Which language is the most advanced?

Enochian.

Sanskrit was specifically devised to be perfect and produced the basis of almost all Hindu, Buddhist, Jain, Sikh, and a shit ton of Islamic thought. I'm gonna go for that

Afrikaans is just a dumbed down version of Dutch. It sounds like you are speaking to a mentally disabled child when they talk to you.

t. Dutch person

voynich

I think Finnish and Hungarian are the most complex in grammar tbqh.

Archaic Japanese is much easier than Archaic Chinese from what I gather. I don't speak chinese though so i'm not sure
Chinese isn't really a single language by some definitions and Mandarin is far removed from the literature most people want to read
Japanese has been simplified a lot since WWII but not to the same extentas Chinese. It helps that people tend to want to read relatively more modern Japanese works than Chinese.
Japanese to English loses an awful lot in translation to English compared to other Eoropean languages and I imagine Chinese is the same

complex =/= refined

Arabic, the language of God.

Ebonics

>not middle high german
youtube.com/watch?v=x-g1bmCzw74

THE LANGUAGE THAT I LIKE THE MOST

also, finnish is basically less complex estonian. i speak both, both are primitive enough vocabulary wise to have to borrow words from surrounding languages as well as from german and english

>mfw I speak the most advanced language

trots oor my taal

At least during the Tang dynasty, I've heard that much of Chinese literature is a masturbatory reference fest. Court writers tried to show off the broadness of their knowledge by filling their books with references to other literature, to the point that it's pretty opaque. Imagine if /s4s/ and Lucky Star got together and wrote a book.

I cannot imagine Japanese authors being that pretentious. I've read some of the old Heian stuff in English, it's lovely and really human, feels like it could have been written recently. The lauded Tale of Genji, the world's first novel, is a fetishy harem ecchi by the way.

But, Chinese grammar is simple to English speakers, and the characters are generally less vague in meaning than what the Japanese turned them into.

It's not though, Mr. Dutchoven. In any sense, anything besides English is a fucking meme, unless it's Chinese.

Danish is complex, and very counter intuitive.

It doesn't have a whole lot of words in its vocabulary, though, if that's what you mean by "advanced"

If complex words are the case, it's German. I'd imagine, an "advanced" language is a combination of vocabulary combined with grammar (where English is superior)

Latin is literally one of the most least advanced languages there is. Just look at how defective esse is. It's pretty hard to talk about philosophy when your pleb language literally has no word for being. Also all the cases look the same which is retarded and why cases disappeared in popular speech not long after Latin became a literary language.

Saltus - "of the twat"; "the twats" as subject; "the twats" as object; "the twat" as subject.

Ficoso - "in the butthurt one"; "to/for the butthurt one"

Landicae - "of the cunt"; "to/for the cunt"; "the cunts" as subject

Natis - "buttock" as subject; "of a/the buttock"; "buttocks" as plural object

Take any sentence from any author. "Haec omnia indices detulerunt." Did the omnia delate the indices or the indices the omnia? HURRR there's no way to tell. "Hic senex si quid clam uxorem suo animo fecit volup." Did he clam make his uxor into a volup with his animus? Or did he make volup in his animus clam his uxor? HURRR whichever seems more reasonable :)

Any Latin sentence you translate is just a theory, a guess.

It's the stupidest language you could possibly conceive of, that's why it takes years to master, because it is retarded. It's not hard like Greek is hard, because it has a lot of precision and so there's a lot of morphology to learn. It's hard because it's stupid. It's the reason Rome fell.

Navajo. Obviously.

>At least during the Tang dynasty, I've heard that much of Chinese literature is a masturbatory reference fest. Court writers tried to show off the broadness of their knowledge by filling their books with references to other literature, to the point that it's pretty opaque. Imagine if /s4s/ and Lucky Star got together and wrote a book.
That's most historical literature in a nutshell. But you wouldn't call Don Quixote or Dante shit, would you?

Patrician.

>the most primitive language known to man is also the most advanced

Someone's jelly.

>not understanding how far language has degenerated

You are just jealous because no other language has as majestic a monument dedicated to it as Afrikaans does.

Nah, we've got way more primitive languages than that.

Hell, the other year I invented a conlang with my friend that is only capable of communicating the presence or lack of hostility, police presence and weight in grams.

Linguist here, this thread is a fucking trainwreck. No language is more "advanced" than another, and what does that even mean? The question makes no sense at all.

I grew up speaking a low-class register of Tagalog and there were just no good words for abstract concepts like there are in Chinese or English.

Did you find this impaired your comprehension of abstract concepts until your English skills became more naturalized?

I am interested in exploring the potential evidence behind the claims of Linguistic Determinists heuristically and could use your input.

Addendum; or your Chinese skills for that matter.

