Language is upstream of intelligence:
Discussion
Double plus good. Orwell knew this.
If this is true, then why is Latin dead? Why didn't the Latin people have computers
Latin morphed into French, Spanish, Portugese, and Italian.
I don't know why those people didn't invent computers though.
It all went toward making really good food
The 'English world' had a great historical advantage by becoming increasingly dominant in the industrial area and later the USA had an even greater advantage because the country's development model remained largely dispersed, with little legal intervention and even having the good fortune of attracting very intelligent immigrants.
Although many people in the cultures you mentioned had already been cooperating for the emergence of the computer, whether with scientific articles, prototypes, parts or raw materials.
Y'all just kept taking it away from the original point, language doesn't mean shot when it comes to intelligence and thereby innovation. Simpler language means easier collaboration means more people get educated means more innovation. With language, it's clearly about quantity, not quality
This is a very loose statement... Simple in what? For what? For whom?
English may be simpler to write than many other languages, because it does not have graphic accents, for example, but also, less familiar words may end up being much more difficult to read.
It is also not easy to learn for those who are not already familiar with the vocabulary, something that is very similar among Latin languages. It is much faster for speakers of Latin languages to learn other Latin languages than English, especially among Spanish, Portuguese and Italian.
English also did not undergo the spelling reforms that some Latin languages underwent, such as changing 'ph' to 'f'; 'rh' to 'r'; 'th' and 'tt' to 't'; 'pp' to 'p' and others, which made writing and reading many scientific names and other words much easier.
Wrong. Linguistically English is pretty much the simplest language in existence. We don't have masculine and feminine, a case system, barely have conjugation and tense is mostly from additional words. Thats Just to start.
Your point that "because someone who speaks French can easily learn Italian" has nothing to do with the objective complexity of the language and it just about similarity. As someone who knows both of these, it's simply because their grammar is similar and they have a lot of cognates.
Objectively English is more simplistic that the latin languages and late in more complex that those.
It may seem simple from your perspective, but English is a language that ended up mixing elements from several languages and creating several exceptions and much more dispersed etymologies, mainly when combining the Germanic branch with the Latin branch.
So, those who do not learn from the beginning will have great difficulty knowing how to write a word, speak it and how to read it, as clearly demarcated by: "though", "through", "thought" and "tough", in addition to several subtleties in pronunciation in vowels for each word and the enormous amount of phrasal verbs (look after, turn up, set up) and many agglutinations of words with meanings totally different from the original terms (douchebag → idiot).
The linguistic way of thinking in English is more analytical than synthetic, so from an analytical point of view, an analytical language may be easier while someone from a synthetic language may find it more difficult, because they are syntactically more rigid.
Your definition of English as complex is relative, mine is objective.
Your previous comment is much more biased than you want to realize and lacks objectivity, as there is no linguistic basis whatsoever, just a point of view.
No, it's objective. I am fluent in 3 human languages and studied linguistics. It is simple fact that English is less complex grammatically than Latin languages, you can't refute the simplest of points, for example conjugation
In Italian the word "fu" is a sentence in and of itself that in English translates to "in the distance past, it was" English basically doesn't have that verb tense, nor does it have agreement with the subject in the conjugation. I believe in Latin theres is an even more complex layer where the gender of the subject is also accounted for in the verb Conjugation. This is proof of the simplicity of English.
If by "objective" you mean grammatical/sytaxical, sure. But in terms of communication, I think language is better qualified as a tool that evolves and adapts in ways that are relevant to the ideas we wish to communicate. https://youtu.be/NJYoqCDKoT4
Languages oscillate between becoming more analytical and more synthetic throughout history, and this occurs so that more vocabulary is created and then reduced to more basic words, but each of these processes simplifies the language in a sense; there is never a simplification in general.
Languages that become more synthetic tend to be more capable of summarizing a sentence to one word, making communication more compact and specific. A language that becomes more analytical divides the word into more basic terms, but in many cases requires the speaker to understand the specific context in the composition of the words.
Mandarin, for example, is one of the most analytical languages , but it is necessary to understand what the union of different terms comes to mean, something that, in addition to the writing of the language itself, makes it difficult for other populations to learn.
That said, English is undoubtedly an excellent language for computing and logical questions, as it uses few graphic symbols, short words, a reduced basic vocabulary and rigid syntax, but this ends up making it lose the expressiveness, emotionality and poetry that Latin languages have (with more derivations in words and greater syntactic flexibility). This expressiveness is also perceived by the fact that Latin languages in general have more vowel words than consonant ones, have more variations, prefixes and suffixes, and have more prosody, characteristics that allowed for a long time, and even today, the Latin culture and alphabet to spread throughout the world and even shaped much of modern English.
You're making an entirely separate point.
No, it remains within my initial point.
I just illustrated it with more elements to make it easier to clarify. Reread the first paragraph of the previous text and the first paragraph of my first response to you.
In any case, everything I needed to say has already been said. It's up to you to allow yourself to interpret it 👍
Necessary and insufficient
Linguist here… all languages have syntax and are complex. What is he trying to say about some languages being more “advanced?”