More Language Thoughts

See this thread on X about peculiarities of Danish. I'm pretty skeptical of claims that "all languages are equally complex", partially because of research like this. Interesting findings:

• "Danish has an unusual speech opacity (consonant reduction)"
• "Danish children do present delays in language acquisition: At 15 months, Danish children possess a median vocabulary of 90 words, compared to 140 for Norwegian kids and 150 for Swedish ones"
• "Up to 8 years of age, Danish children have more difficulties [compared to other Scandinavian children] with inflectional morphology, e.g. declining regular and irregular verbs in simple past"
• "Adult native speakers of Danish do NOT seem to have issues with Danish"
• "Danish native speakers are equally affected by near and distant sentential context in their disambiguation of words and phonemes, while Norwegians just won't wait for distant contexts and will make their decisions earlier."
• "The speech signal does not get clearer as Danish native speakers grow up, so we hypothesized that they learn to put increased focus on additional sources of information (e.g. context)"

They ran a nifty experiment to demonstrate this. Two cool findings:

• "Danish native speakers are equally affected by near and distant sentential context in their disambiguation of words and phonemes, while Norwegians just won't wait for distant contexts and will make their decisions earlier."
• "Forcing them to wait makes them more similar to Danish native speakers"

I love learning about stuff like this. If you do too, try reading about the difference in rates of dyslexia across languages!

One more thing: check out the Duostories for Toki Pona and Toki Pona Glyphs (sitelen pona!)