/sci/ - Science & Math

>>16091462
>>>/his/

>>16091474
Linguistics is not history.

Not a linguist, but remember that humans even humans 500,000 years ago probably had grunts and stuff. Humans definitely could have been spread out enough at that time to have local communities that could have their own linguo-genesis. The language families would have diverged beyond the point from which any common origin can be reliably proved by the comparative method in even maybe 10,000 years.
Also the out of Africa theory is fake. Sub-saharan Africans have like 22 percent of their dna being an archaic hominid. That hominid probably spoke some language before homo sapien came and mixed with them. It's an example of either a language that was unrelated or so diverged as to be unrelated from hominid sapien languages. Ultimately the question is unanswerable because languages from different families would be so far diverged that they are unrecognisable related but I would guess the aryan languages are related to turkic ones really distantly.

>>16091478
You're joking, right?

>>16091498
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linguistics
>Linguistics is the scientific study of language.
Literally 2 seconds on Google.

>>16091462
>The existence of language families suggests that language was invented by humans multiple times at the same time in prehistory. What?
you're working from a flawed premise
languages change over time, regularly but unpredictably, and these changes gradually obscure relations between related languages, at some point the links become indistinguishable from coincidence
the oldest language family ascertained with any degree of certainty is Afro-Asiatic which may have diverged as early as 20,000 years ago but no one would suggest that humans have only been speaking for 20,000 years so it's not shedding any light on the origin of language
it could be and indeed probably is related to other language families but again the links are so obscured that it's just guesswork at that point

whether language developed once or many times independently remains an open question but in either case modern language classification provides no useful information to answer it one way or the other other than by saying that languages were clearly distinct at least about 10k years ago but that's a very weak and almost trivial statement

>>16091498
maybe anon is being pedantic
Im not an expert in either field but maybe they're referring to philology?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philology

I'm not sure that it's a popular undergraduate choice of study in North America; I think it's generally just called Lignuistics in N.A. even though (again, I know nothing) Philology might've been the originator

>>16091462
Ultimately all languages probably descend from a singular ur-language. We can demonstrate this with logic: the only alternative to common descent is if language sprung up spontaneously multiple times. I.e. several populations on the planet first had only pre-language grunts and whatnot, and they independently refined these into language. Such a supposition requires some extraordinary assumptions. First of all, a more or less synchronous appearance of the invention of language all over the geographic range of homo sapiens seems like a significant coincidence. But at least it's possible if we assume homo sapiens was already cosmopolitan (lived in all corners of the globe) when this coincidentally roughly synchronous invention happened. But this global spread was only achieved a few 10k years ago. But language is older than that -- dating to when homo sapiens only lived in Africa. Which means such spontaneous invention events would have to be geographically closer together. But this opens the possibility for contact between such groups.
Any introduction of one individual human from a "already-having-language" tribe to one tribe of "still-only-pre-language" would have disrupted this indigenous formation process.
It seems to me not clear why the newly arrived already-language-haver would not quickly make full-language the dominant trait (partially because the pre-language people would adopt it, but mostly simply because his descendants would intermix and it'd spread that way, with them all bringing their fully formed language). The counter-tendency towards that dominance would be if the tribe consciously decided their old ways work best, and that they actively pushed back against the injection/spread of a fully formed language, somehow deciding that they "preferred it they could come up with a language at their own rate".

Well it all began with the tower of babel ...

I assume its more like guy 1,2,3 and 4 used "apple", but then then got away from each other, guy 1 and 2 might decide they would rather say "overpriced shit", or their kids, or their kids kids.

Like you add a lot of time to everything it gets really messy. In the meantime guy 3 and 4 had a different idea, or just managed to keep the tradition.

I mean its not complicated, if you live long enough you have seen how language changes already. Make sense it would change differently in different places.

>>16091462
>language families
Mostly a political concept.
Russian has not less in common with japanese than with english.
Languages would be more accurately described as intermixing clouds than as branches of a tree.

>>16093454
That field is constantly changing its name: because its subject has some serious political consequences, it is constantly infested with nefarious agents, so it's been shifting names from grammar to etymology (or was it the other way around) to phylology, to linguistics, and now, when linguistics is damaged beyond repair by chomskians, the true scientists prefer to name their field of study otherwise, be it semantics or pragmatics, it's all nothing but brands at this point, there's not distinct different between the subject of those fields, even if formally there's some difference between them.

