# Why is Russian so Complicated?



## csawyer

Why is Russian so complicated?

German is almost an analytic language in comparison to Russian -- cases pared down to 4, no inflections except for adjectives and articles, no aspect, all the non-indicative moods either abolished or re-labelled as subjunctive (Subjunktiv II of course is not subjunctive at all), no trace of the dual number.

Why does Russian have all of this and German not?

Russian even has some things which are gone in Classical Latin (aspect fully expressed in all the tenses, dual, etc.).  Why?  Were the Slavs so literate that they preserved the old grammatical structures while the Germans did not?   Or was it because Old Church Slavonic was close enough to the vernacular that the vernacular was constantly replenished?  Whereas the Germans only had Latin as a literary language, which could not be much used to replenish German as Germans forgot their own grammar?

Another thing that bothers me about Russian -- the alternation between nominative and genitive endings for the accusative, when dealing with animate nouns.  Is Russian partially or vestigially ergative?  Note that Finnish is even more so like this -- there isn't even a real accusative case (although they have 15 of them).  Finnish and Russian are unrelated, but the Russians lived cheek to jowl with Finno-Ugric peoples for a thousand years or more -- could this have worn off on the Russians?  Or what?


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## ahvalj

csawyer said:


> Another thing that bothers me about Russian -- the alternation between nominative and genitive endings for the accusative, when dealing with animate nouns.  Is Russian partially or vestigially ergative?  Note that Finnish is even more so like this -- there isn't even a real accusative case (although they have 15 of them).  Finnish and Russian are unrelated, but the Russians lived cheek to jowl with Finno-Ugric peoples for a thousand years or more -- could this have worn off on the Russians?  Or what?


That's more or less a common Slavic trait. Leaving aside the (numerous) details, the nominative and accusative coincided in the singular of the most widespread declension type in most Slavic dialects as a result of certain phonetic changes in the last centuries of the 1st millennium, and, since at least in animate nouns the distinction between subject and object was considered important, speakers began to use the genitive to denote the object, following the pattern found in negative sentences:
_вижу сестру — не вижу сестры
вижу брат — не вижу брата → вижу брата._
This use of the genitive instead of the accusative after negation occurs in Slavic (more in older texts, less so in the modern times), Baltic and Baltic-Finnic, so, while the use of genitive for the accusative in animated nominals is not related to the Baltic-Finnic usage (as only future Russians came into contact with Finnic speakers), the genitive after negation may be a common areal feature in northern East Europe, though a considerably older one.

Along with Slavic, the genitive is used instead of the accusative in Ossetic, a language descended from the speech of Sarmatians that were in contact with Slavs in antiquity, but here it is only used with personal names and not after negation, so it unclear if it may represent a shared innovation or is just a coincidence.


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## csawyer

Wow, thanks, very informative.

So what you are saying is that this is not about some ambiguity between the cases, but rather, the inflections for accusative and nominative simply coincide, and so a distinction was re-introduced (by whom?) in order to distinguish between accusative and nominative, and the genitive was grabbed for this purpose.

Did I understand you correctly?

And do we know this is really true?  Considering the fact that there really is ambiguity between these cases in some languages, at least in the ergative languages accusative is not what it is for us.


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## ahvalj

Yes, of course, compare the singular of the _а_-declension where there is no merger of the nominative and accusative and hence no use of genitive (_вижу маму/папу_), or the singular of the _ь_-declension, where, despite the merger, the genitive didn't penetrate into the accusative (_вижу мышь_).

In the plural, the pervasive use of the genitive for the accusative is specifically modern East Slavic; e. g. in Serbo-Croatian the nominative plural is _-i, _the genitive is_ -a_ and the accusative is _-e. _If we look at the Slavic texts of the turn of the 1st and 2nd millennia, the use of genitive for the accusative only characterizes the singular of the _o_-declension, and even there it is inconsistent.


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## csawyer

Brilliant explanation; thank you.  Now I think I understand for the first time something my Russian teachers were never able to explain.  I owe you a beer.

Now how about the first part of my original question?


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## ahvalj

I think what has happened to Germanic languages is first of all a tragic outcome of the reduction of the (unstressed) endings and the trend towards morphological simplification it set. This, however, is only part of the answer as e. g. Italian didn't experience any significant phonetic reduction (though it lost the Latin _-s_ and _-m,_ which were very important for the morphology), but lost the declension while at the same time preserving (and incrementing) the complexity of the verbal system. As an opposite example, Lithuanian, the most conservative living Indo-European language, has mostly retained the endings and the rich and complicated nominal declension, but has greatly simplified its verb (comparing with Greek and Sanskrit), while creating new, mostly analytic, verbal forms. So, the honest answer would be that the language evolution is caused by phonetic changes + some internal logic + plain fashion.


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## OBrasilo

The Slavic languages have Bulgarian and Macedonian who evolved much the same way as the Romance languages - they largely lost their case system and replaced it with prepositions, but developed (enclitic) articles, and not only retained the old Slavic verbal system, but made it more complex.


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## danielstan

Well, the loss of case system in Bulgarian and Macedonian is considered the biggest influence that Proto-Romanian (the Romance language spoken in Balkan Peninsula before Slavic invasion) had on Middle Bulgarian.
There was a Romanian - Slavic symbiosis in this area,
which resulted in Slavs assimilating the Vlachs in the territory South of Danube and Romanians assimilating the Slavs at North of Danube.
Modern Romanian has in its core vocabulary Slavic terms related to family members, love, friendship and other social relations; also Romanian has Slavic calques - all suggesting inter-ethnic marriages and Romanian - Bulgarian bilingualism that happened during Middle Ages.


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## Olaszinhok

Why is Russian so complicated?

Does Russian have articles (definite, indefinite, partitive, no article, etc.), compound prepositions, the subjuctive mood and many  verbal tenses and moods? These are just a few grammar features other Languages have and Russian doesn't...
Isn't English syntax more unpredictable (and definitely complicated) than the Russian one?


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## francisgranada

Ciao Olaszinhok. I fully agree with your comment (post #9).


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## ahvalj

I think the original question represents one particular comparison, whereas a more general issue is that (1) languages don't enrich with time, they always get and lose, and sometimes lose dramatically, and (2) unlike in many other areas of human activity, languages are not equivalent in their expressive power, even not basically equivalent, and one language will always be more nuanced than any other one in some moments and more restricted in the others.


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## Hulalessar

csawyer said:


> Were the Slavs so literate that they preserved the old grammatical structures while the Germans did not?



Literacy has no relation to grammatical features perceived to be "old", by which, from the rest of your post, I assume you mean something like "bristling with inflections". Many unwritten languages are more synthetic than Russian. In fact, even languages such as Latin, (Ancient) Greek and Sanskrit are only moderately synthetic compared to others.


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## thegreathoo

danielstan said:


> (the Romance language spoken in Balkan Peninsula before Slavic invasion)



There was no slavic invasion.  There was however, Roman invasion, well documented.


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## Awwal12

csawyer said:


> Why does Russian have all of this and German not?


Mostly because proto-Slavic had it and proto-Germanic already didn't, it seems.


Olaszinhok said:


> Why is Russian so complicated?
> 
> Does Russian have articles (definite, indefinite, partitive, no article, etc.), compound prepositions, the subjuctive mood and many  verbal tenses and moods? These are just a few grammar features other Languages have and Russian doesn't...
> Isn't English syntax more unpredictable (and definitely complicated) than the Russian one?


While the English system of articles is frankly mind-boggling, Russian mostly makes up for that with its complex communicative strategy (an inherent part of any language which is often left forgotten somehow), which results in complicated word order, intonational patterns and rules of using discourse markers (English is nowhere close in that regard). In the aspect of language learning it's even worse than any articles, because communucative features aren't related to formal semantics at all and their usage is particularly difficult even to correctly formulate (to the note, scholars still widely use conflicting terminologies and descriptions in that field).

Russian (as well as all Slavic languages) has a very simplistic system of moods, that's really true.

The tense system seems very simple, but the catch is that it cannot be considered independently of the aspectual system, and the latter is very bad news (since aspects are essentially a LEXICAL feature, the resulting system ends up full of all kinds of irregularities - as if it weren't complex enough even without that; remember those SUDDEN usages of the aspects in a good half of different negations).

"Syntax" is too broad a term.  Constructions with dependent clauses (finite and non-finite) are a bit more complex and irregular in English, but it doesn't make a really substantial difference. What else you might have in mind?..

Don't forget the Russian numerals (which are a headache for both native speakers and foreign learners, although for different reasons). 

Overall Russian seems more complex than English grammatically - meaning it has more complex rules and more exceptions (you can safely call the system of declension one big exception: officially there are "just three declension paradigms", but if we take into account all the nuances, - the stress patterns in particular, - the number of actual paradigms may reach a hundred). But you're right that in the eyes of an English speaker that comparative complexity will be usually overrated because he'll naturally ignore all the areas where Russian is actually simpler.


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## jasio

Perhaps, considering the history of Europe, the question should be: why the languages of the western Europe were mixing towards creolisation, while the slavic languages in general did not - with a few notable exceptions like the said Bulgarian and Macedonian.

We tend to perceive romance languages as descendants of Latin, but in fact they are mixtures of a local dialect of vulgar Latin with Celtic, germanic, Greek, Arabic, slavic, and perhaps other admixtures in various proportions. Some of them being substrates, while the others only influence vocabulary and pronunciation. Only Icelandic was pretty much isolated, and to the lesser degree, Nordic languages.

BTW, as far as I am aware, natural languages in general do not develop just to upset foreign learners, and for the native speakers the complexity here and there is less relevant than providing an effective communication tool.


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## Olaszinhok

jasio said:


> Europe were mixing towards creolisation, while the slavic languages in general did not - with a few notable exceptions like the said Bulgarian and Macedonian.


Sorry, that is utter nonsense from a linguistic point of view! You statement does not make any sense.


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## Zec

Olaszinhok said:


> Sorry, that is utter nonsense from a linguistic point of view! You statement does not make any sense.



