The hardest language

[is]

For those who say learning foreign languages is difficult; and for those in Asturias who argue that Asturian and Galician are incomprehensible (nice try), here is The Economist's take on the world's hardest languages to master (Dec. 17, 2009):

http://www.economist.com/displaystory.c ... n=facebook

Here is an advance:

A truly boggling language is one that requires English speakers to think about things they otherwise ignore entirely. Take “we”. In Kwaio, spoken in the Solomon Islands, “we” has two forms: “me and you” and “me and someone else (but not you)”. And Kwaio has not just singular and plural, but dual and paucal too. While English gets by with just “we”, Kwaio has “we two”, “we few” and “we many”. Each of these has two forms, one inclusive (“we including you”) and one exclusive. It is not hard to imagine social situations that would be more awkward if you were forced to make this distinction explicit.

Berik, a language of New Guinea, also requires words to encode information that no English speaker considers. Verbs have endings, often obligatory, that tell what time of day something happened; telbener means “[he] drinks in the evening”.

[Art]

Wow, those details really would complicate a language! Thanks, Is.

If you're interested in languages, the article is worth reading.

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¡Vaya, de verdad esos detalles complicaría el uso de una lengua! Gracias, Is.

Si te interesa los idiomas, vale la pena leer el artículo.

[Art]

Most fascinating is a feature that would make any journalist tremble. Tuyuca requires verb-endings on statements to show how the speaker knows something. Diga ape-wi means that “the boy played soccer (I know because I saw him)”, while diga ape-hiyi means “the boy played soccer (I assume)”. English can provide such information, but for Tuyuca that is an obligatory ending on the verb. Evidential languages force speakers to think hard about how they learned what they say they know.

Boy, it would be great to have this feature in our languages! It'sd make a huge improvement on political debate, don't you think? Most of us are simply repeating what we've heard and have no idea of whether our statements are based in reality.

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Ah, sería estupendo tener esta característica en nuestros idiomas! Se haría una gran mejora en el debate político, ¿no? La mayoría de nosotros simplemente repetimos lo que hemos oído y no tenemos ninguna idea de si nuestras declaraciones se basan en la realidad.