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>> Part of why English got so popular is that on grammar level it's really simpler than most other languages.

I've heard this said often but I don't believe it. For one thing, ancient Greek was once the lingua franca around the Mediterranean (e.g. the New Testament was written in Greek koine) and it's hard enough to this native Greek speaker, so at the very least a language being easy or hard doesn't have much to do with whether it becomes a common tongue. I think English seems easy because its grammar works a bit like a word-stack, you can put words in order and make a phrase, whereas for other languages you have to modify words with pre- and suf-fixes. So in English you can sort of ignore grammar and only keep syntax in mind, whereas in other languages you have to manage both at once.

But, and this is just a theory, I suspect that there is no human language that is really "hard" to learn. Given that most languages must be spoken by at least a few thousand people over a few generations, I guess that every language is eventually optimised to be learned and used without trouble given the average linguistic ability of human beings.

There is actual research in the domain of language complexity! (Which, to be fair, is still a somewhat more niche topic in linguistics)

What little I know of it does suggest a couple of things (but my knowledge might be slightly outdated):

- It's true that no language is fundamentally unlearnable, not even as an adult (although you can of course always debate what "fluency" means exactly - to this date, I'm fairly certain that there are certain kinds of mistakes I make in English which native speakers don't make).

- A lot of the complexity does come from things like vocab and usage patterns, so even for a language where the grammar is "easy" (whatever that means - suppose we have a definition for that) it's not like it would be "easy" to speak properly. English in particular seems to have this "easy to learn, hard to master" problem.

- when we talk about grammar, there are definite differences in complexity, at least when we focus on certain areas (such as complexity of words). English is really just very simple in that regard, so is e.g. Chinese.

- contrary to GP's assumption, there is some evidence to believe that the causality goes in the opposite direction: English is not widely spoken because it's easy, it has become easier as part of being widely spoken as a second language.[1]

- relatedly, it appears that languages with very few non-native speakers (such as indigenous languages spoken only by a couple hundred of people) tend to have rather complicated grammatical features

[1] https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal...

> There is actual research in the domain of language complexity! (Which, to be fair, is still a somewhat more niche topic in linguistics)

I know little about this as well, but there’s been some research done by…… John McWhorter, I think? A quick search through my Big List of Things to Read (3000 articles and counting!) gives https://elementy.ru/downloads/elt/mcwhorter_creole_grammars.... and https://benjamins.com/catalog/slcs.71, which you may want to have a look at if you’re interested. David Gil is also well-known for his insistence that Riau Indonesian is simpler than most other non-creole languages.

> https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal...

Ah yes, this one. I remember carefully reading it a while ago, and I ended up very sceptical about its conclusions. For one thing, I don’t agree with rankings such as ‘Isolating > Concatenating’ and ‘Agent > Agent & Patient’ (though these do admittedly seem to be common assumptions). The ranking as a whole is a bit weird also — I’d love to know how they concluded that Tiwi is less complex than Dyirbal, for example. But I’m more suspicious of the linear fits, which appear extremely bad — I’m not convinced you can conclude anything from a fit of R²=8.9% (for Afro-Asiatic) or R²=14.1% (for Sino–Tibetan). In fact, only one of the graphs has R²>90% at all. And I note that they very carefully avoid giving p-values — except for the overall ‘complexity against population’ graph, a very significant correlation which however disappears when languages are split into groups by family (Simpson’s Paradox again?).

(Though keep in mind that I’m not great at statistics and any of the above could be incorrect.)

Also, they rely entirely on WALS, which isn’t a great source of linguistic data. It’s good for other things, but I very regularly find that a good proportion of its data is incorrect. It’s fine if you want to, say, see roughly what proportion of languages use active–stative alignment, but not for much else. (Though I suppose you could argue that the CLT applies and the errors will cancel out. But as I said, I’m bad at statistics and wouldn’t know how correct this is.)

(Personally, I’m sceptical that there’s a link between complexity and population. Witness Swahili, the lingua franca of a good chunk of East Africa. Or Quechua, the language of the Inca Empire. The main reason most widely-spoken languages are ‘simpler’ is that they disproportionally come from IE, ST and Austronesian, which aren’t the most morphologically complex families anyway.)

All of what you say may be correct, but

> Also, they rely entirely on WALS, which isn’t a great source of linguistic data.

the state of linguistic data is appalling in general. We have over 7000 languages in the world and yet, most of them are barely described, with grammars often being terribly inconsistent. I don't really know how to solve that problem except, in fact, hoping that the errors somehow do cancel out as you suggested.

I dunno, as a native-English speaker of (bad) Czech which has similar-ish thing to what you listed I am not sure these are such a mindfuck after all. If you threw all that at person at once they’d definitely lose their mind, but realistically they’ll learn it in something like this order (edit: updated to use similar example “hrát” - to play):

- conjugating verbs, “hraju” = I play, “hraje” = he/she plays

- past tense of verbs, “hrál jsem” = I was playing, “hrál” = he was playing, “hrála” = she was playing

- that verbs have a “perfective” form, so “zahraju” = I will play, “zahraje” = he/she will play

- naturally the past tense of these follow, “zahrál jsem” = I played, “zahrál” = he played, “zahrála” = she played

- that this can be conditional, “zahrál bych” = I would play, “zahrál by” = he would play, “zahrála by” = she would play

