Some Thoughts on Language

As I get deeper into Modern Greek, I'm starting to see the logic behind the grammar. It's definitely not an easy language, but it does make sense. In fact, the organization of Greek is quite beautiful.

Each word in a sentence is marked with its function, so word order isn't nearly as important as it is in English. You can jumble sentences without destroying the meaning. For example: "Jim hit me" and "I hit Jim" have completely different meanings in English.

Changing the order of the same sentence in Greek doesn't change the meaning, since the object and subject aren't marked by location. That's a linguistic feature that Greek shares with Korean, which got me thinking about the different strengths and weaknesses of organization within languages.

Then, I stumbled across this article online about an eccentric genius who created a language for James Cameron's "Avatar." It's an interesting article (and not just because this guy uses phrases like "gold standard for this alien language niche").

The idea of creating a language artificially isn't entirely unheard of. The written script of Korean, hangeul, was commissioned by King Sejong and designed by linguists to be easy for peasants to learn. Hebrew was essentially reborn as a language with Israel, and while Modern Hebrew was based on biblical Hebrew, there are significant differences. And of course Modern Greek has been artificially revised and changed several times over the years.

At one point there was an official Modern Greek, Katharevousa, which had been "cleansed" of all Turkish and outside influences, which was used in official documents. At the same time, everyday life was conducted in the naturally evolved (and "impure," according to some) Dimotiki. Modern Greek's two simultaneous forms, its diglossia, ended in 1976 with Dimotiki winning out. I can only imagine how impossible it would have been to try to learn two forms of Greek at once.

Speaking of difficult languages to learn, there was a cool article in the Economist a couple weeks ago about the most difficult languages in the world.  These guys make Greek look like a piece of cake. At the same time though, pinpointing the "most difficult language" is impossible, since the difficulty of learning a language depends on several factors including: how similar it is to languages you already speak, your innate ability, where you're trying to learn it, and the quality of your instruction. Still, it's cool to hear about some of the more unique ways of organizing thoughts out there.