What is arguably the dumbest sounding European language? >basque

Dutch sounds pretty disgusting

>>2488650
Spoken Latin in the classical era might have not sounded as good as it's later Italianized forms (weni widi wiki)
Some Slavic languages also sound dumb sometimes.
Also can't forget the Castilian lisp.

>>2488650
basque is based
finnish sounds retarded

>>2488650
>absolutive when you should ergative

full retard

>>2488650
All wogs sound retarded

>>2488650
English
>double negative works like in mathematics
>can't pronounce basic /a e i o u/ sounds

>>2488650
Finnish

>>2488650

Basque isn't really "European".
>>2488658

Seconding this, there can be no more ugly sound than Dutch.

>>2489814
t. barbarian snownigger

>>2489846
Basque is the most European of all languages

>>2489832
>>double negative works like in mathematics

No, it doesn't. In some dialects of English, the double negative is an EMPHASIS (as in, "very not"), in others, it's simply not allowed by the rules of grammar (and therefore not at all like in math).

>>2489858

Apart from Europe being an Indo-European construct, you mean?

>>2488650
english has the same form for subject and object of 'you'

>>2489874
also same 'you' is the same for plurar and singlular

Dutch and Danish are pretty bad.

>>2489916
>>2489874

Also, the same "you" for formal or familiar.

>>2489931
>thou

>>2488650
Dutch & Swedish are pretty bad.

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>>2489916
That's why we Americans thoughtfully invented "Y'all".

(Though I dunno what was wrong with "Ye.")

>>2489954
But that's just retarded.
'You' is by default a plural form that got extended to singular.
So you should come up with a word for singular

>>2489921
Dutch is fucking aesthetic.
The only problem are the <g> and <r> sounds.
Though that problem goes away if you speak a southern dialect

>>2489864
(((dialects)))

>>2489978
what was the singular of you before you become the singular

>>2489934
>because people use that, right

>>2490254
thou

Finnish.

As a dutch person, I surprisingly dislike my own language

>>2490990
Born to be cuck

>>2488650

--> /int/

>>2490990

Just ditch the guttural crap and speak Dutch like the Belgians.

does belgian dutch sound better?

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>>2488658
Nice try

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>tfw people hating on dutch

Allemaal kankerzielige hoerenneukende teringlijers in deze draad.

>>2489978
It's not retarded it's a contraction.
Ye would by that definition be retarded
But then so is Gaelic...

>>2488658
>>2489846
>>2489921
>>2489938
>>2490990
stahp! dutch is just a friendlier, less aggressive, laid-back form of german. germany has officially confirmed this.

>>2489985
the g is showed off to foreigners, people from most areas don't torture themselves in daily life like they do when a foreigner is present. i'm southern, i can't even pronounce the hard g. don't live in the south anymore, but people round here don't say it the way they do when acting to foreigners as if they're showing them how to pronounce it.

also, there's huge variety in how the r is pronounced around the country. funnily enough, the closest i can get to pronouncing a hard g is pronouncing the r the way they do around where i grew up. but you can pretty much pronounce your r's any which way and it will be correct.

>>2488703
Perkele

The answer is clearly Dutch, but what comes after that?

>>2488650
Basque is an ergative language? A lot of Indian languages have split-ergativity, so sentences in which the verb is transitive and in the past tense(s) make the subject oblique and the verb conjugates as if the object was performing the action.

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>>2488650
tonight
look well under your car

Why does French never come up in these threads? It has everything Germanic languages are considered ugly for and more

>guttural R
>umlauts
>nasal vowels

>>2489921
Danish is cute because it's like they're swallowing the end of every word.

>>2488650
I can't take Norwegians seriously, they almost always sound like drunk smurfs.

At least we can all agree that Cantonese is the worst sounding language in the world

>>2491864

That would be Vietnamese. Or Tagalog (mostly because I hate Filipinos).

portuguese is ludicrous. no explanation needed.

>>2488650
Thousands of languages are like that.

Chinese for example, which has babby tier grammar. When you hear Chinese speak in bad grammar English theyre actually just using Chinese grammar structure.

>>2491950
i heard that the same goes for persian, which supposedly makes it easy to learn

>>2491738
Basque nationalists, or COBRA agents?

>>2491950
eh, I get what you're saying but chinese only seems to have babby tier grammar at first, because it doesn't have inflectional morphology. But really it has some interesting and elegant syntactical characteristics, such as the ba construction.

Still, hearing chinese people fuck up he and she in english is pretty funny.

>>2489832
>can't pronounce basic /a e i o u/ sounds
Yes we can, we just do so differently.

You're fine with variance in consonant pronunciation, but not vowel pronunciation?
>>2489874
Youm
>>2489916
Youmnes
>>2489931
Thoumst/thoumstes

Happy? I'll begin using these forms immediately for thoumstes sake.

>>2489832
>double negative works like in mathematics
You couldn't be more wrong.