Also, are there any Tagalog linguistic constructs you've found lack direct parallels in either language?

im not a linguist, but i agree this is a pretty shit thread.

i suppose they mean advanced in linguistic evolution, as one could use "advanced" in biological evolution. Y is more advanced than X if Y is derived from X.

so jamacian creole is more advanced than english. modern german is more advanced than proto-germanic. ect.

----
either that or they mean "advanced" as in difficult, and only to be learnt by one "advanced" in language-learning. so finnish is more advanced that esperanto or italian.

I don't remember desu, I learned English when I was like 6. I certainly can't speak about abstract concepts in tagalog, even though there are "proper" versions that do have words for all that. I speak tagalog when I visit my parents/family and that's it. I can't even read a book in tagalog, that's how different low-class from high-class is. It would be like asking a black person to read The Sceptical Chymist - they might know a word here or there but other than that you might as well be asking them to read Chinese.

>I don't know uncommon words in a language I only use in informal contexts, therefore it's impossible to talk about those concepts in that language

>Also, are there any Tagalog linguistic constructs you've found lack direct parallels in either language?

I don't know about with any language, But it definitely marches to a different tune than any of the languages westerners are likely to be familiar with. I don't know any languages with benefactive particles, or reason particles, besides austronesian ones. The whole verb system would be truly bizarre to most people.

I literally contradict that notion in the very post. At the same time, low-class Tagalog and high-class Tagalog are far more different than Scots and English. My parents don't speak much English and they don't talk about abstract things very much, then again they're working class immigrants, working class Americans don't talk about abstract concepts much either ime.

Holy shit your mad

Frankly, that sounds fascinating, probably because I literally cannot comprehend the function of these linguistic tools, and the alien often seems rather novel.

This is a bit /pol/ but you might find this interesting none the less: whitelocust.wordpress.com/morality-and-abstract-thinking-how-africans-may-differ-from-westerners/

>a bit /pol/
>a bit

muh all languages are as equally complex

fuck off.

Danish is just difficult to pronounce. It's grammar is relatively straight forward

English and its adaptability to Latin, French, and Greek. Someone may correct me on this, but if you exclude conjugated and compound words, English has the largest vocabulary of any language in the world.

The vast majority of linguists reject this concept btw. Abstract concepts precipitate the creation of the words used to describe them, not the other way around.

>difficult to pronounce
Not for Danes

Depends how hard you go with it; no theory is a perfect description of the underlying noumena.

I think there is something in the idea that the languages we speak do inform how we collate and process information.

Using English as an example... imagine you were born into a lower-class family. Redneck, chav, whatever. You would likely never learn words like "quantum", "hyperdimensional", or "glycogen". That doesn't mean those words don't exist or that the language can't describe those concepts. You're simply a product of your environment, and I'm sure it was the same with your Tagalog.

Define "complex" you sperglord. If you're referring to complex morphology then yes, Latin has more of that than Mandarin. But complex is not the same as advanced, and I still don't know what "advanced" is even supposed to mean here.

Most complex? Most simple? largest number of words? what do you mean by most advanced?

More than a "bit /pol/" but still some interesting ideas in there, I just wish he had talked about languages without trying to drag in genetic inferiority and other racist stuff.

Also all of these "abstract" English words he cites go back to something concrete.

A promise is a sending-forth, originally.

An obligation is a binding-to

Morality goes back to a word that means "custom, normal way of doing things, habit", not morality.

Ethics has a very similar history.

Forgive - give away

Sorrow - the state of being sad, not guilt

Half - originally meant "part" in general, and not necessarily a half

Guilt - originally meant wrongdoing itself, not prickings of conscience.

Even in the historical texts you can see this. There is hardly any abstract language in Homer at all. Even the emotions of his characters are more concrete than you would ever see in a modern language; his characters aren't glad they're "glad by their heart/thymos" (I could go a lot more into this).

So what happened in the West that, if we believe this guy, never happened in the parts of Africa he saw? That's a very interesting question and you can try to answer it without saying "lol blacks are just stupid".

I'm also not so up on the guy's insistence that morality is a universal and just "diminished" in some peoples.

"Morality" in the Western European sense, and in the Western European mode are neither of them universal, not even within The West itself.

I have always been one to value facts above feelings, but if something is /pol/ simply because it presents ideas that is contrary to the popular or dominant sociopolitical perception doesn't actually make it any less true or false.

I sometimes get the impression that people label something as /pol/ as a social taboo simply to protect feelings and actual scientific enquiry or fair civilized discussion gets hampered because of this.

I don't hate blacks or anything, some of my favourite people are black, but the exception doesn't change the facts about the norms or averages.

Even then, isn't it an interesting proposition though? If you have a group of people that objectively are genetically inferior with regards to general intelligence, but only marginally, wouldn't studying the languages they use provide significant insights into the workings of the human mind?

/pol/ apologetic aside, you raise an interesting point none the less.

