Talk:Language complexity

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Lede needs NPOV

Nice article. I suggest that the lede could be made a little bit more neutral. Right now it says

...that all human languages are equally complex ... is ... an implication of Chomskian linguistics, which postulates that all human languages are underlyingly the same. However, there is no objective reason to believe this is true, and much reason to believe it is not.

I think that a Chomskian would find that last sentence to be POV. Maybe you could say there is

no empirical support for that theoretical prediction, and there is empirical evidence to the contrary.

Duoduoduo (talk) 19:55, 2 December 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Spanish more complicated?

Spanish is also considered to be much more complex than English

Reference, please? I consider English somewhat more complex and harder to learn:

Spanish verbs have a few more tenses than English; most tenses correspond. In each tense/mood combination, Spanish verbs have 5 or 6 person/number forms; English verbs have 1 or 2 except for "be", but the pronoun is expressed separately. Both have some irregular verbs and the suppletive verbs ir/go and ser/be.
Both have rich vocabularies, with a Romance/Germanic base enriched by the other and lots of borrowings.
Spanish orthography is close to phonetic. English orthography is really difficult. Spanish has a few homophone pairs like haya/halla and izo/hizo, but not nearly as many as English, which also has lots of homographs that Spanish doesn't.
Spanish has five vowels and two kinds of reduction: one inherited from pre-classical Latin (e.g. amigo:enemigo) and also found in English (e.g. apt:inept) and one peculiar to Spanish (ue:o:u, ie:e:i). English has about twelve vowels and much vowel reduction.

So the main difference is the orthography and phonology, and like French, English is more complex. phma (talk) 05:22, 12 February 2012 (UTC)[reply]

English grammar and vocab are both more complex than Spanish. I think s.o. was joking. Deleted. — kwami (talk) 05:26, 12 February 2012 (UTC)[reply]