The double negative has been used since Anglo-Saxon times, and is still used very commonly today. It *is* used as an emphasis; only pedants would correct you for it.

>>2490289
Some dialects still use 'thou' and 'thee'.

D*nish
Sw*dish
Dutch

>>2493203
> thoumstes sake
That wouldn't be a pronoun, now would it, anon? 'Thoumstes' here is a possessive adjective, not a pronoun.

Modern English has only two cases (three if the genitive is included). So for pronouns, there is only a need for

> thou, thee
> ye, you

The possessive adjectives are my/mine, thy/thine, his/her/its, our/ours, your/yours, their/theirs.

Simple.

Southern dialects of Swedish and Danish.

>>2491182
it does
https://www.youtube.com/watch?gl=BE&v=gcikrrS3VfU

Does this sound bad to you?

>>2493239
>being this much of a brainlet

>>2491950

Where Chinese lacks in grammar, they make up for inflection pronunciations.

Also, voting for Dutch.

>>2494191
English is also inflected, you just don't notice it.

I'm sure the Chinese don't notice their inflections either.

>>2494237

Not nearly on the scale of Chinese. They do notice their inflections, because literally *every* word is inflected. A simple example is ma, which could mean mother or horse depending on the inflection.

>>2494251
>not nearly on the scale of Chinese
They aren't on the same scale, English inflection is more subtle. Because English largely must follow a strict SVO form unless it is in the passive voice, a word's importance is indicated by an inflection.

I don't see what you're trying to prove, inflection shouldn't be an issue for any native. It will be instinctual rather than logical.

>>2494276

It makes the language a lot more difficult, conscious or not.

What inflections in English are really meaningful?

>>2494389
not him, but there isn't any way to "measure" difficulty in this field. whereas chinese utilizes a lot of tonality, they also utilize a severe lack of variety of syllables when compared to other language. pointless to argue over.

inflection is used every time you talk to somebody in english, you just don't think about it. it can give all kinds of information to the person you are speaking to, such as when you are finished saying something, that a specific concept is absurd, that you are asking a question, that you are going to continue saying something after a pause, that you are implying that someone is being untruthful in jest, endless examples.

they can even completely change the meaning of a single word in certain situations. "and?", for example, can become rhetorical and not mean "furthermore?" depending on the tonality and context.

>>2494425

I get that, but Mandarin has that on top of every word being inflected.

>>2488650
Russian is literally caveman/nigger tier.

My mom is a whore = My mom whore
I am a Russian = I Russian
I have a car = At me car
Where are you? = You where?
I am sick = Me sick

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>>2488658

>>2494389
Difficulty? Not really.

Inflections in English are more important in regards to effective communication. Good rhetoric relies on them.

I already explained how otherwise inflection is important: it's how we make up for relative structural rigidity.
>>2494428
And English has other aspects that Mandarin and other dialects lack. The point is that English itself is an phonetically inflected language, and while the lack of inflection should not radically change the meaning of one's speech, the use of inflection should clarify.

>>2488650
fun fact

there is written records of basque fishermen paying taxes to spain for hunting whale off of the coast of north america (newfoundland) as early as the 1370's

>>2494452
kek

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>>2494452

>>2488658
Dutch is the funniest, not dumbest sounding European language.

t. German

>>2489938
Swedish here. This is pretty true. We supposedly have rules for when to use en or ett (a or an), but we are never taught them because there are so many exceptions.

>>2493323
I want to dug her fiddies

>>2490990
You have superior culture and people though. Dutch = Masterrace

>>2491182
Flemish is more german-like

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>>2491938
It's perfect, even with all its autistic rules
actually, mostly because of its autistic rules

>>2494452
>doesn't use link-verbs = nigger-tier
What a load of BS
Also there are link-verbs in russian, they just are ommited and it doesn't make the language sound stupid unlike ommiting them in english
I russian = я pyccкий, full form is я ecть pyccкий, they just don't need to use ecть
Order of words is more free, so you can say
You where? Where you?
Also check out the many cases and genders that foreigners always fuck up when they try speaking russian

>>2495575
Don't know anything about the rulese but some dialects sound plain disgusting

>>2494508
Ahahahahah

>>2488658
VERWIJDER DIT

also >>>/int/

>>2495981

Aww, its feelings got hurt...

my vote goes to Finnish with Belorussian being second.

>>2488650
Ukrainian. It sounds like hillbilly Russian.

>>2495575
seems like spanish accents on roids

>>2491751
The difference is that French is a beautiful language and German isn't

>>2488650
slavic languages
baltic languages

>>2494452
Woah, cringe alert.

>>2497404
Get your ass back to Facebook this second

>>2491950
Chinese is a good candidate by the way. Holy fuck does it sound terrible. Jap is fairly pleasant as is even gookrean but Chinkinese is dreadful no matter what form it takes.