>>16093822
..if you ever wondered why they forcefeed you with phoenician being the first alphabet, when it's nothing but hebrew (christianity never let it go, academia is in the jesuit grasp and needs some alternative it would have to compete with)

>>16094040
>Russian has not less in common with japanese than with english.

>>16094040
>Languages would be more accurately described as intermixing clouds than as branches of a tree.
This is accurate, to a degree, and has analogous exchanges to Molecular Biology, both have a Biological component, then familiarity and correpalation, down to Physics.

>>16094063
Languages and writing systems are two different entities: vietnamese use latin alphabet.

>>16094073
Amen, brother.
:^)
Right on.
[raises fist]

>>16094083
Makes sense considering that Jesus went to Japan to become a garlic farmer after his brother Isukiri died on the cross in his stead.

>>16094083

>>16093515
What is the hard boundary between language and pre-language? Why is it so incredible for groups of people in different locations to come to the conclusion that using the same sounds to refer to the same things might ease communication?

>>16094196
There's no hard boundaries even between dialects and languages.
Roughly speaking, we all speak different dialects of the same language.
> Why is it so incredible for groups of people in different locations to come to the conclusion that using the same sounds to refer to the same things might ease communication?
Well, technically, most of actual cognates are considered to be coincidental (because the borrowing happened millenia prior to written history) so official point of view would agree with you, but in reality it is fair to say that human language in its basic levels predates humans as specie:
Why is it so incredible for groups of people in different locations to come to the conclusion that using the same sounds to refer to the same things might ease communication?

>>16094196
There's no hard boundaries even between dialects and languages.
Roughly speaking, we all speak different dialects of the same language.
> Why is it so incredible for groups of people in different locations to come to the conclusion that using the same sounds to refer to the same things might ease communication?
Well, technically, most of actual cognates are considered to be coincidental (because the borrowing happened millenia prior to written history) so official point of view would agree with you, but in reality it is fair to say that human language in its basic levels predates humans as specie: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c_hUIEBwlEo

>>16094083
It takes a lot of fantasy to recognize Hebrew letters in the upper rows of your pic, and I'm sure the creator of the pic made up a lot of bullshit. Can't say anything about the corresponding Japanese letters as I can't read Japanese.

>>16094725
You think you can contrapulate me with you honkey jive sound, busta, you got it comin'.

https://youtu.be/Cai7GtoiRbU

Own the words, you own the mind.
[raises fist]

>>16094725
The japanese are alright, so probaly some nihonjin sperged that shit out.
Here's a better one, as a mnemonic tool it is better, not as actual link between the two. But then what do we know..

>>16091462
there only was the one language taught to us by the anunaki, but after the oceans drank Atlantis it developed into different brances in geographically separate regions as described in the story of the tower of babylon. (which is actually about the great aryan-atlantean war and the grey intervention)

>>16093515
>homo sapiens
It absolutely, definitely, wasn't homo sapiens.
>>16094086
Is that what the Japanese believe? A major difference between Christians and Muslims is if Jesus died on the cross, or avoided it.
>>16094209
No, he means that language would probably develop slowly, from a few unchangeable words, to polysynthetic languages.

>>16094209
But if our proto-language consisted of mere noises then it should come as no surprise that as divergent populations developed those into actual languages as we know them today, they diverged wildly.
>most of actual cognates are considered to be coincidental (because the borrowing happened millenia prior to written history)
Or because they are coincidental. Here's someone who developed a statistical model to determine the odds of unrelated languages sharing "cognates": https://www.zompist.com/chance.htm
Actual known cognates are sometimes completely unrecognisable in their modern form.

The ability for language is genetic.
Once our ancestors acquired the ability, it simply required the distance of time to make the major branches of our linguistic tree seem impossibly different from one another.
But a large part of language is emergent - around the world, cultures develop words and sounds for things based on inherent, objective properties of the things.

>The bouba/kiki effect, or kiki/bouba effect, is a non-arbitrary mental association between certain speech sounds and certain visual shapes. Most narrowly, it is the tendency for people, when presented with the nonsense words bouba /ˈbuːbə/ and kiki /ˈkiːkiː/, to associate bouba with a rounded shape and kiki with a spiky shape. Its discovery dates back to the 1920s, when psychologists documented experimental participants as connecting nonsense words to shapes in consistent ways. There is a strong general tendency towards the effect worldwide; it has been robustly confirmed across a majority of cultures and languages in which it has been researched,[1] for example including among English-speaking American university students, Tamil speakers in India, speakers of certain languages with no writing system, young children, infants, and (though to a much lesser degree) the congenitally blind.

