Arcane tribal languages in remote settings (South America,
Asia, Africa) would be the most daunting for English speakers. This is because of
their isolation from the mainstream languages of more populated areas, and
therefore have little in common with familiar Roman and Greek roots in the
Indo-European tradition.
If you want to try your hand at a south/eastern European
language, try Romanian. It is the only Latin-based language in that
geography, and shows many cognate commonalities with English. And although Danish is a close cognate to
English, its 27 phonetically distinct vowels make it much harder to understand
and master than Swedish and Norwegian. Also complicating Danish
are its varied glottal stops that are both hard to hear and hard to pronounce for
non-native speakers. While Danes can pick up both these Nordic systems,
both the two other speaking groups have more trouble with Danish, and
pronunciation is exacting (Jens Lund, Ph.D., folklorist and native Danish
speaker).
Are you up for a real language challenge that will allow you
to speak to under 100 other specialists after years of work? Then
consider the constructed language (conlang) domain. Klingon would have to be
one of the most challenging. This language was invented for Star Trek III
(1984) as a formal integrated speech for the Klingons in the Trek
universe. After a dictionary was published, many people dabbled in its
difficult spelling and pronunciation, but only a handful (under 100 estimated)
have become skilled speakers able to converse with each other and understand
the film tracks. In addition, since Klingon speech focuses largely on
spacecraft and warfare, it has limited use for day-to-day conversation. It is
popular with linguists for its creative aspects played out within the general
principles of language.
Of natural languages (as opposed to constructed cases), it
is interesting that Mandarin Chinese is the hardest to learn for English
speakers—because of the thousands of ideographs necessary for written
comprehension, as well as a four-tone scale for meaning. But it is also
the most widely spoken global language (besides Globish, basic English spoken
as an auxiliary tongue). Arabic, Polish, and Russian follow, the first
also forcing a totally unfamiliar writing system. The US Foreign Service Institute
groups languages for difficulty from 1 through 4, with the “Super-hard” Category
4 including Arabic, Chinese (Cantonese and Mandarin), Japanese, and Korean.
Classical languages are more difficult simply because of their
restricted lives in religious and academic contexts, but express a range. "Classical Greek and
Sanskrit are extremely difficult because they are so highly inflected--hundreds
of forms of the verb and numerous case endings. Late Greek (koine) simplifies
the grammar and thus is much easier to read and not particularly
difficult. Egyptian grammar and vocabulary are very simple. Its
only real difficulty is mastering the hieroglyphs, which are very few compared
to Chinese" (Prof. Robert Littman, Classical studies, University of Hawaii
at Manoa).
How about learning a tribal language? There are many
still active around the globe, the most in New Guinea (numbering around 850),
the most diverse linguistic area known. The Khoisan language of South Africa
is among the world’s oldest, at 60,000 years. Closer, in the US, the three leading tribal
languages still spoken are Navajo (by far the largest and hardest) in Arizona,
Yupik in Central Alaska, and Sioux in the upper Midwest and Canada. Navajo
was famously employed as an unbreakable talking code by native-speaking marines
in WWII. They are all difficult, made more so by their roots in exotic and ancient
cultures, arcane to learn and relate to vocabulary—and have only in modern
times enjoyed a written format. Hawaii is the only US state with two
official languages—Hawaiian and English--as of 1978. Along the range of tribal language
difficulty, Hawaiian is among the easiest.
So there are many “hardest languages” out there to
appreciate, if not to master as a fluent speaker, and each has a rich cultural
component. Klingon was born from the constructed science fiction of the
Star Trek universe, so does have a soundtrack, but a steep learning for
pronunciation, structure, and symbol alphabet. Klingon was designed to look and sound truly
alien, which it does as a function of its weirdly off-center profile without
cognates. (However, Duolingo now actually
offers the course.) The most widely spoken constructed lingua franca,
Esperanto, has an estimated million speakers world-wide, but little cultural
baggage (literature, history, religion, film, cuisine). However, fluency can be reached in one-tenth
the time of natural languages, and in itself, Esperanto offers a quickly effective
base for language-learning capability.
-----
Next blog: “Easy”
Languages
No comments:
Post a Comment