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mithridates
Joined: 03 Mar 2003
Location: President's office, Korean Space Agency
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Satori
Joined: 09 Dec 2005
Location: Above it all
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 Posted: Tue Oct 24, 2006 12:20 pm Post subject: |
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| Can't say the sound of it really appeals to me. Korean is actually the most beautiful language, soundwise, that I've ever heard... |
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Hollywoodaction
Joined: 02 Jul 2004
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| Posted: Tue Oct 24, 2006 3:29 pm Post subject: |
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| Satori wrote: |
| Can't say the sound of it really appeals to me. Korean is actually the most beautiful language, soundwise, that I've ever heard... |
French and Italian are much nicer sounding, in my opinion. |
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gang ah jee
Joined: 14 Jan 2003
Location: city of paper
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| Posted: Tue Oct 24, 2006 3:37 pm Post subject: |
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| There are a few Bislama speakers in my department. It's pretty cool. |
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jaganath69
Joined: 17 Jul 2003
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| Posted: Tue Oct 24, 2006 3:59 pm Post subject: |
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| I know a few Pidgin speakers from the South Pacific and am familiar with the possessive 'blong', pretty cool. Actually, Vanuatu has it on its banknotes; "bank blong Vanuatu". |
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Hollywoodaction
Joined: 02 Jul 2004
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mithridates
Joined: 03 Mar 2003
Location: President's office, Korean Space Agency
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| Posted: Tue Oct 24, 2006 6:01 pm Post subject: |
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| gang ah jee wrote: |
| There are a few Bislama speakers in my department. It's pretty cool. |
That's a bit of a surprise but good to hear. I don't suppose you've ever come across studies comparing the length of time it takes to learn a creole (or certain creoles) vs. other major languages that they came from? I know that English without irregular verbs, conjugation, irregular spelling, articles, etc. would be a lot easier, but how many times easier is what I'm curious about.
One interesting advantage is not just that they're often easier, but they're easier in ways that work well in early education (grades 1-6 or so). The faster kids can start using a language the better, and I remember conjugating tons and tons of French verbs in school while only using the language once when we had people from Quebec come in and we got to eat Nutella on bread. Besides that it was always Ms. Lorscheider (yech) that we learned it from and she was also the Social Studies teacher so that was never any fun.
Learning a language like Bislama instead would have been dope. Haitian Creole is interesting too. One other thing I like about Bislama though is that the country is stable and crime is low whereas though Tok Pisin is cool I don't think I'd ever want to visit Port Moresby. One other creole from a nice stable place is Papiamentu, but I've never heard it before. |
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kermo
Joined: 01 Sep 2004
Location: Eating eggs, with a comb, out of a shoe.
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| Posted: Tue Oct 24, 2006 7:33 pm Post subject: |
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| Very fluid sounding language, from what I've caught on that radio station. Mellifluous even. |
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gang ah jee
Joined: 14 Jan 2003
Location: city of paper
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| Posted: Tue Oct 24, 2006 7:45 pm Post subject: |
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| mithridates wrote: |
| That's a bit of a surprise but good to hear. I don't suppose you've ever come across studies comparing the length of time it takes to learn a creole (or certain creoles) vs. other major languages that they came from? I know that English without irregular verbs, conjugation, irregular spelling, articles, etc. would be a lot easier, but how many times easier is what I'm curious about. |
My university has quite a few connections with Vanuatu, and some of the faculty have done field- and volunteer-work there. Happiest country on Earth, they were saying earlier this year.
As far as studies go, I don't know of any empirical studies of the type you're talking about. I suspect that they aren't done, for various reasons. |
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Woland
Joined: 10 May 2006
Location: Seoul
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| Posted: Tue Oct 24, 2006 7:49 pm Post subject: |
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I dunno, Mith. Rotokas has fewer phonemes than any other language (we'll ignore claims about that Brazilian language), only 11, and that's cool. (And by Junior's standards, that makes it the best and most evolved language, since evolvement means less of anything apparently.)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rotokas_language |
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cwemory
Joined: 14 Jan 2006
Location: Gunpo, Korea
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| Posted: Wed Oct 25, 2006 3:04 am Post subject: |
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| Not sure about the language, but Yumi, Yumi, Yumi must be the best national anthem title ever. |
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Woland
Joined: 10 May 2006
Location: Seoul
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| Posted: Wed Oct 25, 2006 5:43 am Post subject: |
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| cwemory wrote: |
| Not sure about the language, but Yumi, Yumi, Yumi must be the best national anthem title ever. |
I'll bet they have love in their tummies. |
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mithridates
Joined: 03 Mar 2003
Location: President's office, Korean Space Agency
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| Posted: Wed Oct 25, 2006 9:03 am Post subject: |
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| cwemory wrote: |
| Not sure about the language, but Yumi, Yumi, Yumi must be the best national anthem title ever. |
I like it too. That's also the name of my ex-girlfriend which makes it even more fun.
| gang ah jee wrote: |
| As far as studies go, I don't know of any empirical studies of the type you're talking about. I suspect that they aren't done, for various reasons. |
Such as? I'm curious because I've seen them done for constructed languages before. |
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mithridates
Joined: 03 Mar 2003
Location: President's office, Korean Space Agency
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| Posted: Fri Oct 27, 2006 7:25 pm Post subject: |
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| One of my favourite parts of the language are the words long and blong. Both Korean and Japanese students have problems with things like close to and far from, or go to and come from. In Bislama it's go long and kam long. The whole language is kind of like Indonesian made out of English, that's what it is. |
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gang ah jee
Joined: 14 Jan 2003
Location: city of paper
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| Posted: Fri Oct 27, 2006 8:03 pm Post subject: |
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| mithridates wrote: |
| Such as? I'm curious because I've seen them done for constructed languages before. |
Sorry it's taken me so long to respond. Got distracted by the origins circus over in CE. Funny stuff.
Anyway, language learning is a really complicated process, and in addition to factors like genetic distance between L1 and L2, postive/negative transfer etc, you also have all kinds of sociocultural and motivation factors. Language learning doesn't take place in a vacuum. So, we have to ask who's learning the languages? For what reasons, and in what contexts? Let's take for example a Korean learner. Even if it is the case that Bislama is easier in some ways, most Koreans (unless they're language geeks like yourself) are very unlikely to be particularly motivated to learn it well. On the other hand, they will have a lot more motivation to learn English. So how can we come to any generalisable conclusions? We can't even do introspective studies in one learner to control for individual differences, since the learning of one language will impact the learning of the other. Add in to that the difficulties of organising the logistics of the study and multiply by the "so what" factor - e.g., unlike constructed langugages, creoles are learned as native languages and don't need empirical evidence to convince people to learn them. All in all, I can't find a rationale for a course of research at all, at least not in applied linguistics. I'd be interested in Woland's comments on this, however.
I would be interested to look at the studies of the constructed languages that you're talking about, if only just to see how they dealt with all the methodological difficulties inherent in the enterprise. |
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