LL-L "Language use" 2011.04.12 (01) [EN]

Tue Apr 12 18:27:39 UTC 2011

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L O W L A N D S - L - 12 April 2011 - Volume 01
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From: M.-L. Lessing <marless at gmx.de>
 Subject: LL-L "Language use" 2011.04.11 (04) [EN]

Dear Ron,

I had been hoping for the profound insights you can give, thank you!

   - I don't say English is a model of logical orthography :-) A language
   one already knows seems often easier than a new one.I think Italian has a
   pretty reliable orthography and pronunciation. And it is easy to learn
   (well, I had Latin in school :-)) It would make a fine lingua franca. -- And
   then there is Esperanto. -- But history isn't that logical.
   - Tonality: Another mystery for me. That means that a syllable differs in
   its meaning depending on the height of the tone it is spoken with (relative
   to the "groundline" of the speaker's intonation),right?So the same syllable
   can mean "ja"or "nein" when intonated differently. (They will not take
   downright opposites like "ja" and "nein", or will they?) So if I want to say
   "yes" and my friend Klaus that moment pricks me in my side (I am very
   ticklish) and I utter the syllable in a squeak, I may have said "no" instead
   of "yes"?
   Now this makes speaking more tricky, and I think it should be a hindrance
   to individual intonation,emphasis etc. Is it? -- But wouldn't it,
   theoretically,give you a chance to make writing more simple?At least if you
   constructed a new language like that. You could express everything with even
   lesssounds, that is: with less letters. But the chinese uses all sorts of
   sounds despite its tonality, hm?So tonality is another thing to learn extra.
   - I don't attribute the faults of the chinese government to the language
   (nor do you, I know). I rather pity the honest Chinese who love their
   language and literature in defiance of the nowadays government. A language
   can be a fine thing quite independently from a government. We had
   governments in germany that could have brought lots of shame on our language
   if that was possible. Still German remains a fine language, hm?

Hartlich!

Marlou

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

Subject: Language use

Hi, Marlou!

There was a time when I would have agreed with you *in toto*. These days I
am no longer so sure. Mostly, however, please let me play the devil’s
advocate here.

*(1)* Impractical? The Chinese script is pictographically based, though many
characters that were developed later do have phonetic references based on
Middle Chinese. By and large, though, the script is “abstract,” so to speak.
In theory at least, you could pretty easily use this script for any other
language. In fact, Japanese, Korean and Vietnamese do or did indeed use it,
though with added devices to suit their morphological needs. So you may
argue that the Chinese script, being largely independent of sound, is very
well suited as a *litteratura franca*. To communicate in writing about
contemporarily relevant matters, a person needs to learn a good three
thousand Chinese characters. While this may sound like a lot, I can assure
you on the basis of personal experience that it is not as difficult as it
sounds. (Reading Classical Chinese literature is a different matter,
requiring far more characters and being based on a very different language.)
However, these days many words are *composites* of two or more characters.

*(2)* While you can learn the Chinese script independently from a spoken
language, these days it is paired with and morphosyntactically based on the
Modern Mandarin language. Again, “Chinese” is internationally considered a
very difficult language to learn, and this assumption is largely based on
partial knowledge about the script and about the fact that all Chinese
languages (“dialects”) are tonal (i.e. have phonemic pitch distinction, as
to some degree or other do Indo-European languages such as Panjabi,
Norwegian, Swedish, Lithuanian, Serbo-Croatian and Limburgish – and these
days Japanese and Korean have been shown to be to some degree tonal (i.e.
bi-tonal), too – not to mention scores of African and American languages).
In reality, the difficulty of both script and tone is wildly exaggerated.
Standard Mandarin has four tones, and they are easy to learn (at least in *
my* experience). Besides, I have met many non-Chinese who did not master the
Mandarin tones and still managed to function at least adequately while
living in China. Furthermore, many of my fellow-students in Beijing were
from various parts of Africa, Latin America and Asia, most of them with no
Chinese studies background and with no particular interest in China either;
yet, most of them were quite fluent after about one year, and among them
many acquired functional Chinese literacy.
Personally, I find Russian—one of the world’s most significant *linguae
francae*—no less challenging than Mandarin, perhaps even more challenging
because of its rather involved phonology and morphology.
Please allow me to add that I am fairly educated about Chinese ethnic and
linguistic minorities, and this includes personal encounters. China has
minorities that speak very different types of languages, such as Tungusic,
Mongolic, Turkic, Tibeto-Burman and Austronesian ones, not to mention a
large Korean minority, as well as smaller communities of speakers of
Indo-European languages (Wakhi, Sarikoli and Russian). Most of their members
these days are proficient in Mandarin as well as in their ancestral
languages, and this is due to them being formally educated as Chinese
citizens and being exposed to Chinese (entirely or including Mandarin).

*(3)* While English is morphologically relatively simple, it makes up for
that in terms of lexicon, idiom and orthography. The English lexicon
contains a very rich accumulation of Germanic-, Romance- and Greek-based
items, many of which at first glance seem synonymous but are in fact not
entirely so, differences being mostly contextual or stylistic. English has
an abundance of idiomatic expressions, complicated by use of the
aforementioned mixture of lexical source material. English orthography is
based on 15th-century language varieties’ pronunciation. While it has
etymological relevance, the average foreign learner of English needs to put
a lot of time and effort into English literacy.

So I’ve thrown this into the discussion as intended food for thought. Please
understand that I do not advocate Chinese world domination (certainly not
under a regime anywhere like that of China *now*).

----------

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

Subject: Language use

Hi, Marlou!

In tonal languages, intonation and phonemic tone seem to operate on
different levels. In Chinese languages, for instance, intonation is mostly
based on raising or lowering the baseline voice level. Instead of stress, a
word has tones, and this is independent from intonation. In Chinese
languages, each syllable has a tone, though Mandarin has developed neutral
tones that can be likened to unstressed syllables. European tonal languages
(e.g. Ancient Greek, Lithuanian, Slovenian, and Serbo-Croatian) have
distinguishing tones only on the stressed syllables of words. All of it
sounds more complicated than it really is. As I mentioned earlier, a good
percentage of the world’s language are tonal.

I was not trying to intimate that English is not a suitable world language.
My point was that *any* language could serve as an international lingua
franca. None of them is “perfect.” Italian, for instance, uses written
stress symbols inconsistently, while Spanish and Portuguese, both of them
major international languages use stress symbols consistently. French has a
challenging orthography, yet the language is used in large regions of Africa
and also in Polynesia. English has managed to become the foremost lingua
franca, and that despite of its orthography. Aside from native English
dialects, a more neutral universal variety has been developing. It has been
serving us well, in my opinion, and, as more and more people throughout the
world use it, it seems to discard the colonial aspects of its image,
becoming increasingly neutral with regard to culture. Had historical events
turned out a little different, Dutch might have taken on the role English
has now.

Personally I am not in favor of constructed languages, despite their
supposed neutrality. Esperanto and Interlingua and even Mondlango (whose
creators are Chinese) are anything but neutral; they are based on dominant
European languages. Similarly, Volapük is based primarily on German, English
and French and in addition uses sounds (/ü/, /ö/) that are difficult for
speakers of many other languages to pronounce.

Regards,
Reinhard/Ron
Seattle, USA

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