What People Get Wrong About Language - The Ithkuil Fallacy
Вставка
- Опубліковано 3 тра 2024
- Let's talk about the experimental language of Ithkuil, an experiment I carried out, and why anyone would want verb conjugations by person in German.
Sources:
Foer, J. (2012). "Utopian for Beginners". The New Yorker.
Quijada, J. (2004-2019). "A Grammar of the Ithkuil Language". ithkuil.net. [Retrieved 12/08/2022]
My study:
docs.google.com/document/d/1z...
Chapters:
0:00 - Ithkuil
2:03 - The Ithkuil Fallacy
4:02 - My Experiment
5:56 - My Point & Credits
Written and Created by Me
Art by kvd102
Music also by Me
Thanks to everyone who took part in the experiment!
Thanks to my patrons!!
Patreon: www.patreon.com/user?u=73482298
JOIN DISCORD SERVER: / discord
Translations:
Alex375 - German
@miaudelief - Dutch
Алексей Автономов - Ukrainian
palpatinezw - Standard Mandarin
Rubýñ - Spanish
maika_anarchiya - Bulgarian
beeerden - Irish
didnt ask
sorry i was a bad man im good now
👍
*didn't*
@@monkeyboy4015 redemption arc
@Sumerio d'ndit ask
Redundancy is so often used in general speech as a "negative" word, but redundancy is vital in any system so there is no single point of failure. The conjugation of changing the verb with the pronoun provides an auditory failsafe in the same way a fuse provides an electrical one.
I'd change your fuse for a circuit breaker in my case, it adds a better protection and can be reset several times.
Sorry if it seems like trolling - I'm just a humorless pedantic engineer.
I couldn't have said it better myself.
Good point. Who needs fuses anyway?
Ok but it's hard to see it as vital when i speak a creole language with no inflection of verbs for person or number and though we do have tense marking it's not explicitly necessary. Only aspect marking is. Yet my language still manages to drop subject pronouns more than half the time.
Edit: I said beneficial instead of vital
exactly
additionally to the explained verb conjugations, I see the mentioned grammatical gender as similarly useful bc it also causes different forms going along with less misinterpretation
As a German, I can confirm that we designed our grammar for maximal robustness under artillery fire.
Nicht umsonst ist Deutsch ein Sprache für Pferde und Soldaten.
😅
Nice joke but thing is that both German and English language in past were had far more complex Grammar. Seems like more tight family bonds result in more complex grammar with richer meaning
@@karolinakuc4783 not necessarily that exact reasoning, English his 3-5 languages in a trenchcoat because different groups kept conquering the island until latin, french, Norse, and German all had roughly equal influence on the vocabulary. Under these conditions its obvious the language had to become more flexible to accept the constant influx of new words from different language groups. This gave us a reputation & propensity for word theft with a very rigid syntax. (Very useful for science, as we basically never need to translate newly invented words from other languages, and science invents a ton of new words.)
You are making a joke, but I’ve noticed there’s a few qualities that seem common to languages, which are militarily successful. One of them is they have some thing which helps preserve information over interruptions. In languages such as English and German, this is fairly rigid word, orders, and high degrees of recursivity. And language does like Russian, the large amounts of grammatical components, not only active checks, but they also enable you to cut out words to be more efficient. One thing is that successful military languages are rarely tonal. Another thing is, they tend to have fairly large continent, inventories.
@@Mortabluntthat is merely a coincidence
this is why linguists (especially amateur linguists) would do well to learn some information theory. efficiency is only one component of communication
I know!!! but a lot of people with formal linguistics training STILL make this mistake! one way of thinking about what makes different languages cool and unique is precisely how they treat the interaction and balance between these different components of communication: precision, efficiency, latency, etc
I feel like it would help to learn different languages, the less related the better, to see which things they have in common. There is often a good reason why languages are how they are and do what they do.
@@kklein what is the music at the end?
@@Asdfgfdmn just me playing some guitar
@@kklein thanks for answering , it is very soothing and it reminds me of an old song, let me look it up
The interesting thing about redundant meaning in a sentence is also that it enables you to play more with the words, allowing for more options in poetry, that can ultimately result in expressing a deeper meaning.
Even easier in Chinese, where almost every word has 8 homophones.
@@pierrecurie I love how much of Chinese culture is essentially built on puns.
Now excuse my while I gift someone four clocks for their birthday
@@klop4228 be sure that the clocks look like pears for good measure.
Maybe thats why we germans looove our puns xD
@@pierrecurie that remains me to the: _"shì, shí, shī, shǐ, shi"_ Chinese poem. It use different characters with the same sound, "shi". And it has a deep meaning.
In Slavic languages, you can change word order a lot, and conjugation really helps the reader/listener see which noun is performing which verb
old church texts usually have their word order backwards. At least relative to what is considered normal today
In portuguese we have the same thing, funnily enough, usually the way it is spoken is in the wrong order, as for exemple "amo-te" being linguistically correct instead of "Te amo" as it is the ""correct spoken way"". (both are ways to say I love you)
@@Fafuncho wow nice, maybe that's another reason they sound so similar
In addition to that different word orders have different connotations on top of whatever the words themselves are communicating, at least in Russian: SVO is considered the "standard" and is the one used in formal contexts, but SOV is actually the one used most in conversation because it literally just sounds more casual and informal, meanwhile OVS and VSO sound grand, old-fashioned and poetic. All of that is a ton of linguistic information that fixed-order languages like English or indeed Ithkuil are physically incapable of encoding.
@@goldenhorde6944 wow Ty for this fantastic fact! I’m interested in learning more about this!
Keep in mind, Quijada himself treats Ithkuil as an experiment in pushing the boundaries in information density, not as something to be practically used. Brevity isn't necessary the point.
You still need the ability to communicate precisely. From a STEM or philosophic point of view, you need precise terminology.
i guess this is just a video criticising how some people see ithkuil
Yeah, Ithkuil's cool. The video even says that, pushing limits in a lab is fun and informative. The only think it argues is that redundancy in natural languages has a purpose.
@@the11382there is no such thing as complete Precision unless it is one mind talking to a constantly updated clone of itself. otherwise even the most rigorously defined terms will have ambiguity between different agents.
@@the11382When you need precise terminology, you introduce precise terminology. Where's the problem with that?
This reminds me a lot of how computers talk to each other. There are numerous protocols, most of which use some kind of checksum, or meta information, to identify errors in a message. These extra bits of information are _technically_ somewhat unnecessary, but they make communication more reliable. Some checksums are so smart, they can even decipher the message, even if some 1s got flipped to 0 and vice versa.
Hamming code blew my mind when I first learnt about it
and all of those protocols are smartly constructed. but languages today are not.
@@nottletottle Man, wait until you hear about LDPC! assuming you haven't studied it yet of course ;)
QR codes are another example. Around 30% of the pattern can be covered, with the code still being readable (e.g. when companies slap their logo bang in the middle).
Hamming codes are super cool but cover a different problem than redundancy in language, hamming codes protect against corruption not loss, which is why langauges use much more inefficient means of redundancy
I started learning German recently and the "useless" conjugations really annoyed me a LOT at first, this video changed my understanding of its existence 👍
Same with Spanish; I think most learners dislike them at first since they can be challenging but you grow to appreciate them. They just let you express things differently than in English
well, I think some part of this is still useless
like randomly adding -n to words that have -e at the end.
or, the TeKaMoLo thing. Why is it needed? No important reason, but you have to learn it to sound matural.
