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From: pardoej@lonnds.ml.com (Julian Pardoe LADS LDN X1428)
Subject: Re: The whole language tree thing.
Message-ID: <DF7nw3.G3I@tigadmin.ml.com>
Sender: usenet@tigadmin.ml.com (News Account)
Reply-To: pardoej@lonnds.ml.com
Organization: Merrill Lynch Europe
References: <AC7F8164966813F9B@yarn.demon.co.uk>
Date: Wed, 20 Sep 1995 15:48:03 GMT
Lines: 72

In article <AC7F8164966813F9B@yarn.demon.co.uk>, taka@yarn.demon.co.uk (Paul Talacko) writes:
-->Indeed it might be an interesting exercise to categorise langauge according
-->to current structure rather than on an historical basis.  It has always
-->troubled me that languages such as French and English which are supposed to
-->be from completely different branches of the IE tree are so damn similar. 
-->Whereas German which is supposedly from the same branch of IE is quite
-->different.

A lot of the similarity comes from the fact that English has borrowed a lot of
words from French and that both languages have borrowed lots of words from
Greek and Latin.  German has tended to rely on its own resources much more.

Given this I can imagine people saying that the similarities between F and E
are "shallow" and those between G and E are "deep" but that seems a bit arbitrary.

-->Try an experiment by translating from French and German into English. 
-->Provided you are fluent in French the translation is quite easy.  German is
-->a different kettle of fish.  German is rendered directly into English gives
-->sentences which are completely long and tortured.  To render German into
-->English requires a complete reshuffling of sentences, whereas French by
-->comparison is a push-over.

I'm not sure it's quite so simple.  Yes, French word order is much closer to
English than that of German (especially formal German) but in some ways
that is not the whole story.  French, especially "up-market" literary French,
can be quite dense and whilst it might be possible to produce a grammatical
English sentence by doing a more-or-less word-for-word translation the result
isn't always English as she is spoke.  Sometimes many many ideas are packed closely
together in a French sentence in a way that is not possible in English, which tends
to need to be more loosely structured.  I remember trying to read a Spanish novel
in translation once.  Though the sentences were grammatically correct English
and each word was well translated the net result wasn't really English because each
Spanish sentence needed to be several English sentences and things that were series
of phrases in Spanish (with quite a deep "nesting structure") needed to be broken
out into strings of clauses (with a shallow nesting structure).

The French certainly tend to use words that strike the English as over-formal.
I've heard an unmarked police car described as "banalis'e" and an elephant
called a "pachyderme" to an audience whose English equivalent (University-educated
or not) would have responded with one mind "Wot!". 

I could imagine that in this sense French and German are actually closer to each
other than either is to English.

Has there been much comparitive study of sentence "density" in different languages.

I remember reading an interview with a Romanian writer who contrasted Romanian
and Russian as "peasant languages" with "sophisticated languages".  It wasn't
quite clear if this dictinction represented more than prejudice but I can't
help feeling that English ought to be more at the peasant end because of its
liking for simplish sentence structures.
 
-->Die Parteien legen mir die diesem Notariatsakt beigeheftete, aus einem
-->halben bogen bestehende, von ihnen errichtete Privatkunde, de dato Wien,
-->den 3. August 1995 zum Zwecke der notariellen Bekraeftigung vor.
-->
-->You will never get a French sentence like that.

You'll never find an English sentence either!

I don't know.  The order would be very different (but in a predictable way)
but I suspect it would be easier to come up with a readable single-sentence
translation in French than it would be in English.  Anyone care to try?

If you like complex sentences try Turkish!  The English "Teach Yourself Turkish"
actually has a section at the end on deciphering long Turkish sentences.   The
example is about 8 lines long and ends "(?) ne fark vardir" or "what a difference
there is (between)".  All the rest consists of two long noun clauses separated 
by "and".

-- jP --

