The livingest languages

kw: book reviews, nonfiction, language, languages

My youthful conclusion has been confirmed by a linguist and the experts he cites: It is harder to learn German than most other languages. Not nearly has hard as Vietnamese, perhaps, but hard enough. I learned French rather well in three years in high school, and carried on "pen pal" relationships in French for a number of years, with great enjoyment. In my first year of college, I found I needed to learn German if I wished to be a Chemistry major. No substitutions would be allowed. I flunked German 101, twice. After my sophomore year, during which I truly enjoyed the year of Organic Chemistry, I changed majors…I also moved to another state and changed schools, but mainly for other reasons.

Reading Babel: Around the World in Twenty Languages by Gaston Dorren I had the fun of dabbling in his riffs on what he calls the "Babel 20". These are the languages needed to converse with at least half the people on Earth in their mother tongue, and with about 3/4 of all people in a language they know fluently.

I don't recall what I anticipated when I began to read the book. I found that each section, from chapter 20 (the first, on Vietnamese) through 2 (Mandarin), 2b (the Japanese writing system) and 1 (the last, on English) was focused on one thing or a few things that the author found interesting about the language. He speaks six languages and can read nine more, but they are all Euro-based. He spent six months, much of it in Vietnam, trying to learn Vietnamese, and failed. He got so he could sort-of read small portions of the newspaper, in a language that has the most diacritics of any. Even then, there would be at least a couple of words in every sentence he would have to look up.

A word on diacritics. They are accents, dots and other appurtenances added to our "familiar" Roman letters; it is generally considered that they make them into other letters. Written or printed English hardly has any. We have retained a very few, but they are dropping out of use. How many write "resume" when they mean "résumé" (a curriculum vitae, to use the Latin synonym), or "naive" rather than "naïve"? European languages have them, so that "Do you speak French?" becomes "Parlez-vous Français?". Notice the little squiggle below the "c"; it is called a "cedilla", pronounced "se-dee-ye". Both "résumé" and "naïve" are also from French. Scandanavian languages also have letters like "ø". Consulting Google Translate, I find that "Please show me the way to the restroom" becomes "Xin chỉ cho tôi đường đến nhà vệ sinh" in Vietnamese. Both "d" letters have a slash, some of the vowels have two "things" near them, and one "e" has a dot below plus a circumflex above. I don't know what kind of keyboard can be used to write it!

Two things seem to have conspired to make the language impenetrable to Mr. Dorren: firstly, the pronunciation is subtle, such that at the end of his half year of study, he still could not understand a simple spoken Vietnamese sentence; and secondly, the many levels of respect and politeness that affect the terms used, and they way they are written and pronounced. I learned a little of this kind of thing with Japanese (#13 of the Babel 20; my wife is Japanese), which has four levels: abrupt, ordinary (inside the home), polite (common street lingo; what you mostly learn in language classes), and super-polite. There is also a level of Japanese spoken only by the Emperor, and there are male and female ways of speaking. That's complicated enough, but Vietnamese is rather extreme by comparison.

Vietnamese also has six tones. To those who know a little about it, the four tones of Mandarin might be familiar. The way they distinguish the various meanings of words pronounced "ma" (as in "mama" for mother) is a common "fun story". Depending on tone, "ma" can mean "mother", "horse", "ride" as a horse, and it is also the "pronounced question mark". Thus, with appropriate tones, the phrase "Ma ma ma ma" means "Is Mom riding (the) horse?". Knowing that "dui" (pronounced "dway") means "yes", the answer is "Dui, ma ma ma." Tonal languages abound, particularly in Asia and Africa. Cantonese has nine tones. Luckily, you don't have to have perfect pitch to hear the languages. The tones are relative to the general pitch of the sentence and the person's voice, and some tones are moving, such as the way English speakers tend to end sentences with a rising tone or give one-word answers in a falling tone.

As I mentioned above, Japanese is #13. My nemesis, German, is #11, spoken as a first or second language by 200 million. So it isn't actually all that hard to learn. It is just hard for this Francophile English-speaker. But the author does riff for a third of the chapter on how German is indeed harder than average. Each chapter begins with a one-page summary of language characteristics. It includes such things as language family ("German belongs to the Germanic branch of the Indo-European family", while "Arabic is the most widely spoken of the Semitic languages, … of the Afro-Asiatic family"), script (German uses Roman script, but used to be written using Fraktur, which looks a lot like Old English. My grandmother's grandfather was from Germany and he wrote Fraktur), and sounds (including tones and how many vowel and consonant sounds are in common use).

A word about sounds. This is one area in which I was disappointed. Although little variations can cause the number of "distinct" sounds in any language to exceed 100, they cluster around a more limited number. "Standard" English, primarily the language as described in the large dictionaries, has either 43 or 44 sounds or "phonemes". According to my enormous second edition of Websters Unabridged (published in 1979), there are 30 vowel sounds, but to my study, several of them collapse into one another, leaving 23 or 24, depending on whether a following "l" or "r" actually changes the sounds of "a" and "o". There are 20 consonants, but the number of "nonvowel phonemes" is probably 24, which underlies the claim I have seen for 48 sounds in spoken English. Most languages have fewer than this, usually fewer than 40. But Mandarin (I have been told by several Mandarin speakers) has 88 sounds. Most of them are vowels that English speakers who didn't hear Mandarin as a small child (and keep it up) cannot distinguish, and a number of the consonant sounds are also opaque to us. Thus the common question "Are you Chinese?" becomes "Zhōngguó rén ma". That accented "e" in "rén" is a sound I can neither hear accurately nor properly pronounce (my Chinese friends giggle behind a hand). And "zhōngguó" sounds to me like "choo-go", but I am assured that the "ngg" sound is actually nasalized, though to a lesser extent than ñ in Spanish. At the other end of the spectrum, I understand that Hawaiian has 13 sounds, five vowels and eight consonants. Anyway, the sections on "sounds" for each language do not provide a satisfactory guide.

Dropping that quibble, though, the book is a delight to read, and ends on a thoughtful note. English has become the modern lingua franca, the go-to language for diplomacy and international trade (and internet communications), just as French was a few generations ago, when the term lingua franca was coined. Will Mandarin replace it any time soon? The chapter on English, posed as an interview with a native English speaker, reaches the conclusion that the Chinese writing system(s) would prohibit that. Computer-expedited communication works better when an alphabetic script is used. My Chinese friends, when texting in Mandarin, use a phonetic input method, and the software in their phones picks out possible characters for them to choose. A smaller number use software that lets them draw the character with a finger. That method is actually slower! And, as a final conclusion, automated translation software continues to get better, so we may not need a lingua franca in the future. I have no idea if the Vietnamese sentence I used above is an accurate translation. In another 10-20 years, the translations will be of greatly improved accuracy. I already have an app on my phone that lets me say something in English, and it speaks a Chinese, Spanish, Korean, or whatever translation, and it works pretty well. The person's reply is turned into English that might be a little stilted, but is clear.

Too much fun. I understand the author wrote an earlier book about 60 languages. Worth looking into.