In fairness, he's also arguing that it wouldn't matter much if English disappeared from the U.S., at least on the grounds that the hypothetical calagrandchildren speaking Spanish wouldn't entail the destruction of all that is True and Right.
That sentiment seems to be correct, but it doesn't mean that the loss of a language isn't sad in other ways.
Yeah, that was pretty lame. Why do research when you can just muse on paper for a bit, do a quick copy edit, and send it off? The piece ought to end "Just a thought! kthxbye."
Also English isn't going to disappear, although it will become unrecognisable in its present form - see his riff on reading Elizabethan English. It's possible that a new language (Yanquish? Americano?) will develop from a Spanish/English creole in America, the same way Middle English emerged from an Anglo-Saxon/Norman French creole. But Spanish won't simply replace American English - the politics and demographics are all wrong for that to happen. And forms of English will still be spoken in Australia, Britain, Canada, Jamaica, etc, so our descendents in the Antarctic rain forests will be able to read No Fear Melville to their hearts content.
While labs has issued an adequate refutation, it's fun to pile on*, so:
Because the very thing that made it a mistake for the missionaries to try to stop people from speaking Native American languages (it’s not as if English was better).
It's wrong because coercion is wrong, not b/c of some inherent value in the languages. Of course this odd judgement is there only to prepare his second judgement, which is similarly odd; that the only value of a language is how good it is. If it mattered, I'd wonder what his idea of "good" is.
Um, is it wrong for me to point out that a short piece for the NYT Magazine is not exactly the same as a scholarly article, and that furthermore the article isn't even *about* disappearing languages; it's about population shifts. The Tlingit line is a single throwaway, and he asks "why" rather than asking "if." And the answer--because every language is an artefact that tells us a lot about time, place, and the human mind--is perfectly fine, but not what he's concerned with in this piece.
Plus, the possibility that he's using a bit of, you know, rhetoric to appeal to an anti-Spanish audience who, presumably, isn't all that hung up on the disappearance of Tlingit.
Not wrong, exactly, but, even on rereading, it seems pretty clear that he claims it's not a bad thing when languages disappear. Yes, yes, I know, it's in the service of telling people not to worry about Spanish, but it still looks to me like a dumb thing to say.
The 19th-century problem was about people who couldn’t use their languages; the problem now is about the languages themselves — “tragically,” they’re disappearing.
If the Brits were taught to speak proper network English and forget their quaint Monty Python dialects, how great a loss would that be, either?
To me it's a darn shame that the Anglosphere is cluttered up with these little sandbox "parliaments". It just makes it that much more difficult for the leader of the free world to do his job. Once the so-called "Congress" and "Supreme Court" have been pacified, it will be high time to look at all these other alleged governments gumming up the works.
I wouldn't say it's like paving over an archaeological dig to lose a language. It's more like losing traditional building techniques as a society switches to modern steel or wood frames with drywall, or more typically cinderblocks for cheaper and sturdier housing. It's like losing traditional clothing as everyone switches to cotton t-shirts and jeans or slacks.
The key is that you are expecting these people to live in a dying language, in a dying culture, and why? So the developed world can feel so good about the diversity it is promoting? Not everyone wants to be bilingual or trilingual just to get by outside their little community. English is becoming the de facto language of the international educated class, and as India shows, good knowledge and a proper accent in the language can single-handedly provide a massive boost to a developing nation's economy.
I do understand points about the cultural significance of a particular language, and the desire to see it maintained. But for me, I feel that the original purpose of language as a communication device overrides it's significance as a vessel for a given culture. I think the world would be better off if we could just pick a universal language that everyone would learn, preferably from birth but most likely from the beginnings of primary public schooling. Just think how great it would be to be able to travel anywhere in the world and speak to any of the locals you wish. Just imagine how much that would actually help foster international understanding and make cultures more transparent.
Sorry if I got off-topic, but this is something that I've thought about a fair amount, and argued over quite a lot with my various continental friends at university.
That's not my take, though. I don't care so much that people continue to speak a language, just that the things are documented or understood before they go, because there's a valuable intellectual enterprise that's undermined by their premature disappearance. (What? a natural language isn't SVO of necessity?)
I don't think, JAC, that anyone is suggesting that Tlingit speakers stop learning English too, and refuse to speak anything but Tlingit. Obviously, that's going to be limiting.
I think it's a very fine thing, especially for American native speakers of English, to be reminded every now and again that we are not the center of the universe. That there are other peoples, other narratives, other ways of interacting with the world.
I once worked with a Ks'ank'a* woman who undertook to teach me the names of the edible berries we'd eat while ditching work. I provided nearly endless entertainment trying to pronounce lawiyal (that's not our L, and the scholars don't usually use our L in transcription, but a lower case l with an equals sign drawn through it. Looking it up, I see that it is a "voiceless l with the air forced through the sides of the tongue.") They taste mighty good, too.
*In English, we have another name for her people, derived from the word used by a neighboring people with which her people were often at war. It's not an unflattering name, but she thought we ought to use her people's name for themselves, and I try to remember to do that.
I'd say it's very much like paving over a dig. It's an irretrievable loss, not just of what people have said (with remnants preserved only in translation) and how (the sounds and rhythms integral to a culture's verbal and vocal art), but really an entire conception of the world.
And of course it doesn't have to be either/or. Since the 1970s, there's been a remarkable resurgence of Hawaiian, and you can still get around the islands pretty well in English.
That's not my take, though. I don't care so much that people continue to speak a language, just that the things are documented or understood before they go
Ok, that I agree with completely. A culture's oral traditions and written histories are very worthy of preservation, but I think many can be translated. I am mostly wary of the trade-offs to keeping a very small language active, as that requires it to be the primary language of an entire community and, in a very important way, cuts them off from surrounding societies. Not everyone has a gift with languages that allows them to become easily biligual or trilingual.
I think it's a very fine thing, especially for American native speakers of English, to be reminded every now and again that we are not the center of the universe. That there are other peoples, other narratives, other ways of interacting with the world.
But do you think this really requires a seperate language to appreciate it? Histories of a culture, proverbs, parables, and important literature can provide a very good appreciation of many of the differences, and they're far more accessible than a whole new language. It doesn't take years of immersion and study to gain even a beginning appreciation of them.
And of course it doesn't have to be either/or. Since the 1970s, there's been a remarkable resurgence of Hawaiian, and you can still get around the islands pretty well in English.
But even there, Hawaiian is only spoken as a native tongue by 0.1% of the population. Its resurgence has been due to a desire to maintain a traditional culture on the side, not as the primary form of expression. No one will face drawbacks to their choice of secondary language beyond those of their primary language.
A culture's oral traditions and written histories are very worthy of preservation, but I think many can be translated. I am mostly wary of the trade-offs to keeping a very small language active, as that requires it to be the primary language of an entire community and, in a very important way, cuts them off from surrounding societies. Not everyone has a gift with languages that allows them to become easily biligual or trilingual.
This is pretty much entirely wrong. Translation is always imperfect at best, particularly when the two languages differ structurally to a great degree (as is the case with English and Tlingit). And everyone does actually have the ability to become easily bilingual, provided they learn both languages from birth; there are examples of stable multilingualism lasting for centuries. So no, preserving a language doesn't require cultural insularity.
Also, a world language wouldn't do any good, since within a couple of generations it would just split off into different dialects anyway and eventually those dialects would become mutually incomprehensible and we'd be back where we started.
B, does this mean you're going to slap me with your cock?
Also, JAC, this
A culture's oral traditions and written histories are very worthy of preservation, but I think many can be translated
misses my point, which is that the languages themselves are interesting in themselves, as part of the resources for research in linguistics, for example. It's not only about content preservation.
21 - For practical reasons, any language that became universal would have to be a currently used primary language. That's the only way it could have the vocabulary and speaker base necessary for being usable as a day-to-day method of interaction.
