How many languages / What languages do you speak?

No, sorry if that's the impression I gave. I think any "part of speech" that gives you a small number of words to express a small number of concepts, without any way of creating new ones, is going to seem primitive after the next Paradigm Shift. Prepositions in the Indo-European languages have gone through the Neolithic Revolution, the Dawn of Civilization, the Industrial Revolution, and are now entering the Post-Industrial Era or Information Age. There are only a couple of dozen of them in any of our languages, and unlike nouns, verbs, adjectives and adverbs, there is no convenient mechanism for creating or borrowing new ones. (We have doggedly managed to create a small handful of new ones over the centuries, such as "beyond," "during" and "without.") In, on, with, at, by, to, for, over, under... Most of them obviously originally denoted physical relationships like relative location, but as life became more complicated they were pressed into service for a host of new meanings. In time, in love, in English, in disagreement, in the lead... these are all different relationships, poorly expressed by the same word. It would be difficult for me to explain to a foreign student the difference between arriving at a meeting "in time" and "on time," despite the fact that I sense and understand that difference.

Prepositions in English are a handicap. So are verb tenses and noun cases (in languages that decline nouns like German, Russian, Greek and Romanian) because there are so few of them. Inflections generally stifle the development of a language by not being easily adaptable to a new structure of the external world. That was the problem with Esperanto. It has what seemed 140 years ago like a generous assortment of suffixes and prefixes that "allow you to create any word you need," but it's rather awkward in a post-industrial society. The fact is downright embarrassing today that it has a suffix denoting female, but not male. Titles of occupations and such are assumed to be male.

That seems to be a very common way to teach Arabic.

Do they emphasize writing in the early school grades? Perhaps not!

 

You wondered how they teach the written language in school, since you didn't find a lot of written instructional materials. How exactly do they teach it then? There must be some textbooks available somewhere.

Some extremely small closed classes reflect logical abstraction and are, therefore, probably as timeless as arithmetic. E.g., personal pronouns: One would suppose that I, you and he will be the only people we can talk about for all eternity, no matter where society's structure and technology take us. (Chinese dispensed with the he/she/it variants of the third person pronoun in ancient times.) But larger closed classes, such as prepositions, which attempt to catalog all possible types of relationships, are doomed to obsolescence. A farming society living in permanent villages is going to have a lot more types of relationships between nouns and activities to describe than nomadic hunter-gatherers. People whose lives are full of engineered technology will have even more, and 21st century humans who live a large part of our lives in a virtual universe will have still more.

I agree that the class of prepositions would be useful instead of limiting if it were not closed. The Indo-European languages have a taboo against coining new prepositions.

However, after studying Chinese I have the same criticism of a language structure with a limited set of classes. Nouns, verbs, adjectives, adverbs, conjunctions, prepositions, numbers... this is starting to look very much like the structure of computer programming languages. They become obsolete very quickly as the hardware engineers hand new domains over to the software engineers and the limitations of their languages prevent them from developing high-quality software efficiently. Programming languages reflect the structure of the universe they were built for, and human languages do the same thing.

China, the world's oldest continuous civilization and possibly the world's oldest continuous society going back to the Neolithic Era, has had to adapt to Paradigm Shifts in the structure of its universe. Its solution has been to simplify its language structure, making it more adaptable. It only has two parts of speech, each of which are expandable without limit, no inflections, and it has lost paradigms that once seemed like sensible representations of reality such as singular/plural and past/present/future.

Chinese has done an admirable job. The Wikipedia article on analytic languages goes to great lengths to define Chinese particles. But in practice

• There are only three or four of them; di for possessive and dei for participial are merged into de in standard Mandarin
• Their practical purpose is to parse spoken sentences
• They can be omitted when the meaning is clear without them, and often are in writing where homonyms have distinct characters

I don't know anything about Finnish. My knowledge of inflection in non-Indo-European languages is limited to a cursory view of Japanese and Hebrew. The Japanese language is full of ritual and formality, and a Zen master would surely insist that struggling to express oneself in Japanese builds character.

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Inflection builds a type of complexity into a language that is recursive: it's about the language itself rather than about its use as a technology for communication. If it's difficult to create new prepositions to describe an increasingly rich and complex world, how difficult is it to create new inflections?

I am not as critical of English's word-building engine, which includes tools borrowed from other languages, because it is not a closed paradigm. We find Germanic, Greek and Latin elements like "un-," "ize" and "-able" useful, so we use them. (Sometimes all at the same time as in "unrealizable," a word that would frustrate a traditional etymologist.) As we need more, we invent them or find them. In America we already use Russian "-nik" and Spanish "-ito." "E-", our own prefix meaning "online," is well established.