@@somnvm37 Well the thing about standardized German is that it was made as a compromise between different dialects and especially with verbs it shows. In my local dialect you would say
iich schbiil
du schbiilsch
deer/dii/s schbiild
miir schbiilä
iir schbiild
dii schbiilä
(the orthography is made up, dobble vovels mean long vovels)
As for the TeKaMoLo thing, it's the first time I ever heard about it as a rule. Personally I don't care too much since in colloquial speech you would break it up in shorter sentences anyway.
@@EriniusT Spanish is prodrop, German is not though, Spanish conjugations are not redundant
It really isn't worth the pain of learning for this. I honestly doubt I will ever find my self in a experience hoping that English had these conjugations
Precision is such a nice way of saying the language didn't exist in real life, as soon as a language is born euphemism are created and meaning expanded to cover new stuff
Its true. People intentionally obfuscate the most literal meaning of what can be said because sometimes what we want to say is precisely more meaningful in ambiguity.
It seems ambiguity can also arise out of the even same word. Take for example adjectives that were originally negative like "sick" or "wicked" which have become positive intensifiers, i.e. "that was sick!" or "that was so wicked!" or even "that's the shit!".
Ambiguity seems to be an inveitability with any spoken language because the meanings of words can grow into their opposites for the purpose of exaggeration, emphasis, or irony.
That's my primary problem with Lojban. As an auxlang, the expectation is that people will use it for real life situations. If you have enough people using a language regularly it will inevitably become "corrupted" from its designed form, and in the case of Lojban it will likely develop more syntactic and semantic ambiguity over time.
@@timseguine2 The whole reason we have languages instead of just one language is that people can't remember our learn perfectly. Or just refuse to do so, because it's funnier to write "I forgor 💀".
My take is that "he's tired and emotional" is still precise: it precisely means "he's drunk, and he shouldn't be, and I wish to help him save face to an extent by referring to his drunkenness only indirectly"
This video is really cool. I’m a German living in Japan. For me Japanese is a real challenge. No articles, no conjugation, no declension, and pronouns can also be dropped. As a listener you have to get a lot of information from the context or you are completely lost.
What do you mean no declension? The particles が を に で の and more are very much case markers. Of course the boundaries of each case are slightly different from the indo-European ones, and the horrible way that は (NOT a case marker) is explained in western textbooks help the confusion.
As for conjugations, Japanese doesn’t have a lot of true conjugations but uses a ton of agglutinating verbs to convey precise meaning.
An example of a language that truly takes it very light on grammatical inflection is Mandarin Chinese.
@@somebodyuknow2507 adjectives do not change in Japanese based on what thing the adjectives describe. As does Spanish where you change the adjective based on gender of the word
@@suppositorylaxative3179 That would be because Japanese "adjectives" are syntactically nouns and verbs. When they describe nouns they are treated as relative clauses. And in the broader sense, a system does not have to work exactly like Indo-European inflections to still be a highly inflected system.
What do you mean, no conjugation? Japanese verbs do not mark person, but tense and aspect are there, along with degree of respect and affection. (Tabeta - ate, plain. Tabemashita - ate, respectful. Tabechatta - ate, affectionate. To say nothing of Taberareta - was eaten, Tabesaserareta - was made to eat, Tabetakatta -wanted to eat .... and the -eba, -tara - nagara endings. Just for starters. )
yeah Spanish speaker who tried learning Japanese, we drop pronouns too, but we have conjugation as a back up, Japanese doesn't (have conjugations reflecting the subject), you just have to really pay attention
I'm a live subtitler in English, and I can tell you that the pronouns are always getting mixed up and coming out wrong. It had never occurred to me that this would happen a lot less if we had a broader range of conjugations. I guarantee it happens less in German subtitling.
i like how he brought up the example of "sie und sie" in german, but didn't mention this would also include "you and you" in english (vous et vous in french could also count, but the "respecting" vous isn't really a form in itself).
but "can you do this?" can be confusing if you're not specific.
@@eadbert1935 it seems modern English on the trend to reinvent you plural, in form of "you lot" and so on. Sarcasm: was it really necessary to drop "thou art" to be more official and distant with everyone to be found in the end effectively "dutzen" to everyone?
@@eadbert1935 wait until he finds out the plural sie can be used as a second person pronoun for formal speech.
@@eadbert1935 In English They and You can be both singular and plural. Is Y'all plural or singular? Both, at the same time. In Dutch there are also two forms of you (Jiji/je/u and Jullie). Which sounds fun until you're also a French learner and you unfortunately mix up Je (I in French) and Je (You in Dutch). A great shame
@@falcon_arkaig why do you gringos quit using "thou"?
As a Russian speaker, I don't see this as redundancy, because It allows me in my language to put words in almost any order I want without changing meaning of a sentence. When I am expressing anything I don't think about word order that much because grammar covers me, and sometimes I have a struggle with English, because word order in English is crucial.
German uses V2 word order (so the actual verb comes at the end of the sentence) but is generally a OV language, so it can be quite flexible in which order you say things.
The equivalent of "I will tomorrow swimming go, at the beach", "I will tomorrow at the beach swimming go", "tomorrow will I at the beach swimming go" "swimming go will I tomorrow, at the beach" are all totally valid sentences.
Word order importance in English is best explained by the following experiment:
Place the word Only in any of the blanks:
_He_told_her_that_he_loved_her_.
Each of these 8 alterations has nontrivial differences from the others (except maybe the last 2 but there is still a poetic difference).
English has a lot of weirdness stemming from the fact its so heavily influenced by other languages (because the island kept getting conquered) but it also gained a ton of flexibility in expression as a result. Its still a pain to learn even for native speakers, but as a second language we have a ton of unspoken and implicit rules we never learned but all obey including the exact order of adjectives before a noun. (Its opinion, size, age, shape, color, origin, material, purpose. And we never violate it even in informal speach because it just sounds wrong/off)
Case system is not a redundancy, it's just a way to connect arguments (subject/objects) to the predicate (verb). Consider, however, "у меня нет полноценные понимания лингвистики" instead of "у меня нет полноценного понимания лингвистики". Notice how полноценного agrees with понимания in case, gender and number - that is the language redundancy indeed
@@HappyBeezerStudios Lmfao, never noticed how true that actually is:
Ich werde morgen schwimmen gehen an dem Strand;
Ich werde morgen an dem Strand schwimmen gehen;
Morgen werde ich an dem Strand schwimmen gehen;
Schwimmen gehen werde ich morgen an dem Strand.
that sounds very usefuly for poetry/songwriting.
One additional bonus of features like verb conjugation and grammatical gender is that they allow for greater breadth of expression: when words are separated across an entire sentence, or over a relative clause boundary, for example, grammatical gender or verb conjugations can help identify which antecedent a word is referring to.
Example (German):
(1) Der Mann setzte sich seine Tasse auf den Tisch, *die* nebenbei luxuriös und mit Diamanten ausgeschmückt war. → The man put his cup on the table, which [the cup] was luxurious and filigreed with diamonds.
(2) Der Mann setzte sich seine Tasse auf den Tisch, *der* indessen labil und unstabil schien. → The man put his cup on the table, which [the table] however seemed rickety and unstable.