I agree, but with a caveat. I certainly thing it's wrong to ascribe every case of apparent language simplification to "creolisation". Losing some or all cases is not creolisation, creolisation is, somewhat jokingly, destroying the entire grammar and rebuilding it from the ground up! Anyone who has taken a glance at Tok Pisin, for example, will be able to see that it's grammar is entirely different from English and even much of vocabulary is used in unexpected ways. Calling Bulgarian/Macedonian a creole for losing cases when it has an extremely nuanced verbal system where the aorist, the imperfect and the perfect tenses can all be used in perfective and imperfective aspects is simply wrong.

However, there does seem to be a kind of societal influence on language, at least I've read so. Supposedly large, widely spoken languages tend towards simplification, while small, isolated languages tend to accumulate complexity over time, possibly because in small communities the not strictly communicative aspects of language get elaborated upon.


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## Olaszinhok

Zec said:


> Calling Bulgarian/Macedonian a creole for losing cases when it has an extremely nuanced verbal system where the aorist, the imperfect and the perfect tenses can all be used in perfective and imperfective aspects is simply wrong.


We can certainly say the same for the Romance languages: most of them have a very inflected and nuanced verbal system. Anyway, I wouldn't call that "simplification". For instance, Russian and Polish have inflected nouns and adjectives  but the use of articles, prepositions, verb tenses and syntax is generally much more nuanced in English, for instance. There is  some sort of compansation, in my opinion.
Portuguese, spoken in the far west of mainland Europe, boasts a pretty complicated verbal system with loads of tenses and moods and even a conjugated infinitive.
Besides, Nordic languages, apart from Icelandic and Faroese, are very analytical languages, much more than the Romance languages...


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## ahvalj

And, since it has been mentioned twice here, what's so particularly nuanced in the English syntax comparing with Russian (or Polish), other than the presence of gerund (which also exists in Polish, while Russian retains participial constructions, much restricted in both English and Polish)? Translators of scientific texts from Russian into English always struggle with repackaging long complex and loose Russian sentences into their English, much shorter and very straightforward, counterparts. (This English approach is beneficial to clarity, as Russian writers often fail to express clearly what they mean, but the syntax of an average Russian page is definitely not more restricted than in English).


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## Awwal12

English uses infinitive phrases much more willingly and in a more complex fashion, for one thing.


ahvalj said:


> Translators of scientific texts from Russian into English always struggle with repackaging long complex and loose Russian sentences into their English, much shorter and very straightforward, counterparts.


"Shorter" doesn't mean "fundamentally more primitive". It only indicates one thing: Russian scientific language (especially in scientific papers) tends to have overcomplicated structure (usually the more useless the paper is the more complex language it utilizes). As far as I recall, a French legal sentence is traditionally formulated, indeed, in one sentence (no matter how many pages long). We can only thank God that at least there is no such requirement on a Russian scientific paper: while formally possible, it would make it positively impossible to read.


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## ahvalj

Infinitive constructions (_I saw him do something_) are indeed useful, but these are just a nice way to convert a compound sentence into a simple one, they make the sentence lighter but they don't express additional nuanced meanings.

Update. Though I myself meant elegance in #19. OK, English has infinitival and (especially) gerundial constructions, while Russian has participial and adverbial participial constructions, 1: 1. What else?


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## Zec

I can't speak for other Slavlangs, but at least my native Croatian packs a lot of modality into conjunctions instead of into the verb (I noticed that some conjunctions differ from others chiefly in expressing different modal values, such as mirativity for example). Our coordinating conjuctions are especially nuanced.


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## Awwal12

ahvalj said:


> OK, English has infinitival and (especially) gerundial constructions, while Russian has participial and adverbial participial constructions, 1: 1. What else?


Such a straightforward comparison hardly can tell a lot. The more interesting question is how exactly the languages use their parts of speech to produce more complex structures, how complex are those patterns themselves and how many exceptions they contain.

(By the way, English gerunds are an extremely powerful tool, even though English speakers very rarely use them to their full capacity.)


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## ahvalj

In this case the syntax of the Turkic type (with few if any compound sentences and a rich system of verbal nouns) has no competition.


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## Hulalessar

Zec said:


> I agree, but with a caveat. I certainly thing it's wrong to ascribe every case of apparent language simplification to "creolisation". Losing some or all cases is not creolisation, creolisation is, somewhat jokingly, destroying the entire grammar and rebuilding it from the ground up! Anyone who has taken a glance at Tok Pisin, for example, will be able to see that it's grammar is entirely different from English and even much of vocabulary is used in unexpected ways. Calling Bulgarian/Macedonian a creole for losing cases when it has an extremely nuanced verbal system where the aorist, the imperfect and the perfect tenses can all be used in perfective and imperfective aspects is simply wrong.
> 
> However, there does seem to be a kind of societal influence on language, at least I've read so. Supposedly large, widely spoken languages tend towards simplification, while small, isolated languages tend to accumulate complexity over time, possibly because in small communities the not strictly communicative aspects of language get elaborated upon.



Rather than asserting that any of what Jasio said is nonsense, I would say that what he means depends on what he understands by "creolisation". We have discussed that question elsewhere: Is English a creole?. My view is that if creolisation is to be a useful term it refers exactly to situations a new language arises phoenix-like from the ashes of two or more different languages.

Languages meet and mix in many different ways and proportions. You can start by asking whether any given language has one parent or two. Broadly speaking, most languages have only one parent. A simple situation is where variety A splits into varieties A1, A2, A3...A_n_ and develop without any contact with each other. In practice what happens where the speakers of the varieties remain in contact with each other is that they influence each other. The influence may be asymmetrical depending on all sorts of different circumstances. The position gets more complex when any of the varieties comes into contact with or is adopted by speakers of a variety which is not A. Contact may involve any of the various "strates" in different degrees, but without involving the extreme of a pidgin which develops into a creole.

Each of the Romance languages may have different strates according to the languages spoken before Latin arrived and later influences, but they all follow the same ground plan and have more in common than divides them. If you suggest that, say, French is a creole, you are well on the road to suggesting that a huge number of languages are creoles.

The models of language history are the tree model and and the wave model. Both are useful. The tree model shows the broad genealogy and is easy to follow, while the wave model shows the interactions and can be confusing and is in practice necessarily incomplete as it cannot show everything. You just have to accept that languages, like much else, cannot be neatly packaged.

As to complexity, you can start by accepting that there are basic things that all humans experience. One is that things do things and things have things done to them. All languages can tell us if the dog is chasing the cat or the cat is chasing the dog. Doing it by marking the nouns for case is not inherently more complex than doing it by word order. Children soon grasp how to it however a language does it.

As for the supposed complexity of languages used by small communities, you have to be careful to distinguish between the actual language and baroque formulae consciously introduced and used only in limited situations. Many widely spoken languages are not without features which not everyone may master and which may be required in certain social situations.


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## tunaafi

I have, in my time attempted to learn French, German, Czech, Russian, Mandarin,Turkish and Latin., with varying degrees of success (perhaps I should say failure).

I have certainly found some more difficult than others, but, as a linguist by profession, I can't say I have found any of them more _complicated_ than any of the others. The things that learners often find complicated about another  language are features that don't exist in their own language. It is still almost always possible to express a thought that uses on feature of grammar in one language by a different feature in another.


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## Olaszinhok

tunaafi said:


> I have certainly found some more difficult than others, but, as a linguist by profession, I can't say I have found any of them more _complicated_ than any of the others. The things that learners often find complicated about another language are features that don't exist in their own language. It is still almost always possible to express a thought that uses on feature of grammar in one language by a different feature in another.


 I couldn't agree more...


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## francisgranada

Olaszinhok said:


> I couldn't agree more...


So am I ....


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## Red Arrow

Zec said:


> However, there does seem to be a kind of societal influence on language, at least I've read so. Supposedly large, widely spoken languages tend towards simplification, while small, isolated languages tend to accumulate complexity over time, possibly because in small communities the not strictly communicative aspects of language get elaborated upon.


Then why did Russian and German keep their case systems while the smaller languages Bulgarian and Dutch lost theirs?

Perhaps it makes more sense to conclude that isolated languages are more conservative. Iceland is more isolated than Norway. Wherever in Russia Standard Russian comes from, it might have been more isolated than Bulgaria and Macedonia, which share a border with Turkey, Romania, Albania, Greece etc.

Change does not always make things easier. Estonian has got 44 nominal classes because vowels got dropped and words got shorter, while Finnish and Hungarian follow conservative (but regular) rules.


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## Awwal12

Red Arrow said:


> Perhaps it makes more sense to conclude that isolated languages are more conservative


...And you instantly made a reversed assumption that the more conservative is the language the more isolated it must have been. Though even if the original assumption is valid, it doesn't automatically validate the second one.


Red Arrow said:


> Change does not always make things easier.


True. Say, Old Russian had more complex grammatical rules - but it also was much more regular than Russian is.


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## Red Arrow

Awwal12 said:


> ...And you instantly made a reversed assumption that the more conservative is the language the more isolated it must have been. Though even if the original assumption is valid, it doesn't automatically validate the second one.


My "assumption" (more like a hypothesis?) is not derived from Zec's one. I simply read it somewhere else. (Marc van Oostendorp)


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## Awwal12

I'd re-fotmulate it entirely, merely stating that intensive linguistic contacts tend to intensify linguistic development (having creolization as the upper limit). 

As for Bulgaro-Macedonian dialects, one shouldn't concentrate too much on the loss of noun cases (which, by the way, didn't occur in all the dialects), because, for example, their verbal systems are most archaic and complicated among the living Slavic languages. Russian, in turn, is archaic in certain respects, but demonstrates intensive development in other areas (take the vowel system, for instance), sometimes shared by other mainstream Slavic languages and sometimes unique.


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## Zec

Re: small languages being complex. The context of the statement was an attempt to explain why languages spoken by small tribes of hunter-gatherers often have crazy complexities and irregularities. I agree with Awwal12 that it'd be safer to state that linguistic contact tends to intensify linguistic development. In the context of Bulgarian and Macedonian it would be whatever circumstances led to the development of Balkan Sprachbund and these two languages developing in a different direction than other Slavic languages.