>>2497182
french is disgusting

It sounds like frogs gargling piss

>>2495599
What do you expect, it's spoken only by some irrelevant province of Spain and by jungle monkeys

dutch and finnish look, and smell like ass

jaa deejn haajg veejriijn zuuiijt haajneejn beejb paarviainiein haannaakkaannaakkuulluu ssuuoommii tuunnuuttuurrioiaidikisieiningikiii kekekekek akakakakak jaajaajaajaajaa

they look like some fuckin gay retard alien baby wrote them

the stupid little "doojp" smoking "vlaajndeejreejn" dutch faggot doesn't even know how to use a j right
he says stupid little cuck shit like
"ooo i do yumping yacks in yapan"
"eee i yust sent money to israel for the new yoint military program"
"aaa we need more yustice for yewish people."
"uuu my wife's son, yoseph, and my wife's daughter, yennifer"
"yyy a trial by a yury of one's peers"
"&&& i need yumper cables to yerry rig my new car"

he's such a dumb disgusting little faggot, dude, he can't even pronounce a j. so fucking stupid

>>2502963
that's the original pronunciation of j

>>2502986
no it's not, you dutchcuck little JEW faggot. how about you JUST kill yourself, and then fuck off back to your gay millennial /utg/ circleJERK.

>>2494452
>my language needs to have a strict word order, unless my austistic brain won't be possible to grasp the meaning of the sentence

>>2493184
Underrated post.

>>2502843
Nah, finnish isn't like that

>>2498777
german is objectively worse sounding that french friendo

Any language that can't say the R letter correctly which at the top of your palate is retarded

>>2488701
I think the classical latin must've sounded very whimsical

>>2488650
No fair, you can't just start with the dumbest language.

>>2488650
isnt that just that they have the same word for I and me?

>>2488701
I imagine it was spoken a bit like this:
https://youtu.be/kO9kAV7i5Yk?t=39

>>2504779
Fuck me. It starts at 00:40

Finnish.

Given that it's apparently close to original indo-european languages it's only logical that it sounds autistic.

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>Literally the "This is different from i'm used to so it must be retarded" tread.

>>2504785
>finnish
>indo-european
read a book, nigger

>>2502963
fucking subhuman Anglocuck detected

>>2488703
>>2489843
finnish is literally one of the worst pleb languages and only estonian manages to get lower than that

>>2488650
finnish, you can literally talk it like you're talking to some retard

>hhheeeeiiii nyyyyyymmmiinneeeeeeeennnnn mmmiiiitaaaaaa sinnuuulllleeee kuulllluuuuu

i wish i could speak portuguese

>>2506243
Racist

>>2506264
Why? I thought Portuguese was just a bad mix between latin and local iberian idioms.

>>2506283
portuguese is still much better than finnish, you can speak portuguese more energetically and faster than finnish

>>2488703
>>2489843
>>2490981
>>2497130
>>2502843
>>2504785
>>2506243
>>2506264
>all these jealous niggers talking shit about a unique pure aryan language
lmao

>>2506309
All me

>>2506238
dumb gay guinea homo anal fag SJW judeo-cuckoldian fag kike millennial from /utg/ detected. kill yourself and fuck off back to gay millennial jewish french alaska, you cuck.

>>2506309
>finnish
>aryan

finnish isn't indo-iranian. it's not even indo-european. it's finno-ugric, only spoken by backwater eskimo niggers. fuck off cuck.

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>>2506659

Roach detected

>>2506814
gay millennial homo fag from /utg/ detected. kill yourself. kill yourself. cuck. cuck. kike. kike. kill yourself. jew.

>>2488650
It's a quirk of grammar.
English doesn't mark the object except for in pronouns, so it's hard to make comparisons.

English is called a "nominative-accusative" language.

So you say:

I see [an intransitive sentence, there is no object]
I see him [a transitive sentence, there is both a subject and an object]

But in a language like Basque, which is ergative-absolutive, you say:

I see
Me see he

In theory, that's how it works. Some Indo-European languages in India and Persia use this same system, but only in special cases, like for example the past tense. This is called "split ergativity".

>>2506659
Oh, he mad.

>>2506668
We took Aryans as our slaves, as seen in our word for "slave":
Finnish: orja
Estonian: ori [genitive: orja]
Votic: orja
Veps: orj (technically means "serf", but they're the same concept)
Udmurt: var
Erzya: uŕe

>>2506863
fake news. your country is an irrelevant SJW cesspit with trannies and jewish islam and gay millennial anal sex. you are fake news. kill yourself, then fuck off back to /utg/.

>>2488650
I'd rather be dead than red on the head like a dick on a dog. Say it in dutch and you can fucking give yourself a shower along with any else close by.

>>2506875
>SJW cesspit
I'm Estonian, but ok.

>>2494425
>Furthermore?