Basically, the form of der/die/das that is used in the relative clause lets you tell what is being referred to from the main clause. It's an even bigger feature of languages with yet looser word order, like e.g. Bulgarian, where past participles are also conjugated for gender, and so allow for even more inference. On the one hand, these features can be argued to 'bloat' the language and make it harder to speak; on the other, they simplify communication because people don't have to repeat themselves or clarify what they're talking about.
And in many cases it's even necessary as in many situations the verb, or parts of it are located at the end of the sentence.
But it becomes useless if the man puts a different kind of cup on the table, which we call "(der)Becher".
If you have the same gender for two objects, than you have to say two sentences or you need something like this:
the man puts his cup, which is decorated with diamonds, on the table.
@@jonathanlange1339 True, it doesn't always help, but it does make it easier a lot of the time I suppose.
I hate grammatical gender a lot, and I hate this oft-given "justification" for it even more. "Let's make it so that every word has one more bit of information to memorize so that we speak one or three less letters in this not-very-common case". The trade-off is so hilariously awful, that the fact that this is the most "useful" thing about grammatical gender people can come up with should in itself be proof that it needs to be completely abandoned all around the world. And it doesn't even manage to do THAT job properly when statistically it's not going to work the one third of the time both words happen to have the same gender! Talk about laziness creating extra work...
People don't talk about this enough. This is one of the reasons I struggle to enjoy formal approaches in linguistics.
Huh? I enjoy formal approaches in linguistics, and the idea that there is redundancy in languages to overcome potential noise doesn't seem to me in any way antithetical to thinking about languages in terms of formal logic.
@@StKozlovsky it tries too hard to interpret language as a formal system, when it's not. It sure does have features of a formal system, so formal approaches are useful, but the fact that it's not so straightforward is what makes languages interesting for me.
Language is firstly a subjective artform than an objective spreadsheet.
I absolutely agree! Monolingual English speakers in particular tend to see languages as mere meaning-exchange protocols. The situational utilities and beauties of different features and systems are often ignored. In this way, languages are dehumanised and their importance to culture is downplayed.
Keep up the good work!
French monolinguals as well in my opinion
this applies to any monolingual
you are not aware of the features your language has (or lacks) without comparing it to other language.
and quite frankly, i feel like monolingual english speakers are among the less likely to have this type of perception exactly because (even with minimal contact) they’ll be having the realization that - at least the other western languages - are not all about meaning in a very obvious way.
@@weirdlyspecific302 Why do you think so? English is spoken on every continent and in most regions of the Earth. Justifications of English's position of global dominance are easy to find amongst English speakers. Unlike with Mandarin or German, the majority of monolinguals who speak English are not of the culture from where the language originated. Monolingual English speakers don't identify with the language in any capacity. French speakers at least refuse to speak English to rude yanks
@@micayahritchie7158 Most monolinguals will be like this to some extent, but the phenomenon is most pronounced with monolingual English speakers outside of England. Their English has no connection to the English culture, so they experience language as no more than an elaborate series of grunts
+
I took a math course on error correcting codes when I was an undergrad and the first thing they told was that all natural human languages have built-in redundancy which is crucial for recuperating info over a noisy channel and yeah that blew my mind!
What an interesting concept! It reminded me of a Noam Chomsky quote where he differentiated between what he called linguistic competence and linguistic performance:
"Linguistic theory is concerned primarily with an ideal speaker-listener, in a completely homogeneous speech-community, who knows its (the speech community's) language perfectly and is unaffected by such grammatically irrelevant conditions as memory limitations, distractions, shifts of attention and interest, and errors (random or characteristic) in applying his knowledge of this language in actual performance."
Really shows how it can sometimes be good to not look at a concept in a perfect theoretical space but to consider practical things as well.
(like that old physics joke where a physicist says he could predict the winner of any horse race provided it involved spherical horses moving through a vacuum)
Yes. Like me trying to communicate in spanish. Maybe i dont get the brevity of a speaker who can drop their pronouns for easier casual speech, but if i dont remember the conjugation i can still use a pronoun and the infinitive and communicate what i am trying to say.
Also, choosing to use or not use “redundant” parts is also a choice that can change meaning, or imply a style or feeling to a phrase that can take something that might mean many things and make it more specific -or- into something that expresses culture or belonging to a certain group. Dont ask for an example cuz i dont have a good one rn, but you know what i mean.
Gnome Chomsky is still alive when his best friend another tankie Kissinger finally went to Hell? Couldn't the butt buddies go together? I will donate a few bucks for extra coal for his cauldron.
There's also a limit to how dense the information can be in a language based on human comprehension, since understanding spoken language has a strict time limit. Having redundant information effectively dilutes the information content and makes it easier to understand during the time someone is speaking. Ithkuil completely fails in this regard, and it's why no one can actually speak it.
Ithkuil and similar con languages where 5 syllables = 1 paragraph of english are more like an encryption or code, something useful for a computer to use for data compression but not practical for actual human use.
I'm now curious if you had a perfect translation program if it could compress a .txt file better than compression that preserves the data as english but jumbled up. You would probably have to design the conlang to be entirely compatible with english to enable perfect software translation.)
Woah, smart
@@jasonreed7522 you just need to get smarter, and I don't mean that as an insult. Allow me to explain. There are languages that only use cardinal direction. If I were to ask you which cardinal direction your facing rn, you would most likely have no idea, but for the people who use languages with cardinal direction and no left, right, etc, they would just... "know". Same would happen if you took the enormous amount of time to actually learn this language (the more likely reason). Your brain can comprehend 2 words a second, but that's because we don't use much more than that. You would get used to patterns in the speech and build new neural pathways, most likely getting faster and faster both at establishing and recognizing patterns in the construction of various phrases. You would just get smarter, literally. One of the reasons I'm making such a language and will think only in that language.
@@angelocarantino4803Jessie what the guck are you talking about y
@@noneofyourbusiness4133 reading comprehension is taught in the 4th grade. I'd revisit that skill
Years ago I had thought about the the importance of "redundancy" in communication, somewhat inspired by a torturous telephone conversation years ago: I was in Bombay (now called Mumbai) in 1969 conversing with someone a bit drunk in New York through a London operator who helped as best she could through the static, delay and echo effects. I had to hang on every syllable to glean the meaning of words and phrases and was grateful for those little redundancies in language that helped me get the gist of what was said. Also, think back to how early computers would print out everything twice on screen and we had to enter the command "echo off" to stop the repetition. The repetition allows the computer to compare what is sent. If they do not add up to the same thing, it tries again. Communications to space stations require even more built-in "redundancy" to ensure that the communication at the receiving end matches what was sent at the originating end. It may explain why so many languages use double negatives since it would be very important not to mistake a negative for a positive.
"I did not not not not not not not not not not not not not not not not not not not not not not not not not not not not not not not not not not not not eat all the stray cats" Did I eat all of the stray cats?
@@Anonymous-df8it For languages that allow multiple negatives, the negatives can be considered as addition for emphasis rather than as multiplication in which two negatives equal a positive. "Ya nichevo nye dyelal" or, literally translated, "I did not do nothing" is grammatically correct in Russian, for example. Double negatives persist in dialects of English retaining the negative meaning. But to answer your question, Yes, you did eat the cat. The simple way to arrive at that conclusion is to check if the number of "nots" is odd or even. You have thirty-six "nots"; hence, you did eat the the stray cats.