Also, a world language wouldn't do any good, since within a couple of generations it would just split off into different dialects anyway and eventually those dialects would become mutually incomprehensible and we'd be back where we started.
Australia is thousands of miles off the shores of the US and the UK, it's still done a pretty good job since the 1800s of keeping a similar language. Same with English spoken in India since the Raj (though admittedly that's only been a couple generations, tops). With the amount of intercommunication in today's world, I'd be very surprised if we couldn't keep some semblence of a universal rule set that would allow communication to go unimpeded. Of course regional accents and slang would occur, but that's a far lower hurdle to understanding a new person than an entirely new language.
Also, JAC, this misses my point, which is that the languages themselves are interesting in themselves, as part of the resources for research in linguistics, for example. It's not only about content preservation.
Yes, and a lot of people keep languages alive for precisely that reason. However, if you are fluent in two tongues, one that is only used by the small ethnic group you are related to, and one used by everyone else on Earth, which one are you more likely to use? Which one will your kids use, especially if they grew up outside your ethnic community?
Once a primary global language exists, if it ever does, I think a lot of other languages will die out or become very marginalized. There are probably other people than me who would be unwilling to learn another language simply to gain access to a small body of one group's tradition. And who the hell are linguists to insist these people put in all the effort and time to keep their language alive simply so it may be studied (however interesting and enlightening that study may be)?
22 - I know that, sadly, translation is imperfect at best. I know that a fair amount of tradition will disappear, but it was also tradition that was really only accessible to a small core of people who: a) knew or learned the language in question, which takes years of immersion or study and b) were interested enough in their cultural history to pursue the oral and written traditions in depth (not that many, even just guessing from the number of English majors there are at universities).
I am not denying the inherent value of the diversity of language and the traditions they preserve and perpetuate. I certainly support maintaining the traditional tongue as a second language, if you have the means and interest to do so. However, it's my belief that once any language gains universal primacy, it will become the de facto primary language of pretty much every person, if only because nearly all interaction outside the household will occur in it. After a few generations of the traditional tongue being a secondary language that requires special study, not too far from Latin or classical Greek today, I would be surprised if they really remain that common outside language specialists.
But even there, Hawaiian is only spoken as a native tongue by 0.1% of the population. Its resurgence has been due to a desire to maintain a traditional culture on the side, not as the primary form of expression.
How meaningful is this number? You might as well point out that the number of Hawaiian speakers has risen threefold or more since the early 90s, which would put it among the fastest-growing languages on the planet. Sure, it's only the primary language for a couple hundred people on Ni'ihau, but try telling them it's "on the side." It's certainly not being forced down their throats by linguists, and it'd be a lot more vital now elsewhere in Hawaii if it hadn't been actively suppressed. In that regard -- that the renewed vitality of the language has everything to do with redress for general cultural suppression -- it has something in common with many other marginalized languages, and I think that any community that wants to preserve such a language deserves the full support of the colonizing power that tried to eliminate it.
As far as universal language goes, I think it's a pipe dream, but if numbers matter, well, how's your Chinese?
Once upon a time, not so long ago, modernization theorists expected that languages would homogenize due to the influence of modern mass media, globalization and so on, that dialects would disappear, and languages become far more "efficient" and rationalized. This has not happened. There's evidence in the case of English to the contrary: that mass media have actually reinforced regional dialects.
I mention this because I have some sympathy for what I think I understand Benn Michaels to be saying here, and I think his point is reinforced somewhat by the strong analogies in the discussion between biodiversity and linguistic diversity.
In the longue duree of human history, languages change, get absorbed into others and die out all the time. Does that make the linguistic history of humanity a case of endless tragedy? An endless compendium of resources lost to the linguist, and nothing more? It's as if one set out to say all extinction of all kinds at all moments in the history of life on Earth is a bad thing because any extinction at any moment removed some small, crucial piece of existing biodiversity at that moment. If that's true, then evolution itself is a bad thing; the price of new species is extinction. The price of linguistic variety and the expressive range of language is that some languages change, some languages combine, and some cease to exist.
So to get particularly upset about languages disappearing today takes more than just being upset about the phenomenon of languages disappearing. The phenomenon is at a minimal morally neutral; I'd go further and say it's a positive good, because it is part and parcel of what makes human language the powerful, changing instrument that it is.
To be upset by a language disappearing (or a species going extinct), you need to offer an argument that a given language in the here and now is disappearing for reasons which are abnormal in the history of linguistic evolution. That's an argument you can make in biological evolution pretty successfully, that we're in the middle of an "extinction event" and that those periods, while broadly normal in the history of life, are nevertheless pretty negative in their impact on life forms existing during such events, and also, such events are different in scale and character than "ordinary" extinction.
I'm not sure you can make a precisely similar argument about languages. Linguistic change in human history often has a lot to do with major dislocations or disjunctures in human society: migration, war, environmental catastrophe, colonialization, cultural frontiers, changing family or kinship patterns, new trade opportunities. The present is bigger in scale, but not different in type. Especially if it turns out that globalization doesn't produce in any simple way homogenization, if underneath it all, the drive to diversify and differentiate languages is as strong as ever.
The present is bigger in scale, but not different in type.
To be sure, but the scale really is vast. In some ways what we're seeing now is just the end result of European expansion over the past 500 years; languages have been dying all along, but we're reaching the point where many of the last holdouts are finally giving up.
No, he's not kidding, as the larger argument (thanks, Dr. B!) in the book indicates. (And Jonathan, what's with not pimping the event? C'mon now, you signed the boosterism clause, same as the rest of us.) That said, Michaels' larger complaint is that people wed language to culture incoherently: you can preserve a language even when a culture disappears, just as you can preserve a culture even when a language disappears. You can even recreate a language and pretend you've recreated a culture, like the Israelis did. What he's attacking, then, is the idea of cultural essentialism and what it necessarily entails: linguistic and racial essentialism. More later, as I'm writing about this in detail for the event. (See, not that hard!)
Language death is the most dramatic example of language change. Languages which were spoken by rural and lower-class rather than by urban and upper-class speakers and which were not written down for documentary and literary purposes might shrivel and die. There are several instances from the fringes of Latin Europe. Prussian, for example, a Baltic language akin to Lithuanian and Latvian, which was spoken by the native population of Prussia, had died out by the seventeenth century, swamped by the German of immigrants and rulers. A simple catechetical literature was produced in Prussian after the Reformation, but this was too little too late. A note on the cover of one of the surviving Prussian texts records that 'This Old Prussian language has completely disappeared. In 1677 a single old man, who lived on the Courland Spit and who still knew the language, died.' The language was entered on the list of written tongues only to be inscribed almost at once on that of dead ones. Wendish, the Slavic spoken west of the Oder, also disappeared in the later Middle Ages. Only in Lausitz do Slav speakers, the Sorbs, survive to this day (now with their own protected status and institutes for Sorb studies). Elsewhere the various branches of Wendish slowly died. One Polabian innkeeper and farmer, Johannes Parum Schultze, who lived in the so-called 'Hanoverian Wendland' around Lüchow and Dannenberg, wrote in 1725: 'I am a man of forty-seven years of age. When I and three other people in our village have gone, then no one will rightly know what a dog is called in Wendish.' (203-4)
I am favorably-inclined toward language-preservation, if you exclude the archaic Monty Python dialects of the American language, but from one point of view, if a culture itself is dying, preserving the language is pretty minor, and from another point of view, if everyone who knows a language is in bad shape objectively, preserving their native language might not be the best place to start.
People strongly interested in this topic ought to stop by languagehat.com from time to time. He's got something up right now about the Berber revival in Algeria or Morocco.
So to get particularly upset about languages disappearing today takes more than just being upset about the phenomenon of languages disappearing.
I think I get the point of this, and my agreement is as qualified as your 'upset' is with 'particularly.' Like species extinction, language extinction seems tragic to me, but it's as a social justice issue that it gets me particularly upset. Which is why I brought up the Hawaiian example, which represents some measure of resistance against an imperialist takeover barely a century old.