>>16091462
Is it any more ridiculous than flight evolving in unrelated species?

>>16091462
it's because these language families are the highest groupings for which the comparative method can show that these languages are related.
all language families could be related but they've changed so much over the millenia that the comparative method no longer can show it.

>>16094047
I'm very grateful that you took the time to explain this, thanks
Assuming you're mostly correct; you have saved me a ton of energy and confusion, and helped me avoid a lot of misdirection already

I love languages but dislike having to engage in skewed human agendas and perspectives like that. (Of course, human language will contain human politics, that's understandable) So again, thanks for the quick rundown so I don't have to get my mind dirty

I'm a polyglot (learned for fun and mostly through intuition, not rigor), and while I have no formal credentials in the field, maybe I'll make some small contribution to it someday - if I do, I'll remember you anon

>>16094054
>why they forcefeed you with phoenician being the first alphabet, when it's nothing but hebrew
What did he actually mean by this?
Phoenecian is Hebrew?

>>16095855
It's been like that since they discovered that "primitive" people spoke more advanced languages than Europe.

>>16095956
Which primitive peoples or language(s) are you referring to?
If it's sarcasm, it's gone over my head
I've tuned out of most news for a few years (I go in wanting to be informed; I come out brainwashed and shouldering other people's emotional problems)

I know a little bit about the [Proto] Indo European family.
Is there some widely accepted academic idea which measures language complexity, and established that languages originating in Africa or oppressed populations are more complex or something?

Maybe Im a retard but srsly Im not being intentionally dense or sarcastic, just trying to get caught up with what's going on in this area

>>16095970
Basically any native American language is more complex than even Latin.
No, there are no "academic" souces, as the whole concept if complexity is rejected for this exact reason.

>>16095998
what metric(s) or method(s) do you use to establish complexity?
and does it refer to the spoken complexity only? or does it also look at written forms?

anyway, what's even the merit of having complexity in human language; why would that be a good or bad thing or..well, anything?

Not saying it's not USEFUL to compare. But what virtue is there on its own that a language is more complex or not?

You can fabricate infinite complexity out of something simple.
It's far more interesting when someone notices a connection between something that was previously thought to be super complex, which can now be expressed in much simpler terms

I am very interested in your view, though. I am not trying to antagonize you or anything (at least at the moment huehuheue)

>>16096010
It seems quite obvious, but try to explain it simply. (this one is from Siberia)

What value it has, I suppose more effective communication.

>>16096073
NTA but, motherfucker, dropping some cunt's 410 page thesis on an obscure Siberian language doesn't add any value to this discussion.
Arbitrary complexity or, perhaps more accurately, esotericism, doesn't make a language more advanced, or more efficient/effective for communication.

>>16092646
>wikipedia
LOL.

>>16095898
Just compare the two side by side.

>>16096162
OK, but why can't it be the other way around? Hebrew is merely knock-off Phoenecian?

>>16096181
It's often hard to say what is what, it is much easier to say what is not. The origin of the alphabet that writing system is not. But as the pdf above begins, hebrew culture did preserve some stories about the origin of the alphabet, so if I were them, I wouldn't make the shit up. And I find it divine poetry that so different, and often antagonistic, cultures preserved different pieces of the same common puzzle.
> Diodorus' account
> Some ancient Greek scholars argued that the Greek alphabet should not be attributed to the Phoenician alphabet. Diodorus Siculus in his Historical Library, Book 5, suggests that the Phoenicians merely "changed the form and shape" of earlier letters:
> But there are some who attribute the invention of letters to the Syrians, from whom the Phoenicians learned them and communicated them to the Greeks when they came with Cadmus into Europe; hence the Greeks called them Phoenician letters. To these that hold this opinion, it is answered that the Phoenicians were not the first that found out letters, but only changed the form and shape of them into other characters, which many afterwards using the name of Phoenicians grew to be common.

Plutarch's account
In his essay "On the Malice of Herodotus", Plutarch criticizes Herodotus for prejudice and misrepresentation. Furthermore, he argues that Gephyraei were Euboeans or Eretrians and he doubts the reliability of Herodotus' sources.
As for Aristogeiton, Herodotus puts him not forth at the back door, but thrusts him directly out of the gate into Phoenicia, saying that he had his origins from the Gephyraei, and that the Gephyraei were not, as some think, Euboeans or Eretrians, but Phoenicians, as himself has learned by report.