@@Doigt101 And in foreign languages it's even easier. "Damn, that's a lot of nots. The person who wrote the comment really really really didn't eat the stray cats"
May I ask how you're supposed to determine whether the negatives are added or multiplied? Because my first reaction is generally to assume multiplication in the absence of tone. With tone, it's easier to tell if someone is trying to negate a negative vs just repeating a negative word multiple times.
@@angeldude101 In English tone is a good guide to what the speaker intends. Standard English is expected in formal settings and among most middle-class people, except sometimes when being humorous. Dialects that use double negatives with negative meaning stand out by accent and choice of words from standard English.
You are getting at part of the riddle: utility. Natural languages carry forwards because we find them useful (a VERY big range of reasons, I might add). English underwent a weird process of shedding much of its conjugation because of the mixture of different peoples in early medieval Britain. This process was not uniform, nor did it happen consistently across the language. But it satisfied an important need for people to communicate across languages with wildly different grammatical rules. What did English gain as a language? Cognates with everyone, to the point that it can be hard to tell which ones are calques. What was the trade-off? The most complex syntax ever seen. Natural languages also have a harmonic rhythm: improper grammar *sounds* wrong; the rules never need to be stated, they just sort of emerge through use over time.
I recently saw a video on the development of English that raised a really good point related to this. English easily became a European lingua franca since it has a mostly germanic grammar with many romantic root words. Each language group only had to go "half way" when learning it.
Compare that to a European learning an Asian or Native American language, where they have to learn the grammar, vocab, phonology, and alphabet from scratch.
As a Spanish speaker, learning English was weird because of this mixture. In fact I think the basic English vocabulary is harder than the formal one. For example, the first sentences you learn are: hello, how are you? what's your name? My name is. Nice to meet you... This has nothing to do with Spanish. But then you find words like: information, consider, vomit, descend, particular, etc. These words are similar (or even the same) to Spanish words but they're mostly used formally in English.
@@mep6302 I think that's probably something to do with both french being initially introduced as the language of the king and upper class and a period in the renaissance where people got really in to stealing technical terms from the french to sound more fancy.
So a lot of our romance language bits are very much top loaded in the formal, technical and posh parts of the language.
@@mep6302Indeed. When I started learning French, it felt as if I was being very formal. With time that feeling disappears of course. The shared vocabulary helps a lot, and I have a good vocabulary in English, so I know most of the shared French words. In fact, I’m learning the meaning of some English words from French e.g. abrogate.
The endings in German, as much as they frustrate me to get everything right, can also be really helpful in poetry for rhyming. Having so many similar sounds actually can make the sound of a language really pleasant or aesthetic. Looking at the Ithkuil gives me a headache and I would be curious how it would sound and how poetry/prose would be composed in it.
inflected verbs are so easy to rhyme that in some cultures rhyming verbs is considered bad taste by the poetry snobs
There is prog rock in Ithkuil, sung by David Peterson the creator of Dothraki ua-cam.com/video/3uLzdTndP34/v-deo.html the lyrics seem to have originally been written in English
@@artembaguinski9946 I was about to say the same thing. Rhyming verbs is considered to be like the most vulgar thing you can do in Russian
Don't you feel like you're cheating though? Isn't it like rhyming '-ing' with '-ing' in English?
As a Turk, i can confirm that people usually roll their eyes when the same conjugation of different verbs are used to rhyme
5:21 - that 17 was me baybeeeee B)
seriously tho, excellent video and a great point well made. the idea that language has to be absolutely "optimal" just portrays a misunderstanding of how language works and evolves, and the range of speakers (eg. disabled speakers, speakers who are far away, among others) that a language has to cater for in order to be truly as versatile as you'd need for a holistic communication system
Congratulations on your English high score!
Congratulations on beating all your peers, achieving the grand deed of being almost as good as the worst German.
(I'm so sorry, but there's no way I could resist phrasing it that way. There are sentences that cannot be left unspoken once you have thought them up, no matter how flawed their meaning is. This is one of them, and now I wonder if Ithkuil would be able to convey such a statement, or if it is too "perfect" for the bit of communication I just did that goes beyond pure meaning.)
This is just an amazing video! I like how you popularize experimental linguistics methods in quite a simple yet technically precise manner!
thank you so much :D
I second that, as a fellow experimental linguist I was like 😃 when you showed the Mann-Whitney U test at 99% confidence! You don't usually see quite that level of rigor on UA-cam. Great job! 👏
I would love for you to do this experiment with Spanish with dropped pronouns, so you would have English with little conjugation and pronouns, German with conjugations and pronouns (or maybe another language like French), and Spanish with just conjugations. It would also be interesting to see how this affects comprehension between strong accents and different dialects. Some examples of the audiofiles would be good. Fantastic video!
Okay, now I'm starting to think of how to incorperate hamming codes into a conlang.
ithkuil: hamming code editon is the mother tongue of the gods
The way that grammatical redundancies make communication clearer reminds me of the old story of why Italians gesticulate so much: that they needed to have such expressive body language in order to compensate for the noise of marketplaces.
As an Italian myself, I can confirm. Historically, Italy has only become a united country in 1861, but some kind of "proto-Italian" language, as a distinct entity from Latin, existed as early as the 1200s. The political fragmentation on the paeninsula also produced linguistic fragmentation in the form of dialects (many, many dialects...), so this fact, together with the frequent trade exchanges between across the borders, meant that gestures became a common way to get understood, especially in marketplaces, even if the language was fundamentally the same for everyone.
Germany was also pretty much fractured and only become a properly unified country in 1871, but at least until the 1810s there was much more bickering among each other until a common foe (in the form of Napoleon) came and gave them a good reason to become one nation. Under the HRE people identified more with their local state than the whole thing. More than 1000 years of people speaking roughly the same language, but local identity was strong. Even today dialets are more or less a thing. A bavarian or a swiss traveling to the north would have a hard time understanding a low german dialect and vice versa. A form of modern german was around since the 1350s
As a German I am very thankful to be able to just spit out my words and still get understood well, to a point where I can just colloquially leave half my morphemes out and noone cares, like in „smachta“ = „was macht er“ / „was macht ihr“ where the well-hearable conjugating t allows me to reduce the unnecessary pronoun to a simple schwa. „smachste“ would be „was machst du“ etc
So like English "Imma"
Wasn? = Was ist denn?
Ich lieb's XD
Alles klar, Mister Smachta.
Mishearing can be a problem. There was a video I watched that made that so clear. They took words that where all the same except for the first consonant. Like pan Dan fan ban etc. Don't remember exactly what words they used. They had the speaker hold up a card with the first letter of the word as they said it. Afterwards they revealed the person was holding up the wrong letter in each case and said "I bet you heard the word as the letter they held up". It was so true for me, I totally misheard the words. I think the video was explaining the difficulties of learning a new language. That it takes a long time to get past the "mishearing" phase of your language learning journey. Like your brain often tries to hear the sounds you would hear in your native language, getting the sounds wrong. Your brain has to do a lot of work to get all the words a person says in a sentence and not mishear them. Anyway, I can totally see that the more clues you get as to what is said, the more accurate your comprehension is going to be.
That sounds similar to a "brain game" where you have to read words correctly as fast as possible, except all the words are color words and the font color is randomly any one of the base words (so you get the word RED in blue font and need to say RED), the brain likes to take shortcuts and i can 100% see how this can cause problems learning a new language. (I took spanish in highschool but without an environment to actually use it outside of class my retention is pretty low)
Brilliant video! I love the shift in perspective back to "What is language for", I feel that the purpose of things is often forgotten. Robustness and usability are qualities that matter a lot.
