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[–]languagejones 482 ポイント483 ポイント  (59子コメント)

Most of the replies you've gotten so far are perfect material for /r/badlinguistics.

In general, linguists agree that no language is more or less complex than another overall, and definitely agree that all natural human languages are effective at communicating. This is in part because there's no agreed upon rubric for what constitutes "complexity," and because there is a very strong pressure for ineffective language to be selected against.

Can very nuanced, subtle communication be lost in translation from one more 'complex' language to a simpler one?

A few thoughts:

(1) information can be lost in translation, yes. More often than not, it's 'flavor.' That is, social and pragmatic nuances, or how prosodic and phonological factors affect an utterance. Translated poetry, to give an obvious example, will either lose rhythmic feeling and rhyme, or be forced to fit a rhythm and rhyme at the expense of more direct or idiomatic translation.

I would link to peer reviewed papers, but this is so fundamental to the study of linguistics that I'm not even sure where to start, honestly. The claims that a given language is more complex than another, or better suited to abstract thought, or what have you have all gone the way of other racist pseudo-science,= like phrenology...which is to say, long gone from academia, but alive and well on reddit. ¯_(ツ)_/¯

(2) You would have to define complexity, before you could answer this. Every time I've seen a question like this, what the OP defines as complexity is just one way of communicating information, and the supposedly more complex language is less complex in other ways. For instance, communicating the syntactic role of a noun phrase can be achieved either through case marking, or through fixed word order. Which of these is more complex? Well, one's got structural requirements at the phrase level, another has morphological requirements at the word level. Or here's another example: think about Mandarin and English. Mandarin has fewer vowels than English. Is it therefore less complex? What about the fact that it has lexical tone that English lacks?

Do different languages have varying degrees of 'effectiveness' in communicating?

No. In general, you'll find that the people who argue they do (1) have not ever seriously studied linguistics, (2) tend not to know how global languages became global languages -- through colonization in the last few centuries, and (3) tend to want to support overly simplistic narratives that are based on ethnoracial or class prejudice. They're also often really poorly thought-out. For instance, I've seen a lot of arguments in this thread that English is somehow superior for math and science, claiming that speakers of other languages have to switch to English, or borrow words from English to do math or science -- while conveniently forgetting that English borrowed most of those words from Latin and Greek. And that the speakers of other languages they're holding as examples were educated in English in former English colonies, so they were taught math and science terminology in English rather than their home languages.

[–]sinxoveretothex 12 ポイント13 ポイント  (3子コメント)

information can be lost in translation, yes. More often than not, it's 'flavor.' That is, social and pragmatic nuances, or how prosodic and phonological factors affect an utterance. Translated poetry, to give an obvious example, will either lose rhythmic feeling and rhyme, or be forced to fit a rhythm and rhyme at the expense of more direct or idiomatic translation.

Tangential question: is it the view of linguists that the only differences between languages are "flavor"? For example, I found it really interesting that Hindi uses "The knowledge doesn't belong to me" (Muche nahi maloom) for "I don't know" or uses the same word "voh" for "this thing" as well as "this person". Or how in French we have gendered plural pronouns for example.

I find these differences thought-provoking. Are linguists of the opinion that they are superficial differences?

[–]jivanyatra 0 ポイント1 ポイント  (0子コメント)

There are structural differences between languages that are lost but may or may not be significant. I'd argue that your Hindi example doesn't have additional flavor, and that it is the standard way to say "I don't know," so a more literal translation doesn't add useful information. These are the kinds if difficulties in comparing, though, so I see your point.

As for information loss, Arabic differentiates between male and female second person singular (you), while English does not. Hindu differentiates between 3 levels of formality in the second person singular, while English hasn't for quite some time. Mostly context can make up for this. It's like when you ask someone "how are you" and they reply "fine," and you can offer they're referring to themselves despite not having said it. These kinds of pragmatic rules allow for contextual information gathering at the conversation level that all languages benefit from and can counteract most examples of information loss.

When many people argue about information loss, I think it's about more involved forms of passing information, usually like being able to speak in hypotheticals (some languages have a subjunctive they can use, others have different constructs), or speaking in reference to different perspectives (I know John likes Sally, but John hasn't realized that, so how would different languages convey this information?). Some languages don't have a past tense the way English does. That doesn't mean you can't explain that something happened in the past.

[–]Gregorymendel 41 ポイント42 ポイント  (0子コメント)

This is the best answer here.

These threads almost always devolve into gross oversimplifications and completely arbitrary metrics for judging any aspect of any language.