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## ahvalj

I think it's not the matter of complexity, only of relative conservativeness. Complexity may represent a survival of some older stage or a novelty arisen from phonetic changes: Old French was not a minor language yet it had very complicated morphophonemics with various complex alternations within paradigms (mostly leveled out in the modern times, but cp. _veux — voulons_).


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## jasio

I see that an interesting discussion arose from my comment - although I did not follow it for a while. It seems however that my point was completely misunderstood, so let me try to clarify  it a bit.



jasio said:


> Perhaps, considering the history of Europe, the question should be: why the languages of the western Europe were mixing towards creolisation, while the slavic languages in general did not - with a few notable exceptions like the said Bulgarian and Macedonian.



Inspired by Is English a creole? discussion perhaps I used the word 'creolisation' a bit too lightheartedly, with the sole purpose of enhancing the difference of evolutionary trajectories of the Slavic languages vs. Romance and Germanic languages. I must have overdone though, if my main point was generally missed, and the discussion focused on whether 'creolisation' as such was used properly.  

The issue is, albeit it's convenient for clasification purposes, the tree model does not fully represent the history of the European languages. For example, standard italian - albeit often perceived as a pure descendant of Latin - was a product of mixing local vulgar Latin with the germanic language of the Longobards (not mentioning other influences), on an earlier local Celtic stratum. The French is a product of a local vulgar latin on a local celtic stratum mixed with another germanic language of the Franks. So are English and Spanish. In all these cases the grammar complexity of the Latin was almost entirely got rid of, and their grammars were to a large extent constructed anew using other linguistic tools, such as an extensive use of prepositions, more rigid phrase structure, articles, complex tense systems, etc. What was left of the original Latin was chiefly vocabulary. 

On the other hand, Slavic languages mostly retained their complex case and aspect system, relatively simple tense system, yet imported primarily the vocabulary adapting it to existing inflection patterns. This is the case with Polish at least, although we have a 1000 years' history of close contacts with German (most cities and some rural areas were predominantly German-speaking until some 18th century), Latin (which was an official language of the state the Church, and was broadly spoken by the gentry and educated people), and French, not mentioning Turkish and neighboring Slavic languages including Ruthenian (AKA Old Russian) and Czech. 

The same goes for Russian. Someone suggested that Russian had only limited contacts with other languages - but this is not the case. A mere fact that on modern maps Russian is shown as a big, red spot does not mean that other languages are not or were not used in the same territory. In fact, Russian and Old Russian have quite extensive contacts with UgroFinnish, Baltic, Turkic, Greek, and many more languages which had been used on the lands which are currently associated with Russia. Not mentioning other Slavic languages, including Old Church Slavonic and Polish. 

So my question is: why the West-European languages generally simplified their case systems and some other aspects of their grammars, while the Slavic languages in general did not.


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## jasio

Separately, albeit I agree that comparing complexity of the languages is not a football game, I would not agree that the structure of analytic languages has the same complexity as synthetic languages. Even if the children learn respective structures at similar paces, I would rather claim that synthetic languages have higher entry barriers than analytic languages, at least for foreigners. Let's take the simple phrase which was quoted earlier in the discussion: 


> the dog chases a cat


That's pretty straigtforward and even if you have only limited grammar understanding and say


> *dog chase cat


you still end up with an understandable statement, isn't it? In Spanish it functions quite alike:


> el perro persigue a un gatto





> *perro perseguir gatto


 would require a bit of thinking to decode unusual structure, but would still mean the same.
In both of these languages you can communicate at the basic level quite effectively using just the SVO structure and a handful of words.

But what about:


> kota (Acc.) goni pies (Nom.)


If you simply disregard the inflection and say


> *kot gonić pies





> *cat chase dog


you end up with a phrase which is not only incorrect, but also has quite an opposite meaning than the intended. And in case of such a simple statement in Polish (and in most other Slavic languages) you can put the words in any of the six possible orders without any change of the meaning whatsoever - perhaps just the nuances. So to understand or express even the basic messages you must be able to use at least two-three cases in most popular conjugations (and recognise more of them). Actually, there's even a children's rhyme based on this very phenomenon:


> A było to tak:
> Bociana dziobał szpak.
> A potem była zmiana,
> I szpak dziobał bociana
> Później były jeszcze trzy takie zmiany.
> Ile razy szpak był dziobany?


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## Red Arrow

jasio said:


> This is the case with Polish at least, although we have a 1000 years' history of close contacts with German (most cities and some rural areas were predominantly German-speaking until some 18th century), Latin (which was an official language of the state the Church, and was broadly spoken by the gentry and educated people), and French, not mentioning Turkish and neighboring Slavic languages including Ruthenian (AKA Old Russian) and Czech.


In the Germanic languages, the case endings are all unstressed. Unstressed vowels turn into schwas, schwas are dropped, as are often the consonants R, N and T. (think of Dutch or English) This leads to case endings being dropped.

In Polish, the stress is always on the last syllable. I don't know much about Polish, but to me it looks like it has also dropped vowels (like in Źdźbło), but no case endings because those are stressed.


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## jasio

Red Arrow said:


> In the Germanic languages, the case endings are all unstressed. Unstressed vowels turn into schwas, schwas are dropped, as are often the consonants R, N and T. (think of Dutch or English) This leads to case endings being dropped.
> 
> In Polish, the stress is always on the last syllable. I don't know much about Polish, but to me it looks like it has also dropped vowels (like in Źdźbło), but no case endings because those are stressed.


I get your point, and you may be right with the Germanic languages, but for the Slavic languages it does not work that well.

In Polish the penultimate sylable is accented, not the ultimate. Although depending on the length of the suffix it could indeed be accented, the fixed accent can protect the cases to some extent because dropping a syllable would require changing the speach pattern - and this is quite unlikely. The Polish accent is quite stable  and nowadays I observe that more and more words, which originally were accented differently and deviated from the regular rule,  are  nowadays accented in the regular way (even if it's perceived incorrect by the linguists*). And it worked quite similarly in the past: during disappearance and vocalization of yers the syllable structure was reconstructed to preserve the rhythm of the spoken language, which eventually produced a lot of complications for modern learners (pies, psa, psu, psa, psem, psie). So the regular accent in Polish could have contributed to the preservation of the cases even if the suffix itself was not accented.

But what about the languages like Russian, with its entirely free and movable accent? Or the Czech and Slovak languages (and some Southern dialects in Poland), in which always the initial syllable is accented, so the suffixes are never accented?



*) the words of Greek origin, like *fi*zyka, mate*ma*tyka, gra*ma*tyka are now often pronounced as fi*zy*ka, matema*ty*ka, grama*ty*ka. Also some verb forms in which the former auxiliary verbs or particles had been assimilated as suffixes, and for centuries were accented according to the original patterns: *by*liśmy, *by*libyśmy (from *by*li śmy, *by*li by śmy, standing for "we were" and "we would be") are now more often pronounced as by*li*śmy, byli*by*śmy.


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## Red Arrow

Oops, sorry, you are correct. Polish stresses on the penultimate syllable just like is often the case in Spanish... but Spanish lost its grammar cases and Polish didn't. I don't know why that is.


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## Hulalessar

When comparing French and Spanish with Latin it can be said that the morphology of nouns has been simplified. However, when it comes to verbs, whilst the number of forms has been reduced, complexity has increased because of the number of the number of irregularities which have been appeared. There are only about a dozen irregular verbs in Latin. My reference books have 83 different tables for French and 65 for Spanish. Some of the irregularities are purely orthographic, but they still have to be learned. Having studied Latin, French and Spanish at school I would say that it takes more effort to master the forms of French and Spanish verbs than Latin verbs.

We have had a few discussions on complexity. Complexity tends to be equated with complex noun and/or verbal morphology. When a language has them you have to get to grips with them early on otherwise you are not going to make progress. The complexities of English are of a different order but may not be perceived as such since they do not involve "Amo, amas, amat" type rote learning. It is also difficult to see how complexity can be measured. How do you compare the devilshness of Spanish radical changing verbs with the opaqueness of English phrasal verbs?


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## jasio

Hulalessar said:


> However, when it comes to verbs, whilst the number of forms has been reduced, complexity has increased because of the number of the number of irregularities which have been appeared.


Aren't "irregularities" as such byproducts of the descriptive grammar? I've heard somewhere that when Panini encountered phenomenons which did not fit within existing rules, instead of marking them 'irregular', he created a new rule. And indeed, many 'irregular' verbs exhibit traces of older grammar rules, and are in a sense similar.



Hulalessar said:


> The complexities of English are of a different order but may not be perceived as such since they do not involve "Amo, amas, amat" type rote learning.


Geez, I spent weeks and months walking 'round my house and repeating 'have, had, had', 'put, put, put', 'get, got, got', 'steal, stole, stolen', 'held, hold, hold' - and now you're telling me that I was only wasting my precious time? ;-)



Hulalessar said:


> It is also difficult to see how complexity can be measured. How do you compare the devilshness of Spanish radical changing verbs with the opaqueness of English phrasal verbs?


...or with the Polish verb conjugations which are based on the known conjugated forms of the verbs rather than on the infinitives like -ar(e)/-er(e)/-ir(e) in Romance languages. ;-)

It's not simple indeed. And the additional question is, what level of the language comprehension and what registers are we going to compare: whether an A1/A2 level beginner, precise yet complex legalese or a rhyming slang in which a the words rarely mean what one could  expect. 

A number of existing word forms, a number declension patterns, and a number of 'irregular' words - whatever it would mean in the shed of my remark above - could give a hint though. You can also compare similar phenomenons one by one to see if they produce any meaningful patterns between the languages.

For example Slavic gender/category system, which embraces  differentiation between inanimate, animate and personal noun classes (at least in some languages) and influences both verbs and adjectives, is objectively more complex than two grammatical genders (even, if you consider exceptions, such es 'el agua') in Romance languages (italian and spanish, at least) or no gender at all, as in English. So are adjectival declinations, where the adjective not only has to agree with the gender and number, but also has to assume the correct grammatical case to match the noun. Unlike again - Spanish or Italian where the adjectives only have singular/plural and masculine/feminine forms. Or English, where "red" is always "red" regardless of the grammatical context. On the other hand, the tenses in English - even if some of them do exist only in theory - Italian or Spanish are objectively more complex than the Slavic past-present-future (ok... in practice it's a bit more complex because of the verb aspect and aorist in some languages, but still I do not think we could compare to eight tenses in italian, even disregarding conjuntivo).