I'm gonna be honest, I actually like grammatical gender as a concept. Yes, it's not always done in the best way, like only having a masculine and feminine gender without having a neuter version, but being able to say "a gata" in Portuguese instead of "the female cat" is a lot more elegant in terms of raw information being communicated which I actually really like. Plus, 90% of Portuguese words are pretty easy to tell the gender of purely based off the last letter of the word, so it's more of a minor roadbump than an actual blockade, imo.
If people stopped calling both the masculine and feminine like that, changing it to class 1 and 2 there'd be no problem with grammatical gender
In Portuguese, and the other romance languages, for example, the noun classes are just feminine and everything else, so a neuter exist: it is what's usually called masculine
@@tuluppampam in some languages none of the genders are "masculine" or "feminine" (e.g. you might find animate/inanimate instead, or "common" and "neuter").
Ironically, if grammatical gender were properly implemented, it wouldn't actually help encode information most of the time. One of the biggest frustrations people have with grammatical gender is how arbitrary it is when there's no obvious answer. You might instead try Chinese, which can encode "mother's younger sibling's son who is younger than me" in two syllables: 表弟. It's not a grammatical trick. They just have vocabulary dedicated to the job. There's similarly specialized words for stuff like "mother's eldest sibling", "mother's second-oldest sibling", and so on. In cultures that don't care about these distinctions, you just say "cousin" or "aunt" and you don't care about differentiating the specifics, but when you *do* care, your language can reflect it (see how "second cousin twice removed" has fallen out of usage in common American Englishs because no one cares about keeping track anymore).
Well said. Redundancy lowers efficiency but increases resilience. Slashing public services for ‘efficiency’ sounds great until COVID shows up and you have no spare capacity, for instance.
This reminds me of what i learned in my theoretical computer science classes. When sending information, it is first compressed and stripped of all unnessecery parts to minimize the effort of sending it. Then the second step is to add redundend parts following specific patterns, so that a damaged transmission can be reconstructed.
The high-noise-environment experiment is extremely intriguing! After watching this video, I am thinking maybe those speaking non or less reflective languages tend to speak louder to increase comprehension. My native language is Chinese and I live in Germany now, and I do find generally Germans make fewer noises when speaking in German in a restaurant :)
I'm german. I started learning Mandarin last year as a casual hobby. I was intrigued by the need to pronounce each syllable with full force as to not lose meaning. I'm originally a dialect speaker, so even speaking casual High-German is a strenuous task :p
Mandarin has a couple good examples of this, for instance why it is that yi becomes yao and all the various measurewords.
I think the noise level in restaurants can be explained by culture more than language though, Chinese love 热闹 while Germans prefer orderly silence!
@@kky-jd3xj Just look at Japanese culture. They also tend to be quite quiet in restaurants even thoug there language lacks personal endings, pronouns and they also rely more on tonal aspects than German. And Japanese has many many homonyms. I am always fascinated of how good they understand each other when speaking quiet.
@@kky-jd3xj Culture really plays a big role. Looking at americans and germans, the former tend to be louder on conversation. But brits on the other hand, who also speak english, tend to be closer to the german level than the american one. So it's not language that defines volume.
Never thought about it this way before. As someone who struggles to make out what people are saying (not cause I'm hard of hearing, sometimes my brain just interprets people as mumbling), I really like this.
This video changed my entire world view on efficiency and accounting for redundancy for accuracy. Thank you so much.
And this doesn't even go into pragmatics, where the "meaning" of the words isn't always the intention.
Like the difference between "thats a great idea" and "ThAt'S a GrEaT iDeA" (text is horrible for sarcasm whish is basically 100% in tone of voice but atleast we now have the SpongeBob mocking "font")
Funny thing is that Mandarin requires such an immense amount of vocal precision for tones to be correctly spoken and understood that it results in mandarin speakers having a base volume that is much higher than English speakers since they need to be extremely clear even in loudy environments
Maybe that's also why Germans think Americans speak too loud.
Excellent video essay, definitely agree with the point of the video. Not every single thing in a language has to convey extra information, because it's not a code. Languages can be more expressive, repeat stuff, confirm stuff, have nuances etc.
the funny thing about that is that code often has a lot of repeated or redundant bits, as a failsafe. makes you think: if computers find it useful, then it should be good for humans too, right?
the "redundancy" also allows for more clarity when pronouns and verbs are shuffled around - German has a less rigid word order than English - or if the pronouns are ommited in colloquial speech.
e.g. Sie habe ich vergessen = Ich habe Sie vergessen ≠ Sie haben mich vergessen (I forgot you ≠ You forgot me)
Which is why usually languages with more redundancy have got a less rigid word order
Look at Latin: you can write sentences in any order and more often than not it can still be understood (I learnt that while translating Sallust)
@@tuluppampam Almost, there are a small number of words that have restrictions on their placement in a sentence, but yes, you can put most words wherever you like and have no issues. German also has more options than English, but there are a few rules about word ordering that can get strict and complicated. Mandarin offers practically no choice about the ordering in many cases.
@@SmallSpoonBrigade I had noticed that the more complex the language is grammatically, just generally the superior it is in conveyance, now don't don't take my words for anything the most complicated language I know a bit of is Russian but my knowledge of English suffices to tell where it lacks.
Learning Japanese, was in the beginning really nice for me, because it does not have conjugation, plural and only two time indications, it even has nice verb endings which can indicate that "you can do", "you would like to do", "let us do" or "accidentally do" the verb. But in Japan I realized: making myself understood is easy, but understanding others is actually quite hard. While especially German is on the one side of the spectrum of giving lots of information repeatedly with every word, in Japanese there is lots of hidden meaning which allows for short sentences and fast speeches but the listener needs to know every meaning of the word and find out the full meaning of the sentence by himself (which may be why you see Japanese listeners often nodding and making sounds to show they are listening and understanding our even say wakata= understood)
Studied 10 years, lived and worked in japan and yeah this is spot on. Reading books in Japanese is really interesting because the language can be made so precise that it’s mind boggling, and even if you don’t know this new precise word the Kanji will guide you to immediate understanding. But then you go out and talk to people, you have a whole conversation, then a few hours later you’re in your room like “wait…wtf happened there? Did I miss something?”
Ironically it may be a result of being TOO compact. It’s so compact that the meaning gets packed into the cultural context rather than the words itself, and it makes Japanese so hard to master because there is so much beyond the language you need in order to truly understand it.
This kind of thing is covered a bit in Claude Shannon's "The Mathematical Theory of Communication," which actually gets into precisely defining how good communication systems are based on the ability to "mishear" things, giving natural language as an example. It was the first thing I thought of when reading about Ithkuil, that it would be absolutely trivial to critically mishear or mispronounce everything.
I spent a lot of time reading over the Ithkuil page again and again years ago. The phrase, "a bridge too far" sums it up for me. Yeah, there are some clever bits. But he completely misses the point about efficiency. Packing an entire paragraph into a syllable doesn't save you any time if it takes you 7.3 minutes to properly pronounce that syllable. Or if you have to repeat it 23.6 times before it is correctly heard.
This video is much longer than it needs to be to explain the concept of redundancy. Well done!
Yea so obsessed with efficiency and explained 30 sec of concept in 7 minutes
Classical Chinese writing is extremely concise. In ancient times, paper was expensive, so conciseness was probably more important than redundancy. But I think there were differences between the written language and the various spoken languages. I bet the spoken languages were a lot more verbose. Of course, nowadays Mandarin is mainly used for writing, and there is a one to one correspondence between characters and syllables.
