Linguistics questions?

[Antrax]

Is there any basis to the claim that Hebrew is harder to learn than English? Is there any objective way to determine which language is harder to grasp?
Antrax

------------------
"Look, that's why there's rules, understand? So that you think before you break 'em" - Lu-Tze, Thief of Time

[Vinny]

Antrax, are you suggesting to me that you made that claim to me without thinking it's true? eh?

Tahnan, compares the difficulty of learning these languages, while you're at it:

English
Arabic
Chinese
Spanish

p.s. The easiest language to learn, in my opinion, is Vietnamese. To read and write anyway. Are you familiar with the Vietnamese spelling/grammar system, Tahnan?

[This message has been edited by Vinny (edited 03-31-2004 12:04 PM).]

[Tahnan]

Other than Basque, which is learnable only by aliens? (Not true: see this LanguageLog post for a discussion of the "unlearnability" of Basque.)

The first thing to note, of course, is that every langauge is equally easy to learn for an infant. Babies who grow up in Hebrew-speaking households have no more trouble learning Hebrew than babies in English-speaking households have learning English.

But I suspect you're talking about second-language learning in adults. Bear in mind that languages are related to one another historically, which makes them more or less similar to one another. English is Indo-European, and Hebrew is Semitic. So Hebrew may be somewhat harder for English speakers to learn than, say, German; but it'll be much easier for an Arabic speaker to learn.

Primarily what makes a language easier or harder to learn is how different the two are. Hebrew seems hard for English speakers because it has gender, agreement on its adjectives, possessives marked as suffixes instead of separate words; tense marked by changing the vowels rather than adding a suffix or a separate word; and so forth. Beyond the syntactic differences, there are few cognates, so the vocabulary must be learned from scratch (as opposed to the similarities in lexicon between English and, say, German or French), and there are differences in phonology--that back-of-the-throat sound that English doesn't have. And, of course, the problems of learning a whole new alphabet.

The same holds true of Chinese, of course, which has an alphabet even more different than Hebrew's, and has tones.

It's hard to quantify this sort of thing in absolute terms. No one element is in and of itself hard to learn (again, babies do it all the time). English itself is supposed to be hard to learn--though I don't know, myself, as it only took me a few years, and I was too young to remember them now; I don't know how much of that is our extremely irregular (i.e. non-phonetic) spelling system, and whether English is easier to learn though a purely conversational method.

So I don't know that there's any way to state objectively whether one language is easier or harder to learn, even relativized to the language(s) the learner already knows. The best one can do, I think, is to compare the degree of differences between the language, to see how many new aspects (morphology, tense system, number of noun cases, phonological differences....) the learner must master.

(I don't know anything at all about Vietnamese, other than the fact that the diacritics on the vowels scare me--many of which are tones, which also rather scares me, as I don't have a great ear for tones.)

For further reading, see The Writings of Metalleus--in particular, the rather short "Parable of the Two Kingdoms" on that page.

[Vinny]

I will put out that Chinese and similar languages, I suspect Japanese and Korean to be the same, is the easiest to learn grammar-wise. They have a very simple grammar system. No plurality, no tenses, no genders, no verb conjagations. The writing system, however, is extremely difficult, because there're no alphabets, and you learn word as a whole solely from memorization.

The Vietnamese grammar system is similar to Chinese, and it also has alphabets. I say it is simple to learn because the spelling and sounding rules are very exact. Once you learn the rules, you can look at any words and would know how to pronounce it, even if you don't know its meaning. Similarly, if someone say a word to you, and even though you don't know its meaning, you can write it. The problem is ofcourse, with the meaning. I've only get up to 4th grade level of education in Vietnamese, but I can pick up any books or newspapers and read it outloud. I might not understand half the thing I said, but a better learned Vietnamese speaker will.

Isn't that just dam interesting?

http://www.lmp.ucla.edu/profiles/profv01.htm


[This message has been edited by Vinny (edited 03-31-2004 01:13 PM).]

[Tahnan]

I can't speak to Vietnamese, but Japanese grammar is much, much harder than you seem to think. I've been to a number of talks on Japanese syntax, involving where words can move and how to embed a clause and such, and the (descriptive) rules are anything but simple. I don't believe Japanese has gender, but it has different sorts of agreement.