A side note: this reminded me a discussion somewhere, when a Dutch lady asked me 'if you do not have articles, how do you distinguish between the noun cases?'. Whatever complications are related to the declension of articles, it's a peanut compared to the declension of nouns, believe me. ;-)


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## Hulalessar

jasio said:


> Aren't "irregularities" as such byproducts of the descriptive grammar? Etc



When writing my last post I put "irregularities" in quotes and then changed my mind. I discussed the use of the word in post 135 on this page Complex morphological structure of IE languages in comparison to other language families. From a historical perspective some irregularities are no more than instances of sound changes that occur throughout a language and in that sense are perfectly regular. “Irregular” is though a useful word when teaching and in a thread like this where it means something like “follows a paradigm that lots of other words do”. It may be arbitrary, but there is at least some method to it and it is also useful. In a discussion about complexity whether you say Spanish has three conjugations and lots of irregular verbs or 65 conjugations it comes down to the same thing: there is a lot of spadework to be done. Anway, my point is that to say that Spanish verbs are less complex than Latin verbs homes in on the reduction of the number of forms and ignores the increase in variation.

Consider the verb “to ask”. In Latin the present tense go like this:

_rogo
rogas
rogat
rogamus
rogatis
rogant_

In Spanish it goes like this:

_ruego
ruegas
ruega
rogamos
rogáis
ruegan_

The Spanish forms reflect sound changes affecting stressed syllables which occur across the language. In that sense they are regular, but they nevertheless introduce a complication not found in Latin. _Rogar _is just one instance of many where Spanish introduces complications not found in Latin. My subjective opinion is that, solely considering the forms, the Spanish verbal system is at least as complex as Latin’s, if not more so. I certainly found it more confusing when I was a boy.

Your anecdote about the Dutch lady highlights that the average person regards anything which deviates from their own language as a complication, or at least an oddity. This thread has concentrated on complex morphology, but is is worth pointing out that languages which are highly analytic or isolating are often found tricky to get a hold of by speakers of synthetic languages because they feel they lack precision.

Someone somewhere said that there are languages where you have to know everything before you can say anything. That may be an exaggeration, but there is some truth in it and it applies equally to languages with complex and simple morphology.

*See also this thread: https://forum.wordreference.com/thr...nguage-isnt-that-difficult-after-all.2746680/


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## Awwal12

Hulalessar said:


> From a historical perspective some irregularities are no more than instances of sound changes that occur throughout a language and in that sense are perfectly regular.


If they are regular in the etymological sense, it doesn't necessarily make them regular from the point of modern morphology, since the original phonetic differences which triggered the changes may be long lost. Obviously no one learns Russian by studying its development from the proto-Slavic stage.


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## Hulalessar

Awwal12 said:


> If they are regular in the etymological sense, it doesn't necessarily make them regular from the point of modern morphology, since the original phonetic differences which triggered the changes may be long lost. Obviously no one learns Russian by studying its development from the proto-Slavic stage.



I agree. My last post was responding to jasio who was suggesting that irregularity was something invented by grammarians. From one perspective that is a valid observation. However, my point is that if considering complexity irregularity has to be taken into account.


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## jasio

Hulalessar said:


> I agree. My last post was responding to jasio who was suggesting that irregularity was something invented by grammarians. From one perspective that is a valid observation. However, my point is that if considering complexity irregularity has to be taken into account.


It actually very much depends on what you actually mean as "irregularity". 

Probably in every given language you may encounter the words which do not fit some basic rules. The issue is, what you do about them. You may say "they are irregular words, here's the list for you to memorize" or you may say "there is an extra rule for these words: if the word belongs to a class xyz, which can be recognised by abc, def features, then it behaves like that (for example, there is an o -> ue  ablaut)". Using one approach you end up with a long list of isolated (irregular) words tomemorize, while using the other - you end up with a long list of rules which may or may not be easy to use in practice, but with only a limited number or no exceptions at all. In this sense, irregularities are not part of the language, but of the description of the language, ie. they were invented.

Anyway, for a reason I do not have sleeples nights because of the aformentioned Spanish o -> ue ablaut. There is an L rule for them, now I understand that it's a matter of an accented o (thank you) which also appears in many quite regular words which I know with the original "o" from other languages (like porto -> puerto, corpo -> cuerpo, etc.), so it should be easier for me to spot them  now.

Now imagine, that you could have such irregularities not only in verbs (with their 6 forms in the present tense), but with all the words, including 14 (2 * 7) forms of nouns, even more forms of adjectives (they have to match the grammatical case and the gender of the noun) and numerals. Someone counted that in Polish there are as many as 17 different forms of the numeral "two", while in English there are only two of them "two" and "second" (or "dos" and "segundo" in Spanish - although I'm not 100% sure if this list is complete). In English there are two participles, past and present, the Spanish has three (present - which perhaps may not be considered a participle any more, gerundio and past), while Polish has four (not mentioning the past participle, which for a strange reason is not considered a participle in the Polish grammar), and Russian has six, if I counted correctly (not mentioning the original past participle, which now is a past tense form for all persons).

That's why I still claim that the grammar of the Western languages is much more simplified than of the Slavic languages.


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## Awwal12

jasio said:


> and Russian has six


It depends on the verb in the first place. Perfective verbs have past active and past passive participles (no future forms in modern Standard Russian, past participles of perfective verbs do double duty).
Imperfective verbs may have 4 proper participle forms (past and present, active and passive), although passive forms are often formed from the reflexive counterparts, - very often as the only option, - and certain verbs simply have lacunas in the word formation paradigm (typically using the present participle as the past one as well), so the main problem is not that there are up to 4 proper participles, but that you hardly ever know what they will look like, having simply to learn the set every time.
Generally it looks as follows (for masculine singular nominative forms ):
делающий - делаемый (?)/делающийся - делавший - деланный (?)/делавшийся
сделавший - сделанный
любящий - любимый - любивший - любимый
бьющий - (0) - бивший - битый
etc.

Of course, there are also adverbial participles, and in that case there are no morphological means to form passive ones directly, so the reflexive adverbial participles become the only possible variant for passive meanings - although not a guaranteed one.

So, ultimately everything comes to the manner of counting participles - and their very formation is essentially irregular.


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## Hulalessar

jasio said:


> It actually very much depends on what you actually mean as "irregularity".
> 
> Probably etc



"Irregular" is recognised by dictionaries as a term used in grammar. e.g. _Departing from the usual pattern of inflection, derivation, or word formation_. Some do not like the term because they feel that it implies a value judgement. They may be thinking of situations such as where a Spanish speaker says: "Russian is difficult because it has a lot of irregularities." That prompts the reply: "Excuse me, but so does Spanish." The point would be made that the Spanish speaker may not recognise the irregularities in Spanish. Having a term to distinguish between forms which follow a standard pattern and those which do not is useful when describing a language and particularly when teaching it. We could use a word like "exceptional", but personally I see no need. Rejecting established terms tends to lead to confusion.

In any particular language you have to decide what you are going to class as irregular. In French we can I think distinguish four classes of verbs.:

1. Verbs which follow a rule such as: take _-er_ off the end of the infinitive and add _-e_, -_es_, -e, _-ons_, -ez, -_ent_ for persons 1,2,3 s and 1,2,3 p respectively.
2. Verbs which follow 1 but require a change to comply with the rules of French orthography, e.g. _manger _which requires an _e_ before _-ons_ and _commencer_ which needs a cedilla unde the _c_ before -_ons_. (If French orthography was totally phonemic this class would not exist.)
3. Verbs which follow 1 but need a change in orthography to reflect a change in the pronunciation of the vowel in the stem, e.g. _lever_ where you have _je lève_ but _nous levons_ and _jeter _where you have _je jette_ but _nous jetons_.
4. All other verbs, that is those which have a unique paradigm or a paradigm shared by a very small number of verbs.

A French speaker familiar with the rules of French orthography may not regard verbs in class 2 as irregular on the basis that he knows the _e_ and cedilla are needed. He may tend to think of those in class 3 as being on a par with those in class 2. He is likely to concede that those in class 4 are irregular. We could call class 1 "regular", class two "orthographic changing", class 3 "slightly irregular" and class 4 "irregular". We could also decide not to call them anything. Whatever we do you cannot avoid the fact that a learner needs to get to grips with a complex system.



jasio said:


> Now imagine etc
> 
> That's why I still claim that the grammar of the Western languages is much more simplified than of the Slavic languages.



That assumes that complexity involves only morphology and ignores syntax, not to mention phonology, semantics/pragmatics and orthography. Tone is a complication and so is having a lot of homonyms. I once read that the syllable /i/ has 87 different meanings in Chinese. Is that more or less than a complication of having 17 different forms of the number 2? French has the phenomena of elision and liason and in Spanish the pronunciation of some words depends on the preceding word - those are all complications which a learner has to master.

Complexity is any event difficult to measure. Just keeping to verbs, we may be able to say that Ancient Greek is more complex than Latin because it has more forms, but how do we compare Latin with Spanish when the latter has fewer forms but more irregularities than the former? Is a language with 20 cases and no prepositions more complex than a language with no cases and 20 prepositions? Is the requirement to get words in the right order not just as much a complexity as getting the right endings on words?

As I said in anotther thread, an Ancient Roman learning English may feel it is complex because it involves:

· An obsession with specifying the definiteness of nouns.

· The not entirely straightforward way questions and negative statements are formed.

· The continuous and affirmative forms of verbs.

· The abundance of phrasal verbs whose meaning cannot always be guessed from their components.

· The need to get words in the right order to convey meaning.

· The inability to convey degrees of emphasis by word order.

· A general feeling that the language lacks precision and leaves too much to context.

Report


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## jasio

Hulalessar said:


> That assumes that complexity involves only morphology and ignores syntax, not to mention phonology, semantics/pragmatics and orthography. Tone is a complication and so is having a lot of homonyms. I once read that the syllable /i/ has 87 different meanings in Chinese. Is that more or less than a complication of having 17 different forms of the number 2?


