View Content #10543
| Contentid | 10543 |
|---|---|
| Content Type | 1 |
| Title | Article: In Search of the World’s Hardest Language |
| Body | From http://www.economist.com/world/international/displaystory.cfm?story_id=15108609 Assessing how languages are tricky for English-speakers gives a guide to how the world’s languages differ overall. Even before learning a word, the foreigner is struck by how differently languages can sound. Beyond sound comes the problem of grammar. Beyond Europe things grow more complicated. Take gender. Twain’s joke about German gender shows that in most languages it often has little to do with physical sex. Linguists talk instead of “noun classes”, which may have to do with shape or size, or whether the noun is animate, but often rules are hard to see. George Lakoff, a linguist, memorably described a noun class of Dyirbal (spoken in north-eastern Australia) as including “women, fire and dangerous things”. To the extent that genders are idiosyncratic, they are hard to learn. Bora, spoken in Peru, has more than 350 of them. Read the full article at http://www.economist.com/world/international/displaystory.cfm?story_id=15108609 |
| Source | The Economist |
| Inputdate | 2010-01-03 07:08:38 |
| Lastmodifieddate | 2010-01-03 07:08:38 |
| Expdate | Not set |
| Publishdate | 2010-01-04 00:00:00 |
| Displaydate | Not set |
| Active | 1 |
| Emailed | 1 |
| Isarchived | 1 |