35: And Minnesota takes the division. What a game -- my respect for the Royals' taking down Detroit in their last game of the season is tempered by their role in the Red Sox' disastrous collapse. And by the fact that they suck.
As far as universal language goes, I think it's a pipe dream, but if numbers matter, well, how's your Chinese?
Eh, not so great, though Mandarin would probably be the one language on Earth I currently see as worth the effort of learning, if I get around to that someday.
Still, even from a numbers standpoint, although Mandarin has more than twice as many native speakers as English (though this does lump together a lot of local dialects that seem more different from one another than any English dialects I've come across), I would be surprised if more people worldwide had low-level literacy in Mandarin than do in English (and yes, I know that Ethnologue claims this is precisely the case, I'm still very suspicious unless I saw how they came by those numbers).
I was beaten to the Valve link, but Miri/am Bur/stein wrote something about the Canon and reprint practice that seems somewhat related and interesting, even tho I don't think I completely understand it. It struck me because I have a constant contact with Project Gutenberg, and the incredible depth of minor stuff they are preserving raises questions for me. Not is it worth it, but what does it mean? What does 100 amateur travel journals about 19th century do to a researcher, what does it do to just someone just looking for something to read, or a subject to explore?
"Information Overload" has been a subject at least since "Future Shock" but I think we are reaching some kind of tipping point.
I think Mandarin would make a great world language, if only they switched to a Romanized orthography. All those symbols are just gratuitous. I pity the Japanese. One symbolic alphabet and three phonetic ones.
I wonder, if I have kids, what languages they should learn besides English. Spanish, definitely. Maybe Japanese or Mandarin. But schools don't often teach Japanese or Chinese.
I think Mandarin would make a great world language, if only they switched to a Romanized orthography.
This doesn't sound too bad. Hanyu Pinyin is even phonetic, which would be a big help. My biggest problems with Mandarin as a world language are the orthography, since individual characters for each word takes ages to learn and can't be figured out from the spoken form, and the tonality, since I think tonal languages are less "abusable" than spoken English. Even among native speakers, I've heard Vietnamese complaining about the occasional tone-deafness of some people, and how much you just have to figure out from context if the tones are undetectable or incorrect.
38: I know a couple of Reids from Reed, but no Kay. It's possible I met her elsewhere in life, but since my daughters destroyed portions of my brain in their infancy, much data has been irretrievably lost.
39, 43. Yeah, mine too. In my limited experience, Mandarin's definitely worth the effort, if you're okay with a steep learning curve in the beginning. Phonetically, it's a bit of a challenge; there's also the writing system, which to me was taxing, but more than fascinating enough to make up for the relentless routine of rote memorization. I can't imagine Romanizing it, though; especially in Japanese, you'd end up with heaps of homonyms and no visual clue to distinguish them. Japanese, incidentally, uses two syllabaries (which are very easy to learn) and the Roman alphabet (in a very limited way) in addition to Chinese characters. It's really only the characters that present much difficulty, though some have many readings, so achieving high-level literacy is a struggle.
When I was teaching English in Japan, I had a class at IBM whose members were almost exclusively from the Kanji Support department, back in the day when it seemed that Japanese orthography might be too inefficient for modern information systems. Now you can get Japanese language support -- and support for dozens of other languages including Hawaiian -- built into your Mac OSX.
This has probably been covered already, but I think his point is that whatever scholarly interest and value a given language may have, its value to those who might have spoken it but didn't is small. When the last speaker of Wendish died, something was lost to human knowledge, but no human being was any the worse off.
Japanese orthography might be too inefficient for modern information systems
An interesting way to look at it. Damn you, language. Adapt to my tool!
(ATM)
Exactly. I'd bet money that there will be translation software adequate to general purposes long before the Chinese adopt Romanization. They're poised to kick our asses anyway, so I'm brushing up on my characters.
Okay, that was totally not meant to be a calligraphy joke, so I'm leaving it as written.
48: I work on documenting a dying language - when the current oldest generation in three villages dies, the language will be dead. Most of the people, young and old, feel a sense of regret at this, and they want Something To Be Done. (Not enough to revitalise the language, I think in this case, but enough to feel bad about it).
When the language dies, this ethnic group will be further disconnected from what makes them 'different' in the region and Indonesia as a whole, and compared to larger groups like Bugis or Balinese, they will be 'missing' a level of identity. The extent to which that is a problem is debatable, but it is some form of loss, they will in some sense be worse off, and they recognise this.
Oh, it's not nothing. But I think Michaels has a point that it's not much. Non-Erse speaking Irishmen and women aren't suffering for the lack of their own language-- that doesn't make the movement to teach Irish in schools a foolish or worthless one. But it's not something worth trading much material prosperity for.
It certainly needn't be. I'm not arguing that language preservation efforts should stop, and I don't think Michaels is. Just that they are not of vital importance.
Lots of worthwhile things people spend their lives on aren't of vital importance. The argument is that, maybe, preserving a language is more like working on the history of jazz guitar than it is like eradicating malaria.
(This sort of argument is, even when true, incredibly obnoxious -- saying to someone whose life is jazz guitar that "Well, you aren't exactly eradicating malaria, are you?" is asking to get a very hostile response, and reasonably so. But it's still, on some level, true.)
Well, up to a point I guess I'd agree - I'm not one for weeping and gnashing my teeth about it. But the 'vital importance' point is odd - how many of us do stuff which is of 'vital importance'?
51: When the language dies, this ethnic group will be further disconnected from what makes them 'different' in the region and Indonesia as a whole, and compared to larger groups like Bugis or Balinese, they will be 'missing' a level of identity.
Michaels would say that culture doesn't exist outside of certain practices; if the practices survive but the language doesn't, the culture--i.e. the practices of which it's composed--survives. His argument's incredibly unsentimental, but remember that he makes it in a context of cultural diversity versus economic equality. He believes that "the trouble with diversity" is that it allows conservatives to respect other cultures while doing nothing about other classes. His example from the Boston Globe article is particularly good on this point: so long as one respects the poor as a culture, one need not do anything to alleviate their poverty. It's a win-win situation for conservatives, who can 1) seem considerate by respecting diversity while 2) doing absolutely, positively nothing.
Michaels' arguments sound strange outside of their comparative framework, and I admit to going "Huh? What?" when I read that one this morning, since it seemed far more inflammatory than explanatory.
Jazz guitar is more important than eradicating malaria. Nineteenth-century program music is not only less important than eradicating malaria, but in fact is almost as bad as malaria itself.
"Night on Bald Mountain" is not noneteenth-century program music.
Also, my "prelude" (read: link-dump) for the WBM event auto-posted while I typed the previous comment.* It includes a link to LB's earlier post, but not this one. It will, soon enough.
*I figure if I associate myself with Walter strongly enough, FL will someday write a post admitting that I'm the reason he read something or other.
Michaels would say that culture doesn't exist outside of certain practices; if the practices survive but the language doesn't, the culture--i.e. the practices of which it's composed--survives.
That seems odd when cultural practices can be rather difficult to separate from language - the use of speech levels in Balinese being a rather obvious example.
SEK: too obvious to say, maybe, but the language is part of a practice. I suppose in the book there's a way of distinguishing the constitutive practices from the contingent? $5 says that the Tarksi t-schema enters into the WBM reply early on.
That seems odd when cultural practices can be rather difficult to separate from language - the use of speech levels in Balinese being a rather obvious example.
Well, this is why he argues for linguistic equivalence: anyone can say anything in any language. While it may be more or less efficient to say "The Dear Esteemed Gentlemen Mr..." than it would be to say the same thing in a language with inflected honorifics, it could be done; and, if it were of cultural importance, it would be regularized such that one called one's grandfather "The Dear Esteemed Gentlemen Mr..." and one's father "The Dear Gentlemen Mr..."
Not that I know what a Tarksi t-schema is, but I doubt it. Nothing on that level of detail is mentioned in the relevant chapter of the book -- the argument is much more "So long as people are reasonably prosperous and have some culture they regard as their own, who gives a damn what it is?"