As far as Vietnamese's feature that "the spelling and sounding rules are very exact," the same is true for a number of other languages. I can, for instance, read Hebrew aloud with pretty good fluency, though I know very little of the vocabulary (though admittedly the other direction is not as easy). As I said earlier in the thread, many languages that had no written forms before missionaries learned them are written phonetically.

And of course Hangul, the Korean alphabet, is so phonetic that not only does each symbol correspond to one and only one sound, but the shapes of the alphabet are designed to echo the position of the tongue and lips when pronouncing the sound. For a while (from 1960 to 1991), Hangul Day was a legal holiday in South Korea (and possibly the only holiday in the world celebrating a linguistic achievement, though some Slavic countries seem to celebrate a "Day of Slavic Writing and Culture", which is close).

[Vinny]

Ah, ditto. Thanks for the englightenment, Tahnan. I didn't know there are so many languages with exact sound of words from spelling (since English and the Romatic languages aren't). Arabic being one surprises me. Shows how really ignorant I am in these matters.

Here's an interesting thing about Chinese. You said earlier you're not sure why all languages in China are all lumped together as "Chinese", even though some sound totally different from each others. I think, though not definite, that the main reason is that even though all the different dialects are spoken differently, with the main one being Mandarine, Cantonese, Shanghainese, and Taiwanese, they all share a common writing system. A man from Peking can travel all over China, and even though he can't communicate with the locals vocally the further he headed away from Peking, he can still communicates through writing.

The other interesting thing about Chinese, from what I've heard (I can't read and write Chinese, only able to speak Cantonese and a little Mandarine), is that when you're a learned scholar fluent in many of the Chinese dialects and proficient with the writing system, you don't translate the words you're reading first to a sound, and then interpreted the meaning via the sound. Instead, the image of what the words and sentences mean go straight from you seeing the words to your understanding of what the writing means, bypassing the middle step of sounding it out first in your head.

Also, when I was a child, because my first language is Cantonese, I would think Cantonese thoughts. Later, when I learned Vietnamese through the school system, I would occasionally think in Vietnamese. After I moved to the U.S and became familiar with English, I think in English all the time and rarely revert to thoughts in my first two languages. Even when I am speaking Chinese or Vietnamese, I would think in English and then translated it in my head to either languages before speaking it.

My question is this:

Can you *not* think in any specific vocal languages at all? Or do you think that human beings required that middle step of translating what you see into sound and understanding the meanings that way? How do human beings think before languages were invented?

I am probably over analyzing and making up too much stuff here. Any more accurate portrayals or interpretation of how you think the system of "thoughts -> sound -> writing" works, and the reverse, would be greatly appreciated.



[This message has been edited by Vinny (edited 03-31-2004 06:40 PM).]

[Hitchhiker]

Vinny: what language were your dreams in during the transition period? A friend of mine from Germany came to my high school (in the US) for two years, and she said for months, she would dream about school and we all spoke fluent German.

Then when she went back to Germany, for a while her dreams were still in English.

[Bicho the Inhaler]

[casinopete]

"Then when she went back to Germany, for a while her dreams were still in English."

For a couple of days after a particularly annoying double-all-nighter programming project a few years ago, my dreams were in Java.

[Vinny]

Hitchhiker, I don't remember what languages my dreams are in during the transition period. Heck, I don't even remember what languages my dreams are in recently! I have a feeling it could be a mixture of everything, like if I dream about my parents they would speak in Chinese, if I dream about my American friends it would be in English. I don't think I have ever dream in Vietnamese. I'll see if I can pay more attention to my dreams and see what the heck is going on with those little people in my head.

Thanks for the answer, Bicho. But try as I might, I simply cannot read English without first sounding it in my head. I can't just glance at a sentence and understand what it means without "reading" it. For example, if I see "red", I don't see the color red immediately. I noticed a subtle, yet extremely quick, process of translating the letter 'r', 'e', and 'd' into the word 'red' before understanding it meant to describe the color.

I understand that in Chinese, because it's not a phonetic written language, but a pictorial one, it is possible to see a "picture" immediate w/ seeing the words. You're saying this is possible also for English?