Although a few years ago there were discussion on the Net claiming that Polish was the most difficult language globally, I do not go that far. I only claim that the modern Slavic languages are more complicated than most modern Western languages. I won't even claim "all modern Western languages", because I know nothing about Basque or Celtic languages. 



Hulalessar said:


> how do we compare Latin with Spanish when the latter has fewer forms but more irregularities than the former?


Depending on how many is "more". And what do you understand as "irregularities": "o" -> "ue" for L-class irregular verbs is in fact a minor thing. So are spelling changes resulting from a bit awkward Spanish orthography - but it's a complication of the orthography per se, not an 'irregularity'. 

Anyway, CIA evaluated it, at least for the English speakers, so yes - it's a mixture of a difficulty and deviation from English. But at least it's already done. In short: most Romance and Germanic languages are in the category 1. German is category 2 (it depends on the source actually), Slavic languages, Icelanding (as probably the only Germanic language) and most other languages are category 3, and Arabic, Chinese, Japanese and Korean are category 4.
https://cms.qz.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/11/how-far-will-language-study-take-you-_mapbuilder.png



Hulalessar said:


> Is a language with 20 cases and no prepositions more complex than a language with no cases and 20 prepositions?


Depending on how regular is the use of the prepositions and cases - both in terms of morphology and semantics.



Hulalessar said:


> Is the requirement to get words in the right order not just as much a complexity as getting the right endings on words?


I learned this requirement as a second language and believe me, it's peanuts. Sometimes I make mistakes in more complex situations, because I'm used to a more free syntax, but it's not something I would call complication - because it's regular. Asking questions by inversion is regular. Negation using an auxiliary verb is regular. In general, compound tenses are simpler than simple tenses - because they are regular. Learn several irregular forms of "to be" and "to have" - and you have 95% complications done, because verb forms used in compound tenses are mostly regular. Simple future tense in English is 100% regular - because it consists of a single auxiliary vern and the basic form of the verb. Present continuous is 99% regular - the only iiregularity is the auxiliary verb. OK, present perfect may cause some issues because most irregular verbs are commonly used.


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## Hulalessar

Difficulty is relative. The CIA evaluation is made from the perspective of native English speakers. Romance languages may be easier to learn than Slavic, but the main reason is that a huge amount of vocabulary is the same. I learned Russian at school along with French, Spanish and Latin. I did not find the grammar of Russian any more complicated than the others. A significant difficulty though is that you get no help with the vocabulary. I am not sure I ever quite got to grips with the perfective/imperfective thing, but then I do not always use the right form of the verb when speaking Spanish. The unpredictable stress was something of a problem. However, I was able to go from zero to reading Pushkin and Chekhov in two years. (Today I can hardly hold a conversation in Russian, but that is because since leaving school I have never used it except to order breakfast on a train in Romania in 1973. If you learn a lot in a short period you lose it if you don't use it.)

There is also a psychological aspect. If you tell someone something is difficult they will probably find it difficult. Russian is perceived to be difficult because it has a different script. English as a foreign language is typically started young and studied over a long period. Complications are taken one at a time and you get a lot of practice. You may start off saying "I do not must" but you will eventually get it right.

You also cannot ignore the fact that a huge number of people speak fluent Russian as a second language. Necessity is often the mother of second language acquistion. People will acquire a language if they really need to and they do not worry about difficulty or complexity. Difficulty and complexity do not come into it when children acquire their native language. Russian children use the right cases just as Spanish use the subjunctive when it is needed. There is nothing obvious about when a language which has articles uses them as the rules vary from language to language. If you look at the rules for any language they are quite involved, but small children follow them. Perceptions of difficulty and complexity come down to how different a language is from your own.

Although perceptions of complexity may be biased, complexity itself is not relative. The problem is though in devising a way to measure it. What exactly are you going to measure, how are you going to measure it and what weight are you going to give to each thing you measure? One thing you can be sure of is that linguists are never going to agree.


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## Awwal12

Hulalessar said:


> As I said in anotther thread, an Ancient Roman learning English may feel it is complex because it involves:
> 
> · An obsession with specifying the definiteness of nouns.


It wouldn't be complex by itself weren't the very cathegory of definiteness arbitrary enough. I often get the feeling that the native speakers just have made some secret agreement behind our backs about definiteness of every possible kind of noun groups.  And as if it wasn't enough, encoding of definiteness in English is very complex by itself (the tripartite system of articles with a long, long list of specific cases and possible border situations again).


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## jasio

Hulalessar said:


> A significant difficulty though is that you get no help with the vocabulary. I am not sure I ever quite got to grips with the perfective/imperfective thing,


Which approximately doubles the complexity of the verb system. Doubles - because the aspect is NOT a matter of inflection. It's a matter of knowing two separate verbs with the very similar meaning, yet having significantly grammatical function and very specific semantic distinction. For example, you cannot distinguish future tense from present tense if you do not understand the aspect.



Hulalessar said:


> If you learn a lot in a short period you lose it if you don't use it.


I learned Russian for ten years, and now, after 30 years I barely speak it. So it really does not depend solely on the pace of learining.



Hulalessar said:


> There is also a psychological aspect. If you tell someone something is difficult they will probably find it difficult. Russian is perceived to be difficult because it has a different script.


Try Polish then. It has quite a similar script to English. Or Czech - which uses even simpler orthography than Polish.
But I do not think it would make the difference, as using some training you can get used to the Russian script within a few weeks.  



Hulalessar said:


> English as a foreign language is typically started young and studied over a long period. Complications are taken one at a time and you get a lot of practice. You may start off saying "I do not must" but you will eventually get it right.


Starting young is an advantage, of course, but I do not agree that it's THE differentiation between Russian (or virtually any other Slavic language) and English. 
I started learning Russian at the age of 10 (approximately) and English - at about 15, so I have a comparison. With Russian we based quite a lot on multiple similarities between Polish and Russian, and primarily the differences had to be explained. For example, we when we encountered a perfective verb in a textbook for the first time, it was enough for teacher to explain "this verb is perfectve", and it was clear for us, it did not require any further explanations at this stage. I think, you might have had a similar impression when your Spanish teacher explained you preterite perfecto referring it to the English present perfect tense - as both of them function in a similar way. 

So it's quite probable, that a fully idiomatic native-level proficiency in an educated register of the language has similar level of objective complexity regardless of the language. But who speaks a foreign language with a fully idiomatic native proficiency? Not many people, in fact, and most of the learners stop progressing when they reach the level which is sufficient for their purposes. And this changes the game entirely.

Slavic languages are much closer to "you have to know everything to be able to speak anything" extreme than English. In English it's enough to knowing a handful of words to produce grammatically correct phrases. In Slavic langiages - in general you cannot. To produce correctly even the simplest phrase, you must at least know the grammatical persons, because the infinitive forms generally are not used for this purpose. If you want to include objects - you have to understand at least two cases (with all the complications resulting from inflection patterns), and at least elements of the gender/category system. If you want to include adjectives - the grammatical cases (which have different pattarns for adjectives than for nouns) and genders are a must. Etc. And we even have not even reached the compound statements yet, or tenses. So wherever the asymptote is, the learning curve of Slavic languages is much steeper than in case of English, Spanish or Italian.


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## Hulalessar

Having different forms for the perfective and imperfective does not double the complexity of the verbal system, it just means you have to know two words instead of one. Whilst not completely on a par, Spanish can be said to have something approaching the same difficulty for learners because for a large number of verbs the first person singular indicative, and accordingly the form of the present subjunctive, is unpredictable from the infinitive. Apart from that, the future or preterite of some forms is not predictable from the infinitive. If you add in that there are far more tenses in Spanish than Russian you have difficulty saying which overall has the more complex verbal system. Whilst I may have had trouble deciding whether to use the perfective or imperfective in Russian, I found learning the forms verbs take to involve less memorising than for any of French, Spanish or Latin. Also, complexity is not just how many forms you need to know but also how many uses each form has.

How well anyone remembers anything depends on the person and circumstances. Both how long you spend learning something and how long it is since you learned it if you do not keep it up are though going to be factors.

I agree that the Russian alphabet is by no means the hurdle some people think it. My point is though that the very fact it is written in a different alphabet leads people to think it is difficult. As for Polish, to the casual observer it looks like it has five consonants for every vowel. That gives the impression that it is unpronounceable and therefore difficult. What happens with certain languages (we can add Hungarian, Finnish and Basque to the list) is that non-native speakers declare them to be difficult or complex. Native speakers not only believe it, but take pride in having a language foreigners have trouble getting to grips with because it has a different game plan which requires a new way of looking at things.

Ancient Roman and Greek grammarians wrote grammars for Latin and Greek which were fine for Latin and Greek. When European grammarians started to write grammars for modern Indo-European languages they used the ancient models. The fit (as for English) was near enough but required banging a few square pegs into round holes. When they turmed to non-Indo-European languages the models were wholly inadequate. Because the languages failed to follow what were considered inviolable or ideal rules they were declared over-complicated or illogical. Grammars were written with numerous tables setting out paradigms because that is what grammars did. However, the tables were wholly artificial because what they did was set out the permutations which agglutinative languages allow. It was like having tables for French which run_ Je ne le vois pas_,_ tu ne le vois pas_ etc and _Je ne la vois pas_, _tu ne la vois pas _etc. That made the languages look horrendously complicated when in fact the forms could be constructed following rules as straightforward as those required for forming the French examples above.

Every person's knowledge of a language reflects their experience and a native speaker's experience will be signifcantly different from those who have acquired the language even if they have native-like fluency. Native speakers do not of course all have the same experience and some may not be at ease with all its registers . It is not easy to separate out all the elements of language, but, for the purpose of a thread like this where languages are being compared, you have to assume a level involving control of all the elements of the language, but not mastery of all its registers. I suggest that for any language something like 100 hours of instruction from a good teacher and 200 hours of private study should produce the same level of competence. Observation suggests that children achieve significant control at around the same age whatever the language being acquired.

