Talk:Language complexity

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Linguistics: Applied Linguistics

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Lede needs NPOV

Nice article. I suggest that the lede could be made a little bit more neutral. Right now it says

...that all human languages are equally complex ... is ... an implication of Chomskian linguistics, which postulates that all human languages are underlyingly the same. However, there is no objective reason to believe this is true, and much reason to believe it is not.

I think that a Chomskian would find that last sentence to be POV. Maybe you could say there is

no empirical support for that theoretical prediction, and there is empirical evidence to the contrary.

Duoduoduo (talk) 19:55, 2 December 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Spanish more complicated?

Spanish is also considered to be much more complex than English

Reference, please? I consider English somewhat more complex and harder to learn:

Spanish verbs have a few more tenses than English; most tenses correspond. In each tense/mood combination, Spanish verbs have 5 or 6 person/number forms; English verbs have 1 or 2 except for "be", but the pronoun is expressed separately. Both have some irregular verbs and the suppletive verbs ir/go and ser/be.
Both have rich vocabularies, with a Romance/Germanic base enriched by the other and lots of borrowings.
Spanish orthography is close to phonetic. English orthography is really difficult. Spanish has a few homophone pairs like haya/halla and izo/hizo, but not nearly as many as English, which also has lots of homographs that Spanish doesn't.
Spanish has five vowels and two kinds of reduction: one inherited from pre-classical Latin (e.g. amigo:enemigo) and also found in English (e.g. apt:inept) and one peculiar to Spanish (ue:o:u, ie:e:i). English has about twelve vowels and much vowel reduction.

So the main difference is the orthography and phonology, and like French, English is more complex. phma (talk) 05:22, 12 February 2012 (UTC)[reply]

English grammar and vocab are both more complex than Spanish. I think s.o. was joking. Deleted. — kwami (talk) 05:26, 12 February 2012 (UTC)[reply]

Orthography is not a part of language complexity. Every language could be written fairly phonetically using the Latin alphabet, possibly with some diacritics added, to take an example. And if someone mentions tones as a counterexample, I'll defuse that right away: Vietnamese is tonal but uses the Latin alphabet with loads of diacritics. Most African languages are tonal and they usually don't indicate the tones in writing. Cheerio Sorte Slyngel (talk) 21:32, 16 May 2015 (UTC)[reply]

A wiki article based on writings by a known crackpot in sci.lang

This canard comes up regularly. See: http://www.reddit.com/r/badlinguistics/comments/1nn38z/one_part_of_a_language_is_more_complex_than_the/ 178.75.168.218 (talk) 07:58, 4 October 2013 (UTC)[reply]

A Couple of Thoughts

How to Determine whether All Languages Are Equally Complex

1. Devise a metric for measuring linguistic complexity.

2. Apply that metric to all known languages.

3. Study the results. If they all get the same grade, they are equally complex. This seems a bit improbable, given that there are 6.000-7.000 languages still alive, although many are headed for extinction.

4. Alternatively and more easily, find just two languages applying the metric, which gives a counterexample.

Some Invalid Methods to Determine whether All Languages Are Equally Complex

1. ~~This article is a fine example of one way. Take two languages and do a bit of handwaving.~~

2. Reason like it says in a FAQ somewhere: All languages are equally complex, the complexity is just hidden in different places. Latin has a complex morphology but completely free word order. English has relatively little by way of morphology but a complicated syntax. (You may point to some thick book about English syntax for "proof".) The problem with this is that Latin word order is not completely free and we don't have all the materials available to write the kind of massive books that otherwise unoccupied people with a degree in English have. Neither are there enough Latinists around to compete with English. For a more impossible comparison, how would you compare English with Eyak, whose last speaker died years ago?

3. Anecdotal evidence is not permitted.

4. The feeling that something ought to be does not make it so.

~~As this article stands, it should probably be dropped entirely.~~ All the best. 85.220.22.139 (talk) 23:26, 7 December 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Corrected myself. 85.220.22.139 (talk) 13:27, 8 December 2014 (UTC)[reply]

This article needs a rewrite

I understand that whoever wrote this put in a lot of effort, but this article leads nowhere.

The article is called "language complexity" yet talks about only two languages and compares their "complexity" in a completely subjective manner, using this as proof for the idea that not all languages are equally complex, which, if anything, should be a subsection of the article or an article on it's own.

Instead, I propose that the article explains what is language complexity, how it is measured or determined and how the concept works on a variety of languages around the world (without actually having to summarize entire grammars).

If there is no such thing as a definition of language complexity other that "I find X language easier to learn than Y" then I suggest this article be deleted for it serves no purpose.

M BARTELS M 13:16, 19 March 2015 (UTC)[reply]

Apparently no accepted metric exists and for good reasons. You'd have to take every language into account, and good grammars are only available for a minority of the world's languages. Remember that the number of speakers is completely irrelevant. So we would have to have an account of, say, 7.000 living languages and apply the metric in question to each of them. Dead languages would have to be investigated too, as sources allow. Since the metric doesn't exist and the majority of languages is poorly documented, we can't decide one way or the other. But it is very easy to imagine situations where two languages differ on one or a few points, making one of them more complex. So far, I've only seen handwaving as an "argument" for equal complexity. All the best Sorte Slyngel (talk) 20:59, 21 May 2015 (UTC)[reply]

History section needs work

McWhorter is solely cited for half of it. There needs to be a more nuanced section about differential complexity. The first part of the section implies a certain superiority to the complexity of languages, but differential theory today don’t necessarily support a superiority ranking in the complexity, as McWhorter notes. This needs to be expounded upon more in the article about the scholarly consensus today. 2603:6010:11F0:3C0:8193:2CDF:11E8:FE23 (talk) 03:41, 27 October 2022 (UTC)[reply]