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La complejidad de los idiomas
Este libro recorre distintos campos de la lingüística (fonología, morfología, sintaxis, semántica) en busca de las principales características que hacen que los idiomas sean más simples o más complejos. Luego procura medir dichas características, a través de indicadores tales como el número de sonidos, la extensión promedio de los enunciados o la frecuencia con la que se repiten las palabras. Tales medidas son a su vez comparadas entre sí, a fin de detectar posibles «efectos de compensación» que indiquen, por ejemplo, si un idioma que tiene palabras más largas tiende por otro lado a usar oraciones más cortas. En todo este recorrido, el autor introduce una serie de conceptos tomados de la lingüística cuantitativa, es decir, del estudio del lenguaje a través de métodos estadísticos. Para ello hace un uso extensivo del Atlas Mundial de Estructuras Lingüísticas (WALS), que es probablemente la base de datos más completa sobre características de los idiomas a nivel internacional. También relaciona sus resultados con teorías elaboradas por diferentes corrientes del pensamiento lingüístico, que hacen referencia a factores de tipo biológico, funcional, histórico y geográfico.
254 pages, Paperback
Published December 22, 2016
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October 15, 2020
Having had several discussions with a British Spanish-speaking polyglot friend on the differing levels of complexity among languages, I was intrigued by this title, and went to a fair bit of trouble to get a paper copy of it. I recommended it to my friend so we could discuss it together.
It starts out with a good first chapter that provides a fairly solid overview of the issue of linguistic complexity as a whole. But as it got down to the nuts and bolts, many weaknesses came out. First, the author mistakenly describes Saussure as "French"- he was in fact Swiss. Most egregious were a few wildly ungrammatical German example sentences, which really made me lose confidence in the author. Then came a series of parameters for comparing the complexity of languages, in which having contrasting forms of 'to be' corresponding to Spanish "ser" and "estar" was classified as a key marker of more "complexity" - while making no mention, e.g., of the use of adjectives that also function as stative verbs (as in Chinese, but many other languages as well), with no 'to be' verb at all. Also having tones vs. not having tones was classified as being "more complex" - something I consider highly subjective. There are, according to some sources, more tone languages in the world than non-tone languages, and one could easily argue that a tone system is in fact simpler than, say, an English-style word stress system.
The book goes on to use various statistical methods to establish whether "complexity" in one aspect, e.g. phonetics, is in any way correlated with less complexity in another, e.g. morphology. I personally was unconvinced by the methods and the findings.
In addition, using a translated ancient fable with personified inanimate entities ("The North Wind and the Sun") to compare things like "length of an utterance" and the ratio of tokens to types I also found way too narrow a basis for any kind of generalization.
On the other hand, the book did provide some new approaches toward thinking about complexity in language, and I learned about how Kolmogorov used compressibility as a measure of complexity. I'm not sure how well you can really identify all of the redundancy in any sample of language, since much is hidden, e.g. in the use of near-synonyms, but it's something I will give further thought to.
The language is very clear, precise and easy to read, assuming a reading knowledge of Spanish and some acquaintance with linguistics.
If the author is interested in improving the work, he might give some thought to collaborating with others who have specialized knowledge and experience in the areas in which this volume falls rather short. Its fairly obvious shortcomings account for the three-star rating, but having come away with some new cud to chew away at for a while, I'm still glad I read the book.
It starts out with a good first chapter that provides a fairly solid overview of the issue of linguistic complexity as a whole. But as it got down to the nuts and bolts, many weaknesses came out. First, the author mistakenly describes Saussure as "French"- he was in fact Swiss. Most egregious were a few wildly ungrammatical German example sentences, which really made me lose confidence in the author. Then came a series of parameters for comparing the complexity of languages, in which having contrasting forms of 'to be' corresponding to Spanish "ser" and "estar" was classified as a key marker of more "complexity" - while making no mention, e.g., of the use of adjectives that also function as stative verbs (as in Chinese, but many other languages as well), with no 'to be' verb at all. Also having tones vs. not having tones was classified as being "more complex" - something I consider highly subjective. There are, according to some sources, more tone languages in the world than non-tone languages, and one could easily argue that a tone system is in fact simpler than, say, an English-style word stress system.
The book goes on to use various statistical methods to establish whether "complexity" in one aspect, e.g. phonetics, is in any way correlated with less complexity in another, e.g. morphology. I personally was unconvinced by the methods and the findings.
In addition, using a translated ancient fable with personified inanimate entities ("The North Wind and the Sun") to compare things like "length of an utterance" and the ratio of tokens to types I also found way too narrow a basis for any kind of generalization.
On the other hand, the book did provide some new approaches toward thinking about complexity in language, and I learned about how Kolmogorov used compressibility as a measure of complexity. I'm not sure how well you can really identify all of the redundancy in any sample of language, since much is hidden, e.g. in the use of near-synonyms, but it's something I will give further thought to.
The language is very clear, precise and easy to read, assuming a reading knowledge of Spanish and some acquaintance with linguistics.
If the author is interested in improving the work, he might give some thought to collaborating with others who have specialized knowledge and experience in the areas in which this volume falls rather short. Its fairly obvious shortcomings account for the three-star rating, but having come away with some new cud to chew away at for a while, I'm still glad I read the book.
Displaying 1 of 1 review