Wednesday, December 30, 2009

Elative Absolute

This article in The Economist tries to determine which of the world's spoken languages is the most difficult to learn. Here's a sample:

For sound complexity, one language stands out. !Xóõ, spoken by just a few thousand, mostly in Botswana, has a blistering array of unusual sounds. Its vowels include plain, pharyngealised, strident and breathy, and they carry four tones. It has five basic clicks and 17 accompanying ones. The leading expert on the !Xóõ, Tony Traill, developed a lump on his larynx from learning to make their sounds. Further research showed that adult !Xóõ-speakers had the same lump (children had not developed it yet).

Beyond sound comes the problem of grammar. On this score, some European languages are far harder than are, say, Latin or Greek. Latin’s six cases cower in comparison with Estonian’s 14, which include inessive, elative, adessive, abessive, and the system is riddled with irregularities and exceptions....

7 comments:

Dezmond said...

I always have trouble with the abessive tense.

Anonymous said...

In 40 years, I'd like to see a scholarly assessment of texting. How will it evolve into common parlance? writing & then... speaking? We already drop lots of final syllables.

Welcome back!

Barbara Carlson
(Had to use Anonymous because Google says my password is incorrect....?)

Barbara Carlson said...

test'g

Barbara Carlson said...

test'g

Johannes said...

Icelandic, i think is one of the most difficult. A young man with some "rain man" talent for languages. They flew him to Iceland to try to learn Icelandic in a week. Somebody deemed it one of the most difficult languages. to learn or speak. In 7 days he became conversant.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qMz3gjl9x-M


"Uuta buta, Solo..."

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