Manny’s Reviews > Language Interrupted: Signs of Non-Native Acquisition in Standard Language Grammars > Status Update

Comparisons between Malay and Tukang Besi. It was smart of him to keep this chapter for last.

Now starting on Malay, and groping around for a reference point. Well, it belongs to the same superfamily as Hawaiian...

Read the chapter on Persian, now on Arabic. This book is making more and more sense...

Finished the chapter on Chinese. Nice to see the author complaining too about how hard this stuff was to follow...

"If Mandarin is Dutch, Cantonese is High German". So Mandarin got simplified too, but not as much as English.

All the things English has lost and other Germanic languages haven't. It's an impressive list!

A long comparison of Estonian with Saramaccan creole, to demonstrate that Estonian grammar really is more complex.

A whole chapter to show some languages have more complex grammars than others. Can the mathematician at the back stop giggling? Not funny.

He thinks that the grammar of a language only becomes radically simplified as a result of contact phenomena. A bold claim!

Just arrived! Yum.