One time, many years ago, I ended up in a police station in Bangkok because of a robbery. They wanted my address but they didn't want to write it down in latin letters, so I had to pronounce my address and the woman wrote it in Thai script.
I really wonder how they would ever use that address. I am pretty sure the swedish postal service would have an interesting time if they decided to mail me a document.
Agree with the characters. Although it’s not super hard to learn (my non-Thai wife learnt the characters pretty quickly), I wish we officially have something like pinyin.
Fun fact: written Thai in Latin characters is unofficially called ‘karaoke’ [1].
[1] https://blogs.transparent.com/thai/how-to-readwrite-in-karao...
If they were completely superfluous they wouldn't arise in the first place. You could argue they aren't worth it, but that's a separate argument.
I'm Polish, my language has 3-5 genders (gender is a misnomer BTW, should be called "noun kinds" or "categories"), and while the complexity is hard on non-native speakers, it also allows for using lots of pronouns in shortened sentences without losing precision.
If you say "book is on the table, burn it" - the "it" can mean "book" or "table". In Polish you say "book is on the table, burn her" if you want to burn the book and "book is on the table, burn him" if you want to burn the table, because book and table are different genders. You can see how useful it is by the fact English sailors often call ships "her". Not many other "hers" on the sea in the age of sail.
I also think it's not an accident proto-indo-european (the language of people whose main thing was domesticating animals) had grammatical genders. It's nice to have that feature when you're mostly talking about cows and horses.
Then there are other features, like regular multi-degree diminutives you can form from any noun. You ever wanted to say somebody invented "cute little abstracion" - in Polish you can create a diminutive from the noun "abstraction" if you ever need it. "Abstrakcyjka" or "abstrakcjunia" if you're curious. Same with any other noun, no matter if it makes sense or not. In English you have a word for "cute little dog" ("doggy") but not for "cute little dinosaur" or "cute little blue color", "cute little love" or "cute little death". In Polish "dinozaurek", "niebieski kolorek", "miłostka", "śmiertka". I like this feature very much, because it's pretty regular, not much overhead to learn, but it adds a lot of color and expresivity to the language. There's whole slangs where people speak only in diminutives (for example truck drivers for some reason :) ).
Grammatical features like these are the best, because they are multiplicative - you have N nouns in your language, with small constant overhead you create 2xN new potential words.
On the other hand there are features that provide very little to no value - usually historical baggage. Like the non-phonetic spelling in many languages. English is by far the worst here, but in Polish there's a few problems to fix as well.
What's your opinion on "the" vs "a"? Cause in my language there are no articles. If you mean "a book" you say "any book". If you mean "the book" you say "this book" or "that book" or something to that effect. If you don't care (which is 99% of the time) - you say "book".
Do you think this distincion is worth it?
BTW I'm wondering if AI and programming will eventually create a new distinction, similar to the grammatical genders caused by domestication - it would be useful to be able to distinguish between antropomorphized but non-intelligent entities (this function threw an exception) and actually intelligent actors (this AI decided you should be fired).
The most common count is 3 because in singular nominative there's 3 - male/female/neutral - same as in English, but he/she/it applies to all nouns not only to people.
In plural nominative there's 2 - malepersonal and nonmalepersonal. So that's 5 in total.
But some people join singular and plural kinds to get 4 - malepersonal, malenonpersonal, female, neutral.
But that's only in nominative. Polish has 7 cases and in some of them the pronouns and endings behave differently depending on whether the group is grammatically male animals or grammaticaly male things.
So some people separate these as well and get 5 (if you join singular and plural kinds) or 7 if you don't.
It's fucked up when you think about it, but you don't think about it when you speak - you just know what sounds good and use that.
It causes a lot of problems with translations from other languages - you need more information that authors usually provide to know what pronouns and verb/adjective endings should be used.
(CI mężczyźni) vs (TE psy, TE stoły) = (male people vs everything else)
widzę (TEGO mężczyznę, TEGO psa) vs (TEN stół) = (male animate vs male things)Another fun example - we repeat an adjective to turn it into adverb. Since most adjectives are 1 syllable, it has the same cost as adding ‘ly’ in English.
If you want to eg talk about the past or future, you can put the markers for the different times into your verbs (like English or German do with grammatical tenses) or you can put those markers into other parts of the sentence (like English or German also do).
Eg in colloquial English you can say 'tomorrow I go to the market' and be well understood. Even if in print you would put it as 'tomorrow, I will go to the market'.
As I got a better understanding of why she spoke that way, because there weren't those structures in her native language, it made me do a lot of hard thinking about English and left me with a lot of unanswered questions, but tenses are useful. "l will be going to the barbers while I'm in town" – that's compact and informative and I'd like to know how a Thai speaker would render that.
Incidentally redundancy serves a useful purpose of error detection and rectification, just as much in human speech as in RAM.
Regarding redundancy, I so think that it's important and other languages have other ways of handling it. I know that Vietnamese for example very often doubles up the verbs for example for "help" it's common to say giúp đỡ together although both these words individually also mean help.
the first one is something like "I have it in my calendar" or "that's the plan" or "as is routine"
the second one is a declaration of current intention, in some cases emphasizing your determination.
Also, don’t take it the wrong way - the usage of superfluous is strictly logical. Like saying computer languages are superfluous (who ever needs anything other than an infinitely long tape?).
I find it interesting to your point how even the way we make sense of something like this brings its own contextual baggage. Even "complexity" as a word can be good ("more powerful, developed") or bad ("more fragile, inefficient, and complicated") depending who you ask in what context.
