Determining the most primitive language

Which of these is a primitive language: French, English or Russian?

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merriam-webster.com/dictionary/primitive
books.google.fr/books?id=qQ20vvzacXMC&pg=PA51&lpg=PA51&dq=genders abandon in english&source=bl&ots=xx-l5eyGjF&sig=2AhbfUELJrX7X_pfmzS71qzOdq0&hl=fr&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwjcobD3y6HSAhWiKMAKHbbOBWIQ6AEIPzAD#v=onepage&q=genders abandon in english&f=false
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russian

t. Turk rape baby

All three are incredibly complex and can convey amazing things in literature and poetry.

>english
>incredibly complex

>primitive language
Explain

Russian

English is basically Germanic French and no latin language can be primitive, so: Russian

but you can't even speak it

My gf has taken one course of russian language. She says its very simple and primitive

>its
Also, do you honestly believe a fusional language with actual inflexion and declension is somehow more primitive and simple than fucking English?

English has the largest vocabulary of any language

Yes I believe that. You might also not see your own language from the outsider perspective since its your native language

That does not make it complex.
A cruiser is not more complex than a space shuttle.

Also, iirc the ONE MILLION WORDS thing was a farce, counting any words commonly used in any english-speaking region as "english", such as celtic, gaelic, aboriginal, etc. words.
The English vocabulary is certainly one of, if not the biggest, in the world, but mainly owing to modern technical jargon, rather than words used in normal conversation or literary work.

It's easy to incorporate words from other languages and claim you have 'the largest vocabulary'

English is like the language of Tarzan, it's so extremely simplified it's stupid, when i translate something literal from English sounds like a cavernman talking

French because it's what fucked up and dumbed down English

>most primitive language

No such thing, take a linguistics course.

define primitive

leaf versions of both English and French are primitive

it's something that resembles Indians and their retarded way of life

that was mean :'(

You would do that too if you didn't keep archaic bullshit like genders inflections and cases. English is the VIP of languages.

But anyway, the most primitive language by far is any chinese dialect; they have so many problems with adapting their symbolic radicals to modern language that are relatively unchanged for over thousands of years, and they are forced to simplify them so that they can be read on computer screens. Its important to consider primitivity as being different from complexity or context. Any recently developed language, whether it comes from europe or africa, cannot be primitive and any language with full deixis cannot be incomplete

>its very simple

Yet, none of you can speak it properly, even those who're studying Russian for more than 20 years.

Kill yourself Ivan.

>Any recently developed language, whether it comes from europe or africa, cannot be primitive
>africa
u wot m9?

rude but true

if you can't speak Russian properly after 20 years of studying you're beyond retarded

I think French is the most flexible and splendid language, whereas English is really quite a primitive and overly simplistic speak.

How do you know what language someone can speak and cant?

of course I don't with absolute certainty, but it's very likely that you can't

Verdict: English sucked.

Define "primitive language" please.

Those three are indo-european languages but I can't say more about them.

Isn't Mandarin Chinese something like "I many friend many like go cinema"? Why are people arguing about Indo European languages?

A primitive language is a language which capacity for expression is at the level of Spanish.

> t. "knife in kitchen"

For research purposes I'm gonna need a source on that lovely lady.

The correct answer is Russian, btw.

English is the easiest here, you can learn it in months.
My first language is Russian, second is Chinese and i can say that they both are very hard to learn, and to master.
Dont know anything about french tho.

Бългapлap — күбeceнчә Бългapcтaн кыйтгacындa яшәгән төpки хaлык.

And when Spanish speakers who can't into English (most of them) try to translate something from Spanish to English it ends up sounding like caveman speak

If you speak Finnish without the cases they can still understand you. You can literally say, 'I go store buy bread' and it is correct, but incorrect grammar. Might as well be cavemen.

Then again, in Basque, the word for stone and hammer is the same.

Your grasp of English is probably that of a 12 year old, as is most foreigners who learn English and then just stop at the most basic stuff and don't go any further, thinking they've mastered it.

Vocabulary speaking probably english considering they have to steal half of their vocabulary from french to be able to express any complex idea. The other day I realized thst english speakers can't tell apart germanic and romance words. Like when that aussie thought scribe was a germanic word.

Now, english is more evolved in the sense that it simplified many features, according to an english guy I've meet it was because of the dozens of dialects and influx of the celtic, old english, old norse and old french mixing that happened. Russian would be gramtically more primitive because they keep the cases for example.

>Russian would be grammatically more primitive because they keep the cases for example

english

it's a very bastardized language that makes no sense.

you can just make it up as you go along

Japanese is literally cavemanspeak. If their writing system wasn't so fucked up everyone would be able to master the language in like a couple of years.

Yes, like keeping claws and fangs. The more cases the less evolved. Germans for example are losing one of their cases right now.

Why would having more cases be primitive?

I wouldn't be happy if i had to learn french. Better learn english as a 2nd language than being a native english speaker imo

At the same time, Finno-Ugric and Turkic languages are forming new cases from postpositions. Just because Romance and Germanic language tend to simplify their grammar does not necessarily mean it's a universal rule.

Primitive doesn't have to mean worse. But the more cases an indo-european language has the closer it is to the proto-indo-european language in that regard.

Lithuanian has seven cases and russian six for example while the proto-indo-european had eight or nine. And btw iirc lithuanian is the closer indo-eruopean language to the original one.

