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Gabe Bokor was born in Hungary in 1937. He attended school initially in
his native country, and then in Romania and Bulgaria. Upon graduating from the
Russian-language M. Gorkyy secondary school in Budapest, he was granted a
scholarship to study Chemical Engineering in Moscow, USSR. After the 1956
Hungarian revolt, he defected, with his parents, to the West and emigrated to
Brazil.
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Keywords: Language,
native, acquired, vocabulary, grammar, phonetics, morphology, syntax.
The Oxford English Dictionary https://www.oed.com/dictionary/language_n?tl=true defines “language” as “The system of spoken or written communication used by a particular country, people, community, etc., typically consisting of words used within a regular grammatical and syntactic structure; (also) a formal system of communication by gesture, esp. as used by deaf people.” The total number of languages spoken in the world is estimated at 7,117 (https://lighthouseonline.com/blog-en/how-many-languages-are-there-in-the-world/), distributed as follows: Asia – 3,000 Africa – 2,144 Americas – 1,061 Pacific – 1,313 Europe – 287
These are admittedly arbitrary numbers, since they depend on what is considered a “language.” The well-known definition that “language is a dialect with an army and a navy” does not tell the whole story, since it does not take into account the evolution of languages (why is Latin considered a language, but the language of Beowulf is just “old English”?), nor does it recognize that some languages (like Kurdish) are spoken by people that do not have a country of their own, and, conversely, some dialects are restricted to a single sovereign country, like Swiss German, spoken only in Switzerland. Many human subgroups, such as families, members of the same profession, people living in the same geographic area and even some individuals use expressions peculiar to this group or individual (idiolect). The conversation of two members of almost any of these groups may sound as a foreign language to an outsider. Siblings, especially twins, have been known to have their own “secret” language. The number of languages actually spoken in the world is declining, since many of them have only a handful of living speakers, and, by the time you are reading this, some of them may no longer be alive. In this essay we will
discuss only natural human languages, occasionally mentioning engineered
languages such as Esperanto, which share most features of natural languages,
but not computer languages such as COBOL or Java. Given the number and
variety of languages, it is difficult to make statements that universally apply
to all languages spoken on planet Earth. In this essay a not entirely successful attempt has been made
to avoid, as much as possible, bias favoring the languages the author is familiar
with, which are admittedly few in number and tend to be geographically restricted
to Europe and the Americas.
Many animals, and even
plants, communicate with each other, although very little of this communication
has been deciphered by humans. However, as
far as we know, humans are the only living beings having and using language as
defined above, and all human groups, even those isolated from what we call
civilization, have some form of language. For this reason, our species, the
“homo sapiens” (the human who knows) could more appropriately be referred to as
“homo loquans” or “the human who speaks.”
Human communication
using grammatically structured language must have started at about the same
time when our ancestors developed the technology to make tools and weapons that
enabled them to produce (kill, grow, or manufacture) more goods than was necessary
to satisfy their own needs and started to trade the surplus for something their
neighbor had and they did not. To negotiate these transactions, something more
than grunts and hand signals was needed. Thus, technology gave rise to commerce,
and commerce gave rise to language. Obviously, humans living in tropical
rain forests, where food is readily available from the surrounding vegetation and
fauna, and there is no compelling need for shelter or clothing, have technological
and thus linguistic needs different from their counterparts living in the
moderate or polar climates. Accordingly, the development of technology and
language followed different paths for humans living in different surroundings. The ways climactic factors affect language, both directly through temperature, humidity, and altitude, and indirectly via people's lifestyles, is a complex subject, not yet fully explained by science. The need for transmitting the technology to
the other members of the tribe and to posterity, and for establishing the rules
of commerce to be followed by all those involved led in turn to the invention
of writing. We obviously do not know much about human language of the era before
the first words were recorded on a stone tablet, tortoise shell, or wooden
board, just as we still do not exactly know what human speech sounded like before the invention of sound-recording devices. We can only assume that the invention of writing followed shortly that of
the spoken word for most of humankind, although there are languages even today
that have no established writing systems.
One language with over
half a million native speakers and a standardized writing system introduced as
late as 1986 is the Sranan Tongo, an English-Dutch-Portuguese creole language also
known as Surinamese or Taki Taki. It is spoken by the majority of the
population in Suriname. The Modern South Arabian
languages spoken in Yemen and Oman--Mehri, Hobyot, Harsusi,
Soqotri, Shehri and Bathari--were until recently largely unwritten languages. Of
these, Soqotri got a script, developed by the Russian Arabist Dr. Vitaly
Naumki and based on the Arabic one, most recently, in 2014. Most
sign languages such as ASL (American Sign Language), have no written form. The Brazilian
Sign Language LIBRAS and the Nicaraguan Sign Language LSN are exceptions.
