Data Comparisons

Be afraid. Be very afraid. Mom is going to….

31 Comments

We’ve always joked that my Mother causes revolution. There was some sort of revolution when she was in Guatemala. She visited Quito in 2005; I received this email:

“The Ecuadorians are trying to oust their president. There are demonstrations – even in the residential communities.

There is some problem about the legality of the new appointments to the Supreme Court and pardoning of the previous president who had stolen billions from the national treasury.

We shall be away from Quito until Friday as we are leaving at 6:30 a.m. for the Galapagos.”

I don’t know if her visits have caused insurrection elsewhere. But guess where she is going in July? Norway. Yep. Norway.

Naturally when she mentioned this in December, I thought, “Great! A trip to a place that peaceful!” She goes with a group– and normally I hate traveling with groups. But Mom’s getting old, and I thought it would be fun to spend time with her. So I said, “Hey. Can I go too?”. Jim thought “Scandinavia. What could go wrong? ”

So… I arranged for tickets. Bought them last week. Naturally troops are now mobilizing in Norway. Sigh. . .

31 thoughts on “Be afraid. Be very afraid. Mom is going to….”

  2. Well… I think I need to learn some Norwegian now. You can decide whether I should do it for the sane reason or the tin-foil hat reason.

    Sane reason: It’s nice to be polite and be able to say a few things in Norwegian while visiting.
    Tin-foil hat reason: If the whole country erupts in fury while I’m there, I might need to hole up in someone’s basement in the country side, hidden from Ruskies or something. In that case, in the event they don’t speak English, I’ll need to speak Norwegian. 🙂

    The method of learning Norwegian would have to be: find an online MOOC, spend time learning a bit. Then find Norwegian shows or movies to watch on Netflix and try to understand a bit.

    So far, I’ve mastered “Ja” and “Nei”.

  3. Regarding the sane reason, I try to be able to at least express an apology for not speaking the language and a query about whether or not the person I’m speaking to speaks English. As fluent as I can make it anyway. I think most people appreciate the effort even if it doesn’t quite manage to be good.
    Tin foil hat: Sounds reasonable. 🙂 Although I’d consider hedging my bet and maybe picking up some Russian as well…

  4. Mark,
    I think I can really only master one new foreign language at a time. Plus, I don’t think Netflix has any movies in Russian. But yes, if the tin-foil hat need arises, Russian would be good to know.

    Also, laziness make me lean toward Norwegian because the lexical distance between English and Norwegian is fairly short.

  5. remember, if you are feeding Norwegians and you want to offer seconds you need to ask three times.

    we know this from an unfortunate experience where we starved some visiting Norwegians.

  6. Oh my. . . In my case, I’m going there.

    So I guess if I want to eat all my chocolate myself, I can offer the box around, wait for them to know and get it all to myself. Bwhaaaaaaaa!!!

  7. Lucia,

    I found Norway to be civilized, clean, wealthy (certainly on average), very sparsely populated (at least outside Oslo) and the people helpful and friendly. I drove from Oslo to a scenic town called Sandefjord about 70 miles south on the E18. Sandefjord was a whaling center back in the day. People told me that if you continue South down the E18 there are many beautiful views, but I had to return to Oslo.

  8. I once had a Dane explain to me that Norwegian wasn’t a language but rather a condition of the larynx.

    At any rate, all Norwegians learn English in school….

  9. Lucia,
    Thanks for the language map; I was unaware such things existed. I am not sure such a map always predicts ease of learning a new language. For example, for English speakers to learn simple German is no doubt easier than simple Spanish, because there are far more simple cognate pairs between English and German. But learning more fluent Spanish, with a substantial vocabulary, is probably easier because there are so many more sophisticated (latin based) cognate pairs between English and Spanish. Then there is the sense of “always clearing your throat” with Germanic languages…. too ugly for my taste. 😉

  10. SteveF,
    I think some languages are just “easier” in some sense. My impression is English is considered an easy to learn language because the grammar was greatly simplified during the various invasions. During that time English became sort of a “pidgin” and many complicated things like declensions and so on were lost.

    Norwegian might turn out to be more difficult to learn. But I did find some online sites, and I think I can start learning some words– at least as far as hearing and spelling them. I have less confidence on pronunciation.