[Tahnan]

I should note that Vinny was quite correct about why Chinese is called a single language; Merriam-Webster tells me that Chinese is "a group of related languages mutually unintelligible in their spoken form but sharing a single system of writing in which the visual symbols directly represent words regardless of the sounds involved used by the people of China and constituting a branch of the Sino-Tibetan language family". I should have thought to look--in fact, I should have known already, and frankly already did, though I wasn't able to call up the fact out of my memory.

I didn't yet answer Vinny's question:

[Huey]

[Bicho the Inhaler]

Originally posted by Tahnan:

---

I was actually rather hoping that Noam Chomsky, as he's been reading the forum...

---

What? Are you serious? Are you telling me that "Noam Chomsky" was Noam Chomsky?

Anyway, I admit to being far from an expert on that subject; I was going by my own experience. My intuition is that language is merely a useful tool that isn't required for thoughts (even complex thoughts) but is a useful crutch we lean on because our brains are limited and it gives us a convenient handle on things. As far as formulating thoughts, language doesn't make new things possible in theory, but it makes new things feasible in practice.

Now I'm really out of my depth, but it seems much more likely to me that language developed as a tool of communication; it just so happens that it not only makes it easier to communicate with others, but also with ourselves.

[Tahnan]

[Vinny]

ok ok, who is dis "Noam Chomsky" character? some kind of linguist dweeb?j/k! I Heart Linguists!

[Vinny]

Tahnan, which books by Noam Chomsky do you recommend, for a "linguist dummmy" like me?

[Tahnan]

Apropos of nothing, I remembered an anecdote told to me by a friend after her semester in France. She was talking to her math tutor, who was French, and he complained about how silly English spelling was, because there were all those letters that aren't pronounced. My friend just stared at him, and he said, in French, "You know, like..." followed by a word that sounded like "vin". "Wine?" she asked, in English, thinking he said "vin"; and he said, "No, <vin>. 'Twenny.' It's got that t that doesn't get pronounced." To which my friend thought, "You're complaining about a dropped 't' in 'twenty' when you just pronounced 'vingt' with one consonant and one vowel?"

It seemed passingly relevant to the question of whether one language is harder than another to learn: one doesn't notice the difficulties of one's own language, because one is immersed in them.

---

To answer Vinny's question, Noam Chomsky is something of a towering figure in the field of modern linguistics. In the 1950s, he argued vehemently against the behaviorist view of language, i.e. that language is learned as a series of responses to stimuli, so that in the same way that a rat learns that pressing a bar gets him food, a child learns that forming the sounds in "I'm hungry" will get her food. He suggested that language followed a structure which is hardwired into the brain the way breathing and walking are, observing that, for instance, one can judge that a sentence one has never heard before is either part of one's language or not, and that one learns restrictions on language without any specific evidence against them.

Unfortunately, I can't recommend any books by Chomsky, though one might try to find 1957's "Syntactic Structures." Because he is so influential, often in field-changing ways, many people feel they need to read his work, and as a result his writing is no longer aimed at easy understanding. (Or, perhaps, human understanding.)

If one wants an overview of the field, one could do worse than Pinker's The Language Instinct. It's not perfect (for one thing, it's very one-sided in its acceptance of the details of Chomsky's theories), but it's a good starting point.

[This message has been edited by Tahnan (edited 04-14-2004 07:24 PM).]

[DP]

Slight addition on the Chinese side: PRC have introduced a simplified form of writen mandarin (still symbols, I'm not talking hanyupin), which Taiwanese and HongKongese usually can't read.

[Vinny]

Ok, new question.

Not sure if you can answer this or if there is a definite answer. I am not even sure how to ask it correctly.

How many major language "roots" are there? What I mean is, all the Romance languages (English, Spanish, French, Italian, ...) are derived from Latin, which is derived from Greek(?). Then there're those Basque and Semitic you mentioned, and Sanskrit, and Chinese, Japanses, Korean, and so on. Has all those languagues been traced all the way back to where it wasn't derived from a previous languages? If they have, how many are there, those original language roots that evolved independently of each other?

I hope that makes sense.



[This message has been edited by Vinny (edited 04-15-2004 10:17 AM).]