We do not know
whether the different languages existing today were created independently from
each other or developed from one “proto-language” or a small number of
“proto-languages.” The one-proto-language theory, represented by the biblical
story of the Tower of Babel, has been neither validated nor refuted by modern
science. The undeniable fact is that the variety of languages spoken on planet
Earth today, whether by age, number of speakers, size of vocabulary, complexity
of grammar, or any other criteria, as well as the variety of existing writing
systems, is hard to overestimate. Neither do we know how language evolved from animal grunts to grammatical speech, but, counterintuitively, the trend for the past few millennia for which we have written records, has been from more complex to simpler grammar, which is demonstrated by the evolution of grammatical gender in the Western languages. Sanscrit, Old Greek, Latin, and Old English had three genders, as do contemporary German and the Slavic languages, among others: masculine, feminine, and neuter. Modern Hindi has two genders: masculine and feminine. Grammatical genders have all but disappeared in modern English, in which today almost all non-animated objects are neutral (it), with the exception of certain countries and transport vehicles, although pronouns have preserved the gender distinction for humans and inanimate objects (he-she-it); for animals, he or she is used when gender is known or relevant, it otherwise. However, cats of unknown gender are often referred to as she, while dogs are assumed to be he. Most languages have different words for the male and female
of domestic animals, which differ from each other in appearance and/or economic
function: rooster-hen, bull-cow, ram-ewe. (Spanish: gallo-gallina, toro-vaca,
carnero-oveja; German: Hahn-Henne, Stier-Kuh, Bock-Mutterschaf; Russian: петух-курица,
бык-корова,
баран-овца).
Russian has a masculine and a feminine noun for horse (конь-лошадь), but, rather than for
the gender of the animal, they are used for a race or battle horse, and for a
traction animal, respectively. A trend toward simplification can be observed in most language families. The three genders of Latin have been replaced by two (masculine and feminine) in modern Romance languages. Romanian has a "neuter" gender, which behaves as masculine in the singular and feminine in the plural. The three genders of proto-Germanic have been preserved in modern German, but have been reduced to neuter and non-neuter in the modern Scandinavian languages Swedish and Danish, while Icelandic and Norwegian have preserved the three-gender system (masculine, feminine, neuter). Dutch has retained the three-gender structure in some dialects and in formal language, while most native speakers use only two genders. Most Slavic languages have three genders for nouns and adjectives, and a gender-differentiated past tense for verbs. Chinese does not have gender-specific words, although it has two different characters for "he" and "she," (他 and 她), which share the same pronunciation (ta) and differ only in the first part of the character, which is indicative of its meaning.
Traditional Japanese makes a distinction between "women's words" (onna kotoba) and "men's language" (danseigo). However, today's educated Japanese women tend to ignore this distinction. The same erosion of gender-specific speech can be observed in the Korean language.
Simplification of language is also manifested, in addition to the reduction in number or disappearance of grammatical genders, in other languages and other language areas.
Informal American English often uses simple past tense ("Did you do your homework yet?") where traditionally present perfect would be used. In contrast,
the passé simple (simple past tense) is all but obsolete in colloquial French,
but not in the written language. Brazilian colloquial Portuguese has abandoned
the mesóclise, or placement of a pronooun used as direct or indirect object between the
root and the ending for future or conditional of the verb (dá-lo-ei or enviar-lhe-ia), and it is abandoning the ênclise (placement of that pronoun after the verb -- dá-lo, enviar-lhe), among other
evolutionary simplifications of the language.
One distinguishing characteristic of languages, and one of the few that can be quantified, is the size
of vocabulary. While this may seem to be a precisely knowable quantity, it is
far from being that. Some languages fuse several words into one, others like to
keep them separate. Middle age are two words in English, while the
respective cognate Mittelalter is a single word in German. The term Glass
surface cleaning is expressed by three words in English, while its
translation, Glasflächenreinigung, is one word in German. Should flexed
forms be considered one word or several? Should homonyms (such as run as
a verb and run as a noun)? Should words borrowed from other languages
(such as Schadenfreude), obsolete (crapulous) or “made-up” words
such as trembulate count at all?
Isolating languages
like Thai and Chinese, and polysynthetic languages like Yupik (spoken by the
indigenous people of Alaska and Siberia), have no words in the meaning familiar
to speakers of European languages. Instead, the first group has syllables, each
of which may be one word with an independent meaning of its own or part of a
single concept expressed by two syllables. The second group expresses a complex
meaning with a single root and several appended suffixes.