Plutarch and other ancient Greek writers credited the legendary Palamedes of Nauplion on Euboea with the invention of the supplementary letters not found in the original Phoenician alphabet.[10] The distinction between Eta and Epsilon and between Omega and Omicron, adopted in the Ionian standard, was traditionally attributed to Simonides of Ceos (556–469).

Plutarch goes further back to describe an older Greek writing system, similar as he attested to the Egyptian writing. In his "Discourse Concerning Socrates's Daemon",[11] he describes how Agesilaus king of Sparta, uncovers Alcmene's tomb at Haliartus and discovers a brazen plate on which a very ancient script was written, much older than the Ancient Greek alphabet. Agesilaus sent a transcript to Egypt in order to be translated back into Ancient Greek. Agetoridas the Spartan travelled to Memphis of Egypt and gave the transcript to Chonouphis the Egyptian priest. Some scholars speculate that this plate was written in Linear B.[12] Agesilaus' decision to have text sent to Egypt is not unreasonable; it is widely accepted that Ancient Egyptians during the 4th century BC were able to translate to and from various other languages; they used three different writing systems within Egypt: hieroglyphic script, hieratic and demotic; this tradition continued during the Hellenistic period when all kinds of scripts were translated and copies were added to the library of Alexandria; one example today of a script written in three forms is the Rosetta Stone that appears in three texts: in ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs, in Egyptian demotic, and in ancient Greek. And therefore, as the story goes, the Egyptian priest, having studied the script and translated it, concluded that the writing enjoined the Greeks to institute games in honor of the Muses.

>>16096084
I posted it because somebody claimed that complexity in languages isn't real.

>>16096247
The first paragraph is distorted by the academic narrative. Palamedes invented 11 letters in addition to the initial 7:
> Hyginus' account
> Hyginus recounts the following legends about the development of the alphabet:
> The three Fates created the first five vowels of the alphabet and the letters B and T. It is said that Palamedes, son of Nauplius invented the remaining eleven consonants. Then Hermes reduced these sounds to characters, showing wedge shapes because cranes fly in wedge formation and then carried the system from Greece to Egypt*. This was the Pelasgian alphabet, which Cadmus had later brought to Boeotia, then Evander of Arcadia, a Pelasgian, introduced into Italy, where his mother, Carmenta, formed the familiar fifteen characters of the Latin alphabet. Other consonants have since been added to the Greek alphabet. Alpha was the first of eighteen letters, because alphe means honor, and alphainein is to invent.

>>16096261
Did he claim it wasn't real? Or merely question whether or not it made a language "advanced" or more useful?

>>16096306
Both: >>16096010

>>16096346
Where does he claim linguistic complexity isn't real?

>>16096443
First paragraph.

>>16097312
For a linguist, your comprehension needs improvement.

>>16097345
I think he refers to the first sentence: if there's no method to measure complexity, then it is not actually real.
One of such methods would be quantitive method: the more lexical units or grammatic constructions a language has, the more complex it is, but then should we count long words or should we break them into morphemes? Because orthography is rather arbitrary.
They say chinese is rather simple, grammatically, but then they still preserved meanings of every syllable, so isn't it more nuanced?
I suspect, on example of chinese, we can say that simplicity in one aspect of the language is inevitably compensated by coplexity in some other aspect of it, and such balance may be influenced by the shape and size of the brains themselves. Different people speaking the same language may use it with more or less sophistication, and so on.

>>16097356
>I think he refers to the first sentence: if there's no method to measure complexity, then it is not actually real.
He asks which metrics measure it, not the validity / existence of such metrics.
How would a linguist measure facetiousness, sarcasm, or irony? An outwardly simple phrase can have layers of more complex meaning that can't be understood or measured by esoteric rules of grammar and syntax.

>>16097430
>He asks which metrics measure it, not the validity / existence of such metrics.
He did, but the fact that you didn't even try to answer it made that question rather rhetorical.

>>16097430
>He asks which metrics measure it
He asks which metric(s) someone would use to measure it. By explicitly mentioning the agent, he's making the implicature that such metrics are not objective, and by marking the ambiguity on their grammatical number (i.e. singular or plural), he's connoting further doubt on their conceptual coherence.