It’s not a stroll in the park, but the path that leads you to constructing those little sentence fragments isn’t too bad IMO. There are other complications tho (I just showed first and 2nd person singular, no plurals, I didn’t decline any nouns or adjectives, didn’t cover positions of words in a more complex sentence)

It always amazes me somewhat when people talk of languages like Polish as having complex words, because Indo–European languages generally have pretty simple words compared to most languages outside Europe. Consider, for example, the average word from Yimas:

planmaawkurampikacakapimpitɨprak

‘he got those two and hid them and lay them down inside’

Or Wichita:

kiya꞉kíriwa꞉cʔárasarikitaʔahí꞉riks

‘by making many trips, he carried the large [quantity of] meat up into it’

These sorts of words, as far as I can tell, are the norm rather than the exception outside Europe. (Well, perhaps not that extreme, but certainly words like those Polish examples are pretty common.)

That just sounds like an agglutinative language, which is scary just because the words are long. But if you know the language, it's easy to figure out since you can see the individual words inside the big word.

The cases in Slavic languages are much harder to deal with in real-time, IMO, since English speakers aren't used to thinking about all of those different aspects of the word.

> if you know the language, it's easy to figure out since you can see the individual words inside the big word

This happens to be correct for those Yimas and Wichita examples I gave, but in many languages the relationship between the constituent parts and the word itself is extremely nontrivial, e.g. in Mohawk:

tcioteriʻsioñʻhắtie né hotăskoñnioñniʻhătiḗne

s-yo-ate-rihsy-u-hatye-∅ ne hro-at-askw-uny-∅-hatye-hne

And in any case, most of the ‘individual words inside the big word’ aren’t ‘words’ at all but bound morphemes, in many cases with quite general semantics which are more along the lines of ‘someone caused this’ or ‘action done multiple times’ rather than anything more concrete.

My favourite word is in Nuxalk: clhp'xwlhtlhplhhskwts' . It has no vowels and it's pronounced [xɬpʼχʷɬtʰɬpʰɬːskʷʰt͡sʼ]. You can here it here[1]. It means "he had had in his possession a bunchberry plant".

[1]: https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/x%C5%82p%CC%93x%CC%A3%CA%B7%C...

I think that cross-linguistically, these might be a bit extreme? Also, the languages are head-marking (meaning that grammatical relations are encoded on the verb) which is just one of multiple possible ways if encoding grammatical relations.

That said, you're absolutely right that it is English that is the outlier here. I guess that many English speakers don't realize how much of an oddball English is as a language (even within European languages, which by themselves have a number of fairly oddball features).

(I wish there was a "follow" feature here on HN, I really like reading your comments.)

> I think that cross-linguistically, these might be a bit extreme?

You’re very probably right, though such ‘extreme’ examples are at least more representative of world languages than English is. Possibly more representative is something like, say, Jarawara:

ee to-ka-haba ee-ke ahi, fare owa teme-ne ite jaa, Boniwa; Boniwa teme-ne ite jaa, ee to-wa-ke-bana-ka

But that doesn’t emphasise my point nearly as well.

> Also, the languages are head-marking … which is just one of multiple possible ways if encoding grammatical relations.

Sure, but dependent-marking languages generally aren’t nearly as agglutinative as head-marking one, which again doesn’t illustrate my point too well.

> I guess that many English speakers don't realize how much of an oddball English is as a language (even within European languages, which by themselves have a number of fairly oddball features).

I personally like the list of Standard Average European features at https://risteq.net/languages/. And then English is highly isolating on top of that, which in and of itself is fairly uncommon (at least outside SE Asia and W Africa). Personally, I suspect that IE is no weirder than any other language families (TNG and Sino–Tibetan are at least as weird); people just tend to think of it as ‘average’ when it really isn’t.

> (I wish there was a "follow" feature here on HN, I really like reading your comments.)

Why, thank you! Honestly, I joined HN mostly to talk about programming, but there seem to have been lots of linguistics articles lately, so that’s what I’ve ended up talking about a lot. (There’s a fair bit of XKCD 386 about it, really.) But I post more regularly on linguistics here: https://www.verduria.org/

(And IIRC I believe the lack of notifications is intentional, though I don’t know the details.)

Languages are not inherently easy or hard. It all depends on where you're coming from: if you happen to already speak languages that are similar, then it can be said English will be easy to learn, otherwise, it's a language like any other. Just ask any Japanese or Chinese speaker how easy/hard it was to learn English.

The reason English got so popular is purely because of the power and wealth English speaking nations have amassed in the recent history.

Spanish is easier because there's just the two - an action is either discrete or not. There's some ambiguity as to which to apply in some cases, but the fact that there's just the two forms means there's basically an order of magnitude less to memorize.

But yeah, the challenge is that the prefixes/postfixes aren't uniform... if it was always po/przed/za/whatever prefix for the same use, that would be one thing, but instead it differs across verbs. Conceptually I get it, but it's just so difficult to go through the process of constructing words while speaking.

Though honestly I don't think that's the worst part - it's a ton of information, but there's a useful communicative purpose to it. What gets me is changing the endings to nouns based on the case - most of the time, doing that adds absolutely nothing from a meaning/comprehension standpoint. If I say "Cooper jest moj pies," 100% of Polish speakers are going to understand me 100% of the time, even though grammatically I'm clearly wrong. I swear it's just so my in-laws can have a good chuckle while I stumble through sentences :)