Are some languages richer than others?

and what does it mean to be rich when you're a language?

Last Saturday, when my kids were at their dad’s, I spent the whole day doing what every normal single parent dreams of doing on a child-free weekend: learning an endangered Uto-Aztecan language and drawing a tweed coat.

Why drawing and not weaving? I hear you asking. (Am I right? Is that what you’re asking?)

So many reasons:

a) Drawing tweed coats instead of weaving (sewing??) them doesn’t harm any sheep.

b) I don’t actually know how to weave tweed coats.

c) I missed drawing tweed coats. Or, rather, I missed drawing. I used to attend an illustration workshop in Tel Aviv (I plan to write and illustrate a picture book when I grow up) but this year, because I was busy learning languages, all I managed to draw was a couple of sleeping dogs.

I’m now back at the workshop and am drawing this tweed coat.

Can’t show the rest of the picture just yet because everyone else there is still coat-less.

So I was immersed in the Yaqui grammar, and once in a while, to rest my mind, would go back to the tweed coat and add a couple of stitches.

Grammars are a lot of fun but I’ve found that for best results, and to avoid breaking your brain, you need to combine the more left-brain activities with the more right-brain ones.

Also, as a wise person once said, most of your best ideas come while you’re busy drawing tweed coats.

“Most of your best ideas come while you’re busy drawing tweed coats.” (Wise Person)

Apart from the tweed coat, two amazing things happened this week. First, a reader named Mark emailed me and offered to buy me a copy of Heidi Harley’s Yaqui grammar and bring it all the way to Israel.

Second, Heidi Harley herself got back to me and sent me the PDF of the grammar AND the draft of the second volume which will come out sometime in 2025, AND a book of stories in Yaqui.

Yay. Life is good and the world is full of generous people.

So this is the grammar I have been reading in between tweed coat stitches.

But before I got my hands on it, I had to make do with J.Alden Mason’s “Preliminary Sketch of the Yaqui Language” from 1923.

It was a very interesting read. At one point, in the introduction, he mentions an older grammar of Yaqui written 300 years earlier by a missionary, noticing that the language hasn’t changed much since then. He says: “Apparently, this tongue, innocent of all literature or expounded grammar, has undergone little or no change in the three centuries and more which have elapsed since the good father first employed it in his missionary labors.”

I feel bad making fun of J. Alden Mason and his condescending attitude towards the Yaqui language because this kind of attitude was the norm in those days. Even as missionaries came and described indigenous languages, they treated them (just like these people’s faith and costumes) as something inherently inferior and primitive.

Thankfully, these are outdated views. Today, linguists don’t consider one language’s grammar more “expounded” than another’s, because all languages are equally complex and fascinating in completely different ways.

But regular people still say things like “Russian is such a rich language” or “Such-and-such language doesn’t really have any rules.” Even speakers of non-Indo-European languages sometimes refer to their own languages as “more primitive” (like my friend who once said that her native Swahili is not as elaborate as English).

The question is, are some languages richer than others? What does it mean to be rich when you’re a language?

What makes a language rich 💰?

I have a feeling that when people say “X is a rich language” they mean it has many words, and possibly many words to describe the same thing (synonyms).

Interestingly, people often claim that Inuktitut has 52 words for ‘snow’ but I’ve never heard anyone add that “Inuktitut is such a rich language.” Perhaps because talking about snow all day isn’t considered all that rich.

Out of curiosity, I googled “What is the richest language?” and the answer I got was Arabic.

The Russian language, I’m told, has 200,000 words. English, I’m also told, has 1 million. Arabic, apparently has “12 million distinct words.”

My first question is, what is a “distinct word”? My second question is, who cares?

The first question is too big to address here, but to put it simply, languages differ vastly in how they form words and what they consider a word. Some languages can form new words from existing words. Russian is very good at that. For example, malen’kij means ‘small’ but malyusen’kiy means ‘very small’ / ‘tiny.’ In English, you use different words for these or add the word ‘very.’

In Arabic, you can form many different words from the same root. Maybe this is what accounts for the “12 million distinct words,” I don’t know.

When I used to read Sanskrit, it would take me an hour or more to translate one shloka (a two-line poem.) Sanskrit not only has many words but also many meanings for each word, so it was impossible to know which of each word’s many meanings was the correct one for that shloka until you figured out the meanings of all the other words.

Sanskrit has a long written tradition that spans 2000 years, so it needed all these words and all these meanings at different points in its history.

When people say “You can’t say X in such-and-such language,” I ask, what do you need to say? Any language can express anything you want, but languages are incredibly pragmatic and they don’t invent words just for the sake of it, or just to compete with each other in richness.

That’s one reason that Swahili, for instance, isn’t particularly rich in the snow department, and why Hebrew has only one word — ohmaniyot — to describe the great variety of non-red berries that grow in more Northern countries.

And, if we’re talking, why do we consider the number of words in a language a measure of richness? Why not the other way around: i.e. when a language can describe the world with fewer words, isn’t it also a sort of richness?

I’ll tell you more about the Yaqui expounded grammar next week, but for now, I just want to share my favorite feature so far that makes this language so incredibly rich.

Sound symbolism

In Yaqui, the same word can be pronounced with the sound r or l depending on the speaker’s attitude towards whatever he is talking about.

Using l makes it sound positive, and using r makes it sound negative or derogatory.

So, you would say siali ‘green’ if you’re talking about your favorite green dress, but siari ‘green’ (with an r) if you’re talking about the unfortunately green curtains that your mother-in-law bought you for Christmas and expects to see in your living room every time she visits.

Actually, while it’s a super cool feature, it’s not that uncommon. Many languages sometimes use sound symbolism (this is what it’s officially called) to convey the attitude of the speaker.

Russian does something similar with r and l in some words. The word for ‘good’ or ‘sweet’ is horoshiy. But if I’m talking about my tiny cute fluffy kitten in the comfort of my living room, I may say kakoi halyosiy ‘soooo sweet’ because l makes it sound just so much cuter and fluffier. (I would not say it this way if I were discussing my tiny cute fluffy kitten on TV because it would make me sound stupid.)

kakoy halyosiy!!!

The difference of course is that in Russian it’s just one or two words that do that, while Yaqui seems to do it a lot more consistently.

Just imagine how much richer life would be if English did the same thing with its l’s and r’s. I wonder if you’d get beaten up if you accidentally used the wrong sound in the phrase "our plesident” or “our plime ministel”?

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FLIENDS with WOLDS is the main thing I do this year. If you like this post consider buying me a virtual coffee ☕