I wonder how shared language affects individual judgments of community/culture membership.
Do you mean "How do specific languages do it differently?" or "How does the lingustic/cultural interplay work?" Because if it's the latter, well, if no one speaks a language anymore, the point's moot. If it's the former, well, I can't answer it, but I'm sure someone could point to neuro-linguistic research on whether inflection influences different parts of the brain than hierarchially-structured adjectives do. (Damn, my terrible writing skillz tonight made that sound snarky. Didn't mean it to.)
62- Nakku, like LB, I'm not sure what the "Tarski-t schema" is, and Google only pulls up things involving math. A quick background, maybe?
Supporting Scott: Erse is not in the best shape, but Irish culture not only survives, but has made its mark in the world far beyond what Irish numbers would suggest.
There's a book out by Wixman about the languages of the Caucasus. Basically Georgia, Armenia, and Azerbaijan have more language diversity than all of the rest of the Middle East and Europe combined.
There isn't a corresponding cultural diversity. There's an enormous amount of trilingualism (on up), and a lot of intermarriage. The significant diversity there is according to religion, location (mountain or lowland), urbanization, education, and maybe ideology.
I was in the midst of typing up a thingy about Davidson and Tarski when I found this, which is helpful, if you want to read more. Second half is where the relevant action is.
Sorry about that: in short, Davidson's argument against incommensurable conceptual schemes, which uses the Tarski biconditionals to claim that anything recognizable as a langauge can be translated.
67: Do you mean "How do specific languages do it differently?" or "How does the lingustic/cultural interplay work?"
The latter; SEK said culture doesn't exist outside of certain practices; if the practices survive but the language doesn't, the culture--i.e. the practices of which it's composed--survives.
and my question involved how shared language (or not) was involved in judgments of shared culture (or not); the thought is our group's no longer having a distinctive language might undermine our sense that we constitute a distinct culture, the way we think of our practices, and so on.
73: That's kind of the point with the language I'm working on. Broadly speaking, not too much makes the community different culturally from their neighbours these days. The language, which is quite distinct, was the main thing.
Way to crash my computer, Labs. I'll reboot and read the .pdf shortly. That said:
The thought is our group's no longer having a distinctive language might undermine our sense that we constitute a distinct culture, the way we think of our practices, and so on.
Isn't that a non-starter, though? If the language dies and the people still consider themselves a culture, then they do; if it does and they don't, then they shared a way of communicating information about their practices more than they did the practices themselves. Of course, the other part of Michaels' argument is that no one cares whether their great-great-great-grandchildren speak the same language as them, as that will have no material effect on their lives (i.e. determine whether they work in as a high-powered attorney or are enslaved in a sweat-shop).
Of course, language does matter to some degree in this determination, inasmuch as not speaking English will prevent you from beiing a high-powered attorney in Iowa. But that, Michaels would argue, is precisely why notions of linguistic essentialism should be relinquished. His example in the book is a hypothetical American decline and concomitant Chinese/Indian rise: put Americans on the losing side of globalization--no unions, so we work cheap; no health case, so we work sick, &c.--and, in his words, "Are we supposed to feel good because sure we're broke and sick, but at least we have our culture?" In this case, he says, most people would wish their great-great-great-grandchildren didn't speak English, but Chinese or Hindi.
74 - Or if more people just listened to The Walkmen
75 - It's also way way more technical. I feel like I'd have to read up for a week or two just to know the theoretical work that you're drawing on.
I would argue that culture is certainly maintainable outside of a given language. Like Scott mentioned, certain words and phrases pick up new connotations to reflect the difficult-to-translate meanings from the old language. If all else fails, some choice words are oulled into the new language. As James Nicoll said:
"The problem with defending the purity of the English language is that English is about as pure as a cribhouse whore. We don't just borrow words; on occasion, English has pursued other languages down alleyways to beat them unconscious and riffle [sic] their pockets for new vocabulary."
FL, I'm scanning a copy of this chapter, so if you want one and would like to participate in the event, send me an email. (We'll find some way to credit you when Holbo turns it into a book.) Now, to the scanner!
31 is funny to me because my Bavarian friends referred to Hochdeutsch as "Preussisch" -- I had no idea there actually was a language called Prussian, and which was not even a dialect of German.
I believe that one shouldn't give one's child a name that is guaranteed to be mispronounced by almost everybody the child will meet over the course of her entire life.
My principle would also forbid the use of the name "Niambh" anywhere other than particularly insular areas of Ireland. This also applies to Welsh names and insular areas of Wales.
It's not at all hard to pronounce, but it's exceedingly hard to figure out how to pronounce it based on its written representation. Unless, of course, you know a little about its writing system of origin, but "almost everybody" won't.
The problem is that Irish is an oral culture, so the Irish make great litigators and poets, but thay can't spell for shit. Words were spelled sort of randomly the first time, and then memorized every time afterwards.
It's not at all hard to pronounce, but it's exceedingly hard to figure out how to pronounce it based on its written representation.
That's only true if you're fluent in English but not fluent in the Irish language.
Seriously, I imagine that any American whose parents name her Niambh will have the following conversation at least 10,000 times in her life:
Office worker: "Okay, and give me your first name."
Niambh: "Neave. That's spelled N-I-A-M-B-H."
Office worker: "Oh, so...so...the A, the M, the B, and the H are silent?"
Niambh: "No, the A is silent, and the M is silent, and the B becomes a V when you add an H to it. It's Irish."
Office worker: "Wow, were you born in Ireland? A lot of immigrants change the spelling of their names when they move here so people aren't constantly misspelling and mispronouncing them."
Niambh: "No, I was born here. My parents just love Irish crap."
68 - Missed it earlier, but it's pronounced "Sh?-vaughn" (rhymes with "prawn"). Then again, I entered grad. school a Joycean/Irish Modernist, so I'd suck unimaginably harder than I already do if I didn't know that. So the deaf guy can pronounce that name and hereby declares your point thoroughly trounced...er, wait a minute, what was your point? Too busy grandstanding to notice. (Damn, I'm a dick.)
85 - Gee, ben, thanks. (Fortunately, ben's a bigger one.)
91 - Unpronouncable's alright. The danger's in having it rhyme with certain anatomical features. (Like...)
Actually I just realized that I have been assuming "Niambh" is a female name. I have no evidence for this assumption except that I dimly remember that some people spell "Maeve" in a way that looks sort of like that. ("Maoidbh"?)
And some people might actually like and want to maintain their ethnic identities. My New Zealand friends' Maori kids' names are v. hard to pronounce for North Americans, but common enough in New Zealand. On the other hand, there are perfectly good English names that are difficult or impossible to pronounce in, say, Spanish.
It's not really all that difficult to explain to people how one's name is spelled and pronounced. I don't particularly mind it, and I'm pretty sure I prefer it vastly to having to be one of three Jennifers all the goddamn time.
And some people might actually like and want to maintain their ethnic identities.
Of course that's true, but the fact remains that having a name like "Niambh" is going to be a giant pain in the ass in certain situations. There must be more pronounceable names that come from the same heritage.
On the other hand, there are perfectly good English names that are difficult or impossible to pronounce in, say, Spanish.
In that case, a person who expects their child to be surrounded by people who speak only Spanish should think twice about naming their child one of those things.
Can't believe I missed this thread. First, worth pointing out that a lot of the mourning over languages done in the US is mourning over Native American languages, and there's a lot of righteous guilt behind it. It that context, "Meh, no biggie," is annoying.
But on the broader point, I thought Teh Invidious Postmodern Theorists had managed to convince everyone that language isn't just a tool for communication, but the medium in and through which we come to conceptualize ourselves and our world. The fact that English has words for "sorry," "regretful," "chagrined," and "chastened" is one reason we can feel, in a meaningful way, the difference between those very similar emotions. When a language dies, we'll never know what else has been delineated, and how else we might understand things. We're all poorer for it. It might be, in any given instance, that economic gains are more important than the preservation of a language, but that's what makes it tragic.