Old Chinese had more complex syllable structure, so single syllable words could have differentiated better. Classical Chinese that developed from it added a unique writing system that allowed to differentiate words even better. As more phonetic changes happened, spoken words became harder to disambiguate, and spoken languages became more disyllabic which is especially obvious in modern Mandarin that has few tones. And now we have to write twice as much to express the same meaning. Also Classical Chinese is much more context dependent though, so i guess we have to learn much less than people had in order to become proficient in Classical Chinese.
There’s another part of this which I’m sure every second comment mentions which is that these ‘human errors’ carry a lot MORE meaning in many ways. They tell us about the history and culture that the language has come from. A lot of the time they even indicate foreign origin, age, original meaning and a lot more than just the word meaning. Spelling is a huge part of this.
Very interesting. Thank you for taking the time and trouble to do everything to bring it to us! All the best, Rob in Switzerland
This was a very interesting and unusual study you've done! Loved the video
I love videos like this that have no filler. Every bit was relevant, clear, and interesting. Subbed.
awww thank you so much :)
I think the reason for this fallacy is that people tend to only look at written language, which, yes, is impractical and seems to have many unnecessary parts as it is while forgetting how we value drastically different things in written and spoken language and how incredible it is that our current languages manage to link them as efficiently and simple to understand as they do.
Excellent theory! Really appreciate the effort you put in to make your arguments ❤️
That was just great! Thank you so much for this experiment!
I studied some Esperanto, like 15 years ago. One of the things that irked me was that it was sometimes "logical to the point of being illogical." Like, if I'm remembering correctly, the interrogatives are built from the same root word, as an example. Learning "who" and "what" was difficult, because the words sounded very similar, and were so thematically related. Different words would be more distinct, and less likely to get mixed up in my mind.
who = kiu what = kio when = kiam where = kie
so "ki" is the questioning word, and u/o/am/e are the suffixes that determines which questioning word it is.
It is pure logic as you say. -u is the suffix of individuals, -o is the suffix of objects, -am is the suffix of time, -e is the suffix of location.
Sounds a lot like they never did any usage testing.
Funnily enough those wh- question particles in English come from the original wh- question particle and others that helped specify the meaning, so we got what, who, where...
Furthermore, it seems to me that the problem is mostly found within you, given how English works perfectly fine with its system and noone's unhappy (it isn't meant as an insult, only as a reminder that you need to get used to language)
@@tuluppampam English works fine because the question words sound very different. Esperanto's don't and would be difficult to distinguish even in good conditions. That's just bad design. It even applies to written language; kiu and kio are only a minor slip of the pen apart.
Words that are likely to show up in the same context should be easy to distinguish. That's a simple matter of usability.
@@Llortnerof to me kiu and kio sound more different than who and what, so it is probably dependant on what you're used to
I once heard a talk mention that a major difference between for example German and English is, that the former lays more of the communication burden on the speaker (hard to speak, easy to understand clearly) and the latter more on the listener (easier to speak, harder to understand clearly). This is true for both pronunciation and grammar - What makes German harder to speak actually makes it much easier to understand in difficult hearing situations.
And given that, on average, more people are listening than speaking at any time, the German way seems quite utilitarian (dare i say efficient) to me.
German language engineering XD
This is interesting. I'd like to see a similar comparison between English with resp. without an accent. With separate comparisons for American and Scottish accents and perhaps more.
@@rosiefay7283 what english would you consider accent-less?
Do you have a link to the talk you mentioned? Sounds interesting^^
@@derpauleglot9772 no, unfortunately not. I looked for it a while ago but couldn't find it anymore
stumbled on this vid by chance, and it's totally off-topic, but I love your outro song... it's strangely comforting.
What a concise explanation of the potential usefulness of redundant information in language - well done.
I think you're spot-on. In aerospace applications triple-redundant systems are routinely used to prevent corrupted communications from causing disasters.
And then you get French, where conjugation happens, it just turns out that thanks to all the silent letters in French they're all pronounced the same. Je mange, tu manges, ils mangent. All different conjugations, but all sound identical.
EDIT: In some cases, it's actually worse than English (when spoken, at least). 'il mange' and 'ils mangent' are 'he eats' and 'they eat' respectively, but both are pronounced completely identically. So not only can't you use the verb to help you work out the pronoun, you can't even use the pronoun itself.
I never understood that myself. If you can't 'hear' the difference, because well, there isn't any...why bother showing it in written form if the SOUND is the same in speech?
Absolutely agree - for me this is the most French part of the French language...
@@jayc1139 pretty bold statement for an English speaker to make lmao. Or is it somehow different when English has homophones?
@@oliviaaaaaah1002 No, it's all terrible. Why even have those endings if it sounds the same?
@@falcon_arkaig so that people could understand something at least in writing
Another great video, subscribed! An additional example of useful redundancy is all the filler in the Ithkuil sample sentence. While not exactly meaningless, 'on the contrary', 'I think' , 'it may turn out' and 'at some point' don't convey much new information, but are useful to help the speaker think of what to say and the listener digest what is being said. A very condense language might work as a written language, but you couldn't have a natural conversation in it.
Wow this video was absolutely amazing. Loved it. You got a new sub. Keep it up with this high quality content
I really like how that observation funnels into the idea, that languages aren't equal in what they demand of hearer and speaker respectively. Languages like German are more complicated to speak, because of its complex syllables and grammar, but is therefore easier to understand, because syllables are more distinct, word endings are marked and information has redundancy. In contrast languages like Japanese are very easy to speak: Very simple grammar and syllable structure. And yet it's really difficult to understand in comparison, because a lot of different morphemes sound the same, word borders are hard to make out and grammatical information is so underdefined, that you have to rely on context clues all the time.
You get the concept of redundancy in genetics a lot, where multiple genes, sometimes exact duplicates, perform the same task. For example, domesticated dogs have a duplicate gene for a protein called amylase which is used to digest starch, while wild dogs have one copy or even a non-functional copy. The thinking there is that domesticated dogs would have had more fruits and vegetables in their diets, so it's more important that they're able to digest starch. It's almost like languages are putting multiple copies of the same information around the place to make sure the information doesn't get corrupted/ mutated. Could be interesting to compare between languages to see what sorts of information get duplicated.
This is really cool! Congrats on a successful experiment. As someone with an interest in morphology, I personally enjoy conjugations.
Just discovered your account through this video and your other videos sound really interesting as well! I'll grab myself some snacks while I binge the rest of your videos :)
I think another reason why German specifically benefits from redundant conjugation is to ease comprehension of the different sentence structures we employ. In a more complex sentence, it helps to match which subjects and predicates go together when these are both conjugated, especially when in ordinary speech the sentence structure is mixed up.
I love this video as a rebuttal to a reduction of complexity to languages! I think you add a lot to the discussion but I would like to add this: In Japanese there are no verb conjugations based on the speaker, and you can very easily drop the subject of a sentence. This would fail the test you made since sentences that omit the subject would not indicate the subject/ pronoun and would be no better than a guess. Japanese works around this by dropping the subject if the context is already understood by all parties which is one of the reasons why Japanese is notoriously difficult to translate into English.
fascinating topic. Great video and experiment
Amazing experiment, really changes your perspective.
