glauxosdever wrote:
embryo2 wrote:
And may be you can provide an example where english is too bad?
Sure.
Let me say "read". Does this lone word mean anything? I read? You read? We read? They read? I/You/We/They read in the present, or in the past? In Greek, for example, for each one of these cases, there is one specific grammatic form which usually means something, even with no surrounding words.
A simple spelling change would fix that: iread, youread, weread, etc. - if we simply turn these into single words of two syllables each, the language is instantly "improved" (though it becomes harder to read). The endings that many languages have on verbs were independent words originally, but over time they typically developed into different sets of endings to tie in better with the sounds of the root word they're tagged onto. In some cases people may start using personal pronouns in addition to the endings, and then the endings can degrade and become ambiguous, to the point that the separate personal pronouns have to be used most of the time, and ultimately the original endings can disappear (which they have almost completely done in English). These changes may come about for a many reasons, such as a person of high status speaking in an unusual way which others then immitate to make themselves seem more grand, or it could be driven by poetry and song where artificial new forms can become established and popular.
What languages are all good at though is getting ideas across efficiently: if a language is too slow at communicating some kind of important idea, someone will soon innovate and create a fix for it which will spread widely and become a standard part of the language. It's the same with ambiguities: where there are difficulties in understanding things, new words are quickly invented to clarify things and they catch on because of their utility. Non-native speakers have more difficulty with ambiguous words because they don't know the rules as to which meanings need clarification in different contexts or types of phrase, and they miss all the subtle wording differences around the ambiguous word that native speakers use to flag up the differences.
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Also, in Greek a sentence can be spoken with many different word orders, which essentially changes where the focus of the sentence is.
It can be done fine in English through stress, though that's not so easily to show in writing. The reality is that all natural languages have solved the problems they need to solve for the people who use them. There are some languages that don't have numbers, such as Piraha, but the people who speak that language (who are also known as Piraha: they live somewhere in the Amazon) didn't need numbers and had no drive to develop any. Now that they are interacting with the modern world and need to deal with things like money, so they are quickly taking on Portuguese numbers. If the Piraha language survives long enough into the future, these will likely evolve to become distinct Piraha words. Languages adapt to the speakers' needs and rapidly eliminate any deficiencies. It's hard to make up new words, so they generally borrow from other languages instead when another culture introduces them to some new kind of idea which is beyond the capabilities of their own language.
There are certainly some serious disadvantages associated with some languages, but it's rare for this to affect spoken communication. Chinese and Japanese are much harder to learn to read, and the dreadful spelling system used in English is extremely costly too, but that's not a defect in any of those languages: it's the writing systems that are to blame. Some languages are harder to learn than others because of the multitude of different forms of most words as they inflect in various ways, and that means some languages take ten times longer to learn than others if you want to speak them perfectly, though they aren't so much harder to learn to understand, which means children aren't at any great disadvantage: it just takes them a bit longer to get on top of all the word endings when they're speaking.
Are some languages more efficient than others though? Well, some use twice as many syllables as others to get the same amount of information across, but people simply speak twice as fast, going at the speed their brain can translate their thoughts into words (or the speed which other people can interpret them). The loss in clarity that comes from gabbling fast is cancelled out by the extra information stuffed into all those extra syllables which gives the listener multiple ways of identifying each word.
In short, natural languages are all good at the task they're used for in the societies where they evolved, and whenever new ideas are hard to handle, languages soon adapt to be able to cope with them efficiently.