[Tahnan]

It makes sense, and it's a fine question, one about which there is much debate (surprise).

First, I'm not sure it's quite right to say that Latin "derived" from Greek; certainly the former borrowed words from the latter for cultural reasons, but Latin is more a sibling than a descendent of Greek. Second, English isn't, properly speaking, a Romance language; it's a Germanic language which, in the move from Old English to Middle English, was heavily influenced by French. Nevertheless, the grammar is much more Germanic than it is Romance.

That said: Latin/Greek/Germanic and Sanskrit are part of the same family, Indo-European; Chinese and a number of other continental Asian languages are Sino-Tibetan; and so on. By comparing sound changes, linguists have reconstructed what they call "Proto-Indo-European": for instance, they postulate "*bhrátér-" as the PIE word for "brother", with the initial sound becoming an /f/ in Latin ("frater", hence English "fraternal") and a /b/ in Germanic, with the middle consonant becoming a /d/ or /th/ (German "Bruder", English "brother").

I imagine a Proto-Sino-Tibetan has been constructed, though I know less about it.

SIL's Ethnologue lists about a hundred different families. How indepedent they are is an open question, and certainly there are historical linguists who attempt to derive "Proto-World". This has generally struck me (and I am not alone in thinking this) as only slightly more productive than the search for a perpetual motion machine, and that "slightly more" comes only from the fact that such a thing might exist (and even that I rather doubt). The odds of finding either one seem about equal to me.

Perhaps the worst part of this, of course, is that historical reconstruction of this sort is ultimately unverifiable; no experiment can be run to check the predictions, and the likeliness of finding any written (or other) evidence that confirms the facts is pretty much zero.

So ultimately the best answer to Vinny's question "of how many are there, those original language roots that evolved independently of each other?" is something like "Somewhere from one to a hundred, very probably closer to the latter." Humans are inventive, and we know that in the absense of language they'll invent it--in the 1970s, Nicaraguan deaf children were put together in a school for the first time, and lacking any adult language to learn, they developed a sign language of their own. I myself have no problem imagining tens, perhaps hundreds of different clusters of people independently developing language. (And if I had to venture a guess, I'd say that it wasn't adults sitting around the fire grunting at each other until they agreed that "ugh" meant "warm" and "urgh" meant "cold"; I'd suspect that it was children, babbling to each other, who formed common sounds and then passed them along to younger children. But that, too, is a guess.)

[Quailman]

I understand how pig latin works with English. Can it be applied in the same fashion to other languages? If so, which ones adapt best?

[Tahnan]

Pig Latin is the best-known English example of what linguists call "language games". In theory, one could apply Pig Latin to any spoken language (though not every language has the "ay" sound, but it's pretty close to universal(*), and one could substitute in a native vowel sound instead). In practice, language games are ubiquitous, and pretty much every language has some sort of game. The examples I recall off the top of my head are Verlan, a French language game which moves syllables (I think the first syllable moves to the end, but I only remember examples with two syllable words, so it may be "reverse the word, syllabically" or "swap the first and last syllables"), and a game of Walpiri speakers in which all words are replaced with their opposites. (If I recall correctly, adult males speak this without explaining the rules and wait for adolescent males to figure it out, as a sort of initiation rite.)

[Tahnan]

(*)Actually, "ay" in English is a diphthong, and therefore isn't very common across languages. But the non-diphthongized version is close to universal.

[Vinny]

What, pray thell, is a thip thong?

[Tahnan]

I wondering if someone would ask. From the Greek phthongos "sound", a diphthong is two vowel sounds spoken together as a single vowel. The easiest to hear in English is what we think of as "long i" (the way "eye" is pronounced). Say "eye", but drag it out, and you can hear an "ahhh" followed by an "eeee". (If you can't, say "ahhheee" really fast and see what it sounds like.)

English has a number of diphthongs: the vowels in hay, hi, how are all two vowel sounds (ehhh-eeee, ahhh-eee, ahhh-oooo). The sound at the end of English "ballet" is a diphthong, "ehh-eee"; the sound at the end of French ballet is a monophthong, a singly-articulated sound which is not unlike our diphthong.

[Vinny]

Is there a trithong? (H'owdy! Y'all!)