Please speak English with me

>>2506885
no difference, other than that you are also permanently cucked by russians (indo european)
you are fake news
you are gay guinea anal homo fag
you are subhuman degenerate derelict
you are cuck
you are kike
you are /utg/
die in a bus fire

>>2491950
Note: languages are all equally complex, in one way or another.

Chinese has tones, which means it packs more info into less syllables. It also has classifiers, which are really unique.

So e.g to say "three cats" you say:

"three head cat"

Chinese doesn't inflect words like English does (English has lost a lot of inflection and is moving towards a Chinese-like grammar structure)

E.g verbs only have a few forms
eat, ate, eats, eaten, eating

Most Indo-European languages have forms for all persons, tenses, and numbers seperately.

So "he walks", "they walk", "I walk", "I will walk", "he will walk", "we will walk", "we walked", "I walked" etc are all distinct words.

>>2506924
Shows how ignorant you are.

Estonians, Finns and Livonians are literally the only Finno-Ugric peoples who have been untouched by Russification.

Livonians were cucked by Latvians, Estonians were cucked by Germans, and Finns were cucked by Swedes.

Not Russians though.

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>>2494508

>>2506952
Hate to break it to you but those auxiliaries all give the words different meanings also not sure why you're ommiting all the past tense and conditional auxiliary forms. They're an easily identifiable and uniform way to convey tense.

>>2506993
"will" marks the future tense, which in most Indo-European languages is marked by a suffix.

The conditonal aswell.
"I would walk" is one word in Lithuanian, for example [eičiau]

>>2491751
French is a beautiful accident.

It really shouldn't sound beautiful on paper, but it turns out it does.

>>2506981
your country was cucked under russian imperialism for over two centuries, then cucked under russian communism for another 75 years. you are nothing but a rape-baby of mountain-nigger subhuman whore mother and the big dick russian who raped her. kill yourself, and then fuck off back to /utg/.

>>2507005
Having fewer proper verb conjugations than other languages is not evedentiary of some trend towards linguistic simplification when auxiliary verbs have always fulfilled the same purpose. The fact is English hasn't lost any complexity in this department over any meaningful period of time.

>>2507021
There has always been segregation between Estonians and Russians.
Russians live in certain districts and certain towns. There are generally no mixed areas, with some exceptions.

Also, why are you so angry? What is /utg/?

>>2507034
Yes, that's my point.
All languages are equally complex.
"babby tier grammar" is misleading when English does some things just like Chinese.

On the subject of English inflection, say the sentence "I didn't say you stole my money" seven times, each time putting emphasis on a different word. It alters the implied meaning each time

>>2507043
you are a rape baby. go back to /utg/

>>2507081
I think you're confusing "inflection" with "tone"

"inflection" is why you say "I see him", and not "I see he". And why it's "he eats", and not "he eat".

"tone" is the better term.
Anyway, almost all languages do this.

In Estonian:

"Ma ei öelnud, et sa varastasid mu raha"
"I no said, that you stole my money"
You can emphasise different words just like in English.

>>2488658
I'm an English native speaker, but I've lived in Germany for the last 6.5 years.

It's funny, I've never studied Dutch, but I swear I can understand a lot of it. Reading, I can make most of it as long as it's not technical or complicated. Spoken I understand half or so. It really does sound like something between English and German.

It's not THAT bad, but to me it kinda sounds like Donald Duck's down syndrome brother is being slowly strangled to death. The Rs are kinda of durrrrrrr retarded R, and then of course there's that harsh throaty G sound (sounds like a duck being strangled). What I find weird is that if people are whispering in Dutch, or like if you hear just murmurs, I really seriously cannot tell if it's English or Dutch. It's closer to German, but if the mouth-sounds (morphemes) were slightly more English, more rounded and softer. (Apart from that kghhhhhhh sound)

It's hard not to hear it without giggling. Anytime I take a train to Netherlands from Germany, when the announcements are done in Dutch, a lot of Germans on the train will giggle and make fun of it.

That said, I love ya Dutchbros. You're good people. Your language is just a little weird.

I have to confess that hearing Castillano Spanish kinda makes me want to punch someone. Say your fucking Ss, cunts.

>>2491864
>>2491868
You clearly haven't heard Tamil.

>>2493195
There's no such thing as 'Chinese' of course. If we're going to sperg about languages, you might as well be specific.

I actually don't mind the sound of Mandarin, but Cantonese can be pretty fucking annoying

>>2494508
Dood... that wasn't Hitler we just smoked

>>2494612
link or gtfo.

Finnish is the worst. All Finns sound like they have brain damage.

>>2506659
>>2506848
>>2506875
>>2506924
>>2507021

Is that some kind of modern dadaist poetry or what?

there are words, but no meaning. fascinating.

>>2508218
yeaaaaa, that's real hip daddio.

*finger snaps*

>>2488650
Belgian language sounds weird

>>2507724
I think they both can sound pleasant to the ear, it's just that they allow you to talk very fast, and every chinese person I've met abuses this option
>bubudadaxingxinyoushuogunianzi!!