Every language has
specialized subsets of words used in the different areas of human activities
and under specific circumstances: sports, arts, sciences, slang, etc. For all
these reasons, the number of words in any given language is difficult to
assess, and the numbers for different languages calculated in different ways are
not comparable. The numbers of headwords in existing printed and on-line
dictionaries for some of the most widely spoken languages are listed in Wikipedia
at (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_dictionaries_by_number_of_words).
Tamil
1,516,952
Korean
1,149,538
Portuguese
818,000
Finnish
800,000
English
755,865
Swedish
600,000
Italian
500,000
Japanese
500,000
Chinese
378,103
Example: The headword
“patient” as an adjective is defined in Webster’s New Encyclopedic Dictionary as
1: bearing pain and trials calmly and without complaint; 2: being kindly and
tolerant; 3: not hasty or impetuous; 4: steadfast despite opposition,
difficulty, or adversity. “Patient” as a noun adds another headword and another
definition for the same word.
The actual number of
words in any language is much larger than that of dictionarized words. English
is considered the richest language in the world, due in part to the fact that, in contrast to some other major languages, English has no Academy to police the “purity” of the language by attempting to pevent its native and non-native speakers from enriching it by borrowing foreign words, inventing new ones, and modifying existing ones. The English language
has an estimated 1 million words, or about 35% more than those that have made
it to the dictionary. In addition to being the world’s largest borrower of
words, it is also the largest “lender,” having contributed to the vocabularies
of virtually all modern languages.
On the other extreme, Toki Pona, a language created
by Sonja Lang, a Canadian linguist and translator with the purpose of testing the idea of minimalism, has less than 150
words formed using only 14 phonemes. Learning
a Language
According
to Newsdle, https://www.newsdle.com/blog/world-population-bilingual-percentage,
43% of the global population is bilingual, 40% is monolingual, and 17% is
multilingual. According to the same source, 67.3 million people in the US
(20.6% of the population) are bilingual or multilingual. This means that the
percentage of monolingual people in the US (79.4%) is twice that of
monolinguals worldwide. The main reason for plurilingualism is also different
in the US from the rest of the world. While in the US bilinguals are typically
immigrants or children of immigrants, elsewhere most plurilinguals are born
into plurilingual families or learn their non-native languages later in life.
Outside the US it is also more common that individuals use one language or one
variant of a language at home, another one within their social circle, and
possibly a third one professionally.
Most languages make a
distinction between an informal style used in speech and a formal one used in
writing. This is true for most modern languages to a varying degree, although
few go to such extremes as Arabic and Chinese where the written forms serve, in
different ways, to unify the different spoken variants.
The spread of social
media and smart phones introduced a third style of communication characterized
by extreme informality, use of a special slang, abbreviations, and graphic
symbols (emojis). These features tend to prioritize brevity and efficiency of
communication, rather than grammatical correctness and linguistic elegance. The
learner of a foreign language has to navigate among these three styles,
correctly understanding utterances in any one of them and choosing the right
one to use according to the circumstance of the moment and the audience.
While at least one
foreign language is taught in elementary- to secondary-level schools in most
countries, this is far from being the general practice in the US. The lack of
Americans’ interest in foreign languages is often justified by the phrase
“everybody speaks English,” which may be at least partly true in Western Europe
and some countries of Latin America and Asia, but Americans may suddenly find
themselves in unfriendly linguistic territory if and when they venture outside the
classic tourist locations or outside their professional environment.
With inexpensive air fares
making overseas visits increasingly affordable and global trade making
Americans more and more familiar with foreign-made and foreign-labeled
products, Americans’ interest in foreign languages has sharply increased in the
past few decades. The influx of immigrants, even more than their own trips
abroad, also introduced Americans to foreign languages and foreign customs.
Technology has made it possible to learn a foreign language without going
abroad or even without having a flesh-and-blood teacher. Thus, it is not
surprising that on-line and recorded language courses have proliferated in and
outside the classroom. Foreign languages are also being increasingly introduced
in US school curricula, despite a severe shortage of competent foreign-language
teachers.
Being familiar with
foreign languages not only facilitates communications with people from
different cultural backgrounds and access to information not available in one’s
own language, but studies show that being bilingual or multilingual may have a
physiological effect by preventing or at least retarding the onset of age-related
dementia. (Mendez, Mario F. “Bilingualism and Dementia: Cognitive Reserve to
Linguistic Competency” https://content.iospress.com/articles/journal-of-alzheimers-disease/jad190397).
The study of foreign languages also benefits one’s better understanding and use
of their own native language.
So, what is the best
method for learning a foreign language?
The simplest and most
obvious answer to this question is: as you learned your mother tongue, at an
early age, listening to your parents and other adults in your life, interacting
with your friends, preferably all in the country where the language is spoken.