If chimpazees has the right vocal tool, can they learn to speak?

When parrots talk, I know they don't really understand what they're saying. Why do they (the parrots) do it? How do you teach a parrot to talk? (Maybe this is more of a question for Dr. Borodog, Phd., but I think it's somehow linguistically related).

[Tahnan]

There are triphthongs, though not so commonly. (Googling for "triphthong" turns up many more webpages of definitions or "weird words" than actual examples.) "Yow" or "wow" (/iau/ and /uau/, or "eee-ahhh-ooo" and "ooo-ahhh-ooo", more or less) are triphthongs, insofar as they're three vowel sounds in a single syllable. Depending on one's dialect, words ending in a dropped "r" (fire, power) may have a diphthong followed by a schwa and thus contain a triphthong.

Some languages have triphthongs the way English has diphthongs, i.e. some of the "vowels" are in fact three vowels pronounced together. I don't speak any of these languages, though a casual websearch suggests that Celtic languages (Gaelic, Manx) are among the languages that have them.

Parrots and chimpanzees. I'm definitely not qualified to say much about parrots other than "they don't understand language regardless of what the BBC thinks". (Not even the kakapo.) For primates...as far as I can tell, primates lack the innate language-acquiring modules that humans have. So it's not just an inability to articulate that's keeping chimpanzees from speaking.

See also this Language Log post for a discussion of parrotspeak and monkeyspeak.

[Vinny]

Heh. Thanks for the article, Tahnan. That was a fun read. Didn't really answer my question though. I am one of those crazy fanatics that wish we can communicate with other species.

Anyhow, let's just move on.

What are you working on now, Tahnan? Liguistically, I mean.

[Tahnan]

Heck, I also very much wish we could communicate with other species; I'm just not optimistic that we can.

At the moment I'm working on two different papers. One is the "concealed question" paper I mentioned in reply 20. Today, I've been working on the interpretation of the Perfect tense and how it interacts with since clauses. Why, for instance, does "I've lived in Boston since I've been in graduate school" mean that the time of my being in graduate school overlaps the time of my living in Boston, but "It's been four years since I've been in graduate school" doesn't mean that the time of my being in graduate school is the last four years (but instead means something like "the time of my not being in graduate school is the last four years")?

[Vinny]

ok, honestly? It took a while for me to work out what you were saying. I have to read that serveral times before I get your point.

Let me just retype the two sentences here so I can see it clearer =)

1. "I've lived in Boston since I've been in graduate school"

2. "It's been four years since I've been in graduate school"

See if I have this correct. The word "since" implies different things in the two sentences.

The "since" in sentence 1 helps established the fact that, "I lived in Boston while going to graduate school, from the beginning till now."

The "since" in sentence 2 helps established the fact that, "From 4 years ago to the present, I haven't been in graduate school."

Even thought both sentences ended with "since I've been in graduate school", sentence 1 marked the time as "did happened", while sentence 2 marked the time as "did not happened". Is that the gist of it?

Sounds like it's just because of context?

For the life for me, I can't think of a Chinese equivalent to "since".

The closest I can think of is "du qui si?" (Cantonese, litteral translation "to how long?")

e.g. "Since when have you have this car?"

"You qui si have this car?"

Or

"You have this car qui loi la?"

("qui si" and "qui loi" are interchangeable, depending on the sentence. "Qui" means "How", as in

"how fast?" (qui fai?),
"how long?" (timewise, qui loi?),
"how soon?" (qui fai?),
"how long?" (lengthwise, qui chueng?),
"how pretty!" (qui len ah!),
"how much?" (qui duo?),

etc.

"Si" literally means "time".
"Loi" litterally means "long", timewise.

To say, "I have lived here since 1999."

I have to say, "I lived here from 1999 to now."

Eh. Sorry not really helping. Just trying to understand what you're working on =)



[This message has been edited by Vinny (edited 04-20-2004 06:02 PM).]

[Quailman]

You've been in graduate school for four years? Do you have any plans to leave academia behind and enter the real world? What will you do with your advanced degree in linguistics? How's your Farsi?