>>2506863
>WE WUZ ARYAN N SHEIT
>ten second later
>WE WUZ BASED MONGOLIAN ARYANZ WUZ UR SLAVS

Finngolian autism everyone

>>2506952
>Note: languages are all equally complex, in one way or another.
That's false. Nigger languages are objectively primitive.

>>2507081
Woah...

>>2508367
why don't you tell us how they're objectively primitive then

>>2494508
Laughed in the middle of a workout. Couldn't do my set afterwards, thanks for the core workout though

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>>2488701
>Castilian lisp

The fuck? Thats the way to speak correct spanish and not the sudaca one.

Ïhñòłńçêjjłyfßš ÿœśłf ńegr

>>2494276
>>2494251

>Not knowing the meaning of inflection when talking about grammar

Holy shit you guys are giving me cancer. There is no inflection in Chinese. Words do not change according to tense, person, mood, etc. That is what inflection means in grammar. Asdfadsgfadgsdf

>>2494276
>>2494251


Just so you know, "inflection" has a specific grammatical meaning and it has nothing to do with phonetics.
In linguistics, morphology specifically, "inflection" is when a word changes its structure in order to show grammatical function.
For example, in English, the difference between "he" and "him" or the difference between "table" and "tables."

>>2508397
It makes you sound like homos

>>2508458

Hm. My Mandarin instructor would use inflection and tone.

>>2508502

You're mixing up two words.
The term you're looking for is "intonation."

>>2507456
If you speak/understand german or danish, then you'll get the gist of what's being said in dutch despite never having spoken it before.

>>2508341
*tips coffee mug

>>2508367
Lmao this boy doesn't even even click languages

Reminder French is the dumbest romance language

>>2508367
Actually, the more primitive (old) the langauge, the more COMPLEX it is. This is a well attested principle in linguistics with many many examples.

Most languages tend to simplify (to a point) over time, both in grammar and pronunciation/morphemes. Of course, this also creates irregularities, which are complex. And new vocabulary enters all the time, keeping the fires stoked.

The more modern Bantu languages settled on their current forms in the past few hundreds years. Most are pretty easy to learn though, it's true. Complexity is a red herring, really.

>>2488650
Dutch is danish/german/english
Most of their retard sounds come from denmark, who talk a mixture of swedish and german(??)

>>2509731
t. Lindybeige

>>2488650

Fucking Danish.

>>2488650

Why the fuck hasn't anyone mentioned Hungarian yet? Or Turkish, if its counted as a European language. These two are terribly and make no sense (and distantly related).

>>2510198
>and distantly related
no they aren't

>>2509731
>>2510094
Not even Anglo, but modern French pronunciation was literally created by aristocrats during Louis XIV. They wanted to have their own dialect so they would be further apart from peasants - so they came up with deliberately weird pronunciations, including pronouncing R-s like someone with a speech impediment would.

>>2510199

My bad, its Finnish Hungarian is related to.

>>2510079
No, it's not.

Three short paragraphs and you got at least one thing howlingly wrong in each one. What you're saying is just as silly as the post you're responding to (which was indeed silly), although you weren't crude about it like he was.

>>2488650
Your native language.

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>>2488701
>lisp
It is not a lisp.It is the equivalent of the th sound in english.That allows shit like this to not happen

>>2507456
>Say your fucking Ss
What are you even talking about sudaca? It is hard to understand a dumbass monkey ranting.

>>2510207
Bullshit. The french guttural R originates in lower classes, aristocracy would roll the R and over articulate the words.

This is the way aristocracy used to speak
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ghcHAsRoY5U

>>2488650
Arabian

>>2508464
Any sudaca accent is retarded beyond believe
>Argentinian
Gay
>Colombian
Silly and very effimanate
>Tiraflechas
Retarded
>Mexican
Stupid beyond believe
>Dominican
Stupid
>Cuban
A walking meme
The only decent Spanish it is spoken in Castile.You people have just poluted a beautiful language and have created a huge disgusting meme

>>2488650
It's ergative, ya donk

They don't have doer/done-to contrast, they have being/doing-to contrast

>>2507456
>he does not understand how z and s are different
why are anglos and sudacas so fucking retarded

>>2510198
Turkish and Hungarian are ridiculously regular.

>>2509665
kill yourself

>>2488701

>Castilian lisp

you must try to enjoy a deep murcian accent

>>2510465
>Castile
homo lisp
spain is 90% gay fag millennials
it's also bankrupt with trillions of euros in debt
a failed state, just like greece
kill your own self, fool

>>2510500
your country is debt
go die

>>2510465
>lisping Castilian calling other dialects "effeminate"

top fucking kek m8

>>2510241
Yes, it is.

Either refute my points specifically with evidence to the contrary, or GTFO.