It's not really all that difficult to explain to people how one's name is spelled and pronounced. I don't particularly mind it, and I'm pretty sure I prefer it vastly to having to be one of three Jennifers all the goddamn time.
Okay, I defer to you, since when I do a Google Image Search for my first and last name combined and surrounded by quotation marks, I get over 2,000 results, less than five of which are me.
But I've always gotten the feeling that people get annoyed when people are constantly mispronouncing their name (Polish last names in particular), and I wouldn't want to consciously inflict that on someone by giving them an unpronounceable first name.
107: This isn't an area in which I have strong feelings one way or the other, so I'm just saying here what I understand Michaels to be saying. What I believe his point to be is "Sure. Something indefinable is lost when a language is lost. But if no person, individually, can be identified as worse off because of it, who gives a damn?" It's a loss to scholarship, but scholars can study something else.
having a name like "Niambh" is going to be a giant pain in the ass in certain situations.
Sure; and so is having a name that's as common as mud, where people are going to be calling you "Bob A" all the time to distinguish you from Bobs B, C, and D. Not to mention the worn "jokes" and rhymes about your name.
a person who expects their child to be surrounded by people who speak only Spanish should think twice about naming their child one of those things.
Says who? I mean, what damn difference does it make to you what someone else's name is? Jeez.
87: LB and SEK get it right. We didn't deliberately seek out an unpronounceable name; the naming process was contentious and protracted, to the point that S's sister was McQ****** Baby No. 1 for a couple days in the hospital. I thought it was a more familiar name than it really is, until someone told me that (based only on the pronunciation) it was really cool we'd chosen a 'black' name. Nor were we trying to emphasize any Irish heritage, though taken together we're predominantly of Irish extraction. The ancestors on my dad's side might appreciate the gesture toward the preservation of Irish orthography, but I'm guessing my grandfather Mario couldn't have cared less.
Says who? I mean, what damn difference does it make to you what someone else's name is? Jeez.
I think you're missing the point of that "should". It doesn't, I assume, matter a whit to Ned, but it may well matter to the person whose name is constantly be mispronounced. Think about Homer considering possible names for Bart based on the ease of schoolkids coming up with mocking soundalikes.
112: Part of the issue here is that it's all well and good for people like Michaels to make claims like that, but he doesn't actually know what it's like to be in the position of someone whose language is dying; his language isn't going anywhere. So it seems a little callous.
Yeah, and if it matters to that person, they can take it up with their folks. They don't need Ned passing rules for them. I suspect that most kids end up having tastes and values that more or less reflect their parents'; families that value individuality or ethnic background or whatever will have kids that do the same, and families that value names that are common and easy to pronounce will raise boring kids that value those things too.
Jesus, Mary and fucking Joseph, as they say on the old sod. My surname, which should be perfectly intelligible to anyone with the barest grasp of English orthography, has been mispronounced all my life. BFD. Anyway, Siobhán is perfectly pronounceable; I pronounce it several times a day with varying inflections.
Thanks for having my back, B. PK is also a perfectly pronounceable name.
There seems to be this idea among people with common names that having an unusual name is some sort of curse that parents should go to great lengths to spare their children from. Seriously, it's not bad at all. Yes, you do have to correct the pronunciation and spelling, but that's hardly a major problem.
Part of the issue here is that it's all well and good for people like Michaels to make claims like that, but he doesn't actually know what it's like to be in the position of someone whose language is dying; his language isn't going anywhere. So it seems a little callous.
He's a Jewish and a French-Canadian, so I think he may know the emotional spectrum associated with dying/dead/revivified languages. Of course, that also misses Michaels' point: if your children are hungry all the time, it doesn't really matter what language they complain in, does it?
I say that glibly, sure, but it's true: the left has fetishized identity, meaning that while the sum-total of respect for people living below the poverty line has increased, their well-being hasn't.
Really, all I'm trying to do is focus the attention away from the faux-nostalgia Ogged mentioned; because sure, we could indulge in mourning the loss of something only we have the requisite privilege to mourn. But anyway, which of you fuckers is man enough to go toe-to-toe with me and AEDPA? You! You? That's what I thought, fool...
Hobie cats are good boats. And Hobie is actually a pretty cool name, come to think of it.
I want to name a kid Salamander. Mr. B. likes Tsunami. I also really love the names Mercy and Dolores, but I don't think I can bring myself to inflict a freakish religious name on a kid, pronouncable though it may well be.
"Maeve" is often spelled "Maebh." It's not that weird; it's just a couple weird letter rules.
I might think it a little weird if the parents were going around exclaiming how authentically 'Celtic' they were (1/16th on one side!) and that's why they named their daughter Saoirse. (Does anyone else know people who decide whimsically that they're authentically something because they found out about a great-grandmother who was something?) But I think I'd be more annoyed if they'd anglicized it to Sairsha, because what's the point of picking an interesting name if you're going to muck it up?
Seriously, though, there's a lot of non-anglo names floating around, and we all learn to pronounce them even if it takes a 'I'm really sorry, could you say that again?' a few times. My tastes run toward classic boring whitepeople names, but that's just my tastes. Don't think that'll make my kids boring, though the philosophy will likely take care of that.
On the larger point, my grandfather used to say, when searching for a word to explain what he meant, 'The French have a word for it', meaning just that some languages are richer than others in their expressive power. Which is a long way of saying I agree with 107.
My dog is named for a Samoan goddess. I liked the name enough that I figured I needed to use it up on a pet in order to keep my kids safe from impulsive naming.
Interesting -- when I first met the Siobhan of my acquaintance, in the several-week period between when I learned her name and when I saw it spelled or asked how it was spelled, I wondered how such a white chick as she had gotten a black name.
Foreign names are mispronounced even if phonetically spelled.
My son's best friend for a few years was named Sithapou Somboumkhanh. It's not quite phonetic (Sit-a-poe Soo-buh-conn). Kids always figured it out orally, but teachers were comparing the written and the oral forms and never got it right.
if your children are hungry all the time, it doesn't really matter what language they complain in, does it?
That's just it; does it? I don't know. My kids aren't starving, and my language isn't dying, and the same is true of Michaels. I'm just saying it would be nice to hear from someone who is actually in that situation before we start talking about what's more important to them.
156, 158 - Yes, "it" probably does matter...but what is "it"? Part of Michaels' point is that "it" is an incoherent cultural identity predicated on unscientific racial logic, an idea of cultural transmission which can't be proven, and an intuitive notion that language is connected to culture. As his fast hold on a retro-Marxist idea of class betrays, he's into demystification, believing that sometimes people don't know what's good for them.
156-8: Maybe. I've got to say that if I have $X to give to charity, and my choices are (1) a program for making sure that a dying language continues to be taught or (2) a program devoted to the material well-being of poor children in the ethnic group with which the language is associated, I wouldn't have much trouble sending all $X to program 2, and without more persuasion I'd think someone making a different decision was being frivolous.
As LB proves, you can either get wrapped up in WBM's polemic and become as hated as he is, or write sensible things. Pony up those shit-lists, people, I know I'm on 'em...
156, 158: Jesus, are poor people so alien to our experience that we have to speculate about them as though they were purely hypothetical? I haven't had health insurance in four or five years, and I know that I'd swap out English for Spanish for the ability to buy medicine or visit the dentist again. Language is important but it's not that important.
I might end up disagreeing with Michaels in some cases. Language loss internationally is sometimes associated with depopulation, subjugation, and the destruction of whole cultures. The language serves to an extent as the proxy for the people. In US muticulturalism, there are other things going on.
I don't know why everyone's framing this as an either/or thing. Surely there's room for language preservation programs in addition to providing for the material needs of the population in question.
it" is an incoherent cultural identity predicated on unscientific racial logic, an idea of cultural transmission which can't be proven, and an intuitive notion that language is connected to culture.