I would rephrase: "You have to know everything to say anything" as: "The learning of some languages is front-end loaded." If a language has conjugations and/or declensions you have to know them to speak correctly. By contrast, a highly analytical isolating language may on first encounter appear straightforward, but as it says in the introduction to my copy of _Teach Yourself Malay_:: "Malay is an easy language. Bafflingly easy. At the end of ten weeks you may feel that you know all that you need to know. At the end of ten years, you know you never will."


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## Awwal12

Hulalessar said:


> Whilst not completely on a par, Spanish can be said to have something approaching the same difficulty for learners because for a large number of verbs the first person singular indicative, and accordingly the form of the present subjunctive, is unpredictable from the infinitive.


But in Russian (and in Slavic languages in general) it's a generic feature which exists entirely independently of the aspects.  Having different verbal stems for present/imperative and past/infinitive forms is quite common (bra-l - ber-ú, kra-l - krad-ú, spa-l - spl'-ú, vorová-l - vorúy-u, etc.). Sometimes, on the other hand, the stems for imperative  and present indicative forms are different (davá-l - day-ú - davá-y). Of course there are certain patterns in that, but the element of unpredictability is considerable.


Hulalessar said:


> Having different forms for the perfective and imperfective does not double the complexity of the verbal system, it just means you have to know two words instead of one.


But you also need to learn their usage, as much as you need to learn the usage of the English tenses (not only how they are formed). There are syntax and semantics behind that, it's not just some pieces of morphology. If it were only about learning 2 different forms every time, English speakers would have little problems with the Slavic aspects. In fact, they have a lot, because first they have to grasp the basic idea of perfective and imperfective activities on the semantic plane, and then they get stuck in numerous grammatical nuances which can (and very often do) contextually change the meaning in pretty unpredictable ways. Of course, Russian speakers learning English have their share of similar problems.


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## jasio

Hulalessar said:


> Having different forms for the perfective and imperfective does not double the complexity of the verbal system, it just means you have to know two words instead of one. Whilst not completely on a par, Spanish can be said to have something approaching the same difficulty for learners because for a large number of verbs the first person singular indicative, and accordingly the form of the present subjunctive, is unpredictable from the infinitive. Apart from that, the future or preterite of some forms is not predictable from the infinitive. If you add in that there are far more tenses in Spanish than Russian you have difficulty saying which overall has the more complex verbal system.


Don't take it personal, but considering your earlier statement:


Hulalessar said:


> I am not sure I ever quite got to grips with the perfective/imperfective thing


I have an impression that you may underestimate the issues related to correct usage of the Slavic aspect. Of course, it's possible that you in fact mastered it. But I've had opportunities to talk to foreign Polish learners from the Western countries, and I cannot recall anyone, who would be fully correct in this area - even in quite simple conversations.

In fact, a foreign pronunciation of your mothertongue is something you can cope with very easy, but using wrong words - and this includes wrong aspect - requires you to slow down and rething what the person may really have in mind. Besides, despite irregularities which @Avval12 mentioned, with every single word you're using, you may have to decide whether to use a perfective word or an imperfective word. In some situations it's quite algorythmic (like in the present tense or in case of sequence of tenses and the only difficulty is to bind the aspectual pair correctly), but for example in the future tense you have to decide whether to use a simple future or compound future (which is solely based on the verbal aspect), so messing the aspect stands out a lot. Besides, some prefixes tend to convert the verb and imperfective into perfective, but depending on the specific verb, it either retains the basic meaning of the verb, or it also changes it. And it has to be memorised. For example (in Polish - but if you recall your Russian, it's quite similar) "przeczytać" means exactly the same as "czytać" (to read) except for the aspect, ie. "to complete the reading". But "przepisać" means something quite different than "pisać" (to write) - namely "to rewrite" or "to prescribe" and "przejeść" means something entirely different than "jeść" (to eat), namely "to spend money on current needs, such as food". Besides, is "podjeżdżam" in the same tense as "podsłucham"? Is "podsłuchuję" in the same tense as "podjeżdżam"? And what about "podsłucham"?



Hulalessar said:


> What happens with certain languages (we can add Hungarian, Finnish and Basque to the list) is that non-native speakers declare them to be difficult or complex. Native speakers not only believe it, but take pride in having a language foreigners have trouble getting to grips with because it has a different game plan which requires a new way of looking at things.


Why shouldn't we question it? After all, how can you have a clue whether your mothertongue is difficult or not, if you have more exposure to it before you even go to school than an average foreign learner will have during their whole life. (ok... it may not be quite true for English ). And indeed, Polish native speakers typically claim that the most difficult area for the foreign learners would be pronunciation (which is an issue, but normally it doesn't disturb the conversation) and spelling (which is not 100% phonetic, but still it's peanuts compared to English or French), while entirely disregard the problem with irregularities of inflection or verbal aspect. We even recognise cases or aspects in entirely different ways than the foreigners do, because we leverage vast experience and elements of the school education, while they have to use their tables.



Hulalessar said:


> However, the tables were wholly artificial because what they did was set out the permutations which agglutinative languages allow.


Exactly!
Some indoeuropean concepts simply do not make sense when agglutination comes into play.



Hulalessar said:


> I suggest that for any language something like 100 hours of instruction from a good teacher and 200 hours of private study should produce the same level of competence.


Years ago I read an article of a person who had learnt Japanese in Japan. Tha author stated that after a year his teacher had not praised his progress, but had said 'now I begin to understand, what you're trying to say' instead. And indeed, a friend of mine, bilinguial Polish-Hungarian, recorded that when he started learning Japanese in an international group, he was way ahead of the others because of his agglutination background. So although I cannot judge for lack of personal experience, my gut feeling is that your statement may be overoptymistic. Unless you equal only in-the-class hours, not the home work, which may be different.



Hulalessar said:


> Observation suggests that children achieve significant control at around the same age whatever the language being acquired.


Considering a number of hours the children spend on acquiring their mothertongues, I would expect that it's a result of similarities of the human brain development rather than an evidence of inherent similarities of the languages themselves.



Hulalessar said:


> I would rephrase: "You have to know everything to say anything" as: "The learning of some languages is front-end loaded." If a language has conjugations and/or declensions you have to know them to speak correctly. By contrast, a highly analytical isolating language may on first encounter appear straightforward, but as it says in the introduction to my copy of _Teach Yourself Malay_:: "Malay is an easy language. Bafflingly easy. At the end of ten weeks you may feel that you know all that you need to know. At the end of ten years, you know you never will."


There's something in it. After all, after several decades of learning Polish, I still discover new phenomena in the language. Albeit after this time typically they are either new words, which I have never encountered, or new observations based on similarities or differences from the other languages. But still, learning a language - even if it's your mothertongue - it's a never ending story.


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## Awwal12

jasio said:


> For example (in Polish - but if you recall your Russian, it's quite similar) "przeczytać" means exactly the same as "czytać" (to read) except for the aspect


I wouldn't actually say so. "Читать" is an activity of an inherently prolonged, continuous manner, which you can split into several pieces (hence the possible iterative usage) but cannot precisely pinpoint in time. If we say that someone "читал" (was reading) at 12:00, we merely state that he was reading at that moment - as well as right before that and just afterwards; we narrow the focus of our attention but not the activity itself (which then consumes the focus).

Perfective verbs, on the other hand, essentially denote singular events by default (with some possible semantic extensions, like the perfect usages, but in the nutshell it's so). And you cannot make an event out of the process of reading without adding something to the semantics. So you do: "прочитать" denotes the event when you finish something reading - it's a resultative (unlike the English perfects, it doesn't relate the result to some other particular point in time, but merely states its abstract existence; that is, the very moment of the activity separates the states of not having read and having read something). However, since perfective verbs may denote only singular events and obviously resultatives may be iterative, we need to derive another imperfective verb - "прочитывать", exactly for that case. Here we can truly say that "прочитать" and "прочитывать" are different only because of the aspect.

But, obviously, verbs are different, refer to very different kinds of activities, so the example above cannot describe the multitude of possible relationships.


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## Awwal12

...So as I said: one has to learn the usage of Russian aspects just as he learns the usage of English tenses. One may even get the idea of aspects, but how can he deduce what he should use when he wants someone to jump off - "прыгай" or "прыгни"? The logic seemingly requires the second, perfective variant, but in reality it would only mean "make a jump (up into the air, and land back on your feet)" in that context, while a Russian native speaker would say exactly "прыгай", i.e. "be jumping" (literally), and that can only be learned.

P.S.: And the lexical nature of the aspects causes problems even to Slavic speakers when they begin to learn other Slavic languages. So, I used to know a Polish linguist who was very fluent in Russian. Once in the heat of a pretty non-linguistic discussion he tried to say "to give a tumble" in Russian. Ok,  "to fuck" in Russian is  "ебать" (much like in Polish), which is a typical basic imperfective verb of repetative activity, and he also had heard the verb  "ёбнуть", which should make a singular act out of it... Except our friend didn't know that  "ёбнуть" unexpectedly has only one meaning: "to hit hard (with something)", and he should have used the prefixed perfective derivate  "выебать" (lit.  ~"to fuck out") instead. Given his general fluency in Russian, we were caught unprepared by such outspoken propositions of violence towards women from him. It took quite a while to sort it all out.


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## jasio

jasio said:


> For example (in Polish - but if you recall your Russian, it's quite similar) "przeczytać" means exactly the same as "czytać" (to read) except for the aspect, ie. "to complete the reading".





Awwal12 said:


> I wouldn't actually say so. "Читать" is an activity of an inherently prolonged, continuous manner, which you can split into several pieces (hence the possible iterative usage) but cannot precisely pinpoint in time.(...) Perfective verbs, on the other hand, essentially denote singular events by default.


Did I forgot to place a remark "except for the aspect"?  This is the only difference between the words which you pointed out.
Besides, apparently, writing a post rather than a novel I was not clear enough, because my objective in that paragraph was to demonstrate that with regards to the aspect, you cannot deduce too much from the composition of the word alone - unlike in case of the inflection. And the same prefix may have entirely different results depending on the word it's attached to.


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## jasio

Awwal12 said:


> ...So as I said: one has to learn the usage of Russian aspects just as he learns the usage of English tenses.


I have an impression that the English tenses function a way more regularly than the aspects. 