The only concession I'll make is that I'm not well studied in Bantu languages, but this is what I've been told by two sources, independently

MA in applied linguistics here.

>>2510207
British aristocrats did much the same thing. It explains the roots of RP.

However, this was not really a conscious or specific effort. Nothing was 'created', it's just that certain pronunciations caught on among a closed group of 'insiders'. Over time, these became reified as shibboleths to show if you belonged to the elite class (or wished you did) or not.

Social classes with little contact with each other will show similar linguistic drift as if they were geographically isolated.

>>2510500
As for a GOAT-tier anglo like me, it's simply that we are not bothered with a slave language like Spanish.

I call it chor-its-so, and don't give a fugg.

>>2510241
>you're wrong
>doesn't provide any evidence
why do these people live

>>2512470
As a rule, whenever I write up a long-ass post substantively addressing something somebody on here is claiming, the person simply ducks out of the thread and I end up having wasted half an hour (this is also why I never post on /pol/). Now that he's replied I'm more than happy to.

>>2512432
>MA in applied linguistics here.
This is a genuine question, not meant to belittle you: did you actually have to take any courses in historical linguistics to complete your degree? I'm kind of hoping you'll say no, given that you're trucking around with several common but serious misconceptions, though it seems have to believe that you wouldn't have.

The original post you were replying to -- no, not the nigger one, the original one -- was getting at the right idea, although oversimplifying things a little, when he said "all languages are equally complex." He's quite right that languages tend to encode and convey *about* the same amount of grammatical information; morphologically complex languages tend to be syntactically simple and vice versa.

You don't need to look further for examples than his examples of Chinese and English, which, having relatively analytic typologies, also have quite rigid (and complex) sentence structures. Compare to languages with complex morphologies (like, you know, most European ones, particularly if you go back more than a few centuries) which tend to have freer word orders. I can dig up citations for this, but this is a very trivial claim (something I'd teach in Intro to Linguistics 101, probably in the first week) and frankly unless you insist I'm not inclined to.

So that means that this
>Actually, the more primitive (old) the langauge, the more COMPLEX it is. This is a well attested principle in linguistics with many many examples.
is frankly not even a MEANINGFUL claim, because you haven't established what KIND of complexity you're talking about.

Now, there is some evidence that morphologically complex languages are harder to learn than analytic ones, and so there *may* be a tendency for languages to morphologically simplify when they get used as a lingua franca. Regardless that doesn't mean that syntactical complexity isn't "true" complexity -- just that for whatever reason adults at least find it easier to acquire a new sentence structure than to learn a new system of word formation.

Assuming that's what you're talking about (morphological complexity), which is what most people mean when they repeat myths like this ... it's still not true. That's an illusion caused by the fact that the most-studied language family in the world by far, Indo-European, has indeed morphologically simplified over time (also true to a lesser extent for several other *well-known* language families, which does not make it true of all or even most language families in the world!)

1. That's not the case for every language family in the world, not by any means. Somewhat famously, Uralic has sprouted up a whole bunch of NEW case endings (Proto-Uralic had like six or something, compare to modern Finnish, Estonian, Hungarian …) There are other counterexamples as well.
2. Even though we've reconstructed PIE pretty fucking far back, it's not the ORIGINAL Proto-Indo-European language. You understand that, right? No such thing ever existed. It had to *become* (morphologically) complex first; it's simply that we're only able to reconstruct it a couple thousand years back. But language change isn't a linear process, it's a cycle. We just happened to drop in at this point in the cycle. That's the idea behind Dixon's "typological clock."

Dixon thought he had actually figured out the exact process by which fusional languages (like European ones) became isolating -> agglutinating -> back to fusional. And he thought it happened in that order, as though isolating -> agglutinating -> fusional were like 8, 12 and 4 on a clock.

Now, a lot of people find those claims pretty speculative and personally I agree, but while plenty of people disagree with the fact that there's an exact order and process to it, 'cause the truth is we really don't know why languages change in the ways that they do, few disagree that the clock itself (i.e. the cycle) exists. Dixon's work also provides us with an example of a language that completed the whole cycle, i.e. passed thru fusional, isolating and agglutinating forms: Egyptian.

There's a reason that the idea that "language tends to simplify over time" (i.e. Jespersen) popped up ALMOST A HUNDRED YEARS AGO. It really was not uncommon in linguistics back then for parochial claims to be accepted as universal truths. There's a reason why, these days, people who make *any claims at all* about languages past our earliest credible reconstructions (~4000 BC) are laughed at. There's a reason Greenberg and and Ruhlen are not taken seriously.

>The more modern Bantu languages settled on their current forms in the past few hundreds years.
What, you mean like ... literally every spoken language in the world? OK, you got me, this isn't so much as "howlingly wrong" as banal (but misleadingly so, because it implies there are languages in the world that reach fixed states and then fail to change for hundreds of years). There are languages that are more conservative or more innovative on average, but take any language (that has not been deliberately and artificially preserved) and roll back the clock more than a "few hundred years" and it'll be quite different.

