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Comment by endisneigh | Hacker News Reader

Inherently won’t you always need the same level of complexity to express the same meaning with equivalent preciseness? You either have complex grammar, vocabulary or both.

Though I suppose in the far future sending thoughts to each others brains directly will probably require less energy and will be completely unambiguous.

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But not all complexity that we see is needed for precise expression. Like, if romance languages like Spanish and French did not require nouns and adjectives to agree on gender, but instead only the noun needed to carry gender info, that would not obligate the vocabulary to get more complex.

Similarly English has rules about the order of adjectives (Clifford is a big, red dog, not a red, big dog) and the presence of those rules didn't simplify the vocabulary.

> Similarly English has rules about the order of adjectives (Clifford is a big, red dog, not a red, big dog) and the presence of those rules didn't simplify the vocabulary.

The rules do have at least two functions though:

First, they increase redundancy without noticeably decreasing expressiveness. That's good for communicating in noisy environments. (I suspect the same can be said for your example of Romance language genders.)

Second, and less important: by deliberately breaking the adjective order in English you can bring special emphasis on specific aspects of your description.

> Clifford is a big red dog, not a red big dog

Speaking of which, I've yet to see a similar description of tightly structured adjective order for any language other than English. I can't believe that English is unique in this regard.

In fact, strong preferences on adjective order are extremely common, and languages including English are often in agreement about what order (or proximity to the noun) adjectives ought to have.

https://www.annualreviews.org/doi/full/10.1146/annurev-lingu...

Thank you for this!

Some other Germanic languages have specific adverb order:

- German adverbs are time-manner-place.

- Swedish adverbs are manner-place-time.

fixed order simplifies grammar/orfography. look at russian moving verbs - thats what happens w/o the order. and not all forms are even achievable! f.e. russian can not say 'i will win' w/o using hacks such as 'i will get win'.

I think that's more a peculiarity of Russian than a necessary quality of flexible sentence order. For example, many deviations from the standard sentence order in Japanese can still be understandable and grammatical because particles denote the parts of the sentence.

I don't speak Japanese, but you are talking about fixed order, allowing deviations. Russian language doesn't have this kind of deviations because of there is no order at all. If you take any Russian sentence (better not to take a too long one) and mix words in random sequence, the sentence became mostly the same but with other words nuanced.

Roughly example of conception of "other word nuanced" from Russian:

1. explosion happened - I waited for the explosion and it happened.

2. happened explosion - I waited for arriving of my girlfriend but what arrived first is the explosion.

Um, я выиграю? Победить doesn't have the first person form so you have to use одержу победу, but that's not because the form isn't achievable, it's just a weird conventional feature of that word that the usual pattern doesn't apply.

You are right in every word but I keep having an opinion that this is because of not-fixed order. I am not out of examples, imagine describing something to the some person in singular second person for (regular discussion with anyone) and in plural second person form (discussion with somebody having higher status or age).

It is very uncomfortable to have an extra sillable which encodes plurality in EVERY verb (except of infinitives, of course). Посмотрите когда сможете, уже посмотрели? The last Russian word in sentence has an ambiguity - it means both a state when the companion looked at something alone and a state when we both looked at something. That's why I hate to discuss anything in such a "respectful" style.

Verbs like "победить" (used for serious competitions, conflicts, wars) are closer to an exception like irregular verbs and often in such cases people use synonyms like "я выиграю" (usually used for games). Sometimes "я побежу" can be used, especially by kids, but because it sounds "unnatural", it is not recognized as part of the literary language.

There is the well-known list of irregular verbs, no surprises.

Forms which I claimed as "not achievable" are random, they suddenly happen in conversations and such situations require knowing synonyms which I name as "hacks".

IMO complex grammar just creates a high barrier to being understood at all, while hiding the complexity in vocabulary allows a more gradual learning curve.

Would it really be simpler if there were a language where the grammar were that you only say one word and one word only, but all expressions require you to memorize a dictionary of a billion words because they’ve decided they want their grammar to only be one word utterances?

Agglutinative languages say hi.

I think you meant polysynthetic languages. And you don't have to memorize all the forms of each stem, there are grammar rules that usually let you derive each form.

The other extreme would also create a very high barrier to being understood at all.

For sure there's a minimal necessary complexity but I don't think natural languages are anywhere close to it, and I don't think different natural languages have to be the same distance from it.

For example English is pretty simple in many aspects but it has absurdly complex spelling for no benefit. If not for historic reasons it could be simplified significantly without losing any expressive power whatsoever - simply by making the spelling regular.

Also, English has very complex “implicit” rules about word order, as it relies on that much more than languages with more complex grammars, e.g. German. If you do encode more information into a given word by a suffix, you can more freely reorder them.