[Tahnan]

I myself don't distinguish between "academia" and the "real world"; I can assure you that academia is not filled with magic swords, unicorns, and fire-breathing dragons. (Not even the last, in spite of what some people say about their advisors.)

I myself am quite looking forward to being able to teach; I'm not looking for ways to apply my storehouse of knowledge to solving world hunger. (Nice though it would be.) My Farsi, luckily, is terrible, which means I'm somewhat less likely to get drafted.

To answer Vinny: yes, it's very much "because of context"--but the question I'm exploring is what that context is, and why it should matter. To put it another way: the clause in (1) can be paraphrased as "since I entered graduate school" and the clause in (2) can be paraphrased "since I left graduate school", but why should that be?

Perhaps:

(1) I've lived in Boston since I've been in graduate school.
(2) It's been four years since I've been in graduate school.

(1') I've lived in Boston since I entered graduate school.
(2') It's been four years since I entered graduate school.

(1'') I've lived in Boston since I left graduate school.
(2'') It's been four years since I left graduate school.

The last four sentences are all perfectly sensible things one might say (whether they're true or not will vary). But then what does "since I've been in graduate school" mean? If there's nothing wrong with either (1') or (2'), why is only one of them an accurate paraphrase of (1) and (2)? And if there's nothing wrong with either (1'') or (2''), why is only one of them an accurate paraphrase?

Hopefully that makes sense. The answer is, well, complicated, and I doubt I've found the right one anyway.

[RequiemEternam]

I'd love to read your dissertation when it's finished. To me, the major difference between (1) and (2) above (and their derivatives) is overt subject vs. expletive "it." Doesn't that automatically present control/binding/raising issues? For the life of me, I can't think of two sentences to compare that would eliminate that confound. For the following:

(3) It has been raining since I've been in college.

a) Are you still in college?
b) If not, did it start raining after you graduated, or when you entered?

[dave10000]

My 2 cents.

[Tahnan]

Oh, very much so! Dave has observed the difference between the "Universal Perfect" and the "Existential Perfect." So both of the following are true of me:

(1) I've lived in Boston since 1999.
(2) I've lived in Minnesota since 1990.

The latter is true because I spent four years (1992-1996) in Minnesota. Even more sharply, there's the distinction:

(3) For four years, I've lived in Boston.
(4) I've lived in Minnesota for four years since 1990.

The latter must mean "there's a me-living-in-Minnesota-for-four-years between 1990 and now"; the former must mean "every time is a me-living-in-Boston time between four years ago and now."

We don't think of there literally having been either an "ever" or a "at some point" that's elided; it's a difference in the meaning of the Perfect itself (essentially, the difference is that in one sentence it means "all times in this time span are such that..." and in the other it means "some time in this time span is such that...").

The strangeness that I've encountered (and which my professor looked at and confirmed that yes, it's strange) is that, while the perfect in the main clause of "I've lived in Boston since I've been in graduate school" (that is, the living-in-Boston perfect) has exactly the ambiguity that Dave describes, the perfect in the subordinate clause (the being-in-grad-school perfect) does not: it only has the "all points in the recent past are such that I was in grad school at them" and not the "some point in the recent past is such that I was in grad school then, but not any time after that" meaning. Whereas the perfect in the subordinate clause of "It's been four years since I've been in graduate school" must have the latter and not the former.

(Funny, too, that you should pick "visit Quincy Market" as the event to illustrate that. The paper I'm discussing uses "visit Cape Cod"; I'm using "visit the MIT Museum", because I asked a friend to supply an event that didn't contain an indefinite article, as I'd been using "since I've seen a movie". So all three of you came up with that as the example independently. I wonder why visiting something is so canonical an example of an event?)

[Vinny]

Hi Tahnan.

If we were to accept the premise that most human being think in their most fluent language (and not in images), for the majority of their thoughts, could it possibly be then that a lot of the regional and racial "quirks" are due to the nuances of the languages itself?

Vietnamese are harsh and gutteral, and I get the impression that most Vietnamese are ruffians, even if they were dressed up. Is this stereotyping/wrong?

Japanese are extremely formal and polite (small sound). So I get the impression that they're mostly a very quiet and polite people. Bad?

The difference between British and English. The language itself sounds more sophisticated in England, and so do the people. A bum can seem well bred if he speaks with a British accent.