And now maybe you see why I didn't bother responding substantively before I knew this thread wouldn't simply float down and die?

>>2492036
>It's /his/ related cause linguistics. now what sounds dumb guys?
Eh, it's subjective.
I hate romance languages. There is a thing about the way they are spoken that annoys me. I guess it's the way people talk, plus the overstressed vowels.
>a group of tourists appears 100 meters in the distance
>LA PAELLA DEL KAZZO CINQUE AGUA MERDE DE LA TETE AVANTI VAFFANCULO
Chinese is fucking ungodly though. It sounds like someone trying to make sense with half the letters of the alphabet and a pinched nose.

>>2514229
Didn't mean to reply to
>>2492036

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Dutch = most disgusting

Best language = Welsh

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>>2514304
>Best language = Welsh

Northern Welsh yes, not that dopey sounding Southern """language"""

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>>2494508
kek

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>>2494452

>>2508397
>The fuck? Thats the way to speak correct spanish
Well, that "th" sound comes from Old spanish "ts". In Spain, that "ts" changed to "th", and in the dialects that took root in the Americas (and other regions of Spain before the prestige dialect started to take over), that "ts" instead became "s".

So, Spain did good in keeping that "ts" phoneme distinct from actual the "s"-sound, whereas Hispanic speakers merged the original "s" with the original "ts" so that the distinction was lost there....but on the other hand, to a lot of people, the Spaniard outcome "th" sounds really lispy (plus, "s" does indeed sound closer to the original "ts" than "th" does). I feel like non-English Germanic speakers don't see English th as being as lispy as the Spaniard th.

>>2488650
Danish. Literally no argument.

Worst english accent is belfast northern irish tho

>>2514154
>>2514119
>>2514090
Btfo

>>2514154
>Dixon's work also provides us with an example of a language that completed the whole cycle, i.e. passed thru fusional, isolating and agglutinating forms: Egyptian.

Do you have any links relating to this? i.e. specifics regarding Egyptian moving from isolating, to agglutinating, to fusional, etc. I remember briefly touching upon Dixon's "clock" in my comparative linguistics course but we didn't get into the specifics of his theory.

>>2515244
I really, really thought I was going to have to disappoint you. The clock metaphor is from Dixon's book The Rise and Fall of Languages, which your university library (if you still have access to one) almost certainly will have. The relevant pages actually *are* available on Google Books (if you do the "search inside this book" thing for the word "clock" they pop right up). I tried to link it but 4chan thinks my post is spam so I can't.

He's not afraid of making controversial claims, but if you're interested in this, the whole book is well-worth reading in my opinion. Even if you just read the preview, it's worth starting back a couple pages for the parts where he makes fun of Nostraticists and Morris Swadesh.

... BUT although he came up with the clock metaphor, Dixon wasn't actually the one who came up with Egyptian as evidence of typological cycles. That was Carleton Hodge, in a 1970 paper, and I thought I was going to have to mumble something about how you might be able to find it on JSTOR or through your library. Imagine my surprise then when a pdf just turned up on Google.
http://www.public.asu.edu/~gelderen/Hodge-1970.pdf

It also drops a couple other examples of languages that have developed more synthetic features from an analytic base, with citations that hopefully won't be *too* hard to dig up if you're interested.

In looking for the Hodge paper, I also turned up a couple by Chris H. Reintges, who seems to have written a fair amount about this, i.e. Egyptian -- I hadn't heard of him but it actually seems to be "his thing." But for him I will unfortunately have to mumble something about "maybe you can find his stuff through your university library."

So linguistfag, what do you think of the hypothesis that language evolved from music, that it represents in some sense "highly structured singing"?
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=129155123

>>2515637
To be honest, I ... don't. Think of it, that is.

I'm not saying any and all claims about the origin of language are necessarily pseudoscience, or that this one in particular is, but a lot of them are. It's like with other speculative fields like evolutionary psychology: plenty of stuff gets published that seems quite reasonable (along with stuff that's ... not), but it's tough when the reasonable and unreasonable alike is all equally unfalsifiable.

That's not to insult the researcher quoted in the NPR article, who I'm sure would *kill* to have more actual data to work off of, even if it meant abandoning his personal favorite hypothesis. It's just an overlong explanation for why whenever I run into stuff like this my reaction is a long, uncomfortable "ehhhhhhhh" sound. Anyway, egardless of the merits of the hypothesis, it's definitely not something I'm qualified to comment on.

>>2514090
>>2514119
I think we're probably not that far apart in what we actually believe. Just that one of us seems to be sperging about the word 'complexity'...

But here we go, I probably should have qualified that MORPHOLOGICAL complexity tends to simplify over time. This is what I meant. I mean we're on /his/ for fucks sake, sometimes you have to bring your language down a level...