>>16097445
NTA, I posted the siberian language above (>>16096073) It's just such a massive difference that the burden of proof is on your side to argue why it actually isn't that complex.

>>16094047
>>16095855
Each of those are different branches of the study of language.
Linguistics studies languages in practice. Grammar is a branch of linguistics that deals with the rules of composition within a given language. Semantics looks at the meaning of words, and pragmatics is a subdivision of semantics which looks at meaning within a given context. Philology is the study of ancient texts. All of these are still practiced side by side and informed by each other, though they are formally distinct.

>>16097484
Nobody who doesn't study it is going to read it.
I looked into it and found that they probably have to borrow their pronouns from russians (which is my first guess on the basis of the way they use them, and also because of how unlikely for those two languages to be related on that basal level)
So it definitely would help if you shared the complexity you found it other than the book itself being compled (or, rather, just poorly written)

>>16097487
>Philology is the study of ancient texts.
Actually it is not. The most difference, to my understanding, is that philology mostly focuses on the native language, while linguistics focuses on foreign languages. When I passed my entering exams into a linguistics department, I was asked what was the difference between linguistics and philology, and I guessed that maybe philology was more in-depth study, like etymology and such. They laughed that a schoolboy knows etymology and said that the real answer is "nobody knows" (and the person who said it was a doctor of philology, whom I later found to be rather weak as a scientist, most of people up there are purely administrative people, but this evaluation of her seems to be accurate)

>>16097500
You lost your argument. It is indeed more complex.

>>16097535
How exactly is it more complex?
By the way they have less established orthography that the researcher could only appreciate the way they actually pronounce those pronouns?
Bringing a whole book as an argument is a non-argument, for it is not better than to say "read all the books of bible and all the commentary to it, maybe then you'll be competent enough to argue god"

>>16097542
>appreciate
approximate
sorry, efl retard here

>>16097542
>By the way they have less established orthography that the researcher could only appreciate the way they actually pronounce those pronouns?
That's true for literally every language on Earth.
Why would you pick pronouns out of everything in that book?

>>16097580
Because they're some of the simplest words and seemed to be a good place to start.
Also because you yourself didn't pick anything from that book to back your statement.

>>16097581
How about chapter 12, it's such a stereotypical topic. Or 13, if you don't want that.

>>16097592
Do you want me to review those tens of pages in a message or what? If you have something to point out, feel free to do it, for fuck sake

>>16097621
Argue how it doesn't make it a more complex language.

>all animals are of the same size
how about that cow?
>what's with it
it's bigger than my dog or your cat
>really? how do you measure it?
come on, even its head is bigger than the cat!
>nah!

>>16097633
How doesn't what make it a more complex language? Are you some chukcha and are russian jokes more than propaganda? Are you really retarded a little bit? Hardly can retards have a more complex language than their more advanced neighbours, sorry to break it for you like this, kid.

>>16097661
So your argument now is that Chukchi can't be a complex language because the Chukchi are retards??

>>16097661
So your argument now is that Chukchi can't be a complex language because the Chukchi are retards?? I guess we're back to >>16095956

>>16097893
Well, your presence here sorta supports that hypothesis. But let me help you. You said:
> Argue how _it_ doesn't make it a more complex language.
I asked you to clarify:
> How doesn't _what_ make it a more complex language?
But you ignored that question, whether because you are indeed retarded, or because your task was not to find the truth, but to promote your narrative of "backward nations are actually not backward", and yes, I'm sorry, but I doubt that your language can become complicated without elaborated literary culture.

>>16098015
Honestly, are you jewish?

>>16098096
I am not and I denounce talmud and all their dirty tricks. Now tell me if you're a chukcha.

>>16092646
> wikipedia
You are such a fucking retard.

>>16095956
> more advanced languages

>>16096124
>>16098112
What's wrong with academia? I think it tries to support its claims with outside sources, unlike you niggers.
None of you argued the definition itself, because it's to the point (even if most of linguists are not exactly scienitific, I think today it applies to every field of science, alas, too many retards infested it with their stupid selves for the sake of easy job and sometimes for young bodies too)

>>16098131
> academia
"wikipedia" that word supposed to be
(and yes, there's plenty of wrong with academia, both the site and the structure)

>>16098099
I'm not a Chukcha.

Now, why do you deny sonething so completrly obvious? It doesn't seem like you have an actual reason to believe in the contrary.

>>16095670
This association is not that special, the words when spoken make a round and pointed shape of the mouth so its naturally apparent to any human who can speak.

