Linguistic legends - do you know of some in your language pair?

vladex wrote:
I believe that it is shared by all European languges.

GoodWords wrote:

People sometimes think of languages such as English as 'having little grammar' because there are few word endings. But this is once again the unfortunate influence of Latin which makes us think of complexity in terms of the inflectional system of that language.

"The idea that one's own language is superior to others is widespread

Dan Marasescu wrote:

A few years ago, an orthographic reform was passed in Romania with the sole porpose of making the latin origin of Romanian more obvious. This is probably the only example of orthographic reform that made the spelling more complicated instead of making it more simple.

frank1 wrote:

Hi Vladex, all

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Well, since i'm kind of collecting language myths concerning the First Language and historical comparative (fringe) linguistics, do you have references to people who claimed that this or that language was the First One.
Thanks in advance!

Heinrich Pesch wrote:

Some languages are declared more difficult than others. Finnish was said to be together with Hungarian the most difficult european language, because it has 17 different cases in relation to the four of German or the six of Russian and Latin.
In reality one has to learn 4 cases for each noun: nominative, genitive, partitive singular and partitive plural. All other cases are derived from these in a very simple manner. The Finnish word-endings substitute much of the prepositions and postpositions used in indoeuropean languages, and Finnisch has only a few of these.
In comparison the use of prepositions in Swedish is rather complicated, also in English non-natives make mistakes all the time. Finnish has no gender and no artikel, which simplifies things a lot, as you can imagine when comparing it to the three genders of German!

frank1 wrote:

Well, since i'm kind of collecting language myths concerning the First Language and historical comparative (fringe) linguistics, do you have references to people who claimed that this or that language was the First One.
Thanks in advance!

Henry wrote:

I don't know if these qualify as myths, but here are a few of my personal feelings about Japanese:

Most of those so-called myth are created by Japanese themselves. Like anyone else, Japanese also like to think they are special -- no other people are like them -- which is most of the time have that vain tendency of BSing.

- Rudimentary spoken* Japanese is not as hard as some people assume. The set of sounds is small and similar to Italian ("r" excepted), there are no tones, and the grammar is relatively simple and almost completely regular (albeit reversed, which is confusing for a while.)

Yes, Japanese language has surpringly short list of phonetic sounds (linguistic terminology to express this, I temporary forgot). No nasal, no guttal sounds.

- Japanese is not as ambiguous as it is sometimes made it out to be. It is true that sentence subjects are frequently omitted. But not if they are required to disambiguate! Besides, English speakers do the same thing. No one is confused by this exchange: "Q: What are doing?" "A: Reading the paper."

Yes, subject-verb are often missing, and it's mutually understood when face-to-face interface, things that happen in other languages as well. But that is not what making Japanese ambiguous. It can be sometimes ambiguous because people are not trained to implement cause-effect relationship in their course of conversations. For instance when someone told me "Yea, I found that movie is very good", my Americanized mind immediately ask back "How it makes you so moving? Why and what about it?" If that's American his/her answer is very descriptive. But Japanese are very reluctant to describe their feeling (be it about their own, or about other's) like ordinary American would. Then too much questions make them very uncomfortable about you, the questioner. As a result you are left under impression that Japanese are ambiguous language.

Here is a myth that has some basis: the word "no" is avoided in some situations. You do have to calibrate your meter to reflect the fact that "I'll think about it" can effectively be a flat "no". However, I tend to think the difficulty of re-calibrating is over-rated. People of all cultures I know avoid uncomfortable "no's", and it is easy to find non-Japanese people who avoid direct confrontation to similar degrees.

Yes, you are right. Most people across national border are not so comfortable in saying "NO", even some Americans. In a way then, if Japanese language don't differenciate Yes to No much, then it is a result of cultural backdrop that emphasizes compassion to other's feeling. NO violates their sense of integrity.

Just my personal opinions. Many would disagree.

* Written Japanese, on the other hand, is difficult. And the fact that one can not read for a while also makes learning the spoken language more difficult.

Dan Marasescu wrote:

I'm sure you all know how much some languages, like Hebrew or Latin, owe to religion. But this true story, that a trustworthy friend once told me, took me completely by surprise.

This friend of mine, who is a priest, went to Greece a few years ago, to visit the famous Mount Athos. On his way, he met a local, who addressed him in Greek. He replied that he didn't speak Greek, but the Greek seemed very surprised and said: "How do you expect to save your soul if you don't speak Greek? Don't you know they speak Greek in Paradise?"

My apologies to our Greek colleagues. I would hate to offend anyone, especially that I like the Greeks, but my friend appeared to be telling the truth. I'm sure that person was very particular, but still, the story revealed to me another linguistic myth.