Experience shows that not only is language learning easiest and most efficient
in early childhood, but a child can also learn more than one language
simultaneously or consecutively without one language interfering with the
other(s). It is not uncommon to hear a child talking English to mom, Spanish to
dad, and Portuguese to grandma, all without a foreign accent and translating
idiomatically between those languages.
Unfortunately, around the
age of 13, something changes in our brains and our speech-generating organs,
and this capacity to learn a foreign language instinctively, as we learn our
mother tongue, disappears. For the vast majority of people, learning a new
language after that critical age requires a conscious effort involving the
study of grammar and vocabulary, as well as careful listening to and emulating
the pronunciation of native speakers. Even so, few adults manage to learn to
speak a foreign language without an accent and without interference from the
grammar and vocabulary of their mother tongues. While adults can achieve
fluency and proficiency in several acquired languages, and some individuals,
like actors, learn to simulate almost any accent, this ability is far from
common. Total immersion
in the new language either in the country where it is spoken or in an
institution that ensures exclusive exposure to it is the closest alternative to
childhood-type learning. If this is not possible, some of your options include,
in decreasing order of efficiency for the first five items:
1. Periodic
visits to the country where the language is spoken, long
stay and maximum interaction with the natives;
2. Hiring
a private, preferably native tutor;
3. Taking
a course in a classroom with a live teacher together with as
few fellow students as possible;
4. Purchasing
an on-line or recorded course from a reputable vendor;
beware, however, of unrealistic promises, such as “We will teach you to speak
like a native in 30 days”;
5. Purchasing
a grammar book/language learning manual and attempting to
interact with one or more native or almost-native speakers to perfect your
pronunciation;
6. This essay will focus on
language learning at an adult age, using mostly examples from the author’s
experience. The reader must be aware of the fact that not all statements made
here are applicable to all situations, which will vary according to the
language to be learned, the purpose of language learning, the learner’s native
language, the language(s) learned previously, the learner’s age, natural
talent, dedication, and time available, among other factors.
The first machine
translation systems introduced in the 1950s were rules-based, i.e., they worked
on a principle similar to the one used by adults to learn a language: Take a
number of words and put them together with the help of a set of grammatical rules.
This system has proved to be inadequate for various reasons: First, it had to
be re-engineered for each language, since the rules (grammar) of one language
cannot be automatically applied to any other language. Second, it did not take
into account the context in which the words are used, or the existence of
homonyms, i.e., words having the same spelling but different meanings. This
resulted in translation errors, just as adult learners of a language are faced
with interference of another language’s grammar and vocabulary with those of
the language being learned.
Modern machine
translation systems such as Neural Machine Translation NMS, introduced in 2014,
attempt to emulate the way infants learn their mother tongue: by collecting and
processing a large number of actual samples of text, and then finding and
applying patterns of use. Since language is not an exact science, computers use
statistical methods to determine the most likely optimum translation of a given
word or group of words. This requires an amount of processing power that was
unavailable just a few years ago.
Regrettably, there are
serious obstacles to using the technology of modern machine translation for
teaching foreign languages to adults. Our brains are not equipped for acquiring,
storing, and processing millions of text fragments from different sources and
used in different contexts. For this reason, we’ll have to content ourselves, for
now and for the foreseeable future, with traditional methods of language
learning: by studying vocabulary and grammar and training our speech-generating
organs in the correct pronunciation.
Several
methods have been devised for measuring foreign-language proficiency.
The ACTFL (American Council on the Teaching of Foreign Languages)
scale https://www.languagetesting.com/actfl-proficiency-scale distinguishes
five levels of proficiency:
The first three levels
are each subdivided into three sublevels (Low, Mid, and High).
The
Inter-agency
Language Roundtable (ILR) scale (https://www.languagetesting.com/ilr-scale)
that is set by the U.S. Foreign Service Institute also measures language
proficiency on a five-level scale with levels 0 through 4 further sbdivided into two sublevels each:
Interpreters’ language proficiency
is usually classified as A, B, or C. An individual’s “A” language is usually
their native or mother tongue, but can also be a language acquired later in
life, but which is now the individual’s language of habitual use. Their “B” and
“C” languages are acquired languages used with proficiency decreasing in this
order.
Learning
a foreign language involves basically four targets:
Learning the vocabulary
of a language is the beginning of learning any language and is an endeavor that
never ends. We learn new words even in our mother tongue all the time, and even
if we could, at a point in time, have learned all the words of a language, new
ones are constantly being created and old ones become obsolete or acquire new
meanings.
