the hardest natural language

[gusl]

to learn is perhaps Ubykh, with 80 consonants, and extremely fast communication.

The verb basically reiterates the entire syntactic structure of the sentence, agreeing with subject, object, indirect object, benefactive and oblique objects (English, by contrast, has agreement only with the subject of the verb, and that only in the third person singular).

However, I do not doubt the difficulty of learning tonal languages. Hoa showed me her beginner's Vietnamese tape, and I was completely hopeless.

Now, going away from phonetic and towards deeper, more conscious aspects of language:
On Dec 5, I saw a DIP lecture on the evolution and complexity of languages, Linguistic complexity, by Wouter Kusters. He argued convincingly that it is highly unlikely that all languages have equal complexity, for this would require a mechanism for adding complexity somewhere else whenever something got simplified in evolution and vice-versa.
I learned that languages can have more than one function: communication is always the primary function, but showing speaker identity is also a function in some languages. Isolated languages (type I, I think) tend to have "illogical", useless features that only make it hard to learn. e.g. although Dutch is not a good example of an isolated language, adjectives are marked by both gender AND article definiteness, e.g. "de grote kamer", "een grote kamer", "het grote huis", "een groot huis".

Comments

[gustavolacerda.livejournal.com]

I can usually identify Canadians from the raising: "around the house", etc and sometimes other features. But I have a high false positive rate: I have often asked Americans if they were Canadian.

I've heard that at least one California accent is the product of Spanish influence, even among non-hispanic native speakers.

What did people make fun of in your accent?