  11. That map surprised me a little bit. Of course I don’t really know, all anecdotal, but the distances don’t line up well with my baseless notions about how hard some languages are [edit: to learn]. Gaelic for example; I’d always heard that one was a real beast to learn, yet it’s pretty close on the map to English.
    Learn something every day I guess. Except for Slavic languages, apparently. 🙂

  12. You know, now that I look at it again, my eyes might be deceiving me about the weighted distances… Probably if I really wanted to understand the distances it’d be better for me to compute numeric values, or redo the map changing weighting to actual [edit: spatial] distance.

  13. Also, I might be reading too much into it. Is the effort for an English speaker to learn Gaelic proportional to the distance from English to ?Welsh I guess? to Gaelic? Or am I reading meaning in there that isn’t implied? (Real, although not burningly important questions)

  14. mark bofill: “Gaelic for example; I’d always heard that one was a real beast to learn, yet it’s pretty close on the map to English.”
    .
    I don’t think Gaelic and English are indicated as being close. From the legend, the line type connecting them indicates a lexical distance >71, the most distant category.
    It looks to me like the line length should be ignored. For instance, the line from French to Portuguese appears to be longer than the line from French to Breton, but from the legend the former lexical distance is 36-50 and the latter is >71.
    In trying to figure out if the line length indicates anything, I found no insight from what appears to be the original source:
    https://elms.wordpress.com/2008/03/04/lexical-distance-among-languages-of-europe/

  15. Mike M.,

    Thanks. After posting that comment I started thinking along the same lines myself. Particularly, thanks for looking at the spatial distance question. So apparently the actual distance doesn’t have meaning in the graph.
    .
    You’d think a denier like myself on a climate blog of all places would look for misleading characteristics like this in a graph! Heh. Apparently not.

  16. The Foreign Services Institute list in this blog post is geared more specifically towards “what is easier for English speakers to learn”…it puts German in a slightly harder category than Spanish (and the author of the post thinks Spanish and Italian should be downgraded to an “extra easy” level).

  17. the author of the post thinks Spanish and Italian should be downgraded to an “extra easy” level

    I always felt that way too, but then I’m biased. I don’t speak Spanish, but my parents were native Spanish speakers that only made the effort to completely stop speaking Spanish at all (with some older relatives for example, like my grandparents) around the kids after I was a couple of years old. So – it always sounds sort of familiar; like it would make sense if I just paid enough attention.
    .
    My Mom has told me before that Italian sounds like badly spoken / misspoken Spanish to her, but that she was always able to get the gist of what an Italian speaker was saying. (She doesn’t speak Italian).

  18. Joseph W,

    The list agrees with my personal impressions from travel, and from becoming fluent in Portuguese as an adult. The more distant languages are so completely disconnected from English that you might as well try learning Martian…. there are no meaningful cognates, totally different grammar, totally different sound generation, etc.
    .
    My impression though is that the inverse of that list might be significantly different. That is, native speakers of another language may find learning English more difficult (or less difficult) than English speakers learning that other language. Many native Spanish and Portuguese speakers seem to have a terrible time with English, even after considerable effort, while lots of Germans speak English very, very well.
    .
    One of the problems for Romance language speakers is that those languages have relatively few irregular spellings/pronunciations… if you can pronounce the word you can usually write it correctly; if you can read the word you can usually pronounce it correctly. So speakers of these languages seem to be driven to distraction by written English (which they are often broadly exposed to), and end up trying to pronounce written English words as they would be pronounced in their native language…. leading to often completely unintelligible pronunciations. Were they able to learn via only hearing the correctly pronounced words, I suspect they would do much better, but since written English is ubiquitous in many countries, that is just not possible.

  19. Mark — A few acquaintances of mine confirmed that in the opposite direction; if you speak Spanish tolerably well, you can get by in Italy.

    SteveF — I’ve heard it said (by a very multilingual writer whose native language was Czech) that English had the easiest grammar and the most horrible spelling of any language he’d studied. So you may be on to something there.

    The Brazilians I’ve known have told me that our phrasal verbs are one of the hardest parts to pick up (e.g., “call up” instead of “telephone,” or “put out” instead of “extinguish”….or, you know, “pick up” instead of “learn”).

  20. mark Bofill,
    With respect to the map: the distance corresponds to the proportion of shared words. Closer together indicates more common words in the two languages. The colors are language families. Language family affects grammatical rules a lot.

    Both rules of grammar and words affect the difficulty of learning a language properly a lot.

