What are transparent languages?

[sporedandroid]

I’ve heard this term being used on this forum, mostly when talking about French. I can kind of guess what it means, but I’m not entirely sure.

[Denzagathist]

I believe a transparent language is one that you can mostly understand or make sense of based on prior knowledge of some other language(s). For you, (written) French would indeed be fairly transparent given that you have knowledge of Spanish, which is closely related. Since the two share a great deal of vocabulary and similar grammatical structures, a speaker of one language should be able to relatively easily make sense of the other. As far as I've understood, though, being transparent does not necessarily mean that the two languages are mutually intelligible. Despite being closely related and fairly transparent to one another, Spanish and French are definitely not mutually intelligible. Likewise, a speaker of Arabic would find Persian and Swahili at least somewhat transparent because both have borrowed extensively from Arabic, so the Arabic speaker would be able to understand many of the words that they encounter in Persian and Swahili, even though those three languages belong to three completely different language families and are not even slightly mutually intelligible.

[Doitsujin]

I’ve heard this term being used on this forum, mostly when talking about French. I can kind of guess what it means, but I’m not entirely sure.

It might have been a reference to Transparent Language, a language learning software company based in Nashua, New Hampshire.

[Henkkles]

I believe a transparent language is one that you can mostly understand or make sense of based on prior knowledge of some other language(s). For you, (written) French would indeed be fairly transparent given that you have knowledge of Spanish, which is closely related. Since the two share a great deal of vocabulary and similar grammatical structures, a speaker of one language should be able to relatively easily make sense of the other. As far as I've understood, though, being transparent does not necessarily mean that the two languages are mutually intelligible. Despite being closely related and fairly transparent to one another, Spanish and French are definitely not mutually intelligible. Likewise, a speaker of Arabic would find Persian and Swahili at least somewhat transparent because both have borrowed extensively from Arabic, so the Arabic speaker would be able to understand many of the words that they encounter in Persian and Swahili, even though those three languages belong to three completely different language families and are not even slightly mutually intelligible.

I wouldn't say that it's the language which is transparent, but the orthography. Conflating languages with writing systems is a pet peeve of mine.

[Saim]

I wouldn't say that it's the language which is transparent, but the orthography. Conflating languages with writing systems is a pet peeve of mine.

Those are two completely unrelated things.

A transparent orthography is essentially the same thing as a shallow orthography: close correspondence to the language's phonology. This is contrasted with an opaque, etymological or deep orthography. The linguistic repertoire of a given learner does not determine or in any way influence how transparent the orthography is: it's an inherent characteristic of the writing system.

A language with a transparent vocabulary is one where there is little lexical distance from languages you already speak. It's relative to what languages you already know and how well. I'm not aware of this being a technical term in the field of language acquisition, I think I've seen transparency refer to a word where the meaning can be deduced from knowing the word roots.

[Henkkles]

I wouldn't say that it's the language which is transparent, but the orthography. Conflating languages with writing systems is a pet peeve of mine.

Those are two completely unrelated things.

A transparent orthography is essentially the same thing as a shallow orthography: close correspondence to the language's phonology. This is contrasted with an opaque, etymological or deep orthography. The linguistic repertoire of a given learner does not determine or in any way influence how transparent the orthography is: it's an inherent characteristic of the writing system.

A language with a transparent vocabulary is one where there is little lexical distance from languages you already speak. It's relative to what languages you already know and how well. I'm not aware of this being a technical term in the field of language acquisition, I think I've seen transparency refer to a word where the meaning can be deduced from knowing the word roots.

Right, I forgot to only include the definition I was objecting to.

[Cainntear]

I believe a transparent language is one that you can mostly understand or make sense of based on prior knowledge of some other language(s). For you, (written) French would indeed be fairly transparent given that you have knowledge of Spanish, which is closely related. Since the two share a great deal of vocabulary and similar grammatical structures, a speaker of one language should be able to relatively easily make sense of the other. As far as I've understood, though, being transparent does not necessarily mean that the two languages are mutually intelligible. Despite being closely related and fairly transparent to one another, Spanish and French are definitely not mutually intelligible. Likewise, a speaker of Arabic would find Persian and Swahili at least somewhat transparent because both have borrowed extensively from Arabic, so the Arabic speaker would be able to understand many of the words that they encounter in Persian and Swahili, even though those three languages belong to three completely different language families and are not even slightly mutually intelligible.

I wouldn't say that it's the language which is transparent, but the orthography. Conflating languages with writing systems is a pet peeve of mine.

Perhaps it's not simply that the orthography is transparent, but that the most opaque feature of French for speakers of other Romance languages is the phonology...?

(But there is also the fact that the orthography does make distinctions not present in the spoken language, which of course makes the written language significantly more transparent than it otherwise would be.)

[golyplot]

A native English speaker can read French and understand a surprising amount of it, due to how much shared vocabulary there is, with the same or similar spelling as in English. But this doesn't extend to spoken French because the pronunciation is completely different.