John McWorter, lecture notes from "The Story of Human Language" p122 "Cree and Ojibiwa are so complex that children are not fully competent in them until the age of 10" McWorter is an expert on pidgins and creoles. He sees the creoles as being the simplified languages with all the hard stuff left out because immigrant plantation workers in the field can't be bothered to learn the irregularities or hard parts of the host country. On the other hand, when language communities are at rest for 1000s of years without needing to make concessions to adult language learners, you get American Indian language and Georgian levels of complexity.janKipo wrote:Well, I don't know what languages these might be that a native speaker doesn't learn until he's 11 or so
Among the IE languages, Danish has a reputation for causing delayed speech among children on account of it's fierce phonetics (the grammar is no more complicated than Swedish or Norwegian), I can't find the ref at the moment.
The relative difficultly of an adult learning a language is confounded by the fact that adults know one language and will be able to learn similar languages easily. The research on children's language acquisition is a better measure of how complicated the language is. For example, kids learning English go through a phase of over-applying rules (assuming past tense is regular for all verbs). I assume the corresponding Esperanto speaking child would get to that stage at about the same time, but once he was there, he's done, while the English speaking child is just getting started on learning the exceptions to the rules.
Someone once said of a verbless conlang that glossed everything as "being-in-a-state-of", "The author is-in-a-state-of pulling our leg."From what I remember of the talk a few years ago, the claim that kelen is verbless is a matter of definitions.
All of the languages with small numbers of verbs tend to also have inflections. When I looked at the language with 3 verbs, the 3 verb part was a morpheme embedded in a fierce long looking word (it looked like verbs were formed by taking nouns and adding do-make-go to them, the final word is more complex than a 3 verb language implies).
I think this is going to depend on how the post verb-pre e grammar evolves. As long as we can presume that that section is a negation or adverb, then no problems. As soon as it could be several things, then it's going to be better to move manner to a la phrase just to keep it separate. (imho)I'm not sure that regular adverbs (pona, ike, mute. musi, etc.) should ever go in the 'la' phrase; the place and time cases are another matter
Still feels like a gap in the specs. If I was feeling conservative, I'd say: jan li pana e nimi Jowan tawa jan lili sama. The prep phrases are pragmatically off center stage and that is a problem, I suppose it could be solved by moving it post-verb/pre-e, having 2 e-phrases, having what looks like a PP before the e, I'm not sure if any of these are better than the other. If I was feeling avant garde, I would say-- jan li nimi pi nimi Jowan e jan lili sama. It needs a separator, and once a separator there the proper modifier has to modify something. If it wasn't a proper modifier, then we'd have a oddity, a pi followed by 1 word. Anyhow, pi sometimes feels like the separator of last resort.There are a few verbs which also take NP complements: definitely 'nimi' (N) takes the name involved when transitive: 'jan li nimi "Jowan" e jan lili sama' (deferred using 'kepeken' apparently). There has been a suggestion that the verbs (all actually V, I think) that take quotations as deferred direct objects mark the subject of the thought/talk/writing as a modifier of the verb (so, using 'pi' if more than one word is involved) and I suppose that making it a NP complement instead would serve as well (though I am coming around to thinking that the habitual solution, just putting it in as the DO, makes as much sense as -- or more than -- other proposals).
Noun phrases often need to be repeated to force co-ordination.(btw, how is 'toki e ni:S' significantly more verbose than "say that S", which it mirrors exactly?)
mi toki e sona ni: sona li pana e nanpa wawa tawa jan. I'm talking how knowledge of numbers give us power.
mi pona e ilo ni: kulupu sona li jo e ilo jan. I'm repair the schools robot. (ok, it's a bad example because it doesn't *have* to co-ordinate in this sentence)
No POS masquerades as another POS, but some words may function in the home function of a POS not its own. Indeed, in tp, most words can and a goodly number do.[/quote]