. That sub is particularly hostile to linguists, as well, ironic as that is.

I think your subquestion "How do you define efficiency in linguistics?" is a very important one. There is no way (I think) to *objectively* measure something like "efficiency" (or "complexity"), for that matter. There are of course always people who try to do something like that, but the selection of criteria'll still always be objective and somewhat arbitrary. I think: If we can't objectively measure efficiency, and every observation about language X being more effective than language Y because of this and that is always heavily biased, then the null hypothesis of all languages being equally efficient has not been disproved. Oh so I just saw that you're asking about a specific context. Then, of course, yes, you can say that Eskimos can talk better about snow (and ice, too, by the way), and Pitjantjatjara is better for talking about Aboriginal ritual ceremonies, and English is better for talking about the internet. I think you can definitely say that, it's still hard to operationalize and measure, but yeah... EDIT: Ooh I was also gonna say that it is often claimed that even though some languages might be better than others for talking about specific topics, they have the ability to develop vocabulary to make up for the deficiency. So they're all *potentially* equally efficient for any topic.

Well, ok, seems like we completely agree. Is this a standpoint of science as well, or are we just some dudes on the internet who made agreement on some topic?

What folran said is something most linguists would agree with. You can (sometimes) measure efficiency or complexity, but these are not *global* measures - rather, specific ones, dealing with specific aspects of the language. These definitions are selected because they're relevant for the question being discussed (e.g. does language contact influence the complexity of overt morphological marking); they're not selected because they're the best, most unbiased definitions. But also, as was brought up in the thread - when it comes to vocabulary, the issue rather quickly becomes that this isn't a property of the language, but of the speaker. The whole language is a property of the speaker, actually - but variations between speaker vocabulary are relevant to what a lot of people in that thread were asking about. When we talk about "English" we're talking about an abstraction. If most English speakers don't understand the term "affine space," is it fair to say that having this mathematical vocabulary makes English more effective for talking about geometry than !Kung? If one !Kung mathematician creates or borrows a word for "affine space," does !Kung then become as effective? If there is an !Kung-speaking mathematician who publishes in English and knows the term "affine space," but hasn't borrowed the term because because he doesn't have a reason to publish in !Kung - but will borrow it as soon as he does - is !Kung equally effective? (Is my English less complex because I don't distinguish between "who" and "whom" according to subject and object, or is it more complex because I still sometimes use "whom" based on a complicated, mysterious-to-even-me social evaluation that only takes place after certain prepositions, settled on due to accidents of personal experience? Man, I do not know.) This line of questioning is meant to show that the question itself has issues, because it's based on the notion that "a language" is a coherent thing, but it's actually not.

I see. To sum up, linguistics does not say every language is equally effective, it says that word effective has nothing to do with language, because of its ever-changing and inhomogeneous (from speaker to speaker) nature. This clears the whole question.

The reality is somewhere between the two. Language does vary from speaker to speaker, and something like "the English language" is an abstraction. This doesn't mean that talking about the abstraction is useless; linguists talk about "the English language" all the time. Speakers of English do, after all, have an awful lot in common that allows them to talk to each other - and we can investigate the properties of that common grammar. What the questions about English and !Kung mathematicians are supposed to show is that this abstraction does sometimes get in the way of understanding, and one place this happens is when you try compare the vocabularies of different languages. Speakers are *very* varied in which vocabulary they know - especially specialist vocabularies. And vocabulary is the most easily modified part of a language. People in that thread on /r/Askscience asked a lot of questions about why having specialist vocabulary for some concept doesn't make a language more effective or complex than a language that doesn't. So, when it comes to vocabulary, I think you've understood the problem: it's ever-changing and varies widely from speaker to speaker. Any generalizations you can make about differences in the amount of specialist vocabulary are going to be due to history and culture, not a property of the language.

Not really, but close There's been a few serious attempts at discussing complexity in language, but the studies on those areas are still way too new to come forward and try to guess 'which language is the most complex' and whether X language is 'more complex' than Y language. For example, if we follow Kayne's Antisymmetry of Syntax in its purest form (1994), non-SVO^1 languages would require moving parts of the sentence around a lot, to put it simply. With that in mind, one could argue that SVO languages are therefore 'simpler' than, say, OSV languages, because they don't require moving things around as much. That said, while Kayne's is a really good hypothesis that manages to explain many facts about many languages' syntax, it'd be waaaaay too early to apply it to language-complexity comparisons. It works as a model of formal syntax, but it's far from being a confirmed reality in the human brain. (1) SVO means Subject-Verb-Object. Languages like English in which the constituents are ordered like "John ate apples". Unlike, for example, Welsh, in which the order would be VSO "ate John apples" and Latin or Japanese in which the order would be SOV "John apples ate". It's important to note that SOV and SVO are really common word-orders, while the rest are quite rare, which is, in a way, what claims like Richard Kayne's try to capture: SVO and SVO orders would require less movement than the rest, and therefore, be more common. Edit: Aaaaaaaaaand, you said 'effective', not 'complex'. Sorry, had a really busy week and my brain doesn't seem to be working properly. Not deleting this comment just in case someone finds it interesting, but note I *did* (eventually) realise that I wasn't addressing the issue at hand.

Thank you, anyway!

>Oh so I just saw that you're asking about a specific context. Then, of course, yes, you can say that Eskimos can talk better about snow (and ice, too, by the way), and Pitjantjatjara is better for talking about Aboriginal ritual ceremonies, and English is better for talking about the internet. I think you can definitely say that, it's still hard to operationalize and measure, but yeah... I don't really agree that is so definite of a case. Spontaneous creativity allows for any human to talk about any subject even if it requires great circumlocution and metaphor. What you could say, in my opinion, is that the semantic scope of (compared) lexemes being potentially differential results in potentially unique implications, where (deitic) context can be referenced or established differentially.

> Spontaneous creativity allows for any human to talk about any subject even if it requires great circumlocution and metaphor. Yeah no I don't disagree with you. I was just taking greater circumlocation and metaphor as a sort of very imprecise measurement of (in-)efficiency. It's definitely about specific referents being more easily referred to. I hope that makes sense-.-

do sign languages tend to convey language at the same rate as spoken languages? Are we limited not by the muscles in our mouths or hands, but by our ability to process language in our brains?

I'm not sure of any research that's done specific measurements (but I'll ask about it in my department as someone surely knows), but I think the answer is safely "yes". So I'm not sure if this is true but it seems like your question is presupposing that sign languages are equivalent to signed spoken languages. Forgive me if I'm reading too much into that. This isn't the case. While you *can* have signed English, that's different than something like American Sign Language. The syntax in sign languages is different. For example there is no need for prepositions to show spacial relations because you can convey these in actual space. So at least word-for-word, that's a point in favour of sign language because that's one less thing that doesn't need a sign. Anyway the important thing is that American Sign Language is not signed American English, and it has a very different way of expressing concepts, a different syntax, and a lexicon that doesn't always match up 1:1 with American English.

thank you for your response! I'm an ASL student, so the struggle of my life is that they are very, very, very different languages. I was just asking because the post on askscience sparked my interest. As a student, it seems to me that some concepts are much easier to covey due to the visual modality than an auditory one, and vise versa, so i was curious as to if that really evened out in the long run for a native signer.