If you have an infinitive - and in case of irregular verbs you have also memorized the 2nd and the 3rd form of the verb - you can easily re-create the whole table of tenses from scratch. So what's left to learn - is only the usage principles. With the Slavic aspect however, you have to understand which of the numerous similar verbs (if any, because, as you pointed out, the aspect is a lexical feature, not an inflection) make a perfect aspectual pair with the verb in question - and you have to know it for every single verb separately. And though indeed there are grammatical tools which can make an imperfective verb perfective or the other way 'round, you still have to remember which of the multitude of available prefixes and infixes only change the aspect, and which do also change the basic meaning - per verb, again. 

Actiually, you may think of it as of phrasal verbs in which the prepositions simultanously serve as auxiliary words to change the tense or mood, on a random basis.

Of course it does not mean that you cannot learn it. If I could do it, and awwal could do it, everybody can do it*). It's only somewhat harder.


*) I'm cheeting here, of course. Almost everybody is capable of learning their mothertongue regardless of its complexity - which is not necessarily the case for L2 learners.Perhaps this is why the crealisation happens in the first case.


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## Awwal12

jasio said:


> Did I forgot to place a remark "except for the aspect"?  This is the only difference between the words which you pointed out.


I don't think so. Resultativeness is not an inherent property of the perfective aspect. What is the fundamental difference between, say, "спеть" (perfective resultative) and "запеть" (perfective inchoative) when they are compared to "петь"?


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## jasio

Awwal12 said:


> I don't think so. Resultativeness is not an inherent property of the perfective aspect. What is the fundamental difference between, say, "спеть" (perfective resultative) and "запеть" (perfective inchoative) when they are compared to "петь"?


Thanks for the clarification. 
Indeed, it seems that in Polish it works a bit different. I must do some more reading about it.


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## Assiduous student

In my view, English is harder than many people appreciate. As someone said, English is not frontloaded. You can say "two tall boys" with only the bare knowledge that the plural requires -s.  In Russian it is два высоких мальчика. You need to pick the correct numeral to go with a masculine noun. You need to know that after "2" the adjective goes in the genitive plural and the noun in the genitive singular. And bear in mind that if the whole phrase is in an oblique case, then all these words would be in that case instead: рядом с двумя высокими мальчиками.

So you can make a start on basic sentences in English more or less from day one. English is an intensively studied language the world over, and so there are foreigners who speak perfect or very nearly perfective English. They are often Scandinavians or from some other country that has generalised English-language education from an early age. Even so, the number of foreigners who wouldn't stumble over "how long will you have been doing that by then?" is quite low. Use of phrasal verbs can often be wrong. When I worked as a subeditor, I found that even English native speakers were generally hazy on the use of prepositions. And the tendency of foreigners to restrict themselves to phrases that are correct but are chosen by them because they mirror their own languages can produce a kind of "verbal mannerism" in some foreigners.

I lived with some German girls once, and they would often say "it's not so big", "it's not so good", "it's not so long", and after a while it grated. Because I say "it's not that good". Both are correct, but whereas English people might say "not that good" 70% of the time and "not so good" 30% of the time, in the mouth of German learners these proportions become 0% and 100%. So to really master an unmarked use of English takes longer than most learners realise. It's also evident that learners often/usually overestimate their English fluency, and start speaking poorly accented English faster than can be easily understood. Some of them don't know they have an accent or that they are hard to understand.


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## Ben Jamin

Awwal12 said:


> It wouldn't be complex by itself weren't the very cathegory of definiteness arbitrary enough. I often get the feeling that the native speakers just have made some secret agreement behind our backs about definiteness of every possible kind of noun groups.  And as if it wasn't enough, encoding of definiteness in English is very complex by itself (the tripartite system of articles with a long, long list of specific cases and possible border situations again).


Speakers of languages without articles are often ridiculed by English speakers for not using the articles correctly: "How cannot one understand that you just use the definite article about an object that has already been introduced, and an indefinite one for an object that hasn't been introduced". It is nonsense of course, the rules for using articles are very complex in English, in addition they also comprise a "no article" article. Actually there are no two "article" languages that have the same rule. An Italian or a Greek will have the same problems as a Russian or a Pole. 
For Slavic speakers the use of imperfective and perfective verbs is simple, and it is relatively simple for a Spaniard.
Actually all languages are equally difficult if you want to obtain a high level of fluency, as more than 50% of the necessary knowledge concerns (the?) idiomatic use of the language, registers, dialects and slangs.


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## Assiduous student

Ben Jamin said:


> Speakers of languages without articles are often ridiculed by English speakers for not using the articles correctly: "How cannot one understand that you just use the definite article about an object that has already been introduced, and an indefinite one for an object that hasn't been introduced". It is nonsense of course, the rules for using articles are very complex in English, in addition they also comprise a "no article" article. Actually there are no two "article" languages that have the same rule. An Italian or a Greek will have the same problems as a Russian or a Pole.
> For Slavic speakers the use of imperfective and perfective verbs is simple, and it is relatively simple for a Spaniard.
> Actually all languages are equally difficult if you want to obtain a high level of fluency, as more than 50% of the necessary knowledge concerns (the?) idiomatic use of the language, registers, dialects and slangs.



I don't approve of mocking foreigners for making mistakes, but it seems to me that many Russians appear to believe that articles are optional in English and make only a random stab at using them correctly. If someone speaks English really badly, then you wouldn't expect correct article usage. But you often encounter people who speak English apparently fluently, apart from the fact that the articles are all left out. And it is that incongruence that surprises native speakers.

I agree the rules on article use can be complicated. And they also vary between English dialects! When Americans say "grandma is in the hospital", we say "in hospital", genericising the noun. Where we say "in the summer", they say "in summer". [I'm not suggesting 100% of speakers of either dialect have a uniform approach to such things. I'm just illustrating the variation that does exist among native speakers.]

Unfortunately, it is not true - it is laughably untrue - to say that all languages are equally difficult. The degree to which this is so partly depends on what language you're starting from. But Russian is simply very complicated. Chinese is not particularly complicated, but the large number of homophones, the tones and the characters all make it a hard language. Some languages are hard even for native speakers.

By the way, "slangs" is not correct. Slang is uncountable. L2 speakers in America say "slangs", but the Americans on this forum agree that "slangs" is not correct in any form of English. See slang vs. slangs You can say "slang expressions" if you need a plural.


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## jasio

Ben Jamin said:


> Actually there are no two "article" languages that have the same rule. An Italian or a Greek will have the same problems as a Russian or a Pole.


Even though specific rules may differ, the Italians, Greeks - as well as the Spanish, Germans, French, etc. - at least have general concepts of an article and definitiveness internalised. Even though they may make mistakes from time to time, they are probably correct most of the time. For an Italian it's obvious that 'la macchina' most of the time is 'the car'. So is for a German with "das Auto". However the Russians, the Poles, the Czechs, the Slovaks - we simply tend to omit the articles because there's nothing like that aside of 'samochód' or 'машина', and it just stands out like hell. Even for me, an L2 English speaker.



Ben Jamin said:


> Actually all languages are equally difficult if you want to obtain a high level of fluency, as more than 50% of the necessary knowledge concerns (the?) idiomatic use of the language, registers, dialects and slangs.





Assiduous student said:


> Unfortunately, it is not true - it is laughably untrue - to say that all languages are equally difficult.


To me, both statements are equally illogical. You may not say that one thing is equal to another just because you're unable to measure them objectively. For the same reason, you may not say that they are not equal - apart from a mere observation that it's not very likely for thousands of natural languages, etnolects and idiolects to have exactly the same level of complexity. Humans are not fundamentally equal, equally intelligent nor equally knowledgeable, so why should their languages be?


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## Red Arrow

jasio said:


> However the Russians, the Poles, the Czechs, the Slovaks - we simply tend to omit the articles because there's nothing like that aside of 'samochód' or 'машина', and it just stands out like hell. Even for me, an L2 English speaker.


These posts from 2009 and 2013 might be of interest:


jazyk said:


> Czech officially doesn't have articles, either, but I keep hearing the demonstratives ten, to, ta everywhere to exhaustion that I think we could (at least tentatively) say that Czech does have articles after all.





Provensalstinar said:


> As you probably know, except for Bulgarian and Macedonian, no standard Slavic language uses definite article regularly. Lately, however, I have often observed in Czech, that many people, including educated speakers in very formal speech, overuse demonstrative pronouns ("ten, ta, to, ti, ty, ta") in a way very close to the definite article.
> 
> E. g.: _Všechny *ty* knihy jsou o *tom* životě *těch *lidí za *té *války.
> (All the books are about the life of the people during the war.)_
> 
> None of these pronouns is used reasonably - all of them are mere articles. I think it was not used before nineties.
> 
> What about other Slavic languages? Is there any similar tendency?
> 
> Thanks for answers.


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## jasio

Red Arrow said:


> These posts from 2009 and 2013 might be of interest:


Thank you. 

I can't tell about the Czech language, but a similar phenomenon in Polish has an emphatic meaning only, and its development to true definite articles is yet to possibly come. Besides, when I browsed through a few articles in Czech on Wikipedia, I didn't find any traces of this phenomenon. Perhaps as of now it's not as common as described, is limited to a spoken language or to some specific groups within the society. Or still is treated as a slangish novelty, not yet fully grounded in the language.


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## jazyk

It is not used in writing, unless it is writing that reflects people's speech.


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## Hulalessar

jasio said:


> To me, both statements are equally illogical. You may not say that one thing is equal to another just because you're unable to measure them objectively. For the same reason, you may not say that they are not equal - apart from a mere observation that it's not very likely for thousands of natural languages, etnolects and idiolects to have exactly the same level of complexity. Humans are not fundamentally equal, equally intelligent nor equally knowledgeable, so why should their languages be?



Saying that "Actually all languages are equally difficult if you want to obtain a high level of fluency" acknowledges that a native speaker's language reflects his experience. A non-native may have an excellent command of the language, but he may only operate like or nearly like a native in restricted spheres. My Spanish is not excellent, but it is fairly good. I have though never worked with native Spanish speakers or lived with a Spanish speaking family. A lot of what I say may be perfectly good Spanish, but I do not speak the way native Spanish speakers speak when they are relaxed with family or friends. I read books in Spanish on linguistics and philosophy, but have a hard time making sense of comics.