Goodness, human beings might be unscientific, non-ideal rational actors. Lots of incoherent cultural identity matters to people, even poor people.
I don't know why everyone's framing this as an either/or thing. Surely there's room for language preservation programs in addition to providing for the material needs of the population in question.
I think a lot of the actual people involved see it as an either/or thing. Every article about language loss seems to include quotes like "Yes, I would love it if my son could speak Dzunza Lower Pokomo with his grandparents, but if I want him to succeed I need to make sure he goes to a Swahili/English school." These fears may be unfounded, but a lot of the time the people whose participation is necessary to preserve the language are the very people who feel the language is incompatible with economic success.
There's a historically significant demographic of parents who do not want their kinds to learn the parents' native language. Many immigrant familes were like that.
I ran into Swedish-Americans whose parents felt that way. The parents didn't hate themselves. They hated Sweden. Sweden could be a hell-hole before 1900.
Emerson's 166 is right. The intellectual value of natural languages isn't what WBM is talking about in his larger project, though the NYT piece doesn't make that as clear as it might be.
Most of the people I've heard complain about the disappearance of languages have been linguists-- are there really people out there who make such a deal of language for the reasons WBM is attacking?
These fears may be unfounded, but a lot of the time the people whose participation is necessary to preserve the language are the very people who feel the language is incompatible with economic success.
This is true, and I assume it's what Emerson is referring to in 171, and it can frustrate linguists to no end.
I'm not entirely kidding when I say that it would be nice to have a sort of timeline of the left, explaining what the left knew and when the left knew it, because I have the feeling I checked out of the left for a while and a lot of important stuff got decided in my absence. This is another way of predicting that when the list of WBM's targets is provided I will find them pretty uninteresting.
I liked the name enough that I figured I needed to use it up on a pet in order to keep my kids safe from impulsive naming.
I had a rat named Chastity in college for exactly that reason.
I don't buy this stuff about the left fetishizing identity. The identity thing was a brief moment in leftish intellectual history; at this point, it's the right, not we, who are really hung up on it in the essentialist way that usually gets seen as, well, essentialist. And wrong.
to 175, etc.: I assume that the people who really feel the disappearence of their language are those who resent the people who speak the encroaching language: i.e., occupation situations.
I take it "fetishized" here means no more than "overemphasized," correct? Or is it the motivation for the overemphasis--that the motivation has somehow become disconnected from the original purpose of the analysis?
176 - Isn't that what Scott, John, and myself have been saying for most of this thread? It's an obvious case of what economics calls revealed preferences. People whose family speaks a dying tongue obviously prefer the economic well-being and greater social possibilities of a widely-spoken or more elite language to the nebulous cultural value and intellectual value of their "native" tongue. If they felt otherwise, their family's language wouldn't be dying.
This does assume a lack of coercion, which can be tricky in real life. Practical concerns ensure that a lot of public schooling must be done in a more common tongue to get textbooks, qualified teachers, etc. and that much of commerce has to occur in a common tongue. That's why languages have such a massive network effect, which could be considered a form of coercion (join our language or be excluded from these fabulous advances) but it's one that will always exist regardless of the respect for cultural tradition and linguistic interest.
Okay, sure, but as an empirical matter those people are wrong; bilingualism isn't necessarily an economic liability. As for coercion, keep in mind that the reason many of these languages became endangered in the first place was that the US and Canadian governments forcibly enrolled kids in boarding schools where their mouths were washed out with soap if they were caught speaking their native languages. So I wouldn't exactly say that these people are freely choosing to abandon their languages and adopt English after rationally looking at the incentives.
It's sort of a moot point, anyway; these languages are all going to die, soon, and there's nothing anyone can do about it.
True bilingualism isn't a liability where it is feasible. But in the current day and age, where kids aren't being forcibly fed soap for speaking another language, why wouldn't people learn enough of the old language to speak to their folks? Clearly it's not worth the effort to them, or they see it as impinging on their more important ability to speak the common language effectively.
There is some cultural history dying along with each language, but it's a very inaccessible cultural history, available only to the small number willing to pursue that language. For each language that dies, at least one more language broadens its cultural histories as the group joins its native speakers. From that point forward, they preserve their culture in a form accessible to far more people, and their future cultural and artistic contributions can be appreciated on a far greater scale. This, in addition to the convenience and economic benefits, is why I see a net bonus for society every time an already large language gets even more native speakers even though it's probably causing the death of another tongue.
I would write more eloquently about the young Germans I knew who felt deracinated because they never learned their village dialect, but I'm too tired. g'night.
186 - Yeah, sorry, I saw the Esperanto and assumed that was the whole joke so I didn't bother to translate it. I should've realized the Unfoggederiat always stick more layers than an onion in their jokes.
150- I also have known a PK, who was "pankaj" I believe.
Also, what's up with the Irish names being spelled weird? When they were first written down by monks or whatever, why didn't they get it fucking right?
I'm not really talking about young monolingual English speakers learning their heritage language; once it gets to that point the language is practically already dead. I mean languages that are still at the point where parents could choose to speak their own language around their kids so they grow up bilingual, but don't because they think it will harm them to speak anything except English. Surely you can concede that they're wrong to do that? Or at least that it's unfortunate?
190 - JM, why didn't they learn the village language if it was that important to them? I don't mean to be glib, I honestly wonder how these languages die if people feel they are essential to their own identity.
Referring to events long expired in this thread: The linguistic import of the Tarski t-scheme seems a little tendentious to me. The author is basically asserting a form of the Church-Turing Thesis for natural languages which, ok, fine, but he's trying to "test" it by invoking the Tarski Undefinability of Truth [hence the t-scheme], which only holds (in that form) for classical first-order logic. [Maybe Boolean-valued classic logic but still.] Since natural language doesn't conform to first-order, the odds that this technique illuminates anything interesting are slim to none.
131: I don't wish I had a more pronounceable name, but I do sometimes (despite going by "tom" my entire life) use "thomas" or sometimes "tomās", because Lebanese can actually hear and remember them, whereas "tom" is just an arbitrary single syllable that goes by so fast that no one can make any sense of it.
Which also goes to show, I guess, that the question of what names are weird and hard to pronounce is not necessarily obvious.
193 - They might not be wrong to do it, necessarily. Accent is considered a big indicator of class and education, and it can get fixed awfully early in some people. One of my good friends from university moved to Oxford when he was 4, but still spoke with a clear Canadian accent when I knew him at age 20. If you want your kids to be able to get along in English / Swahili / whatever the local dominant language is, they should be exposed to it early to at least get a good grasp of the phenomes. Now, as for exposing the child only to the dominant language, to the exclusivity of all tribal and local tongues, that is somewhat unfortunate. I haven't seen it happen much, and most of the people I know who grew up in East Africa (i.e. with tribal languages and a regional language overlapping) or to an immigrant family that spoke a different language than their new home just ended up bi- or trilingual. I will also readily admit that I'm on the very unsentimental side of the spectrum when it comes to language. I think it's a fantastic tool for communication, but I could care less which one I speak so long as everyone else can understand me.
198 - Well, I know that. I just want to hear what the people in that actual situation give as their reasons for not pursuing the old language. I doubt they say "cultural hegemony" in so many words. I doubt they even feel that they're giving up their old culture, as opposed to just a part of their old culture.
Here's my difficulty. There are two sides to this issue: lingual hegemony and cultural hegemony.
Linguistic hegemony is caused by the network effect of languages. The more people who speak a language, the more that is going on in that language's global "conversation", the more appealing it becomes as a primary language to those who can learn it. They in turn can contribute their cultural background, disseminate it in the widely understood new language, thus contributing further to the tongue's "conversation" and making it all the more appealing. This is a process I have no problem with, and that I think could lead to an effective lingua franca one of these days, or at least only a few super-regional languages. This, in my opinion, would be a vast bonus for everyone.
