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Comment by tguvot

12 hours ago

I have my own sample set as I presented.

Russian is seriously messed up language. Especially after learning Hebrew (which is simple and algorithmic) , I was able to look back in Russian and realize what a horrible mess of a language it is.

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tguvot

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vkazanov  10 hours ago

Hebrew was literally synthesised a century ago. Language designers really did great work on taking a core of a dead language and proposing a cleaner, more modern version of it.

Russian and English never had this "rearchitecture-and-cleanup" moment. In fact, English borrows heavily from different languages (old german, old danish, latin, old french...) adding even more complexity. Russian borrows from greek, old slavonic (bolgarian), among others. So an advanced speaker/reader of these languages has to understand the influences.

A couple of years ago I tried learning some minimal Ancient egyptian. A fascinating language in its diversity. Middle kingdom egyptian, old and new kingdom written dialects. Then, there's a simplified cursive script which almost feels like modern writing.

  • rgblambda  8 hours ago

    >Hebrew was literally synthesised a century ago.

    I had heard somewhere that much of the vocabulary of Modern Hebrew consists of loanwords from Arabic. Is this correct and if so, would it mean that the "cleanliness" of the language is more a reflection of Modern Standard Arabic?

    Apologies in advance if this is seen as some falsehood or if it's a sensitive topic.

    • Adverblessly  3 hours ago

      I couldn't find a source for how many Hebrew words have each origin, so I sampled 25 random words from the Hebrew Wiktionary and counted their sources. Where there wasn't a clear source (or a clear "way" to a source) or the word itself was spelled in English for some reason I just randomized another word.

      The number one source was unsurprisingly Hebrew with 11 words. This includes biblical sources as well as medieval and more modern sources, typically Jewish scholars writing in Hebrew in exile.

      The second most common source was Greek with 5 words and relatedly Latin had 1 word. A lot of them you'd probably recognize in many languages e.g. whatever way you say Democracy probably has the same origin (sounds like Demokratia in Hebrew).

      The third most common source was ancient Hebrew-adjacent languages, 2 for Aramaic, 1 for Ugaritic, 1 for Akkadian. You could include the 2 for Arabic here as well.

      The fourth would be modern loanwords with 1 for English and 1 for Italian ("Pizzeria").

      It is also worth noting that some words with a foreign origin still have a Hebrew counterpart. For example דיאלוג==Dialog==Dialogue is not from Hebrew, but you can say דו-שיח instead.

      Additionally, Wiktionary does slightly bias towards the words you'd want to look up and is not as comprehensive as a real dictionary, so not a perfect sampling.

      My personal guess is that this isn't too far off of reality. A more comprehensive sampling will probably diversify the various European languages rather than just being Greek (i.e. probably a bit more German via Yiddish, a bit of French etc.) and maybe make Aramaic a bit more prominent, but overall it doesn't feel insanely off base.

    • nephihaha  4 hours ago

      No, that isn't true. Hebrew has taken a lot of Arabic words but not the majority. It has also taken a lot from Yiddish (as you'd expect) and certain modern words which are common across Europe.

  • Muromec  7 hours ago

    >Russian and English never had this "rearchitecture-and-cleanup" moment.

    Then 1918th spelling reform was a thing. It's of course always easier to reform other languages to make it closer to yours than change yourself. Those silly natives can't ever figure out the spelling and dictionary themselves without a bit of a genocide.

delitrem  4 hours ago

> Russian is seriously messed up language.

Some (most?) national languages, which developed chaotically, are very illogical, with weird constructions and some inexplicable features (Russian and English are examples of this). Artificial/planned languages such as Esperanto are a different matter -- they are very easy to learn and very pleasant to the ear.