I happened to re-read a comment the other day
and suddenly it occurred to me that I have to clarify one thing some people
seem to have misunderstood:
A language being primitive and a language
being easy to learn are totally not the same thing.
Thai is more primitive than English, but it's
much harder to learn (unless you're Laotian, of course).
Hanji ideograms are harder to memorise than
the Latin alphabet, but if Chinese were written in Pinyin instead of Hanji, it
would be easier to learn all right, but its expressiveness (its capacity of
distinguishing nuances of meaning) would be exactly the same as before.
Or if Latin had only 1 declension instead of
5, it would make it no more and no less expressive.
If English had 20 different ways of building
the noun plural (like, you'd have to say "desktix" instead of
"desks" and "chairlor" instead of "chairs"), it
would neither increase nor decrease its expressiveness. It would be different if
"chairlor" meant one thing and "chairtix" meant another
thing. That would increase your choice of expressing various meanings. But if
"desktix" and "chairlor" were the exact same grammatical
form, and you'd just have to remember that you mustn't say "desklor"
or "chairtix", then it would be a mere complication without any
useful purpose. It would make the language harder to learn but not more
expressive.
Therefore, a greater or smaller regularity of declination
or conjugation has nothing to do with how primitive a language is. What matters
is how many different meanings you can express. If a language doesn't have a
past tense, it doesn't matter if all the verbs are irregular. You still have
to talk about the past in a roundabout way, so in this particular respect this language is more primitive than a language whose verbs have a past tense.
Let me repeat this one more time to make it
absolutely clear:
Speaking of expressiveness, the point is not
how difficult a language is to learn. The point is how precisely you can say
things.
If A-language says
"alcoholics are repulsive"
and B-language says
"human many drink much much fire water me
much much no like"
then B-language is not only inefficient,
needing many more sounds to express the same thought, it's also likely to lose
a lot of meaning along the way, because when a simple 3-word phrase like
"alcoholics are repulsive" becomes a much longer 12-word phrase, then
a phrase like "I feel it's intolerant to hate alcoholics" might be so
long and complicated that, firstly, one would have to read it several times to
comprehend it, and, secondly, no one would bother to say it in conversations.
Scientific works in B-language would certainly be much longer than they are in
A-language, require much more effort to understand, and still contain much more
inexactness.
To bring a more down-to-earth example, in
Russian you add one prefix and one suffix and "играть" becomes
"доиграться", "считать" becomes "досчитаться",
and so on.
How many words would one need to adequately
translate "доигрался!" into English? I have no idea. Now, far be it
from me to deny that there are professional translators or otherwise
linguistically talented people who can find a way to convey that meaning
adequately in English, but the point is that in everyday language, native
English speakers just don't bother with such nuances because it's too
complicated and lengthy, and Russians routinely use this grammatical
construction in their everyday speech and Internet chats because it's no effort
at all. And this is just one example out of many. I can't even begin to describe (especially in English) my utter fascination with all those "выпросила", "доотдохнул" and "подуспокоилась". In English, you get a mere skeletal description of the facts and have to fill up all the subtle nuances with your imagination. Either that or wade through cumbersome sentences laying out with great trouble a mood Russian gets across with a word or two.
The same goes for my native language which is
very different from Russian. I write a lot in English, and it's part hilarious
and part horrifying to see every now and then how I would have to use 10 or 20
words in English for really elementary things. In my language, you just say it
without a second thought, in English you have to think really hard how to
explain what that nuance means. Needless to say, most times I don't bother. I
just say something simpler and shorter. So do (needless to say) the native
English speakers themselves.
