Hardest Language to Learn?

One of the first questions linguists get asked is "What is the hardest language to learn?" Or, to be quite honest, the question often comes out as "What is the easiest language to learn?" Either way, though, the questions are based on the same premise: that there are languages that are easier/more difficult to learn than others.

My answer is typically the same--it hovers somewhere around "all languages have their own unique difficulties." However, if the person who is doing the asking is actually interested in having a linguistic conversation, I like to bring up the fact that some languages may appear easier or more difficult to learn, depending on their native language. For example, as a gross generalization, if your native language is English, it will be easier for you to learn another Indo-European language like Spanish or German than it will be to learn, say, Mandarin Chinese.

I had never seen someone break languages down into difficulty by the estimated required hours to become proficient in the language until I saw this picture below on 22 Words:

Chart from 22 Words

The entire chart assumes a native English speaker is the one learning a new language and then breaks the target languages into three groups. What I wish could be conveyed by the chart (but the chart would quickly become less of a graphic and more of a document) is what features of the languages were used to determine whether a language is closely related to or significantly different from English, how the number of hours were calculated for how long it takes to reach proficiency, and how proficiency is defined for this chart. I don't quite agree with the groupings--for instance, I have a hard time believing that--for the purposes of this chart--Hindi would be in the same level of ease for an English speaker as Polish.


What do you think? Can we group languages by difficulty of learning according to native language? If so, do you agree with the image above?

What the ....?

The post title sums up my reaction to the first time I saw these two sentences, both of which are supposedly sentences in English:

Buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo.

James while John had had had had had had had had had had had a better effect on the teacher.

The first sentence relies on three different senses of the word buffalo: the city Buffalo, NY; the noun (the large mammal that once roamed the prairie freely); and the transitive verb, which according to my Mac dictionary means to "overawe or intimidate (someone)." The Wikipedia article on this sentence provides the background and some syntactic trees for the sentence, but I'll give you a shortened rundown here:

Let's start at the beginning: Buffalo buffalo work together to mean the NP "buffalo that are in Buffalo". This NP occurs three times in the sentence:

[Buffalo buffalo] [Buffalo buffalo] buffalo buffalo [Buffalo buffalo].

 The remaining instances of buffalo in the sentence are the verb form. The first instance of buffalo as a verb is working with the NP [Buffalo buffalo] to modify the first NP [Buffalo buffalo]. You might reword the entire first part of the sentence (this will take care of the first five instances of buffalo):

The buffalo that live in Buffalo that buffalo (other) buffalo in Buffalo...

Now the sentence is finished off with the transitive verb and its object, which also happen to be the buffalo in Buffalo:

The buffalo that live in Buffalo that buffalo (other) buffalo in Buffalo buffalo the buffalo that live in Buffalo.

Is it a sentence? Sure. By loose-ish standards. Is it a good English sentence? No. Why would Buffalo buffalo be buffaloing other buffalo that live in Buffalo two times over? That just doesn't make sense. So while it is syntactically possible, it's semantically void of really meaning anything. While it may not be a sentence you'd want to use in an everyday conversation, it is a sentence you can wow your friends with at parties. Just think of all the debates you can get into once you proclaim, Buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo is too a sentence in English!

The second sentence from above only works with added punctuation. In fact, its Wikipedia article states that this sentence shows why punctuation can be necessary in some sentences to understand meaning. The sentence with its appropriate punctuation looks like this:

James, while John had had "had", had had "had had"; "had had" had had a better effect on the teacher.

Obviously, there was some sort of test, in which James wrote "had had" on the paper but John wrote "had", and the teacher preferred "had had" as the correct answer. All this took place in the past in a situation that required the past perfect to show that the activity was finished, thus leaving us with the seemingly (yet not) redundant pairing had had. In everyday speech, we often put the first had into a contraction, which sounds way less odd: I'd had three bananas before I realized that two would've been enough. That sentence just as easily could have started out with I had had three bananas... and been grammatically sound. That's what happens when a verb that has been grammaticalized as an auxiliary remains a main verb--have as an auxiliary (or helping verb) no longer has anything to do with its use as a main verb that usually (and loosely) shows some sort of possession (though "possession" doesn't even come close to fully describing the use of have as a main verb).

Again, is it a sentence in English? Yes. Is it one you're likely to come across? Not unless you're a teacher that left a blank on a test that should have been filled in with had had instead of had.

Do you know of any other crazy examples of sentences like these that people use to show off the oddities of language and syntax?

Beauty is in the eye of the beholder

What does it mean for a word to be beautiful? That question is what Robert Beard (Dr. Goodword) tackled when he compiled the list of the 100 most beautiful words in the English language.

After looking through the words, I am guessing he was going for sound and not meaning; otherwise, words like beleaguer and untoward surely wouldn't have made the list. But there must have been more than just sound being considered because words like bucolic and ripple just don't sound any more "beautiful" to me than other words that didn't make the cut.

