Do different languages have varying degrees of ‘effectiveness’ in communicating? Can subtle communication be lost in translation from a more ‘complex’ language to a simpler one?

These are the questions I stumbled upon on the world wide web, by chance. I haven’t written a post on here in a while due to assignments and time lapsing, but just had to write something about this conversation that appeared on Reddit (of all places). Instead of just paraphrasing what I read, I’m going to quote it below:

In general, linguists agree that no language is more or less complex than another overall, and definitely agree that all natural human languages are effective at communicating. This is in part because there’s no agreed upon rubric for what constitutes “complexity,” and because there is a very strong pressure for ineffectivelanguage to be selected against.

Can subtle communication be lost in translation from one more ‘complex’ language to a simpler one?

A few thoughts:

(1) Information can be lost in translation, yes. More often than not, it’s ‘flavor.’ That is, social and pragmatic nuances, or how prosodic and phonological factors affect an utterance. Translated poetry, to give an obvious example, will either lose rhythmic feeling and rhyme, or be forced to fit a rhythm and rhyme at the expense of more direct or idiomatic translation.

(2) You would have to define complexity, before you could answer this. Every time I’ve seen a question like this, what the OP defines as complexity is just one way of communicating information, and the supposedly more complex language is less complex in other ways. For instance, communicating the syntactic role of a noun phrase can be achieved either through case marking, or through fixed word order. Which of these is more complex? Well, one’s got structural requirements at the phrase level, another has morphological requirements at the word level. Or here’s another example: think about Mandarin and English. Mandarin has fewer vowels than English. Is it therefore less complex? What about the fact that it has lexical tone that English lacks?

Do different languages have varying degrees of ‘effectiveness’ in communicating?

No. In general, you’ll find that the people who argue they do (1) have not ever seriously studied linguistics, (2) tend not to know how global languages became global languages — through colonization in the last few centuries, and (3) tend to want to support overly simplistic narratives that are based on ethnoracial or class prejudice. They’re also often really poorly thought-out. For instance, I’ve seen a lot of arguments in this thread that English is somehow superior for math and science, claiming that speakers of other languages have to switch to English, or borrow words from English to do math or science — while conveniently forgetting that English borrowed most of those words from Latin and Greek. And that the speakers of other languages they’re holding as examples were educated in English in former English colonies, so they were taught math and science terminology in English rather than their home languages.

I would link to peer reviewed papers, but this is so fundamental to the study of linguistics that I’m not even sure where to start, honestly. The claims that a given language is more complex than another, or better suited to abstract thought, or what have you have all gone the way of other racist pseudo-science,= like phrenology…which is to say, long gone from academia, but alive and well on reddit. ¯\(ツ)/¯

Whilst completely unreferenced, this makes for a fascinating debate. Following this, I found an utterly fantastic section called /r/badlinguistics, which you can find here. I’ll pick out some of my highlights at the moment:

• “Japanese is the most unorganised language I’ve ever seen” – this is despite the language having a character set for native words, foreign words and chinese characters. The original commenter goes on to state “being hard to learn is the same as being disorganised”, which is like saying a ready meal is hard to cook because of its poor packaging. Once you scramble through the mess, you’re ready to master the food, or in this case, the language.
• One person committed not one, but four linguistic sins: ‘Racism doesn’t deserve its own word, it is just hate’ and ‘words are only used literally (besides figures of speech’.
• ‘Someone stated that in the world of botany, there is no such thing as vegetables. As it is a culinary, no plants are classified as vegetables, therefore they don’t exist.’ Convincing? Not too a vegetarian, who questioned their very existence.
• Finally, someone stated ‘Quebecois French’ to be ‘broken and frankly just ugly to listen to’. Someone rightfully corrected them, Québécois, and sated the grammar is the same as French, but the accent is different in the same way British and American English is pronounced with different accents.

If you’re ever feeling down whilst working on an assignment, just being happy there are people in this world with worse linguistic knowledge than yourself.