Few phrases + complexity of languages

1. Une des principales préoccupations de ministres de l'Education nationale

Does préoccupation here means the same as in english;

2: Rivarol croit pouvoir démontrer qu'il est supérieur aux autres langues par sa clarté naturelle.

What does it means ?

3. qu'il fallait - does it means one should or one must

4: décide - is it pronounce like ' dey -si' and the past tense is pronounce like 'dey-si-dey' ?

Thanks for any forthcoming help.

By the way, why was the french language evolved in such complicated ways, is it because there was a rather big upper class who could afford the time to do so? Take the time to make the language sound better or write more flowery language.

In Agrarian country the language is much more simple because I think the farmers didn't have so much time to go into niceties of language , to make it sound better or to make it more elegant or things like that, they spent a lot of time on the land.

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Permalink Reply by Neil Coffey on August 7, 2011 at 5:09pm

(1) Yes, basically: "concerns" might be a more idiomatic translation here.

(2) A translation would be something like "Rivarol believes he/she can demonstrate that it is superior to other languages due to its natural clarity".

(3) Literally, it means "It was necessary to", so an idiomatic translation would often be things like ".... needed to ...", "... was needed", "Doing X was necessary..." etc.

(4) Yes, although you do also pronounce the final "d". If by "past tense" you mean the imperfect form "décidait", then yes.

I'll respons to the other broader question in a separate post.

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Permalink Reply by Neil Coffey on August 7, 2011 at 5:26pm

Re your other point, it's not clear that the French language, or indeed any language, has really evolved in "more complex ways" than any other language, or that you could point to any significant part of its evolution being due to a class system. Any language is hugely complex. The tiny tips of the iceberg that we may see as being signs of "complexity" (e.g. language X has 4 case forms, whereas language Y has 6 case forms; language X has 8 distinct vowel qualities, whereas language Y has only 6 distinct vowel qualities...) are really themselves just the product of our cultural biases: we point to these features as being areas of "complexity" because we've arbitrarily decided that they are complex whereas other features aren't. There's no concrete evidence I'm aware of that, say, the language spoken by a peasant community has less chance of having what learners see as features of "complexity" such as case forms, tenses, sound interactions, means of word derivation etc than any other language.

Another way of looking at things: if you invented some system for measuring the "complexity" of a language on a scale of 0 to 100, you might find that e.g. English has a score of 97.3, French a score of 97.6 and then maybe you might find an African tribal language with a score of let's say 95.4. So you might conclude that the African tribal language is "less complex" than the other languages. But really, you're measuring tips of icebergs and the scores you arrive at are influenced by which specific tips of the icebergs we decide to attach most weight to-- the overall situation is that every language is immensely complex, and statements of the sort "language X is more/less complex than language Y" are fairly pointless. (N.B. You could equally find that the African tribal language has a higher score than French and English, and in any case I don't think such a scale could really exist-- I'm just making a point.)

So basically, the idea of culturally sophisticated communities having more complex languages is essentially a myth.

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Permalink Reply by yong leong on August 7, 2011 at 6:05pm

Well, Neil, I don't quite agree. But I am no linguist so I don't have theory just conjectures. Of course I may be totally wrong.

I personally know two languages (not my mother tongue) I wouldn't mention the name of these two languages- these two languages are from the same root. One has a longer cultural history than the other and when I listen to this one that has a longer cultural history it sounds so much more sophisticated and pleasant to the ears. The other one compare to this one sound crude.

These two languages can communicate without difficulties, only some words are different all the rest remain the same. The difference of about one thousand years in culture development between the two. So I don't think it is a myth like you said.

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Permalink Reply by Neil Coffey on August 7, 2011 at 9:57pm

It's extremely common for people to make judgements about languages and dialects which are heavily associated with their value judgements about the speakers of those languages. For example, if you survey people on how much they would like to live in particular cities, and then survey them on how aesthetically pleasing they find the languages or dialects of those cities, there is a close correlation. As human beings, we also have a natural propensity to try to spot patterns/correspondences where there is really none. So it's extremely common for people to anecdotally "find" that the language spoken by a culture that they see as more sophisticated is in itself more complex or sophisticated.

The true test would be, say, to take 1,000 random speakers from different backgrounds who had no a priori knowledge or bias about the culture of the two languages in question and see if there was any significant difference in the percentage of speakers that found one or the other language to be more sophisticated.

When such studies are carried out, they tend to show that there is no correlation, i.e. a group of random observers with no a priori knowledge of the languages/cultures in question will show no significant trend towards favouring any particular language/dialect they are asked for judgements about.

If you're interested more in this, I'd recommend as a starting point that you have a look at sociolinguistic studies of people like Peter Trudgill and/or the essay by Giles & Niedzielski, "Italian is Beautiful, German is Ugly" in "Language Myths" ed. Bauer & Trudgill.

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Permalink Reply by Pibosan on August 9, 2011 at 10:51pm

When you said "Agrarian country", which country/countries did you have in mind?

Every language is simple to its native speakers and complex to foreign learners.

No language is completely "beautiful" or completely "ugly". I would advise against going down that route as it doesn't help you with acquiring the language. From my own experience, what sounded like an "ugly" language is not "ugly" anymore once you start speaking it. I have learned Dutch and German. Neither scores high on the "beautiful language count-down list", but to me, both have its own innate "beauty".

Neil's reading recommendations are good.

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Permalink Reply by yong leong on August 10, 2011 at 7:48am

You are right Pibosan, once you speak the foreign language well it appears to be beautiful, I have experienced that myself. Is fun too, I speak thai and I look like thai ( I am from neighbour country of thai) so when the thai discovered that I am not thai, they started laughing and said "I thought you were thai " .At first I didn't think thai language was beautiful but when you speak it well you sort of enjoy and begin to think it is a beautiful language. I think it's a misconception.

I had China in mind when I said "Agarian country", in ancient china there was emperor and of course the ruling class spoke a more refined language, more polite form. These were not the people that made up the majority of the population.

The rest especially the farmers and labourers didn't speak in such manner, they didn't have the time to sit around and speak a more polite refined language. . The taxes were already killing them before anything else.

A joke on language " A Japanese tourist in London asked a policeman , "Excuse me,what is time?"