LL-L "Language perception" 2007.09.07 (06) [E]

Fri Sep 7 23:12:52 UTC 2007

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L O W L A N D S - L  -  07 September 2007 - Volume 06
Song Contest: lowlands-l.net/contest/ (- 31 Dec. 2007)
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From: Sandy Fleming <sandy at scotstext.org>
Subject: LL-L "Language perception" 2007.09.06 (03) [E]

> From: R. F. Hahn <sassisch at yahoo.com>
> Subject: Language perception
>
> Welcome back, Jonny!  Good to "see" you.
>
> Personally, I would be at a loss if I had to rank languages.  To me
> it's like comparing apples, oranges, spinach, broccoli, parsley,
> asparagus, plums, cherries, potatoes and whatever.  I like all of
> them.  From day to day and from hour to hour my answer would be
> different.  For me, switching language is like going from one room to
> another. Each room's interior is different and each room's window
> offers a view of another world.

I'm not sure I could compare two whole languages and come up with a
favourite (and as for Jonny putting his _own_ language first - well!),
but sometimes there are aspects of languages that I like better than the
way the same thing is done in other languages.

For example, the Welsh way of building noun phrases has always been one
of my favourites, the way it drops all noun inflections (except plural
endings, which are a mess in Welsh), even for the genitive, and depends
entirely on word order with the qualifiers following the qualified word
(the opposite way round from English, but more sensible to my mind).
It's all very neat and simple and orderly. But it's not perfect - the
way plurals and articles are handled makes a complete mess of it when
they're used, which then again doesn't matter once you're a fluent
speaker as you stop noticing details any more.

It's interesting for me to compare two close languages like Scots and
English and think about how different they seem by nature. Compared to
Scots, English seems a very logical language with a large and very
precise active vocabulary, while Scots seems to try to use common sense
and context much more than English, and tends to compose many concepts
as idiom rather than having a word for almost everything as in English.

But are these really properties of the languages or is it just that
English has been written a lot and Scots hasn't? And that people read a
lot in English but not in Scots?

I tend to agree with Jonny's son that Latin comes across as a simply
superior language, but I suspect real Latin as spoken by the Romans
wasn't like that, and that this is an illusion created by the idealistic
Roman writers we're familiar with, who tried to write on the principle
of "one idea, one word". I would imagine that real Latin was a mucky pup
just like any other language. There doesn't seem to be anything in the
actual grammar of Latin that I find praiseworthy in the way I find the
Welsh (singular, article-free) noun phrases particularly nice. Latin
seems mostly a weak declension system propped up with prepositions and
an overblown set of verb conjugations (which then again, is fine if you
like that sort of thing). But the idealistic way it's been written and
handed down to us makes it seem much neater and more expressive than
your everyday language.

Then again, there's French, which I think many British people at least
tend to think of as a _real_ language, unlike, say English, German,
Swedish, Welsh or Japanese. Somehow we perceive French as difficult and
sophisticated and the fact that it's just plain weird and approaching
meltdown from internal and external forces will never make any
difference to that perception.

In summary, I think that you can look at any language and see the same
thing - a mixture of chaos and order, ugliness and beauty. But our
perception of a given language as a whole might be purely cultural.

Sandy Fleming
http://scotstext.org/

----------

From: R. F. Hahn <sassisch at yahoo.com>
Subject: Language perception

Sandy,

I agree with your views by and large.

You wrote:

In summary, I think that you can look at any language and see the same
thing - a mixture of chaos and order, ugliness and beauty. But our
perception of a given language as a whole might be purely cultural.

I would add at the end "... and political, perhaps also historical."

Also, don't forget the traditional bias in Western education in which
"classical" means "Latin and Greek" which means "epitome," and there is the
old assumption that complex grammar is a sign of superiority (which has a
parallel in India where Sanskrit is considered superior to today's
Indo-Aryan languages).

Part and parcel of this is the afterglow of the one-time European obsession
with French culture and language and the opinion that anything Germanic,
Slavonic and Celtic is crude in comparison with things Romance (perhaps
because it's down home, "ordinary" and not connected with Rome).  I often
wonder if all this goes as far back as to the times of Charlemagne on the
Continent and to the Norman Invasion in Britain, later to be reinforced by
the Francophile craze in the 18th century and the Italian opera craze
roughly a century later.  Well, perhaps it goes all the way back to the
Roman invasions of Northern Europe.

Regards,
Reinhard/Ron

•

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