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Postings from April 2001
>>>>> "Dan" == Dan Sugalski <dan@sidhe.org> writes: Dan> Dunno--the older a language is, the more regular it seems to Dan> be. (The rough edges get worn off, I assume) While Latin had a Dan> reasonably complex set of rules, it was more regular than Dan> English. Japanese feels the same, though I'll grant I've little Dan> enough experience with it that my impression might be wrong or Dan> incomplete. I'm fluent in Japanese (lived there for 6.5 years, married to a woman who didn't speak English until we moved to New York), and I'd have to say you are very wrong. But, your impression is only natural, if your experience with the language is limited. When you learn a new language, you start off by learning its regularities. Only when you start to approach a more advanced level of understanding do you begin to learn the really twisted irregularities that are an inevitable side effect of centuries of linguistic evolution. Japanese doesn't have the perverse spelling rules of English, for example, but it does have plenty of special cases and cultural oddities. Enough so that I would not say it is "regular". More so than English perhaps, given the relative cultural and geographic isolation under which it evolved. English, by comparison shows the effects of protracted foreign occupation of English speaking peoples by conquerors who spoke a foreign language. Japan, in contrast, has no "independence day" because until 1945, they had never been invaded and conquered. Even still, Japanese isn't immune to the effects of "foreign influence". Most of the vocabulary for technology and science are taken from English, and a number of Dutch and German terms have crept into the vocabulary as well. But most of this was introduced in teh last century, since the "Meiji Restoration" in the 19th century, when Japan realized that thay had better start paying attention to the rest of the world. The Dutch influence goes back a bit further, but it is not that deep.