Cultural hegemony is much more imperial in nature. It can be forcible (washing kids mouths out with soap for speaking other languages, laws or community standards against worshipping other religions, etc) or it can be seductive (every complaint about American pop culture, MTV, Levis and McDonalds). Pretty much everyone is uncomfortable with the forcible cultural hegemony, and even the seductive cultural hegemony makes me a little nervous. However, I distinguish it from linguistic hegemony because I feel that most sentiments and cultural signifiers are translatable between languages in some way, so it is possible to give in to one form of hegemony without giving in to the other. Admittedly, a lot of people see the two as intimately tied and think they have to change languages and worldviews just to join a new culture, or vice-versa, but I think they're going a little overboard.
I think we may just be looking at this from different perspectives. I'm most familiar with this issue in the context of the US, where it most certainly is the case that kids are quite often exposed to only English and not their heritage language; there's no choice to abandon the language on their part, it's already gone. The reason for that is that their parents (or, at this point, grandparents) were very forcibly assimilated to American culture and the English language and have internalized to some degree the idea that being Indian is a handicap in modern American society, so they make deliberate efforts to keep their children from having that stigma. Obviously, not everyone thinks this way, and it varies from tribe to tribe, but it's a big problem for language maintenance efforts. These languages are going to die and soon, so the main objective of linguists is to describe them as well as possible before they do.
You seem to looking at this from the perspective of East Africa, an area about which I know little and which I'm quite sure has totally different sociolinguistic issues. Nothing wrong with that, but what holds there doesn't necessarily hold elsewhere, and I suspect the distinction between linguistic and cultural hegemony is probably sharper there than it is in many other places.
I'm a linguist, so this stuff is very important to me. Obviously not everyone cares as much.
Damn, I had to leave just as you guys started duking it out. Fortunately, young teofilo was here to say the right things, and it turns out that an unexpected benefit of my pseud is that whenever anyone uses 'Jesus' as an exclamation, there I am.
JAC, I don't disagree in general; encounters with other languages have helped make English as rich as it is, but I don't see how you can make clear distinctions between linguistic and cultural hegemony.
I ask all you people who are so proud of your unique names: do your names put food on the table? I bet you'd be glad to be named James or Jennifer if it meant that the engraver wouldn't mispell the name on the headstone of your early grave.
Yeah, the immigrants to the US that I've known well have all been well-educated, so their kids typically knew both the native tongue and English.
The big problem was usually that many never learned their native language much beyond a childhood level, since all their higher schooling was in English and evening language classes in elementary and middle school can only take you so far. You don't need particularly high-level language just to chat with family anyway. But since they can't communicate at a highly educated level in their native tongue, they are stuck living and working in English or sounding like a fool.
I think this is a problem that's especially tough for a lot of the 2nd generation Mexican immigrants, or any other very poor immigrant groups in the US. If your parents never finished 8th grade in their homeland, and you have been educated through high school level in English, which language will you be better at? Even taking high school Spanish at a good school could lead you to a higher level of fluency than your parents in their native tongue. It's easy to see the parents' language being dropped by the next generation in favor of greater fluency in the new country's language.
But this is probably all very off-topic, and my replies have been horribly rambling on this thread. I can see why this phenomenon would really piss a linguist off, but since I just want to be able to talk to anyone on Earth, I'm going to keep reaching for that universal language rainbow. Good night everybody.
I'm sure by that time the soldiers of the neoliberal consensus will have turned your tombstone into an altar on which they offer up the children of the poor to the gods of diversity, chanting during the ceremony the solemn word "teofilo" to muffle out the screams.
Also, it may be important to some people, but perhaps not to Michaels, that there is a difference between not growing up to speak a language that continues to be spoken elsewhere (as happens with many immigrants) and not growing up to speak a language that simply diasppears.
(There's also a difference between not beating the world at basketball and no longer playing basketball at all. What that analogy is doing in the op-ed is beyond me. Maybe I was misreading something.)
Right, there's a difference between an immigrant group assimilating and losing their language and an indigenous group assimilating and losing their language. In fact, the sociolinguistic dynamics of the two situations are different in a lot of ways.
Man, there's a direct relation between participating in Unfogged threads and, um, doing anything else. I had to do something else for a few hours, and now I have to sleep...but know this: this Firefox tab will remain open until morning, and I'll respond then. I won't cut-and-run, because then those little sheep--especially that uppity one in the middle there--well, them and us, we'll have to have a "discussion." (Plus, micromanaging book event all night, very tired...but teofilo, you should check out the event, and I say this as a linguistics major, we're not all clueless rubes. Or, at least, we used to not be, before we went to grad. school.)
210: It's not classical (i.e. [2-valued] first-order) logic, so Tarski doesn't apply, or at least not in the usual way. There are also issues of (first-order) material implication v. relevance logics, explosion... really, natural language and classical logic don't look much alike at all. I mean, the Liar Paradox is at least expressible in natural language; most first-order logics can't even manage that much.
And FWIW the paper's point, such as I understood it, was that we could violate this "Church's Thesis For Natural Languages" if we could a) produce a sentence expressible in some natural language ("Saturnian" was the one the author picked) that b) we could know would be true for metatheoretical reasons even if c) we couldn't actually translate the thing in the first place. My response was essentially that getting b) & c) to both hold would be difficult, if not outright impossible, in natural language because it possesses a flexibility, both in truth values and the theoretic/metatheoretic distinction, that classical logic simply doesn't have. In particular, you're not going to break anything that I know of by claiming that the Saturnians have a predicate for truth, for example -- which is more or less what the Tarski t-scheme asserts -- since natural language already has one: "is true".
According to the paper it's Davidson who thinks anything's illuminated by Tarski, and he thinks that a, b and c can't hold. Though the author of the paper thinks Davidson's reliance on Tarski is misplaced, apparently.
I don't really see what the relevance of this is: "you're not going to break anything that I know of by claiming that the Saturnians have a predicate for truth, for example -- which is more or less what the Tarski t-scheme asserts -- since natural language already has one: "is true"." since the point, as I'm understanding it, isn't what's expressible in Saturnian, but what we can comprehend of Saturnian. Just because you can say in Saturnian "'it is raining' is true iff it is raining" doesn't mean that we English-speakers can justifiably believe that the string of Saturnian that expresses that is even meaningful; I take that to be the point of the stage of the author's reconstructed argument about the only way to tell if Saturnian sentence S is true is to say "'womble grunk' is true iff it is raining" where "it is raining" translates "womble grunk". I guess I thought the part of the argument dealing with complete failure of translatability was making a quasi-transcendental claim about recognition of something as a language in the first place.
I still think the argument about Mini-English is pretty* weak, though in fairness it's just barely sketched.
"Even taking high school Spanish at a good school could lead you to a higher level of fluency than your parents in their native tongue."
There's a big mistake here. HS Spanish is standard Spanish, whereas illiterate immigrants from Mexico speak Mexican dialect Spanish. But the parents are fluent in their dialect, whereas no one ever attains fluency in HS classes.
I believe that there's a lot of dialect interference when native speakers of Spanish study Spanish in school. Not an insurmountable problem (schools exist in many places to teach dialect speakers the standard language), but US schools, teachers and materials are almost always geared to the deends of English speakers.
Let's start a Heathers group and ignore Jackmormon until she starts crying.
I could care less which one I speak so long as everyone else can understand me: But each of is alone in this world, and no one can really know what's in the heart of another.
In fairness, he's also arguing that it wouldn't matter much if English disappeared from the U.S., at least on the grounds that the hypothetical calagrandchildren speaking Spanish wouldn't entail the destruction of all that is True and Right.
That sentiment seems to be correct, but it doesn't mean that the loss of a language isn't sad in other ways.
Posted by Cala | Link to this comment | 10- 1-06 9:46 AM
True, but he can't move from "these langauges are all on a par" to "so it won't matter if most of them disappear." It just seems so cloddish.
Posted by FL | Link to this comment | 10- 1-06 10:11 AM
From my limited understanding, it does not appear to be the case that all languages are equal.
