Headline in today’s
New York Times:
Incursions by Turkey
put Greece on Alert
(Chant to the beat of “To market to market / to buy a fat pig”.)
Politico-prosodical footnote:
While world history is being made on the fly,
While world history is being made on the fly,
POTUS is venting
unedited -- and without scansion.
At the least, he should be required to phrase everything
in dactylic measures.
That would also
give time for reflection.
Hi, sorry if this is the wrong place to post this comment but when I typed "David Justice linguist" in google I only found this blog. I just wanted to say that I have started to read your book "Semantics of Form in Arabic" and I realized that the six factors mentioned there to explain why it is an easy language to learn work wonderfully to explain why Japanese is also easy to learn. Let me explain why.
ReplyDelete- Verbs don't change. There are only present and past forms that you will remember soon because they are all the same. No need to learn those irritating endings of European languages. There are only two irregular verbs to bear in mind, くる and する
- Most of the language is writen in katakana and hiragana, two syllabaries that you can learn in less than one day. Their sounds are very similar to Spanish. Let's imagine you want to say or write the word camera. You just need カメラ (or カ-ka メ-me ラ-ra)
- The syntax is simple. A few particles are the concrete that solidify the language. Once you know them, the meaning of the sentences is crystal clear.
- There are no genders and no plural endings to learn
- There are no cases to remember.
- You have to learn the Chinese characters but they all have a radical with a particular meaning that in many cases is related to the whole word and this will be very helpful to memorize them. In many cases you just need to add those smaller blocks to guess the meaning before searching for it in a dictionary.
People think that Japanese, Arabic... are very difficult but your list of factors show clearly that they are wrong.