Whether a language is difficult depends on who is learning it. A Spanish speaker is going to find Italian easier going than Russian. However, there is still a lot of learning to do. I have an Italian grammar written in Spanish. At various intervals it says either "like in Spanish..." or "unlike in Spanish" which is helpful. The point is though that a Spanish speaker cannot predict when something is going to be the same - he has to learn what it is. He can understand quite a lot without being told, but that does not mean he could have said what he understood.

No one says that all languages are _exactly _equal in complexity. So far as most of those with sufficient expertise who have considered the question are concerned it seems likely that they are more or less equal in complexity so as to make no significant difference. Even if linguists agreed on a method of comparison actually comparing all the languages in the world would be a monumental task. Joseph Greenberg did devise a method of comparing morphological complexity. Using the method Basque and Spanish were compared and found to be equally complex, though complex in different areas. The conclusion may surprise some as Basque has the reputation of being highly complex - there is the legend that the Devil tried to learn it and gave up.

It is of course the case that different individuals have different skills and knowledge, but that is not the same thing as saying that any group speaking a given language has less potential than another. Whilst building a nuclear power station is more complex than building a hut the grammar required to explain how to build the former is not more complex than the grammar required to explain how to build the latter. In the same way, the grammar of languages spoken by less technologically advanced societies is just as complex as that of languages spoken by the more technologically advanced societies. Language was fully fledged before the advent of highly organised societies.

Language needs a minimum amount of complexity so that humans can say the things humans want to say. Language also cannot be too complicated for children to learn it at a young age. Accordingly, all languages are pitched at just the right level and the level is going to be the same for every language.


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## Red Arrow

Does anyone know anything that's complex in Dutch but simple in German? German plural forms, verb tenses, noun declension and adjective declension are all more complex.


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## Stoggler

Red Arrow said:


> Does anyone know anything that's complex in Dutch but simple in German? German plural forms, verb tenses, noun declension and adjective declension are all more complex.



Pronunciation.  It’s the only thing I would say (having studied both languages) that I would say was (relatively) easier in German than in Dutch.  Not that Dutch is particularly difficult to pronounce.


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## jasio

Hulalessar said:


> Saying that "Actually all languages are equally difficult if you want to obtain a high level of fluency" acknowledges that a native speaker's language reflects his experience.


I must improve my English then, because to  me the two phrases have entirely different meanings. 
BTW - If I'm a poor immigrant from a peasant country, a chance that I would suddenly start speaking a local legalese just because it's not my mother-tongue is probably close to zero, so an L2 speaker's language also reflects their experience. This makes the latter part of the claim above null and void.



Hulalessar said:


> Whether a language is difficult depends on who is learning it. A Spanish speaker is going to find Italian easier going than Russian.


Haven't we been discussing it since the very beginning of this thread?



Hulalessar said:


> No one says that all languages are _exactly _equal in complexity. So far as most of those with sufficient expertise who have considered the question are concerned it seems likely that they are more or less equal in complexity so as to make no significant difference.


That's again something different, but let's stick to it for the sake of the conversation.



Hulalessar said:


> Even if linguists agreed on a method of comparison actually comparing all the languages in the world would be a monumental task.


Noone said, it wouldn't. Of course, IF the linguists agreed on the method of comparing complexity of languages. And IF they agreed on what is and what is not a language in the first place. The latter case is also still open as far as I am aware - and without settling it we'll never be sure if we're comparing apples to apples.



Hulalessar said:


> It is of course the case that different individuals have different skills and knowledge, but that is not the same thing as saying that any group speaking a given language has less potential than another.


Potential is not the same as capability. There's no reason for a language to reflect a mere potential if it's never going to materialise.



Hulalessar said:


> Whilst building a nuclear power station is more complex than building a hut the grammar required to explain how to build the former is not more complex than the grammar required to explain how to build the latter. In the same way, the grammar of languages spoken by less technologically advanced societies is just as complex as that of languages spoken by the more technologically advanced societies.


Someone tried to convince me earlier in this thread that vocabulary contributes to an overall complexity of the language, so the grammar is not the sole source of complexity of the language. Besides, besides, building a nuclear power plant is not just laying bricks. You need to have a language - including the grammar - which is precise enough to clearly describe what your're doing, what for, prepare and sign the contracts, manage people, etc. For that you require not only vocabulary, but also grammar and stylistic structures which will allow you to express yourself precisely enough.



Hulalessar said:


> Language was fully fledged before the advent of highly organised societies.


And the hunters-gatherers were speaking legalese? Besides, if a language would include all the features it needs from the very beginning, loan-words and cliches would not be needed, because they would already be there readily available, would they?



Hulalessar said:


> Language needs a minimum amount of complexity so that humans can say the things humans want to say. Language also cannot be too complicated for children to learn it at a young age.


Considering a pace the young Chinese and Japanese learn to write, I would call it quite a bold statement.



Hulalessar said:


> Accordingly, all languages are pitched at just the right level and the level is going to be the same for every language.


Any evidence for that, apart from a mere faith in an inherent equality of humans? 

If we're both tall enough to pick fruit, it does not yet mean that we're equally high. After all, one of us may pick walnuts, while the other - grapes.


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## Red Arrow

Stoggler said:


> Pronunciation.  It’s the only thing I would say (having studied both languages) that I would say was (relatively) easier in German than in Dutch.  Not that Dutch is particularly difficult to pronounce.


But I don't think Dutch is harder to pronounce for Dutch children than German is for German children. I was responding to this:


Hulalessar said:


> Language needs a minimum amount of complexity so that humans can say the things humans want to say. Language also cannot be too complicated for children to learn it at a young age. Accordingly, all languages are pitched at just the right level and the level is going to be the same for every language.


The first two sentences are correct, but the third doesn't work for German and Dutch, as far as I can tell.


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## jasio

Hulalessar said:


> Saying that "Actually all languages are equally difficult if you want to obtain a high level of fluency" acknowledges that a native speaker's language reflects his experience.


I have a second thought that it's even more complex. 
If anything reflects your experience it's not your 1st language, but the language of your education and instruction. This is especially true for multinational countries in which your first language - like Nenets or Navajo - not necessarily is the language of your education and command (Russian and English respectively in this a example).


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## Ben Jamin

jasio said:


> Even though specific rules may differ, the Italians, Greeks - as well as the Spanish, Germans, French, etc. - at least have general concepts of an article and definitiveness internalised. Even though they may make mistakes from time to time, they are probably correct most of the time. For an Italian it's obvious that 'la macchina' most of the time is 'the car'. So is for a German with "das Auto". However the Russians, the Poles, the Czechs, the Slovaks - we simply tend to omit the articles because there's nothing like that aside of 'samochód' or 'машина', and it just stands out like hell. Even for me, an L2 English speaker.


You overestimate the difficulty of understanding the basic concept of definiteness/indefiniteness. It can be understood by an average student of an "articled" language in a few days, and internalized in, at worst, a couple of years. For most advanced students of English this is not a problem, if good teaching techniques are used, and if the student is not a linguistic moron. The problem is the idiomatic use of the articles, which will be equally difficult if your mother tongue has articles or not. I have been living in Norway for decades, and I have experienced that Norwegians also have difficulties with advanced use of articles, even if their own language uses articles.


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## Ben Jamin

"_To me, both statements are equally illogical. You may not say that one thing is equal to another just because you're unable to measure them objectively. For the same reason, you may not say that they are not equal - apart from a mere observation that it's not very likely for thousands of natural languages, etnolects and idiolects to have exactly the same level of complexity. Humans are not fundamentally equal, equally intelligent nor equally knowledgeable, so why should their languages be_?"

You mean perhaps that both statements are equally untrue for you, but "illogical"? What logical deviations did you find? 
The claim that all languages are equally difficult if all aspects are considered is not a loose statement. It has been postulated by many linguists.


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## Ben Jamin

Hulalessar said:


> Saying that "Actually all languages are equally difficult if you want to obtain a high level of fluency" acknowledges that a native speaker's language reflects his experience. A non-native may have an excellent command of the language, but he may only operate like or nearly like a native in restricted spheres. My Spanish is not excellent, but it is fairly good. I have though never worked with native Spanish speakers or lived with a Spanish speaking family. A lot of what I say may be perfectly good Spanish, but I do not speak the way native Spanish speakers speak when they are relaxed with family or friends. I read books in Spanish on linguistics and philosophy, but have a hard time making sense of comics.
> 
> Whether a language is difficult depends on who is learning it. A Spanish speaker is going to find Italian easier going than Russian. However, there is still a lot of learning to do. I have an Italian grammar written in Spanish. At various intervals it says either "like in Spanish..." or "unlike in Spanish" which is helpful. The point is though that a Spanish speaker cannot predict when something is going to be the same - he has to learn what it is. He can understand quite a lot without being told, but that does not mean he could have said what he understood.
> 
> No one says that all languages are _exactly _equal in complexity. So far as most of those with sufficient expertise who have considered the question are concerned it seems likely that they are more or less equal in complexity so as to make no significant difference. Even if linguists agreed on a method of comparison actually comparing all the languages in the world would be a monumental task. Joseph Greenberg did devise a method of comparing morphological complexity. Using the method Basque and Spanish were compared and found to be equally complex, though complex in different areas. The conclusion may surprise some as Basque has the reputation of being highly complex - there is the legend that the Devil tried to learn it and gave up.
> 
> It is of course the case that different individuals have different skills and knowledge, but that is not the same thing as saying that any group speaking a given language has less potential than another. Whilst building a nuclear power station is more complex than building a hut the grammar required to explain how to build the former is not more complex than the grammar required to explain how to build the latter. In the same way, the grammar of languages spoken by less technologically advanced societies is just as complex as that of languages spoken by the more technologically advanced societies. Language was fully fledged before the advent of highly organised societies.
> 
> Language needs a minimum amount of complexity so that humans can say the things humans want to say. Language also cannot be too complicated for children to learn it at a young age. Accordingly, all languages are pitched at just the right level and the level is going to be the same for every language.


You emphasize too much the morphological complexity and underestimate the amount of information you have to internalize if you want to speak and write like a native.


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