[–]keyilanHistorical Linguistics | Language Documentation 26 ポイント27 ポイント  (4子コメント)

Thank you! So good to see a voice of reason who actually knows what they're talking about. I just saw this thread and my blood pressure has been going up with each response I read.

[–]Dert_ -5 ポイント-4 ポイント  (2子コメント)

It must frustrate you to not get much support for your silly ideals.

Some languages have advantages over others, some have disadvantages, it's just a fact.

Some languages can say one statement faster than others, some can say it slower, it's just a fact.

[–]cybrbeast 14 ポイント15 ポイント  (7子コメント)

What about complexity of descriptions? For example:

http://news.sciencemag.org/brain-behavior/2014/01/can-you-name-smell

To find out if the Jahai are better at naming smells than the rest of us, Majid and colleagues asked native Jahai speakers and native English speakers to describe 12 different odors: cinnamon, turpentine, lemon, smoke, chocolate, rose, paint thinner, banana, pineapple, gasoline, soap, and onion. The Jahai easily and consistently named the odors, whereas English speakers struggled, the team reports in the February issue of Cognition.

For example, all Jahai speakers tested agreed that the smell of cinnamon should be described as cŋəs, pronounced "cheng-us," the same word they use for the smells of garlic, onion, coffee, chocolate, or coconut. This suggests that Jahai are able to identify common odor properties in all of these foods, suggesting a special perception ability compared with other cultures.

In contrast, Majid says, “English descriptions for odors were five times longer and nearly every participant came up with a completely different name. There is little consensus on how to describe smells, and people often give many conflicting and contradictory descriptions.” What’s more, she notes, when English speakers described smells, they often used the source of the smell in their description; a lemon, for example, smelled “lemony.” The Jahai, meanwhile, had their own unique words for the smells.

[–]WHOareZOO 5 ポイント6 ポイント  (0子コメント)

I like to think of it as generalist vs specific word usage. There is a name for every caribou's stage of life, a descriptor that will tell you the age, sex, and so on. As an English speaker in the us I don't have a need for that. if it was important for enough people we would be using these words. If everyone decided on what each smell was and named it and it was in common use then we would probably be just as good at naming smells. I could name every line on a tall ship with few words and each would say exactly what that line is where it goes and so on. No one does that anymore because we don't use it. It is not better because it does not do anything any other language can't do, they just happen to like smells.

[–]rgamesgotmebanned 2 ポイント3 ポイント  (2子コメント)

For example, all Jahai speakers tested agreed that the smell of cinnamon should be described as cŋəs, pronounced "cheng-us," the same word they use for the smells of garlic, onion, coffee, chocolate, or coconut. This suggests that Jahai are able to identify common odor properties in all of these foods, suggesting a special perception ability compared with other cultures.

Doesn't the use of one word for several smells defeat the purpose and lead to a lot of information loss?

[–]thepsyborg 4 ポイント5 ポイント  (0子コメント)

The point is that they have words for odors that are distinct from the words for the most common source of those odors. Being able to discuss the scents specifically and independently of their origin allows them to be more precise about how they perceive it (which may not be quite the same as how we perceive it, but I suspect the overlap between olfactory neurology, perception, and linguistics is pretty tiny and poorly-studied).

It's like in wine-tasting; when wine tasters describe a wine as having notes of wood or blackberries or grass or whatever nonsense, they're not literally saying it tastes like wood or grass; they're describing certain flavor/odor components that are reminiscent of wood or grass. Imagine if English had words for those specific things, how much easier would it be for wine tasters to come to a consensus on what a given wine actually tastes like?

[–]seiterarch 0 ポイント1 ポイント  (0子コメント)

no language is more or less complex than another overall

(Bolding mine.) The key here as far as I can see is that whilst we can measure some very specific types of complexity, overall complexity is a space with a huge number of dimensions, of which some are difficult/impossible to measure and others are almost certainly unknown to us.

Since no language is more complex than every other language in every aspect, there is no consistent way of defining a most-complex language (though it might be possible to get a partial order when restricted to a specific criterion).

[–]selfish 0 ポイント1 ポイント  (0子コメント)

I don't understand how that's complexity - it's ambiguity, which is a completely different thing.

[–]Treesplosion 7 ポイント8 ポイント  (1子コメント)

I've read that cultures that don't have words for certain things or concepts in their language tend to think less about those respective things.

Would we be able to measure what languages have the most words to describe things, and if yes, could we use this as a method of determining a language's "effectiveness" as the OP said?