The
Collins dictionary https://www.collinsdictionary.com/us/dictionary/english/vocabulary defines passive vocabulary as all the words,
collectively, that a person can understand. It describes active
vocabulary as the total number of words a person can use in their speech
and writing. Our passive vocabulary is vastly superior to our active
vocabulary, and the number of words we actually use is much smaller than
either. We need about 3000 words to maintain an
everyday conversation. The active vocabulary of the average native speaker of
English is about 20,000 words. That goes up to 40,000 for the passive
vocabulary or for the active vocabulary of college-educated people (https://blog.languageconvo.com/how-many-words-do-you-need-to-be-fluent/).
The size of individuals’ vocabulary in their native language and their acquired
languages is a good measure of their level of education. The size of an
individual’s vocabulary in their acquired language(s) is also a good, although
not exclusive measure of their language skills such as fluency, understanding,
and ability of expression.
Grammar
is the set of rules that tell us how to put the words of a language together
for correct and efficient communication. Unlike vocabulary, grammar is fully learnable,
although few people use perfect grammar all the time. It is also subject to
evolution and varies according to geography, the speaker’s social class and
level of education, as well as the degree of formality of the communication.
The difficulty in learning a foreign language is influenced not only by the
complexity of its grammar, but also by the number of exceptions to its rules
and the circumstances under which those rules or the exceptions apply.
Grammar describes the
sounds of a language (phonetics), the structure (morphology), meaning
(semantics) and origin (etymology) of its words, and the rules of
formation of its sentences (syntax). Different languages exhibit
different degrees of complexity and difficulty of their grammatical rules. Easy
morphology is usually associated with difficult phonetics and vice-versa.
Chinese has a simple morphology (no flexed words), but difficult phonetics (one
of four musical tones for each word/syllable). Romance languages have a
relatively simple phonetics, but a more complex morphology (multiple tenses and
grammatical genders). Slavic and Finno-Ugric languages flex both verbs and
nouns.
Pronunciation
is also learnable, although few people are capable of learning proper
pronunciation in their acquired language(s) (lose their foreign accent) after
the critical age of about 13. Some languages have sounds that are almost
impossible for a grown-up foreigner to emulate. The clicking sounds of the Khoisan
languages are an extreme example, but some people, depending on their mother
tongue and their natural talent, have difficulty pronouncing the English th
sound, the German ö sound or the Danish stöd (glottal stop). Distinguishing
between similar sounds, such as the open and closed “e” phonemes in French and
Portuguese, can be another challenge to the non-native speaker.
The musical tone of words
in Chinese and some other Oriental, African, and Native American languages
presents an additional difficulty to the learner. In those languages you must
learn not only how to articulate a word, but also which of the musical tones,
which may number as many as 12, is associated with it. Of course, Chinese and
other pictographic languages are also difficult to learn because the written
representation of each word does not directly tell us how it is pronounced.
Thus, you can learn how to speak Chinese without learning to read or write a
single character and, at least theoretically, you can learn how to read and
write without learning how to pronounce a single word (in which case you must
identify each character by its translation, if it exists, or its description).
Pronunciation includes
not only generating the sounds of a word, but also the intonation and rhythm, the so-called suprasegmental elements (prosody) of
the phrase. Therefore, the native speaker will usually recognize a foreigner
even if the latter pronounces each word correctly. In addition to intoning
their sentences unlike the natives, foreigners also tend to use their speech-generating
organs differently and speak in a rhythm that differs from that of the native
speaker.
The differences in
pronunciation on the sentence level depend, of course, on the languages
involved. For example, a question in a Western language can be recognized by
the intonation of the phrase. Since in Chinese intonation is part of each
word’s identity, a question is marked by a dedicated word, rather than by the sentence’s
intonation.
Non-verbal language
elements such as facial
expressions, gestures, posture, and tone of voice
can also be mentioned, together with pronunciation, as parts of a language.
Italians’ gesticulation when speaking is well known. Bulgarians signal “yes” by
moving their head left and right sideways and “no” by moving it up and down,
which can be confused with the opposite meanings signaled by people of other
nationalities. The Swedish ingressive “yes” sound is somewhere between a gasp
and a slurp. People of different nationalities have different gestures for
different things and differing degree of significance they attribute to those
gestures, as well as to bodily proximity and bodily contact.
Non-verbal signals can be
an important part of interlingual communications, and the wrong non-verbal signals
can cause serious misunderstandings.
Whichever method is
chosen, a language cannot be learned at an adult age without conscious and
sustained effort. Language is no glue, and it will not “stick” to you, even
after prolonged stay in the country where it is spoken. We have all encountered
immigrants having lived in their adopted country for decades and still speaking
with faulty grammar, poor vocabulary, and a strong foreign accent. In the
author’s experience, immigrants who have not acquired language proficiency in
their first year in the new country will most likely never do so.