>translate
Technically true, but you can't break the order of words and every sentence become SPO in structure.

You overestimate the complexity of English.
Anyone that has a college-level education needs to be able to understand academic sources in English.

>But the more cases an indo-european language has the closer it is to the proto-indo-european language in that regard.
That's called "archaic", not "primitive".

Archaic (arcaico) and primitive (primitivo) are synonymous at least in spanish and after checking english dictionaries I see it's the same.

>closely approximating an early ancestral type

It's a connotation thing. Primitive means archaic in a bad way

Archaic can also mean something bad at least in spanish so I don't see the point of this discussion. OP should have been more clear but you are right, this is Sup Forums so we can assume the britbong was trying to bait.

This. When I hear the word "primitive", I imagine something old AND simple.

>I imagine something old AND simple.

That's a subjective view. Compare the civil roman law for example. The primitive formulae were a much more complex system than the late imperial system. New things can be decadent and lack the complexity of the past. Just like english could be more evolved and simple while russian is less evolved and more complex in the sense of its cases.

It depends on what you mean. Icelandic is a rich language and have lots of fine tuned words for rare situations, but it's "primitive" in having otherwise changed little over the centuries.

Norwegian however is primitive in being a rather new language with few but specific detail words and thus hasn't developed much.

>That's a subjective view.
This view might just be influenced by my mother tongue (here arhaichnyj and primitivnyj definitely mean different things), but Wictionary and that Belgian guy above seem to say otherwise.

Well, Merriam-Webster definition of primitive doesn't have a negative meaning. After all primitive is related to primus (first).

>Merriam-Webster

merriam-webster.com/dictionary/primitive

I don't think it really matters now what it originally meant in Latin. The word "idiot" comes from a Greek word for "private citizen", but it can't be an excuse for calling people idiots.

forgot the pic

But idiot is clearly an insult while primitive it isn't in that context considering all the definitions from that dictionary indistinctively point to the same direction; something original, basic, that came first, etc. Now if we are talking about primitive civilizations that's another thing and generally it's true that's used in a bad way.

Russian

more complex grammar = language is more primitive
African and Amerindian languages are hopelessly complicated

Anyway, I'm pretty sure OP used this word in the bad way because:
1. We're on Sup Forums. Most posters are mean here
2. He's a Russian/Ukrainian speaker, and "primitive" is a negative word here.

French, having genders in your language is ridiculous and should have been changed.

>If you speak Finnish without the cases they can still understand you
Can they? I can imagine people communicating without the cases in Russian, but Finnish? As far as I know, it has like 15 of them. Dropping the cases would be the same as getting rid of the prepositions in IE languages. English only dropped 3 but it still sometimes has problems like picrel

yeah for most situations

foreigners tend to remember important cases like ownership and forget less important ones but they get their message across

it ain't exactly poetry but it works

Ukraine is pretty primitive in a sense, since it's basically Russian with few different words.

Create your own language pls

>French, New French and Russian

At least English doesn't assign genders to WORDS

as if it's something bad

Yeah I actually have no problem with it I'm just rooting for my own language ya see

:(

what does 'primitive' mean? changed less compared to its ancestral state?

then English is the least primitive of the three, most likely

if you don't understand the word primitive, you're not the brightest person on earth, that I can tell you

I understand it when it's used appropriately, e.g. "Ukrainians are very primitive"

French is what english was before being dumb down to fit the locals ability.

Im not even making that shit up:
books.google.fr/books?id=qQ20vvzacXMC&pg=PA51&lpg=PA51&dq=genders abandon in english&source=bl&ots=xx-l5eyGjF&sig=2AhbfUELJrX7X_pfmzS71qzOdq0&hl=fr&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwjcobD3y6HSAhWiKMAKHbbOBWIQ6AEIPzAD#v=onepage&q=genders abandon in english&f=false

Define "primitive"
Being more complex doesn't necessarily make a language better

the problem with your question is that primitive languages are more complex, and newer languages like Afrikaans or English, simpler.

russian is easiest language.

English feels really primitive sometimes. It doesn't have nearly enough words for describing things. Instead you have to write entire sentences to describe something when you could instead have a single word for it.

so you cucked their language so hard that genders were removed

>all indo-european
>none of them agglutinative
all of them

i'd say languages such as pirahã are fairly primitive in comparison when it comes to abstract ideas. but of course, such languages also have their own strength. iirc piraha had a case/tense/modifier or whatever that specified whether a past even that happened was wanted or not by the speaker

french by far.
english as we know it is 400 years old at best before it being old english, which would be seen as a different language.
french on the other hand doesn't have an an 'old' counterpart. most has been taken from latin, and the language itself hasn't changed that much.

do you have a source for that?

indonesian

How many caseshas French left?

But it's clearly english since it has none.

this. agglutinative non-indo languages a best

Nah, I just read it on a forum once. What's the difference between cases and a postpositions in Turkic languages btw?

eh, they are completely different. postpositions work the same way they work in english mostly, while cases are indicated through suffixes.

You do know both French and Dutch have the same common ancestor, right?

>postpositions work the same way they work in english mostly
So, you can insert other words between them and the noun?

Unless you mean PIE you're wrong

Talking about Frankish, my dude.
Although it didn't really branch into French, it did have influence on it.

>Burger not understanding we Slavs adopts words from other languages all the time

It is not a fucking exclusive feature of English to loan words.