 

That's becoming quite common. It's fashionable now in L.A. for children of Latino immigrants not to know Spanish. A few years ago the DJs on the leading Latin music radio station had to switch to announcing in English. And the Rednecks worry that Mexican immigrants are going to destroy our culture!

Still it's unfortunate. Since most of the thoughts of most people are formed in words, I agree with the scholars who insist that our thoughts are shaped by our language. Knowing a second language not only gives you a second way of thinking, but it also allows you to analyze your thoughts in both language by an external standard, something most people can't do. I was rather inarticulate in English and struggled to express myself until I started to study Spanish.

When you start studying Latin you will kick yourself in the butt for not learning Spanish when you had the chance. 3/4 of the vocabulary would be at least vaguely familiar, and the complex paradigms of verb conjugation that bewilder most anglophones would make intuitive sense.

Actually "Irish Gypsies" is a misnomer. The Irish Travellers, as far as we can tell from their DNA and culture, are an Irish people, not members of the Indic people who migrated west to Byzantium a thousand years ago. Many similarities between the Traveller and Gypsy lifestyle, as well as the way they're treated by the surrounding populations, reinforce the erroneous notion that they're related.

The language of the Travellers is widely known as Shelta, and strictly speaking it is not a language at all, but a "cant" or "secret argot" developed artificially to prevent outsiders from understanding them. Its vocabulary is predominantly Irish Gaelic with borrowings from English and Rom (the language of the true Gypsies), with a lot of deliberate fanciful twists like swapping letters and turning words backwards. But the structure and syntax of the language is based on English.

The origin of Shelta goes back at least 300 years and possibly earlier. The modern form of Shelta has been heavily hybridized with English and the name "Gammon" may be used to distinguish it from its predecessor which was purely Celtic in vocabulary if not structure.

The opening line of The Lord's Prayer for comparison:

• Irish: Ár n-Athair atá ar neamh, go naofar d'ainm.
• Shelta: Mwilsha's Gater, swart a manyath, Manyi graw a kradji dilsha's manik.
• Modern Traveller cant or "Gammon": Our Gathra, who cradgies in the manyak-norch, we turry kerrath about your moniker.
• English: Our Father, who art in heaven, hallowed be thy name.

There is currently a critically acclaimed TV show on fX, a U.S. cable channel, called "The Riches," about a Traveller family who are living a high life in Louisiana after stealing the identities of a dead family. It's well researched and uncompromising in its portrayal of Traveller culture and their interaction with "Buffers," which is what they call us. It's a typical American sitcom with plenty of laughs but frequent sojourns into dramatic situations and social commentary. Oddly enough the stars are British: Eddie Izzard and Minnie Driver, doing perfect American Southern accents (the only American dialect most British actors can get halfway right).

There are several thousand Travellers in the U.S., around 25,000 in Ireland, and two or three hundred thousand in the U.K.

One Shelta word that has become an everyday word in British English is "bloke" for "guy." Shelta "moniker" for "name" was common slang in the U.S. early in the last century. Both of these words have fairly well-established origins in Irish.

 

Of course. But I thought it was time somebody came up with a simple scale so I invented my own. It's still the only one I've seen. I think the advantage is being logarithmic. Learning 500 words when you only know a thousand vastly improves your mastery of the language, but learning 500 words when you're already getting along pretty well in a language doesn't have quite the same impact.

I don't think I ever knew 500 and probably less than half of that now since I don't keep in practice.

I'm only concentrating on oral/aural fluency. Some languages are easier to understand in print than spoken (French, Danish) while others are the opposite (Chinese). In languages that use the Roman alphabet I'd suppose that understanding writing is easiest and understanding speech is hardest. Making yourself understood in speech and writing are in the middle but the order varies from one language to the next. Some languages are very challenging phonetically (Czech) and it's difficult for people to figure out what you're trying to say. Others come at you in overdrive (Italian) and you can't parse the sentences.

That's a milestone for anyone in any language. Psychologists say the giveaway is whether you or anyone else ever speaks the language in your dreams. Although I don't find that very helpful since the only other language I've ever heard in a dream was Portuguese. I've had very few opportunities to converse in it so I can't believe I can think in it. I know I can think in Spanish, Esperanto and Chinese, although my thoughts are more limited than in English.

That helps. The biggest factor is age. The younger you learn your second language, the quicker you'll attain both fluency and thinking. The second biggest factor is already knowing a second language; the third is much easier even if it's totally unrelated. Learning a second language as a child makes it easier to learn a third, even decades later.