I think one key difference between the west and Africa here to this is the lack of a written component for the African languages. When people die, their abstraction acquired through their lifetime die with them.

Perhaps a written form is required to have something to be abstract about. Without a written form, there is no permanent record against which each successive generation can contrast their experience and thoughts, and thus perhaps the need or potential for abstraction is vastly reduced because of this.

So perhaps the reason Homer isn't very abstract is because there was very little written language before Homer(I actually know very little about this topic though so I'm just guessing).

Yeah I hate to be a pomo but I find it obvious that morality is an expression of culture, and even within one culture there are multiple moralities. Leaving completely aside the question of whether there is one Best morality that we can discover through reason, or total relativism, and all other abstract speculation, merely pointing out the obvious, that while there are some constants, different moralities in different places can diverge widely.

I would be very curious about the languages of African regions that had lots of interaction with Semitic religions, like Ethiopia and Somalia.

I also want to bring up that old chestnut about literacy and coinage having a profound effect on our consciousness and reasoning.

Like I half-way alluded to, the Homeric heroes would not have cut a very nice figure in your dining room. These subsaharan African nations are still in a period of transition from tribalism. Maybe civilization and technology will alter them as it altered the Greeks (and it was a very bumpy road for them I should add). A racist would say that the Greeks had a more fertile genetic base for such civilization but I like to be more optimistic about humanity.

>I would be very curious about the languages of African regions that had lots of interaction with Semitic religions, like Ethiopia and Somalia.

Check out the Lemba people: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lemba_people

meant as a reply to

>implying Dutch doesn't already sound like a mentally disabled version of German
they had to work with what they had...

>I have always been one to value facts above feeling

What I found fault with wasn't what the author said about black people, but the completely mechanistic explanation. "Blacks are dumb, therefore their languages are all concrete, therefore they can't be moral the way western people are." The world is always more complicated than that and peoples do change and evolve, not just genetically but culturally, and culture can change the way people think and behave. If you could meet your direct ancestor from 10,000 years ago he would probably strike you as pretty barbaric and primitive. I bet he didn't have a word for "sexual assault" either.

I'm not trying to have a big argument though. It wouldn't be very fair, since I'm barely advancing any positions myself.

I don't know what makes different groups of people different. I just find as a general rule that when you can think of multiple explanations for a very complex phenomenon, like human behavior, chances are no one will suit, but they all contribute in a complex and uneven way.

>So perhaps the reason Homer isn't very abstract is because there was very little written language before Homer

Yup, that's the explanation I always heard from my profs anyway. One in particular would even draw comparisons between the Homeric heroes and tribal culture in Afghanistan. Their "morality" (for which they had no word) would have looked pretty alien to us.

You invented black vernacular English?

And Dutch just sounds like a drunk version of German , afrikaans has some flair to it imo

that slide looks awesome, has anyone ever used it? serious question

Spanish :^)

dutch more literature i think, so who cares

Whatever language has epistemic modality and evidentiality matching the theory of science. So obviously a con-lang no one has ever heard of before.

Mathematics.

Dutch is widely considered to be the most ugly European language there is.

>What I found fault with wasn't what the author said about black people, but the completely mechanistic explanation. "Blacks are dumb, therefore their languages are all concrete, therefore they can't be moral the way western people are."

I agree with this, which is why I decided to warn against /pol/ness to begin with, since while /pol/ isn't afraid to say what might be contemporarily controversial, this also means many stupid people will do injustice and label all blacks as inferior, simply by virtue of skin colour, which is just as stupid as being completely politically correct.

In general when reading articles like that I have learned to read between the lines, picking out the bits that can be taken as objective facts or observation, and employing a heavy dose of scepticism to anything that smells of baseless personal prejudice.

It is a difficult line to walk though.

>I don't know what makes different groups of people different. I just find as a general rule that when you can think of multiple explanations for a very complex phenomenon, like human behavior, chances are no one will suit, but they all contribute in a complex and uneven way.

This is the more appropriate way to approach this topic I feel as well. There are many factors that influence and feedback on each other. Perhaps the only one that holds sway over the others is genetics, as it is more "cause" than "effect", but my own personal research on this particular aspect has only revealed how complicated things can get.

One could even consider the parallel development of genetic-like systems, for example, the memeplex(culture), or other genetically based systems such as our mitochondria or intestinal bacteria that have their own distinct genetics.

At the very least, the reason genetics are so pivotal is because it is the equivalent of "written language" for the human body, since genetics are literally a biochemical codification. I'm fairly certain that culture, language, thoughts, and so on, as we know it can only be expressed within the context of humans. And what are humans but expressions of genetics?

I have some vague memory of climbing on that thing when I was much younger. The problem though is that the surface is more like a course concrete than a slide. So more scraping and grating than fun times. Also scary as fuck the steeper you get.

what is danish

Thankful for the Dutch.

Korean. 'Just look at it's script.