A study of the Romance languages is a good exercise in how classic Latin 'reduced' its cases and declensions, agglutinating, for example, case inflections directly on to a word, and then those further *morphologically* reducing again and again over time.

The languages themselves stay about as 'complex' as always. Any language can express just about any idea, given the meaning is understood for listener and speaker. Your average pleb stepping of a bus at an Atlantic City casino may not understand much if a top quantum physicist started giving them a lecture on dark energies, but they could be made to understood -- to some extent -- with enough time and clarifications. If you start talking about the modern American health care system in Xhosa, with lots of calques or foreign (English) words, the average rural semi-literate Xhosa cattle herder might also be fairly lost -- at first.

>>2514090
>>2514119
And yes, I'm aware that not *all* languages 'simplify' over time. Modern Tamil would be closely intelligible with that spoken 2000 years ago, for example. I've read of other case studies too, such as some Native American languages.

As you yourself concede, it IS is a feature of many Indo-European languages. That doesn't make it not true. Especially considering the number of speakers of IE languages.

I never talked about PIE, so not sure why you're bringing it up. I am aware of what 'reconstruction' means and all its implications.

TBQH m8, I was simply using the OPs own words to frame his same (silly) argument back at him in parallel form he'd perhaps understand. Hence the Bantu example. You see, I was writing to HIM, not to YOU. Can you understand that?

Nothing you've said, Dixon included, is new to me. Imagine if we all sperged out waving e-dicks like you on every language thread? Do you know how many linguists are on 4chan, even here on /his/? Few. Calm down, step back from the computer and go for a walk or something.

>>2514565
You haven't traversed working class neighbourhoods in Essex, I see.

>>2515637
It's rather unlikely that music emerged before language. Ancient bone flutes have been found, showing that archaic humans at least played music, the jury's out on neanderthals or other hominids...

One of the main things that makes the human brain so special, compared to almost all animal brains (so far as we know of), is that it's so good at recognizing patterns and sorting. That's what music is, a pleasurable realization of pattern in sounds. A by-product of a highly cognitive ape's ability to recognize patterns, and amuse itself and marvel at aural patterns it can create when blowing air through the bone of an ostrich it just ate.

It's a chicken-egg situation, but the facilities for language are probably older than homo sapiens. Said another way, it's likely indirectly because of language that we appreciate music.

>>2515796
>Just that one of us seems to be sperging about the word 'complexity'...
Nice.

I'm sorry, dude, but what you said was wrong. It's not "sperging out" to correct misinfo in a field I care about. Although I wrote a lot, I did so literally at your request -- you had the chance to take a step back and dial back your claims (or clarify them) and did not do so.

I'm not at all surprised that you know the difference between morphological and syntactic complexity (it would be pretty incredible for you to have completed a MA in any branch of linguistics and not know that). Understand that these are public forums and that while my post was addressed to you, I wrote some of it to provide background information to others, and also to segue into later points I wanted to make; I did not write every sentence with the expectation that I would be delivering Totally New Information to you to that you had never once encountered before.

My first post was admittedly harsh, but I'm really not interested in insulting or patronizing you. I'm not puffing myself up or waving around my e-dick, enormous though it might be; I haven't really said anything at all that I wouldn't teach or expect to see taught in an Intro to Historical/Comparative Linguistics course. I get a little testy when it seems like people are confidently repeating linguistic myths, because for whatever reason this field seems to be especially prone to that, but believe it or not, in general, I prefer to just spend time geeking out about stuff I care about to being combative.

As to this,
>I think we're probably not that far apart in what we actually believe.
I don't really know if we do agree, man, considering you just seem to be doubling down on the claim that languages tend to morphologically simplify over time. Which I disagree with, to be clear. I think that is an illusion caused by an overly-narrow focus on 2 or at best 3 language families and also by historical accident. Most mainstream historical linguists these days would agree with me.

Half of my posts were devoted to addressing that. In your haste to let me know that you already knew everything I wrote, admirable though that might be, you haven't really responded to any of it.

>Modern Tamil would be closely intelligible with that spoken 2000 years ago, for example.
I'm really not looking to start a whole new argument, but ... no. Please feel free to drop citations on me, but ... no.

>I never talked about PIE, so not sure why you're bringing it up.
Probably because Indo-European studies practically dominated the field for over a century (still sorta does, just a little less so) and is the root of the great majority of the claims that languages tend to morphologically simplify over time?

>>2488650
Portuguese, it sounds like some very weird Slavic language. I mean Romanian sounds much less Slavic, despite having a lot of Slavic words in it's vocabulary.

Frankly I dislike most languages besides my own.
Dutch, Danish, Turk and Portuguese are the ugliest.
I quite like english (I guess I'm used to it), German and Russian though

Slavic and Germanic languages are pretty fucking subhuman sounding.

>>2488703
VITTU