Australian. Ahaha. They're just weird.

Even in the different regions of the U.S. Ebonic tends to be shorten and abrubt. So you get the feeling of angst, of speed, of getting things done quickly. Midwesterner are "country'ish" from their drawwwl. And the way they talked in Minnesota, like in that movie Fargo, are just cute, mild mannered, child-like.

I know that one can definitely change one "appearances" via the way he speaks and the language he speaks.

Can one personality be subtly changed also?

For example, I wouldn't be "Americanized" if I still think in Chinese.

What do you think?

[Tahnan]

Whew. There's a lot going on in that question.

People often wonder whether thought affects language, or whether language affects thought, and to what extents. Typically, though, these are about the lexicon (this is where the "Eskimos have fifty words for snow, because snow is so important to them" myth comes from). But you're asking, I gather, not about the words of the language but the sounds.

To answer the question: "could it possibly be then that a lot of the regional and racial 'quirks' are due to the nuances of the languages itself?" No. But there're a number of issues raised here.

First, the Vietnamese observation is indeed stereotyping, I think. (In fact, the sweetest individual I ever knew was Vietnamese.)

Second, with Japanese, you have the cause-and-effect backwards: Japanese people aren't polite because the speak politely, they speak politely because they're polite. And that, too, is a generalization, of course (most of the Japanese characters in Kill Bill weren't particularly polite, for instance).

With British vs. American English, you again have the cause and effect backwards, but in a different way. The idea that "the language itself sounds more sophisticated in England" does not make the English more sophisticated. On the contrary, because Americans think of the British as sophisticated, we tend to think of the "Received Pronunciation" British accent as an elegant one. But there's nothing whatsoever more or less elegant about the actual speech sounds: Americans aspirate their unvoiced stops whereas the British don't, Americans pronounce some r's that the British don't, the British add a 'y' sound before 'oo' after more consonants than Americans do (e.g. both pronounce "beauty" as /byootee/, but for "tube" Americans say /toob/ where British people say /tyoob/). All of these are just sound differences, though. There's no inherent elegance in pronouncing or not pronouncing an /r/ or in adding a /y/ sound in some places.

Similarly for Australian pronunciation; it differs from British, but that only makes it "weird" if one has already assumed that British is "correct".

The way they speak in Fargo is "cute, mild mannered, child-like"--but that doesn't stop the characters from committing any number of unpleasant crimes. Again, the perception that the language itself is somehow cute or mild-mannered comes from the way Midwesterns are perceived in general, and in the gently condescending way they're portrayed in the movie.

Or, look at it all another way: when is Kenneth Branagh more sophisticated? When he delivers the lines "...in a moment look to see / The blind and bloody soldier with foul hand / Defile the locks of your shrill-shrieking daughters; / Your fathers taken by the silver beards, / And their most reverend heads dash'd to the walls, / Your naked infants spitted upon pikes, / Whiles the mad mothers with their howls confused / Do break the clouds" with a British accent? Or when he smiles shyly at Emma Thompson in "Dead Again" and says something charming in an American accent? Is Minnie Driver more sophisticated telling an oral sex joke to Matt Damon with her native British accent in Good Will Hunting than she is with an American accent in Grosse Pointe Blank? Does a Vietnamese speaker's personality change if he learns to speak English without an accent?

In short, it's not language that makes anyone anything, though it certainly can change our perceptions of them. (Ewan McGregor certainly comes across as more sophisticated in Moulin Rouge with an upper-class British accent than with the rougher Scottish accent in Trainspotting. Of course, the fact that he's taking absinthe instead of heroin and wearing turn-of-the-century clothing instead of vomit-stained undershirts creates that effect as well. We judge people and mentally sum up their character based on a number of different things, and accent is certainly one of them.)

[This message has been edited by Tahnan (edited 04-28-2004 04:30 PM).]

[dave10000]

A small aside.

[Quailman]

[Hitchhiker]

I'm still thinking about the eleven basic colors in English! Are they red, orange, yellow, green, blue, purple, black, white, grey, brown, pink?

Is the Russian & Hungarian addition flesh/peach/skin-tone? or maybe beige/neutral/walnut?