True, redundancy in language isn't useless. But the question for a purpose of 'unnecessary' grammatical rules isn't really the right one, anyway. A better question is where they come from. And the answer to this question (at least in the case of conjugation and declination) is that they are generally the result of natural language change. For example, Indo-European languages used to have the pronoun (or noun) after the verb rather than before it as today. Over time, the pronoun became unstressed and was used even when there was a noun. (As in: "The man, he is ..."). It merged with the preceding verb, which led to people dropping sounds. The result: a system of verb endings. Once these verb endings were no longer distinctive enough to be sufficiently unambiguous, people came up with a new class of pronouns which they used in front of the verb in addition to the ending (= former pronoun). This made the endings unnecessary, so they started disappearing even faster.
English is one of the more progressive Indo-European languages, where the endings have almost completely disappeared. Spoken French is even more progressive: Not only have the endings mostly disappeared, but the pronouns before the verb have already started to merge with the verb as well, resulting in a kind of prefix conjugation. (This is not official French grammar yet, as written French is quite conservative and reflects an earlier stage of the language.) As a result, the French have come up with yet another set of pronouns, which they also put in front, although so far it's optional (mostly used for emphasis). Example: "I am" is "Je suis" in French, but is typically pronounced "juis" (normally spelled "j'suis"). You can't emphasize "je" anymore, so the new equivalent is to add the new emphatic pronoun "moi" as in: "moi juis" (spelled "moi, je suis" or "moi j'suis").
Neat! The thing I really enjoyed realizing as I learned German as a second language (native english speaker) was that in Early Modern English there WERE actually verb conjugations. Would be curious to see your thoughts on Early Modern English verb conjugations, as well as why we lost them.
Still remember the day when i subscribed. You had just near 100. now, you have 40K.
Good Job. There's a long way ahead.
Idk if this was on purpose, but there’s a video Tom Scott made where he talks about morphemes. In that video, he brings up “hablo” as an example, but he pronounces the “H” which is meant to be silent. That mispronunciation still haunts me lol
British trying to pronounce foreign words
@@frafraplanner9277 More like any human being trying to pronounce foreign words. Unless the rest of the world got telepathy while the British lucked out or something
lol, though technically the h of that word was pronounced till the 17th century (it comes from a Latin f)
@@Copperhell144 it's okay to hate bri'ish """people""".
@@Copperhell144 It's not that bad really. I've heard plenty of bilinguals pronounce non-English words properly, others just seem outright lazy... I don't know if it's because they ARE lazy, or because they're tone deaf.
one thing that is often overlooked that I've personally noticed happens in both Portuguese and Polish is that, because of conjugated verbs, you can often speak >without< the subject being present on the sentence and still be clearly understood
"Do you drink water? Yes, I drink water" - "[Tu] bebes água? Sim, [eu] bebo água."
the only way I can easily explain this in english is with the third person: Does [he] drink water? Yes, [he] drinks water"; because without the main subject, you would still know that the S at the end of the verb would mean it refers to the third person.
same in Spanish and we even prefer to drop the subject frequently, as it is more comfortable
A language which does this is called "pro drop".
Oh yeah that applies to Italian as well. Not using pronouns sounds more natural to us, because the verb conjugation itself already manages to convey enough information.
Amo = I love
Ami = You love
Ama = He / She / It loves
etc.
@@gabriele1695 yeah, if we say "te amo" that's already enough information
"amo" - verb conjugated in the first person
"te" - second person indirect object pronoun.
colloquial german can do that as well. you can just throw out half the sentence and get the meaning from context.
I would like to apprentice the clear and concise structure of your video. I admire the way you rigourously used the data to support your point.
what a great conclusion to a wonderful video!
a bit of a reach, but it’s also interesting to note that even “natural” systems of information encoding - most prominently, the way tRNA encodes Amino acids - actually has redundancy to some extent, for precisely the same reason; to reduce chances of misinterpretation.
@K Klein What a fascinating, swell little video! And the input of the commenters is nice, as well.
this was a way better and more thourough video than i was expecting subscribing now
I’d be curious to know whether the view that redundancy is useless is more common among native speakers of less inflected languages, like English, or if it’s correlated with other factors. Of course it doesn’t help that the English language spread like wildfire through imperialism and now its native speakers can comfortably kick back and demand for every other language to be more like theirs.
Most people in the UK and US don't even speak a second language, so their opinions are exactly that and nothing else.
Actually there's a reason why Spanish denote the plural with both the article and the noun's ending
It is part of a very complex and useful Latin derived pronominal system
For instance, If I were to say 'Give me the glasses' (Dame las gafas) but without mentioning the object of the phrase as in 'Give them to me', I would simply say 'Damelas', attaching the plural form of the article (las) to the end of the imperative form of the verb 'to give' (Da)
Excellent vid, subscribed!
I never really considered this, thank you for sharing 😊
People are always telling me how German is so incredibly precise and has a word for everything. A superior language, they think, except that it "sound horrible". I'm bilingual in Spanish and German (father and mother's sides). And I have to laboriously explain to them, who have no inclination to abandon this prejudice and who are NOT German speakers, that no, German has no real gramatical advantage over Spanish: we conjugate more or less the same information and case is expressed differently but equaly well, and if anything, Spanish should have the advantage (if there were such a thing, which there isn't) because of the extra freedom in word order. As for "a word of everything", well, that's just compounding! But the idea persists. Also, might I add, German can sound beautifully soft, depending on the speaker (just go listen to a Mozart opera). (Also also, Heidegger was an asshat).
Schubert’s Lieder are good examples of this as well!! As someone learning German as a foreign language I never really understood the stereotype (although admittedly I speak Hebrew which is quite rough and ready, so maybe it’s just a sound-world I’m accustomed to).
@@musicaloats yes, of course! Ah, Schubert!
@@musicaloats The stereotype that German sounds "ugly" or "angry" is basically just leftover WW2 propaganda. Just like the stereotype that the French can't win a war and will surrender all the time. It's stupid and annoying that these stereotypes persisted over 80 years.
@@Ellisepha It's not. Or not entirely. German in the standard sense has a lot of consonant clusters and back/throat sounds that simply don't jive well with Anglophone ears that have likely heard either the frontal, trilled, consonant and vowel, no stress Spanish; or the mouth barely moves, slippery, little stress French first.
And then you have German, which is from the throat, clashes with consonants, and then it has stresses and timing which differ from those of English.
Personally, I like the sounds, and the timing actually makes it easier to listen to than most other languages, but I totally can see why it's stereotypically perceived that way.
Curiously, Russian often seems to get this treatment too.
Bit odd for Germans to take this stance considering Spanish has a significantly more complex and nuanced tense system.
I really like how in polish words like 'he, you' etc. Are optional due to conjugations and so you can chose to use both in situations where it may help, thus saving time when it isnt necessary but still exists if needed.
'Ja poszłem do sklepu', I went to the shop.
Is just as correct as
'Poszłem do sklepu' (I) went to the shop.
Actually neither sentence is correct because you said "poszłem" instead of "poszedłem" ;)
@@xGOKOPx Too stupid for my own language.
You can do it in English too. If there’s enough context you really don’t need the subject pronoun in certain situations. It’s probably the same in most other non pro drop languages too
@@papaicebreakerii8180 could you elaborate on what you mean? Because English definitely isn’t like the polish example; technically you can say “went to the shop” in colloquial speech, but it’s only ever used to mean “I went to the shop.” If you want that same sentence to refer to other subjects without using pronouns… no luck.