Take this study: it seems to be exploring a hypothesis that societies that have more adult learners of a language tend to simplify that language to make it easier to learn. It seems quite interesting, and it gives us perspective on something we generally take for granted every day. It also seems to cast doubt on that original hypothesis.
But if this same study was called a measure of grammatical complicatedness, with the "more complex" languages instead called more complicated, and the "less complex" languages instead labelled more efficient or streamlined, we'd likely interpret the information differently.
So taking the summarised posted article. A quick glance reads to me as "some languages are more complex than others, and the hypothesis is that languages tend to reduce their complexity to allow non-native speakers to learn it". This to me, in the Western Enlightenment tradition of the march to progress where "the more something has been built upon and developed, and the more function and capability it has, the better it is" doesn't necessarily read as a positive thing at face value. But we could just as easily read it as language adapting and knocking down barriers to allow people to create connections and feel welcome in ways they were excluded from previously. Or as supporting international trade and being more efficient. Or as you've highlighted that perhaps they've altogether misunderstood the complexity of other languages by interpreting them in terms informed from their understanding of the complexity of their own native languages.
Conservatives in the Burke/Tocqueville tradition (as a quick tangent, a tradition that in my view at its best is like programming aka Don't Reinvent the Wheel, Don't Rewrite from Scratch, Refactor Respectfully after Learning Why it Is How it Is, but at its worst and sadly most common comes across far more as a romanticised and overglorified appeal to return to a time of greater privilege, exploitation, and ill-gotten misused power) would probably bring in another angle arguing that if the hypothesis were true it demonstrates a decay of civilisation: that there used to be these "great" languages that we're losing/lost.
I think you make the great point that there's so much subjectivity in this: that different languages can be useful in different ways without resorting to value comparisons.
We could apply the same lenses to memes and/or emojis: some argue they're a sign everyone is getting dumber and less articulate in the Idiocracy tradition, while others argue they're exciting and creative new culture, or an expression of increased global connection, or something else altogether.
Reflecting on English itself, we historically have seen a bit of both/and to the original hypothesis: a "simpler" more utility style of English that can selectively borrow on more "complex" words. The simpler English appears to have been used as much by locals who were not educated in the language of their new rulers as for any trade/migration reason, and accordingly has been heavily influenced by the older Saxon roots (an interesting outcome given oppressors, including the English, have at other times inhumanely erased the language of those they've conquered), contrasted with the French influence of upper-class conquering Normans whose words are usually considered in English more "complex" and perceived as more refined/intellectual by virtue of them being the language of power. Managementese is probably a modern incarnation of the same idea.
Looking at this differently and taking the "language can be useful in different ways" point, English seems generally still more likely to lean on its Germanic roots in describing practical matters, and French roots in describing aesthetic ones. Indeed its ability to borrow on different traditions is in my view one of its great strengths.
I'd probably argue the more language the merrier as long as we can all express what we want to express and understand each other, but there is probably a risk to entrenching stratification, whether it be of class or race or some other lens (i.e. everyone can speak a common English everyone understands, but the way in which it is spoken and the words selected reveal elements that can have social connotations, and those are often used by those in power as tools of status and judgement). American English seems to have some commonly explored lenses in media in which different styles of speech are heavily culturally and historically influenced and clearly reflect group membership (e.g. contrast Valley Girl English with African-American Vernacular English). We even see a similar idea across generations with slang. And then on the other hand there's the idea of "hidden transcripts" where an oppressed group inverts this model and develops and uses language and/or action (e.g. theatre, music) in a way to communicate in code without tipping off the oppressors (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_C._Scott#Domination_and_...).
Fascinating space given how much we take it for granted!
If you then look at other languages, you can find other cases where individual languages seem unusually simple compared to their relatives. Swahili, the East African trade language, is rather simple compared to its other Bantu brethren. Malay is simpler than its nearest Austronesian relatives. Even Old Chinese does seem like it had a similar grammatical crash to English (compare it to the other Sino-Tibetan languages), just 3000-4000 years ago instead of 1000 years ago. You can also find cases like the Kartvelian languages, where the comparatively more isolated regions seem to produce somewhat more complex languages than the somewhat more easily accessible regions.
There's also a believable putative mechanism. It is a common observation that adult language learners tend to have a harder time learning languages than children. It's not hard to imagine that a language being learned by a lot of adults ends up having those new language speakers shave off some of the harder bits of the language, and those adults then passing on this shaved-off language to their kids (who are of course unaware that they're learning a simpler language).
What's your take on the article's take that they feel this plausible hypothesis is challenged by their study?
In particular, their study says: "The specific claim of the “linguistic niche hypothesis” that grammatical complexity should reduce with an increased number of nonnative speakers is not supported by our results." (from the source https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/sciadv.adf7704).
If I'm reading their study correctly, they seem to suggest there was a somewhat arbitrary mix of complexity in root languages, and that modern languages just carry on that same complexity mix based on the languages that influenced them, which doesn't do a lot to explain why languages differ in "complexity" (except perhaps to argue that maybe it doesn't matter: any old language will do and people just speak like the people they learn from).
In short, I'm not convinced that they have the right data. They're using numbers that are relatively easy to come by or compute (e.g., current L2 speaker estimates), and it's not at all clear that this is the right set of numbers to use (see all of the comments here complaining that fusional complexity being used as a proxy for grammatical complexity).
When adults with different languages meet in a place where there isn't a language to conform to or that's impossible to happen, their native languages merge in a very simple form: dictionary and simple grammatical rules. That's called a pidgin [1].
Then those adults get children and those children learn the pidgin, the "simpler language", and add more complex grammatical rules, because they are useful, because they make the language sound better, because of fashion, whatever. That's called a creole [2].