>>16098861
It is not obvious to me, because I wasn't brainwashed with that marxist nonsense.
I think I gave you my reason to believe that retarded nations have retarded languages, and you also demonstrated yourself to be somewhat retarded: even having the manual to one of those retarded languages, and the one you yourself brought, you couldn't even point out what exactly makes that language more complicated than any european one.
Taking your being retarded into consideration, I may guess, that you wanted to say that the language is complicated, because it is difficult to learn. And it probably is, but mostly because it is distant, I wonder if english would be any less difficult to learn for them. Try to learn some finnish or hungarian, if you are not finno-ugric yourself.

>>16098874
But the word for a thing having a direct relationship to how that word is made, regardless of culture or background, is special, is relevant.
Why should that be?

>>16095956
this is true.
small tight knit cultures tend to result in more difficult to learn languages since they aren't as affected from simplification processes that occur when outsiders learn them.

>>16099059
Surely it has nothing to do with those languages being linguistically distinct from the languages of their researchers?
You (or the proponent of this idea which spoke here before you) failed to define complexity. I dare you to define simplification process.
But honestly there's no need for you to make up more shit, because now we have the technology, so I asked an artificial superbrain and here's what he said:
> That's an interesting claim, and the answer is a bit more complex (pun intended!). In general, it's not necessarily true that isolated languages are inherently more complex than widely spoken ones. Each language has its own unique features, and complexity can vary depending on what aspects of the language you're looking at (e.g., grammar, phonology, vocabulary).
> As for Pirahã, it has a relatively small number of cases (around 4), and its grammar is quite simple compared to many other languages. Some of the more unique and complex aspects of Pirahã include:
> Tone system: Pirahã is a tonal language, meaning the pitch of a word determines its meaning. It has three tones (high, mid, and low) that can change the meaning of a word completely.
> Whistled speech: Pirahã speakers can use whistling to communicate across long distances, encoding the same information as spoken language.
> Lack of recursion: Pirahã may not have recursive grammar, meaning it doesn't use embedded clauses like "The man who is wearing a hat."
And here's the first thing google offers:
> There is a claim that Pirahã has as few as ten phonemes, one fewer than Rotokas, or even as few as nine for women, but this requires analyzing [k] as an underlying /hi/ and having /h/ invariably substituted for /s/ in female speech.

>>16099149
>Surely it has nothing to do with those languages being linguistically distinct from the languages of their researchers?
Please elaborate on this point.

>>16091462
The question of polygenesis or monegenesis is useless if you have no evidence to measure it. Some dude above even mentioned that the Anunnaki taught us words...

>>16098096
>>16098099
>>16098861
>>16098936
>Two nazis disagreeing with each other on something entirely unrelated to race or politics devolve into calling each other Jewish marxists simply for disagreeing
I have to say, thanks for the incidental demonstration of just how vapid those buzzwords are when you use them

>>16099149
>That's an interesting claim, and the answer is a bit more complex (pun intended!).
Which cringe machine is this

>>16091462
Probably there was only one Ursprache.

>>16099149
how much needs to be remembered to speak the language outside of its semantic vocabulary is a good metric for complexity I guess.
The german word for "the" inflects for both case and number meaning you need to remember more to learn it than you do the English equivalent making it more complex.
Though English is more complex in other ways such as it verb constructions.

>In general, it's not necessarily true that isolated languages are inherently more complex
then I guess it's good I used the word "tend".

>>16099162
If you're french, italian is easier for you, than japanese.
If you're korean, japanese is easier for you than italian.
And here comes an interesting part: I wasn't sure about japanese and korean being related, because I remember the language trees, mapping japanese as isolated language, but I also remember studying both languages around the same time, and wondering why, and here comes an independent point of view:
> First of all, Korean and Japanese are very similar. They're in different language families because they are not believed to have been evolutionarily related (more closely than other languages in other families), but they are in fact incredibly similar.
I hope this answer helps.

>>16099222
>how much needs to be remembered to speak the language outside of its semantic vocabulary is a good metric for complexity I guess.
It is not clear what you had to say by "outside of its semantic vocabulary" but whether you said that only grammatic structure would be measured if such metric existed or something else, don't you see that it would be rather subjective, and their neighbours may find their language easier than yours, simply because they use the same grammatic structures or the same "semantic vocabulary"?

>>16099350
That has nothing to do with its complexity.

>>16099415
Are you ready to define it?