I would imagine that most people would find less common words to be more beautiful than more common ones (after all, people tend to be more attracted by the things they don't encounter as often), and many English speakers would probably find borrowed words more beautiful than native Germanic words (I'm going with the foreign-is-exotic-and-thus-beautiful theory on that one). I've long been fond of words like facetious, quotidian, felicity, draconian, stygian, inveigle, fastidious, melodic, and phenomena because of the way they roll off the tongue--their meaning doesn't add beauty or intrigue (especially words like quotidian, stygian, and draconian), but they sound nice to me. It's entirely subjective, though--I can't say why one word sounds "pretty" but another doesn't. And the words that sound pretty to me probably don't sound pretty to other people. All these examples are of English, yet other languages have words that can be deemed as more beautiful than others by its speakers or by its learners. I rather enjoyed saying αληθεια and αμαξια while learning Ancient Greek (pardon my lack of diacritics on the words)--even moreso than the other words I learned.

If you read the description that's on the website, Dr. Goodword wants to help people beautify their language use, and yet I'm not sure what it means to have beautiful language. What do you think? Can words be beautiful? And if they can, what makes one word more beautiful than another? And, more importantly, what words do you find "beautiful"?

Crazy Measurements

Americans have long been the oddballs in the measurement world with our inability to accept the universal measurements like grams and meters, preferring instead our feet and inches and pounds. In fact, if someone tells me something in 3 centimeters, it won't mean much to me until they say it's just over an inch. You can tell me you ran 10 kilometers, but I won't really be impressed until I figure out that's just over 6 miles. We like our measuring units that we've grown to love even if we don't fully understand them (what's an acre, anyway?).

I'm rather fond of our measuring system, but I might be willing to add new units of measurement to that system, especially if they're anything like these that were posted on the Mental Floss blog. Now I can say, with pride, that I am roughly one smoot tall. That sounds so much cooler than 5'7".

Conlanging, how I love thee

Since I was a kid, invented languages have been near and dear to my heart; in fact, I attempted to invent my own language (with very little success) when I was young, and then I grew up to teach a course on invented languages, for which I finally invented my own language. In the spirit of sharing the love of invented languages, I am sharing these six very cool websites about or promoting invented languages:

• Lekh Dothraki
• Learn Na'vi
• Parma Tyelpassiva (Elvish)
• Klingon Language Institute

• Divinian
• Language Creation Society

The first five are about specific invented languages while the last link is for anyone interested in becoming a conlanger (that is, someone who invents languages (or constructs them)). There are many, many more websites about invented languages, but these are some of the most helpful for anyone interested in a specific language or in what goes on behind the scenes with inventing a language.

As I'm closing this post, I realized I focused solely on creative invented languages, but I'd be remiss if I didn't at least mention that some languages were constructed to serve as auxiliary languages, such as Esperanto. While such languages are interesting in their own right, I think the fictional languages have more life because they're meant to reflect an entire culture of a fictionalized civilization. I will also say that while I have never learned to speak any of these languages, I can spend hours learning about them metalinguistically without once getting bored.

British vs. American

The other day I stumbled across the Best of British website, which provides a rather large list of British slang words defined for us Americans who don't know how to speak British. Some of the funniest ones were blow me and blow off, but there are some other great entries. I have no idea how accurate it is, but it's great fun to go through.

The website reminds me of when Ellen Degeneres had Hugh Laurie on her show and held a contest of sorts to see who could understand more slang--Hugh gave Ellen examples of British slang, and she had to guess the words' meanings; Ellen gave Hugh examples of American slang, and he had to guess the words' meanings. You can see the video below, or you can go here and see it on YouTube.

So let's table ideas on slang words and waffle on about sweet fanny adams until we're zonked or until some bladdered tosser who's legging it brasses us off by interrupting our chin wag. It'll be awesome! (Anyone who's British can feel free to openly mock my inability to apply newly learned slang correctly.)

Let's verb that

A poem has been floating around in cyberspace about the "Verbing of America" with examples of verbalized nouns. The point of the poem is to show how enigmatic our language is in selecting which nouns can be used as verbs, and if they are used as verbs, what their meaning will be. I highly suggest reading through the entire poem; an example stanza is below:

If when we change a noun to verb
To come up with our `verbing,'
Why can't I, when I'm using herbs,
Refer to it as herbing?

It is rather intriguing to think of what can or cannot be used as a verb. I can friend someone (i can even unfriend someone), but I don't think I can boyfriend or husband someone. I can Facebook someone, but I can't Twitter or MySpace someone. I can Google a word or topic, but I can't Yahoo or Bing anything. I can Netflix a movie, but I sure wouldn't Blockbuster a movie. I can DVR or Tivo a show, but I never VCRed anything when I recorded shows via a VHS tape (for that matter, I've never VHSed anything).

It's no wonder non-native English speakers get lost in our vocabulary. These examples (and so many more) show how arbitrary the process is in deciding which nouns can be functionally shifted to be used as verbs.

What other instances of verbed words can you think of?