Success in language
learning will depend on many factors, such as the language to be learned (how objectively
difficult it is and how close it is to the learner’s native language), the
quality of the method chosen, the purpose of learning, the amount of time and
effort dedicated to learning, and the learner’s natural talent for languages. You
can predict your success in learning a new language and choose an optimum
learning method by answering the following questions:
·
What
is your purpose of learning?
·
What
degree of proficiency do you aim at?
·
How
much time and effort are you willing and able to dedicate to this endeavor?
·
Should
you prioritize speaking, reading, writing, or understanding?
·
Are
you familiar with any language other than your native one?
·
If
yes, how did you learn your second and possibly subsequent languages and what
degree of proficiency did you achieve?
·
Do
you memorize better visually or auditively?
·
How
many repetitions do you need to learn a word?
·
Do
you easily learn to imitate sounds produced by others? Polyglot
is
defined as a person speaking three or more languages. Hyperpolyglot or hyperglot
is defined as a person speaking 11 or more languages. These simple
definitions, however, need some clarification to make sense.
First, what is meant by
“speaking” a language? Do you speak a language if you can introduce yourself
and ask for directions to the nearest restaurant? The difference between that
level of language skill and being able to converse about an abstract topic as
an educated native is the same as between a toddler’s first step and a
world-class athlete’s performance.
Second, learning a language involves not only speaking
(verbal skill), but also reading, writing, and understanding—skills that
can be acquired more or less independently from each other, depending on the
language. We have mentioned Chinese, a language which you can learn to speak
without learning how to read or write. One of history’s most famous hyperglot,
Cardinal Giuseppe Caspar Mezzofanti (1774-1849), reportedly “spoke” 30 languages,
but in his time and for people in his social position, “speaking” did not mean
conversational skills, but the ability to read, understand, and possibly
translate sacred texts.
Some languages have dialects so different from each
other that they can be considered separate languages for the purpose of speaking
or even understanding them. Should the Swiss child, who speaks Schwyzerdütsch
(Swiss German) at home, but in school
learns and professionally will use Hochdeutsch (standard German) be considered
bilingual?
If you are or
wish to become a polyglot, your job does not end with learning a number of
languages. As is the case with any skill, if you don’t practice it, you will
gradually become less and less proficient until you lose it completely for all
practical purposes. Your mother tongue is less subject to being “forgotten”
than your acquired languages, but if you’re out of touch with it for an
extended period of time, you’ll certainly experience first some impairment in
your use of your active vocabulary, such as difficulty in remembering certain
words or applying the grammar of another language to your speech. Language also
undergoes changes over time; so, if you live outside your country of birth,
when you return there after some years, the natives may find your use of some
words and structures old-fashioned, and you may not understand some neologisms.
Your acquired
languages are affected even more by lack of use. Those who have learned several
languages, must also learn how to keep them alive, an endeavor not unlike the
effort of juggling several balls attempting to keep them all in the air.
The good news
for polyglots is that we never completely forget a language we have once
learned either as a child or an adult. Refreshing a language that has become
“rusty” for lack of use is always easier than learning it anew.
While
a human infant can learn any language with virtually the same ease, some
languages are objectively more difficult to learn than others for a non-native
adult. The ease or difficulty of learning a given language, without considering
the learner’s mother tongue depends on
1.
The
number and variety of its phonemes (sounds);
2.
The
complexity of its grammar and the number of exceptions,
3.
The
richness of its vocabulary.
Wikipedia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_languages_by_number_of_phonemes)
gives the number of phonemes in a number of languages. By this criterion,
English is one of the most difficult languages, with 44 phonemes in “general
American” English—24 consonants and 20 vowels. It is tied with Danish (18
consonants and 26 vowels), Hamer (an Afro-Asiatic language—26 consonants and 18
vowels), Hindi (33 consonants and 11 vowels), and Wambule (a Sino-Tibetan
language with 33 consonants and 11 vowels). It is surpassed only by Norman, an
Indo-European language having 48 phonemes (23 consonants and 25 vowels), Nemi,
an Austronesian language (43 consonants and 5 vowels), and Kosraean, another
Austronesian language, with 47 phonemes—35 consonants and 12 vowels.
On the other extreme, we
have Hawaiian (13 phonemes—8 consonants and 5 or
25 vowels, depending on how long and short vowels and diphthongs are classified),
closely followed by the engineered language Toki
Pona (14 phonemes—9 consonants and 5 vowels), five
Austronesian languages: Areare with 15 phonemes (10 consonants and 5 vowels),
Gilbertese (15 phonemes—10 consonants and 5 vowels), Nuaulu (16 phonemes—11
consonants and 5 vowels), Saaroa (17 phonemes—13 consonants and 4 vowels), and
Dawan (18 phonemes—11 consonants and 7 vowels.