[–]lelarentaka 6 ポイント7 ポイント  (0子コメント)

People do have legitimate reasons to think less about certain things, and that's no reason to mark the language down. Malay and Indonesian do not have a native word for "snow" (it's borrowed from Arabic). Because the speakers of these languages live on the equator, and there's no snow to be found anywhere on their land, at anytime of the year, ever.

Until the advent of air travel and electronic communication, the fact that it's possible for solid white thing to fall from the sky that melts into water would have been regarded as a wild tale spun by foreign merchants. I don't think they knew that water can freeze.

Similarly, English does not have native words for things that don't exist in the British Isle. They borrowed Rambutan, Durian, and Mango because tropical fruits don't grow in their country. Tsunami, because apparently the Atlantic doesn't have an active fault zone like the Pacific.

Spices are a little mixed. Some spices have native English words, other are borrowed. The spices with native words are the really popular spices that would be circulated on the trade route in the middle ages. The spices without native words tend to be less popular spices that English speakers have only encountered recently when they actually step foot on the spice islands and India. In any case, the Europeans are more exposed to tropical spices than tropical fruits because tropical fruits are perishable and they can't survive the months long trip from India and SE Asia to Europe.

[–]captionquirk 5 ポイント6 ポイント  (0子コメント)

Follow-up: are the languages today more effective than yesterday's? You said yourself that ineffective language is selected against, so the way our languages evolve must be making them more efficient, yes? And what about spacially effectiveness? Can't character based languages like Chinese send more information in less space?

[–]Lavarocked 1 ポイント2 ポイント  (0子コメント)

In general, linguists agree that no language is more or less complex than another overall, and definitely agree that all natural human languages are effective at communicating. This is in part because there's no agreed upon rubric for what constitutes "complexity,"...

Without knowing or asserting anything about linguistics itself, I'm having trouble with the idea that there's consensus over something which doesn't have an "agreed upon rubric" for its own definition.

[–]SilverSnurfer 2 ポイント3 ポイント  (0子コメント)

Was "one, two, many" a lie then? That would indisputably be less effective at a huge range of communication tasks. Like, mathematically provably less efficient, no opinions involved.

[–]quasidor 0 ポイント1 ポイント  (1子コメント)

What about written language?

[–]1sttimeposting 3 ポイント4 ポイント  (0子コメント)

I can't be of much help answering your question, but I'd like to point out that another term for "written language" is orthography, and it's really a whole separate and distinct beast from language, and probably worthy of a whole separate question as I'd imagine anything to be said about language on the subject wouldn't apply to orthography nor the other way around.

[–]pinkbehemoth 0 ポイント1 ポイント  (0子コメント)

would it be inaccurate to say that some languages are more effective at communicating various specific things than others? I've been studying chinese, and from what I've learned in my classes there are some things that you say in english that you'd simply not say in chinese and vice versa, or at least you would say something that is kind of different instead; would some languages be better for describing different situations, like relational/scientific etc?

[–]bandaged 0 ポイント1 ポイント  (0子コメント)

what about emojis? there was an npr story about his recently and there is the one translation of moby dick into emojis.

[–]fatal__flaw 1 ポイント2 ポイント  (0子コメント)

I'd like to discuss this a bit because I do think you can quantify complexity in language in various ways. I'll use English, Polish and Chinese as examples.

Burden on memory to speak the language:

Nouns: Polish has 14x those of English because of declensions. Even though there are some rules of declension the amount of exceptions and alternations in Polish are vast.

Verbs: Polish has x2 of English. In English all you do is add 'ing' to a verb, in Polish it's a whole other word. Very often without a common letter other than the ending verb-sinaling letter (ć). 3 tenses, English has 2.

Adjectives/Pronouns: Polish has about 5x that of English with many exceptions.

Misc: Polish has formal and informal cases, 4 gender cases (male thing, female thing or animate male thing, neutral thing, masculine personal thing).

Burden of how much work brain has to do to speak it:

Future words in a sentence change how previous words in a sentence are said, so your brain has to process the sentence twice.

The declensions have to be constantly analyzed to come up with the right form of words. Verbs can change which declensions are used. Contexts can change which declensions are used. Conflicts must be resolved.

English doesn't have declensions (ok, maybe 3, but in comparison are very simple and the third consists of a few words: whom, them, etc).

Conjugations must be analyzed, the right aspect used, and the right rule for the right aspect used. English has trivial aspects.

Burden of Expression:

Polish is very ridgid so new concepts or ideas are difficult to adapt. Foreign words are filling the gap to some extent, but not without sacrificing rules of the language, adding more layers of complexity.

