Newsgroups: sci.lang
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From: markrose@spss.com (Mark Rosenfelder)
Subject: Re: sci.lang FAQ
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References: <3bjmtc$ci3@medici.trl.oz.au>
Date: Mon, 5 Dec 1994 20:55:23 GMT
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In article <3bjmtc$ci3@medici.trl.oz.au>,
Jacques Guy <jbm@newsserver.trl.oz.au> wrote:
>It is far from true that all languages are equally complex. I suppose
>that this strange notion is a throwback, or an offspring, whichever you
>prefer, of "politically correct" whereby all languages are equal,
>complexity is good, so all languages are equally complex. 

"Political correctness" has nothing to do with it; Edward Sapir was 
preaching this point 70 years ago.  It seems pretty clearly to be a reaction
against then-current notions that primitive peoples have primitive 
languages, or that there is some sort of scale of perfection in 
languages-- isolating, then agglutinating, then inflecting.  

>Now, if you
>have tried to learn French, and then Spanish, you might have noticed just
>a tad of a difference. Spanish has nowhere as many impossibly difficult
>vowels as French, nowhere as many abominably irregular verbs, nowhere as
>crazy a spelling... But let's not get personal, so allow me to take as
>an example two languages which will not make anyone raise an eyebrow, I
>am sure. One is called Tolomako, the other Sakao. Both are spoken in the
>same village, called Port-Olry, a place on the island of Espiritu Santo
>in Vanuatu. Both languages are closely related, by which I mean that
>they might have been one and the same perhaps 1000 years ago, probably
>much less.

You make a good case that Tolomako's phonology is much simpler; I'll be
interested to see if any other linguists care to defend the received
wisdom.  I do have one quibble:

>Now for a nice example of Sakao's holophrastic tendencies:
>
>mOssOnEshOBr(i)n aDa EDE
>he-shoots-fish-follows-continuous aspect+transitive  bow sea
>he kept on walking along the shore shooting fish with a bow

This would have frightened me a lot more before I started learning Quechua.
It has a load of affixes, and it takes time for an English speaker to get
used to them; but on the other hand the verb tho' complex is highly regular,
and word order is very flexible.  

I'm reminded of my Russian teacher's contention, that Russian was not 
more difficult than English, just different.  Not always easy to believe
when memorizing lists of perfective roots; but then, reading McCawley's
_Syntactic Phenomena of English_ one may well wonder how anyone manages
to learn *this* language...

By the way, why are these two languages spoken in the same village?
And what are the speakers' own feelings about the complexity of the two
languages?