Caucasian languages, the
African Taa language, and Mandarin Chinese are difficult because of their
almost unpronounceable (for the non-native) phonemes. Chinese also has a large
and difficult-to-learn vocabulary.
Basque and the
Finno-Ugric languages are considered difficult because of their complex grammar
and grammatical concepts that do not exist in other languages.
Japanese has three
different writing systems: hiragana, katakana and kanji, the first two being
alphabets, each sign representing a phoneme. Kanji is a pictographic system
adapted from Chinese.
Some languages like
Finnish, Spanish, and Italian, are more or less spoken as they are written, so
learning how to read and write requires little additional effort once you have
learned how to speak. The Korean script Hangul was designed expressly to
reflect pronunciation.
On
the other hand, Chinese script and spoken language are almost totally divorced.
English is between those two extremes with many words having the same spelling but
pronounced differently (homographs) like bow (of a violin, rhyming with low)
v. bow (a polite gesture, rhyming with cow), or spelled
differently but pronounced in the same way (homophones), like brake and break
or there and their. An extreme and made-up example of non-phonetic
spelling in English is the word “fish” spelled as ghoti (gh as in rough,
o as in women, and ti as in nation).
Surprisingly, the
complexity of a language’s grammar and the richness of its vocabulary have
little to do with the degree of civilization of its speakers. Some of the
peoples living in the most primitive environments have the most complex
languages. This complexity may be manifested in the multiplicity of phonemes as
in the languages !Xóõ and !Kung featuring numerous and
varied click sounds, or in a maddeningly complex grammar as Dyirbal,
an Aboriginal Australian language. The vocabularies of those “primitive”
peoples, while lacking many abstract terms and terms of science and technology,
are rich in terms relating to their environment, fauna, and flora. Different
sources ascribe the Inuit language between 50 to 400 different terms for snow.
Despite their age, no one would label the ancient languages of Sanskrit, Greek,
or Latin as “primitive.” On the other end of the
difficulty spectrum, the easiest natural languages to learn for a speaker of
English, according to Babbel (https://www.babbel.com/en/magazine/easiest-languages-for-english-speakers-to-learn)
are:
1.
Norwegian
2.
Swedish
3.
Spanish
4.
Dutch
5.
Portuguese
6.
Indonesian
7.
Italian
8.
French
9.
Swahili.
The engineered
(constructed) languages such as Esperanto, Interlingua, Volapük, Lojban, and
Toki Pona, are specifically designed for ease of learning. However, their ease
of learning (for speakers of the major European languages) is derived from the
fact that they were invented by Europeans. They have limited practical usefulness,
since they have no native speakers, and no country has adopted an engineered
language for official use.
Although all natural
languages have a full-fledged grammar, those listed above are considered easy
for being non-tonal, using the Latin script, having no hard-to-pronounce
phonemes, and their grammar has relatively few exceptions. European languages,
especially the major ones (English, French, Spanish, and German) also have more
resources available for learning, such as on-line, printed, and recorded
courses, dictionaries, grammar books, and trained teachers.
Learning languages
similar to one’s native tongue is easier than learning a language of a
different language family. Portuguese-speaking Brazilians and Spanish-speaking
Spaniards or Latin Americans understand each other almost without any study of
each other’s languages. The same is true for Swedes, Danes, and Norwegians. Spanish and Portuguese speakers also consider French and Italian easy languages to learn,
but German and Dutch difficult. Speakers of Dutch and Scandinavian
languages--Swedish, Danish, Norwegian, and Icelandic--hold the opposite views of
those languages. Learning multiple similar languages, such as Swedish, Danish,
and Norwegian, does not require the same effort, and for any non-native adult
is not an accomplishment comparable to learning Chinese, Tupi-Guarani, and
Inuit. Similarities in vocabulary, grammar, and phonetics among the languages
to be learned and to the learner’s native tongue are important factors in evaluating
the difficulty in learning and even the degree to which an individual can expect
to learn a foreign language.
For all these reasons,
the statement “Mr. X speaks y languages” does not make much sense and does not tell
us much about Mr. X’s accomplishment unless we define how objectively difficult
those languages are, how close they are to the Mr. X’s native tongue and to
each other, for what purpose and to what level of proficiency those languages
have been learned.
