domenica 26 novembre 2017

Creole, innatedness of language, complexity

In the previous post I exposed the ide of Chomsky that part of the language is inante and that the inante part is the capability to merge two units into a new one. A few linguists think that many more rules of syntax are innate, basing on the study of creoles. Creoles are languages born in colonial areas where peopel from different countries meet together. The children of these people "inventend" new languages which are a a mix of many languages and have a simplified but perfectly functional grammar. Creoles arose many times in various places where the colonizers brought workers from different colonized countries (The antilles, New Guinea etc.), and a remarkable feature of these languages is that they share essentially the sme grammar. For instance the order of words is usually subject verb object, whereas among all languages other forms (for instance subject object verb like in latin) are very common. This led a few linguists to believe thatre is a basic grammar ahrd-wirde in the brain and that the infinite variation existing among languages is a cultural developemnt.

I was watching a video from the Economist in which a British said that he did not like American since it is pretty basic. American is in many ways more expressive than British English (it is almost impossible to speak of philosphy in British english whereas it is not so difficult with the syntax of American englisth, which I therefore use), but it is true that it looks much simpler than British English. Linguist assume that all languages have more or less the same complexity, but many languages are simpler to master. It is largerly a matter of affinity with his own mother tongue (French is easy for an Italian but difficult for an english speaker), but it is quite obvious that some languages are "easier": Malese is quite simple to learn, and many find greek (an extremely complex language) much esasier than latin. Since creoles are among the "easieast" languages, and assuming that the gramamr of creoles is actually the basic grammar of human language, that means that easiness is not relateed to the complexity of the language, but to the distance from this basic grammar. As a matter of fact British English is an infinte series of idioms, which arose thorugh use, whereas American enlighs is probably actually more basic, as stated by the mildly racist British of the viedo.

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