My native language is Polish, you can pretty much reorder words as you please (almost all permutations are valid, but there's usually like 3 or 5 that are used most often - you put the noun that you want to highlight as the first or last word in the sentence basically, or you use the default SVO if you don't care). Any other order is usually a gimmick to make the song rhyme etc :)

I'm not sure German is more free than English with its sentences structure tho. When I'm speaking German it feels like exercise in short-term memory and stack depth because you constantly need to move some words at the end of the sentence :) But I only know it very superficially.

By the way, I never understood why English has rules about the order of the adjectives. Why is it always "good old times" and never "old good times"? I don't see what's the benefit here. Maybe error correction?

Sometimes the complexity doesn’t convey any new information. Some grammarian may correct me, but as an example, I don’t think verb conjugation within a tense adds information for most verbs. I am/You are/He is/We are/They are could all be collapsed into just “[pronoun] is”. In fact, some regions/subcultures in the U.S. do do this.

English has a lot of redundancy. This is kind of complex, but it also means that you can do a lot of "mistakes" and still be understood. I believe that's one reason English has managed to become "the" international communication language (i.e. not only due to historical reasons): You can garble the language in many ways and still be understood, at least by people a bit used to this. In my experience as a traveler working in various countries, and always trying to learn a bit of the language to communicate locally, if the native has learned a little bit of English it'll always be more efficient in communication than whatever I've learned of the native language. And one reason is that due to the redundancy of English the meaning stays the same most of the time, even with tons of grammatical mistakes. "I is" is wrong, but fully comprehensible. Make a single mistake in, say, Italian, and instead of saying "I was stupid now" you're saying "You were stupid now". Argh..

And it's more - if you hear, in a noisy environment, ".... am drinking" then you know that the missed word would be "I". Again, redundancy. There's lots of that in my native language as well, where adjectives etc. changes depending on other factors. Miss out a word and you still get if the table or the tablecloth should be burned (to paraphrase another commenter about a completely different language).

The 'design' of language isn't all about conveying information in written form.

A lot is also about what's easy to pronounce and hear. And, of course, also what's learnable for children.

Compare http://fine.me.uk/Emonds/

> Sometimes the complexity doesn’t convey any new information.

It doesn't when you take a sentence as a whole but a more rigid grammar makes it easier to predict how e.g. the beginning of a sentence will continue. Put differently, entropy is lower. In my experience this allows for faster reading and understanding, and conveying information more accurately, as there will be fewer misunderstandings on average.

It's often (certainly not always!) the case that if a language has significant inflectional morphology (conjugation) for expressing person and maybe number of the subject (and for some languages, the direct and/or indirect object), then you don't need to use the pronouns, unless for emphasis. Spanish and Italian are like that.

In English, you can say "I'm going to Budapest tonight" or "Tonight, I'm going to Budapest" and it means almost the exact same thing. In Hungarian, you can say "Ma este Budapestre megyek", "Budapestre megyek ma este" or "Megyek Budapestre ma este" and each one carries a different meaning, while the English translation remains the same.

In this case, the grammar is conveying information that we don't usually think about conveying in English.

"Ma este Budapestre megyek" implies "I'm going to Budapest tonight, and not tomorrow night", "Budapestre megyek ma este" implies "I'm going to Budapest tonight, and not to Vienna" and "Megyek Budapestre ma este" might be a bit more neutral or might imply "I'm going to Budapest tonight, while you are doing something different.

The second sentence, "Tonight, I'm going to Budapest" is different from the first example, even though the net result is the same - you're definitely ending up in Budapest. The second example introduces a topic (to be slightly Japanese-ish here): "Tonight". Let's talk about "tonight" and what's going to happen tonight. Well, I'm going to Budapest, that's what happens tonight. Oh, and maybe I'll do these other things too (e.g. A, B, and C).

The first sentence focuses on "going to Budapest", and "tonight" is when it happens. Nothing else about "tonight" is interesting, it's not the topic.

But you're inferring things that would be implied in Japanese or Hungarian, but aren't at all implied by word order in English.

I'm not inferring anything, in my opinion. Those sentences _are_ different in English too. That's why people will decide on one more than the other, depending on circumstances - not depending on a random roll of the die.

You are generally right, though the example may not be the best.

> In English, you can say "I'm going to Budapest tonight" or "Tonight, I'm going to Budapest" and it means almost the exact same thing

The second English form I feel does have more emphasis on the ‘tonight’ part - in fact elevating a part before the sentence is the way to do so in English - and thus roughly translates to “ma megyek Budapestre”. In Hungarian, the part right before the main verb is the most emphasized (though in speech, how we stress each word also matters), so in this particular regard Hungarian is more flexible in encoding emphasis then English.

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