Now looking at Chinese, and running the same math with English, it ends up ahead. Chinese has fewer tenses, conjugations, noun forms, rules, exceptions, etc. There's more complexity in Chinese writing, but I want to restrict the conversation to the spoken language.

[–]Inacaveunderthesky 0 ポイント1 ポイント  (2子コメント)

Thanks for your interesting reply. I once read that languages coupled with or evolving from hieroglyphic notations (like old Egyptian or Chinese [?]) have difficulty expressing abstract terms - especially philosophic terms Ego, Consciousness, Causation, Being, Thought, etc. - which are common in languages that allow nominalization of verbs and adjectives. Is that true and would that mean that we could distinguish between languages incorporating more abstract expressions like German or Latin and those that are more, say, "sensory oriented"?

[–]bunnicula9000 0 ポイント1 ポイント  (0子コメント)

languages coupled with or evolving from hieroglyphic notations (like old Egyptian or Chinese [?]) have difficulty expressing particular abstract terms - think philosophic terms like Being, Ego, Thought, Consciousness - and especially those which are common in languages that allow nominalization of verbs and adjectives

Definitely not true of Chinese, which allows words to change category from adjective to verb to noun at least as much as English does. Chinese is a pretty good language for discussing philosophical terms, not least for historical reasons, but also because it's a pretty flexible language that lends itself well to wordplay.

[–]Ar_Nimruzir 0 ポイント1 ポイント  (0子コメント)

Egyptian or Chinese [?]) have difficulty expressing abstract terms.

If any believes this is the case I challenge them to read the Book of Coming Forth by Day and Dream of Red Mansions in their original languages.

[–]hungryhungryME 0 ポイント1 ポイント  (0子コメント)

I remember asking on /r/linguistics or a similar sub years ago why some languages sound "faster" to my ear, and was directed to all sorts of research on language density and language speed. Here's a little article for example that points out that languages have a spread of densities - basically how much information is expressed per syllable, and it's typically inversely related to the speed at which the language is spoken. Vietnamese is the most dense common language (English is up towards the top), while Japanese and Spanish score fairly low densities. But, in a syllable/second ranking Japanese and Spanish come in towards the top, and for the most part the ability to transmit information runs at a similar speed across all languages.

[–]PIDomain 0 ポイント1 ポイント  (0子コメント)

Linguists have slowly started using algorithmic information theory to describe the complexities of natural language grammars (i.e. Kolmogorov complexity). See here. This also proved to be useful when describing morphological complexity. For instance, Max Bane at UChicago computed upper bounds on the morpho-Kolmogorov complexity of various translations of the Bible (upper bounds since k complexity is not computable in general). Danish seems to be ahead of English. You can read the paper here. Of course this says nothing about the communicative efficacy of a given language, but 'complexity' is not foreign to nor dismissed so easily by linguists.

[–]philip1201 2 ポイント3 ポイント  (0子コメント)

You're mostly answering in the negative, not in the positive. According to the relevant xkcd1 , apparently written English contains about 1.1 bits of information (slightly more than two possibilities) per character on average. The average English syllable is probably around 3 characters, making for 3.3 bits of information per syllable. Assuming English is spoken normally at a speed of about two syllables per second, this means English-language communication occurs at a rate of 6.6 bits per second.

However, this concerns written language turned into spoken text, and written language texts often explain the subtext of a conversation outside of quotes. Blindly estimating once more, the context is properly conveyed using about twice the amount of text as the actual lines, so English conversation occurs at a rate of about 20 bits per second.

I'm too lazy to do the research myself, so the above answer isn't very accurate, but such an analysis could be done for every language and with more thoroughly researched information. It may well be that some languages are less efficient than others. For example, Chinese characters are probably very inefficient to write, in terms of information per second of writing, compared to alphabetic or syllabic writing systems, but might be more efficient to read, and are probably more efficient per square unit of writing space.

[1] Or more properly by C.E. Shannon (1950) (pdf).

[–]CunnilAbsent -1 ポイント0 ポイント  (0子コメント)

For instance, I've seen a lot of arguments in this thread that English is somehow superior for math and science

I've actually read that the opposite is true. Without commenting on the "overall" effectiveness of any language, Malcom Gladwell's (admittedly pop science) book Outliers proposes that Mandarin's phonetic and written conciseness (that is, there are fewer characters to read and less time taken to say the sounds for a single number) allow native speakers to learn basic arithmetic and mathematics from a young age because the foundation of all mathematics (learning to count numbers) takes significantly less cognitive resource (time and and characters deciphered).

Whether or not this particular argument has been proven/refuted, doesn't that open the possibility for some languages to be more specialized than others, at least in very specific scenarios?