For individuals with no
prior contact with any language but their native one, the first foreign
language is the most difficult one. All subsequent language learning will
benefit from that first experience, the more so the closer the subsequent
languages are to the learners’ native tongue and to each other. The saying that
learning languages is like purchasing buns in some bakeries: “buy ten, get one
free,” is only a slightly exaggerated statement of the fact that learning any
language can benefit from languages learned previously.
The author’s mother
tongue, Hungarian, has no grammatical genders, so he had to learn the concept
of gender with the first foreign language he had contact with, which happened
to be German. Having cleared that hurdle, the same concept of genders in
Russian, French, and other Indo-European languages no longer seemed so exotic. Similarly,
he learned the concept of grammatical verb tenses, which do not exist in
Hungarian, when studying French, which facilitated his learning the same
concept in English, Portuguese, and Spanish. Russians and Chinese must learn
the concept of definite and indefinite articles, which their languages lack. Some
grammatical features are shared by many different languages; others are
peculiar to one or just a few of them. Even some languages that are only
distant relatives or no relatives at all may surprisingly share a lot of
vocabulary and some grammatical features, like Romanian, Bulgarian, and the
Scandinavian languages all having the definite article in the form of an
ending.
Almost all languages
share some vocabulary with others. Thus, English words, in their
original form or with modified spelling and/or pronunciation, can be found in
almost all modern languages. This is particularly true in some areas such as
the entertainment industry and technology, especially in the computer sciences.
Who would recognize the expression “talk show” in its Hungarian form tak só or the word "site" in its Hungarian form szájt or in its Russian form сайт? In some countries English-looking or -sounding expressions have been
created that are not used and probably wouldn’t be understood in any
English-speaking country. Example: no-break for “uninterruptible power
supply” in Brazilian Portuguese. All languages of Europe (except some Slavic
languages and Greek), as well as most African and Asian languages, use the
Latin alphabet with or without diacritics.
Language sets apart
humans from all other living things, while, at the same time, serving as a
unifier of all humans, regardless of their geography, race, and degree of
civilization. Despite the dazzling variety of languages, this essay attempts to
make some general statements that are applicable to most, if not all natural
human languages, and which may be useful to a person learning a foreign
language for whatever purpose or simply interested in languages.
While all human infants
learn their mother tongue with about the same ease as they learn to eat and
walk, learning a language different from one’s native one as an adult requires
conscious and seldom fully successful effort to prevent one’s mother tongue
from influencing the language(s) to be learned. However, whether you decide to
learn a new language to read Tolstoy in the original, understand a scientific
paper written in German, enjoy an Italian film, or converse with the natives in
Thailand, and whatever degree of proficiency you achieve, each language learned
opens for you a window to a different culture and a different way of looking at
the world.
Regardless of what
prompted you to embark on the study of foreign languages in the first place and
regardless of the degree to which you ultimately achieve your original goal,
you’ll find that the journey itself is worth the effort.
The Oxford English Dictionary Revised
2008. Keyword “Language” n.d. Accessed Feb.16, 2024 Webster’s New Encyclopedic Dictionary,
BlackDog & Leventhal Publishers, 3rd Printing, 1994, ISBN
0-9637056-0-1
Wikipedia n.d. “List of dictionaries by
number of words” n.d. Accessed
Feb.16, 2024 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_dictionaries_by_number_of_words.
Newsdle. n.d. “What Percentage of the
World’s Population is Bilingual?” Accessed Feb.16, 2024 Mendez, Mario f. “Bilingualism and
Dementia: Cognitive Reserve to Linguistic Competency” https://content.iospress.com/articles/journal-of-alzheimers-disease/jad190397
LTI (Language Testing International)
“ACTFL Proficiency Scale” n.d. Accessed Feb.16, 2024 https://www.languagetesting.com/actfl-proficiency-scale.
ILR (Inter-Agency Language Roundtable)
“Testing on the ILR scale” n.d. Accessed Feb.16, 2024 https://www.languagetesting.com/ilr-scale.
Common European Framework of Reference for
Languages “The CEFR Levels” n.d. Accessed Feb.16, 2024 https://www.coe.int/en/web/common-european-framework-reference-languages/level-descriptions.
Collins Dictionary Keywords “Active
Vocabulary” & “Passive Vocabulary” n.d. Accessed Feb.16, 2024 https://www.collinsdictionary.com/us/dictionary/english/vocabulary.
Language Convo “How many words do you need
to be fluent?” n.d. Accessed
Feb.16, 2024. https://blog.languageconvo.com/how-many-words-do-you-need-to-be-fluent/
Wikipedia “List of languages by number of
phonemes” n.d. Accessed Feb. 16, 2024. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_languages_by_number_of_phonemes
The author can be contacted at: gabe@bokorlang.com or send a message to Gabe Bokor via Facebook Messenger.
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