Another brilliant video!
That is exactly what I thought too some years ago but you explained it so I can word it! Thanks!
Cool video, but there's some languages where it's just dumb, like in French where half the time you can't here the "redundancies" because it's silence, making it just a pain in the ass to write.
Yeah by the argument in this video, French really does seem like a mistake. Examples for those unfamiliar:
I swim - Je nage
You swim - Tu nages (pronounced the same)
We swim - Nous nageons
We were swimming - Nous nagions (pronounced almost identically, especially when spoken quickly)
Redundancy itself is like that, it's either an extremely useful failsafe for a mechanism *OR* it's a bunch of useless junk getting in the way.
I would suspect (completely blind) that the way the French spoke gradually changed removing the redundant bits piece by piece until the vestigial spelling was all that remained.
Perhaps you already know this, but your proposal that language “redundancy”, as others have termed it, reminds me a lot of one of the criteria for the development of the NATO alphanumeric code words. The words were chosen so that, even if only part of the word “got through”-as might happen in a static-filled combat environment-the message would still be understandable on the receiving end. The syllables are each unique, so that whether you get only the “al” or the “fa”, you know it was meant to say “alfa”.
The algorithm did it again. Show me a video that made me subscribe. Damn, that was interesting. Thank you!
As your experimention showed, the redundancy of an information reduces the probability of misundestanding the information. At this regard, the basque language is a very interesting information. Several suffixes, prefefixes, are added to noun which is more or less a microcosm of th hole sentences
this and the ithkuil fallacy in general both really illustrate one of the things that bugged me the most about the more logic-y chunks of ling (looking at you, pragmatics/semantics) -- language is Natural and by its nature as a human Thing it's never going to really be "optimal" in any one way. could argue efficiency across languages and like feasibility as a universal language due to phoneme inventory etc etc but like, we Made language and nothing humans make over hundreds of millions of years is gonna be all polished and neat
Portuguese verbs, as well as German and Spanish, are also conjugated. But this allows us to have something called "Hidden Subject", which is used when there is no subject or the subject is unknown. Like the verb "to rain", for example, in english they say "It rained yesterday", the pronoun it is used to express the subject, but in portuguese we simply say "Choveu ontem" where "chover", to rain, is conjugated but there is no subject neither pronouns, however, the meaning remains. Also, it leads to funny stuff like writing a whole sentence without a single pronoun and we still would know about what or who it is talking:
"Choveu ontem então *corri* pra casa, *entrei* e quando *sentei* na cadeira *caí* no chão, pois não *aguentou* o peso e *quebrou* , já que *estava* velha"
"It rained yesterday so *I* ran home, went in and when *I* sat on the chair *I* fell on the floor, because *it* couldn't stand the weight and broke, since *it* was old"
In the first sentence, in portugese, the verbs are conjugated in the first person singular in the first half, so it is talking about me, and the second half is in the third person so it is talking about the chair. I marked the verbs in english in the second sentence so you can see where the pronouns would be
That's called personal agreement
A verb takes some conjugation to let know of its subject
Often languages with it leave out subject pronouns, but at times they don't (allowing emphasis through the mere usage of a pronoun)
Great experiment and video
Might be my favourite K Klein video so far.
I've watched a couple of your videos on the topic of conjugations and it has really changed my mind about the seemingly "pointless" grammar rules, so I really appreciate the educational content and how it was easy to digest for someone not too familiar with the field of linguistics
(edited to remove backstory due to privacy concerns)
Please let me add two quasi-rants here:
Although German isn't a pro-drop language, the internet doesn't care and we'll find a lot of "bin dabei" without any "ich" placed before. Like in Portuguese, Spanish, Italian and Russian, German usually doesn't need a subject to add meaning all the time. Of course there's also "Wie geht *es* dir?" and "*Es* ist verboten" but it's like"It's raining" in English - while Portuguese would say just "Chove" and Russian would go with "Идёт дождь." And I agree, there are special cases in German, beyond the ambiguity with "sie" (she/they/Mr./Mrs.)
Articles also are somewhat useless, since no Slavic language uses them so far. They only keep the numerals and have those despicable declensions while counting things, just to kill student's morale, like, why the heck they need singular genitive between 2 and 4? Wouldn't be easier only having two forms like English or maybe just one - like some German words, as Bier?
I'm no polyglot gigachad but I use Portuguese, English, German and Russian (in this order of importance) for daily communication and I started noticing these language quirks only after studying their grammar, otherwise I'd probably never question about any aspects of them.
Cheers!
"Articles also are somewhat useless, since no Slavic language uses them so far"
Bulgarian/Macedonian: are we a joke to you?
Why would a language feature be “useless”, just because a certain group of languages doesn’t use it? I bet you could argue this way for almost any feature. Like, “tense is useless, because Chinese languages don’t use it.”
Just discovered your channel. very cool. Communication requires a certain amount of redundancy, which is why languages have it.
Great video, thanks!
My native language is Brazilian Portuguese, and just like in German the Portuguese verbs have different conjugations for each person, if you take the verb to work for example which in Portuguese is the verb "Trabalhar" you'll found that:
For the Present Tense you have:
eu trabalho
tu trabalhas
ele trabalha
nós trabalhamos
vós trabalhais
eles trabalham
for the Imperfect Past Tense you have:
eu trabalhava
tu trabalhavas
ele trabalhava
nós trabalhávamos
vós trabalháveis
eles trabalhavam
and so on...
Same in polish! You can shuffle the whole sentence around and it might sound funny, but the meaning is still there. You can also cut out parts of it that are implied by the conjugation to make it less repeating, useful for writing poetry or just not sounding like a broken record when speaking for a long period of time. I'll be honest, I jumped on this video to see why someone would think conjugation is useless XD
In lingua hispanica, lo stesso e lo mesmo pasa.
yo trabajo
tú trabajas
él/ella trabaja
nosotros trabajamos
ustedes trabajan
ellos trabajan
yo trabajaba
tú trabajabas
él/ella trabajaba
nosotros trabajábamos
ustedes trabajaban
ellos trabajaban
And Brazilian Portugueseis different enough from Portuguesean Portuguese to be counted as a different language, both are still somewhat similar to Spanish, That can actually teach a lot about changes in language. The same with Norwegian and Swedish which are sometimes even called a language continuum.
Or low german which is still very similar to dutch.
Something that really points out a flaw in english is that when youtube translates the comment to english is converts the "vosotros" form to "you" except that "vosotros" is you plural so its better translated as "y'all". (I learned some Spanish in highschool but remain far from fluent, the grammar stuck better than the full vocab)
I think its interesting that English lost most of its verb conjugations, all thats left is:
To be:
I am
You are
He/she is
They are
(Only one i can think of, and its irregular)
But this probably helps with our propensity for word theft since we don't need to conjugate so only 1 word needs to be stolen and not all of the conjugations.
This is the same argument I've used when people yell at me for using double negatives. If I say "I ain't do nothing to nobody" you're much less likely to miss a negative then if I say "I didn't do anything to anyone"
Bad example, because the correct "anyone" is also (almost) only used with negatives. Its positive pair would be "I did something to someone".
There are actual languages that use double negatives by default
That's a triple negative, which makes it negative again.
In this case, it's unclear whether the negatives are meant to reinforce each other or if they're supposed to negate the other negatives. So... you did nothing to somebody?