    With respect to Norwegian: It’s in the same family as English– so some grammar is going to be shared; it also shares many words. In contrast French is in a different family, and also shared many words– but the map suggest English shared more words with Norwegian than with French.

    If you watch Norwegian movies you can get a sense of this. You can recognize numbers, many simple words (man). Heck, last night I was watching a Norwegian series on netflix, listened while reading the subtitles and I said to Jim… “I wonder why the translated ‘dumb’ in Norwegian to “stupid” “. Of course, I knew perhaps “dumb” wasn’t the word that was translated to stupid, but then I looked it up. “Dum” in Norwegian is “Stupid”, which, of course, we all know is also what everyone calls “dumb” (and will continue to do so even if corrected by the pedantic.)

    Anyway, my guess is if you had some sort of weighting for number of words and language group, Norwegian should be easier to learn than French. But that might not be so if Norwegian some how has an especially horrific grammar. (Ours was, after all, simplified.)

    I did one 20 minute lessons last night. It was sort of cheesy… but better than nothing. We’ll see if I continue and how far I get.

    With respect to Gaelic: It is in a different language group from English. So, I’d guess that is a factor making it harder to learn. Also if you look at the distance on the lexical map, you’ll see Welsh is quite far from English. It is certainly further than French or Norwegian. It looks further than German. So by my guess that’s going to make it harder to learn.
    And then there is a factor the map doesn’t show: Total complexity of the languages grammar, or ‘weirdness’ of sounds relative to what the student is used to. It may well be that Gaelic grammar is a beast or that the “sounds” are “weird” for an English speaker. If so, Welsh could be really hard.

    But anyway, the short hand rule I’m guessing as true would suggest that Norwegian should be much easier to learn than Welsh. French should be a bit harder than Norwegian (but I already speak it.) German might be about the same as French (because German is same family/ fewer shared words relative to French.) Welsh should be harder to learn than French or German. That said: factors not on the map likely matter.

  22. Lucia: “the distance corresponds to the proportion of shared words.”
    .
    Is that something that you got from the source for the map? That is what I initially assumed until I realized it does not make sense. For instance, I can not believe that the Finno-Urgric languages are as close to the Indo-European languages as indicated in the map. Plus, there are all the places where the line length does not seem to agree with the line type. Or is “lexical distance” something other than “proportion of shared words”. Actually, I think that should be shared root words.

  26. Lucia,
    On the more quantitative map, the line lengths and numbers do seem to correlate, unlike the simpler map. The original source for the simpler one (that you first posted) only says it “shows the lexical distance”; it does not say how it shows that, other than in the legend.
    .
    Then there is the question of what the numbers mean. I am guessing they are the percentage of words that are different, so that the upper bound would be 100. That would explain why the Uralic languages do not see as far from the Indo-European languages as I would have guessed (a distance of 80 would be twice as many words in common as a distance of 90). I suspect that the larger numbers are heavily contaminated by loan words, so that they don’t really tell how similar the languages are. I also suspect that trying to reduce the differences between languages to a single number is probably a fool’s errand.

  27. ‘easy’ is a tricky concept. Having more words in common (or more usually, having words with common roots) doesn’t help that much because the percentages aren’t that high. Grammar is seen as hard, but actually the amount of grammar to learn is small compared to the number of words to learn. If the language is similar to one you already know it’s easier to understand it and harder to speak it (confusing the two). England and the UK have many dialects of English, some I can understand and some I can’t. Actors who can switch between English and American impress me.
    .
    Which part of Norway are you going to? Oslo speaks one language and Bergen and the coast another. Of course everybody is supposed to be fluent in both. and English.

  28. Ledite,

    Actors who can switch between English and American impress me.

    Me too. I’m pretty sure they’re mostly English like Hugh Laurie (House), though. His American is flawless.

  30. Bergen, lovely! Nynorsk. Which I personally think is harder. It’s a sort-of synthetic language, an artificially constructed thing to combine elements of the regional dialects. As you can imagine, the coast line is so difficult, so there were regional dialects. Probably still are although the written language is more unified. The regular Norwegian is really Danish with a different pronounciation. Denmark was the colonial power, so some preferred to have their own language. Or at least their own variant.

    Here’s something you might like and to give you a flavor.

    https://coop.no/extra/mat–trender/slik-lager-du-perfekte-scones-som-hotell-bristol/

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