Posted by Michael | Link to this comment | 10- 1-06 10:24 AM
Yeah, that was pretty lame. Why do research when you can just muse on paper for a bit, do a quick copy edit, and send it off? The piece ought to end "Just a thought! kthxbye."
Posted by redfoxtailshrub | Link to this comment | 10- 1-06 10:26 AM
Also English isn't going to disappear, although it will become unrecognisable in its present form - see his riff on reading Elizabethan English. It's possible that a new language (Yanquish? Americano?) will develop from a Spanish/English creole in America, the same way Middle English emerged from an Anglo-Saxon/Norman French creole. But Spanish won't simply replace American English - the politics and demographics are all wrong for that to happen. And forms of English will still be spoken in Australia, Britain, Canada, Jamaica, etc, so our descendents in the Antarctic rain forests will be able to read No Fear Melville to their hearts content.
Posted by OneFatEnglishman | Link to this comment | 10- 1-06 10:29 AM
While labs has issued an adequate refutation, it's fun to pile on*, so:
Because the very thing that made it a mistake for the missionaries to try to stop people from speaking Native American languages (it’s not as if English was better).
It's wrong because coercion is wrong, not b/c of some inherent value in the languages. Of course this odd judgement is there only to prepare his second judgement, which is similarly odd; that the only value of a language is how good it is. If it mattered, I'd wonder what his idea of "good" is.
*ATM
Posted by Michael | Link to this comment | 10- 1-06 10:36 AM
Um, is it wrong for me to point out that a short piece for the NYT Magazine is not exactly the same as a scholarly article, and that furthermore the article isn't even *about* disappearing languages; it's about population shifts. The Tlingit line is a single throwaway, and he asks "why" rather than asking "if." And the answer--because every language is an artefact that tells us a lot about time, place, and the human mind--is perfectly fine, but not what he's concerned with in this piece.
Plus, the possibility that he's using a bit of, you know, rhetoric to appeal to an anti-Spanish audience who, presumably, isn't all that hung up on the disappearance of Tlingit.
Posted by bitchphd | Link to this comment | 10- 1-06 10:36 AM
Not wrong, exactly, but, even on rereading, it seems pretty clear that he claims it's not a bad thing when languages disappear. Yes, yes, I know, it's in the service of telling people not to worry about Spanish, but it still looks to me like a dumb thing to say.
Why are you defending Goldstein, B?
Posted by FL | Link to this comment | 10- 1-06 10:48 AM
If the Brits were taught to speak proper network English and forget their quaint Monty Python dialects, how great a loss would that be, either?
To me it's a darn shame that the Anglosphere is cluttered up with these little sandbox "parliaments". It just makes it that much more difficult for the leader of the free world to do his job. Once the so-called "Congress" and "Supreme Court" have been pacified, it will be high time to look at all these other alleged governments gumming up the works.
Posted by John Emerson | Link to this comment | 10- 1-06 10:56 AM
9: Well, I'd lose the ability to claim that I'm bilingual: I speak both English and American.
[FWI, over there I say I speak both "English English" and "Real English."]
Posted by Anarch | Link to this comment | 10- 1-06 11:07 AM
Doesn't bilingualism lead to problems. I say that we should crush the retrograde dialects entirely.
Posted by John Emerson | Link to this comment | 10- 1-06 11:08 AM
Apparently that parenthetical wasn't even worth finishing the acronym. [Initialism, to you pedants out there.] Which sounds about right.
Posted by Anarch | Link to this comment | 10- 1-06 11:10 AM
I wouldn't say it's like paving over an archaeological dig to lose a language. It's more like losing traditional building techniques as a society switches to modern steel or wood frames with drywall, or more typically cinderblocks for cheaper and sturdier housing. It's like losing traditional clothing as everyone switches to cotton t-shirts and jeans or slacks.
The key is that you are expecting these people to live in a dying language, in a dying culture, and why? So the developed world can feel so good about the diversity it is promoting? Not everyone wants to be bilingual or trilingual just to get by outside their little community. English is becoming the de facto language of the international educated class, and as India shows, good knowledge and a proper accent in the language can single-handedly provide a massive boost to a developing nation's economy.
I do understand points about the cultural significance of a particular language, and the desire to see it maintained. But for me, I feel that the original purpose of language as a communication device overrides it's significance as a vessel for a given culture. I think the world would be better off if we could just pick a universal language that everyone would learn, preferably from birth but most likely from the beginnings of primary public schooling. Just think how great it would be to be able to travel anywhere in the world and speak to any of the locals you wish. Just imagine how much that would actually help foster international understanding and make cultures more transparent.
Sorry if I got off-topic, but this is something that I've thought about a fair amount, and argued over quite a lot with my various continental friends at university.
Posted by JAC | Link to this comment | 10- 1-06 11:24 AM
That's not my take, though. I don't care so much that people continue to speak a language, just that the things are documented or understood before they go, because there's a valuable intellectual enterprise that's undermined by their premature disappearance. (What? a natural language isn't SVO of necessity?)
Posted by FL | Link to this comment | 10- 1-06 11:37 AM
In the long run the Brits will be thankful to us for making their lives better. In the short run a bit of sternness may be required.
Posted by John Emerson | Link to this comment | 10- 1-06 11:40 AM
I don't think, JAC, that anyone is suggesting that Tlingit speakers stop learning English too, and refuse to speak anything but Tlingit. Obviously, that's going to be limiting.
I think it's a very fine thing, especially for American native speakers of English, to be reminded every now and again that we are not the center of the universe. That there are other peoples, other narratives, other ways of interacting with the world.
I once worked with a Ks'ank'a* woman who undertook to teach me the names of the edible berries we'd eat while ditching work. I provided nearly endless entertainment trying to pronounce lawiyal (that's not our L, and the scholars don't usually use our L in transcription, but a lower case l with an equals sign drawn through it. Looking it up, I see that it is a "voiceless l with the air forced through the sides of the tongue.") They taste mighty good, too.
*In English, we have another name for her people, derived from the word used by a neighboring people with which her people were often at war. It's not an unflattering name, but she thought we ought to use her people's name for themselves, and I try to remember to do that.
Posted by CharleyCarp | Link to this comment | 10- 1-06 11:43 AM
I'd say it's very much like paving over a dig. It's an irretrievable loss, not just of what people have said (with remnants preserved only in translation) and how (the sounds and rhythms integral to a culture's verbal and vocal art), but really an entire conception of the world.
And of course it doesn't have to be either/or. Since the 1970s, there's been a remarkable resurgence of Hawaiian, and you can still get around the islands pretty well in English.
Posted by Jesus McQueen | Link to this comment | 10- 1-06 12:01 PM
That column does not inspire me to think his diversity book worth reading.
Posted by eb | Link to this comment | 10- 1-06 12:24 PM
That's not my take, though. I don't care so much that people continue to speak a language, just that the things are documented or understood before they go
Ok, that I agree with completely. A culture's oral traditions and written histories are very worthy of preservation, but I think many can be translated. I am mostly wary of the trade-offs to keeping a very small language active, as that requires it to be the primary language of an entire community and, in a very important way, cuts them off from surrounding societies. Not everyone has a gift with languages that allows them to become easily biligual or trilingual.
I think it's a very fine thing, especially for American native speakers of English, to be reminded every now and again that we are not the center of the universe. That there are other peoples, other narratives, other ways of interacting with the world.
But do you think this really requires a seperate language to appreciate it? Histories of a culture, proverbs, parables, and important literature can provide a very good appreciation of many of the differences, and they're far more accessible than a whole new language. It doesn't take years of immersion and study to gain even a beginning appreciation of them.
And of course it doesn't have to be either/or. Since the 1970s, there's been a remarkable resurgence of Hawaiian, and you can still get around the islands pretty well in English.
But even there, Hawaiian is only spoken as a native tongue by 0.1% of the population. Its resurgence has been due to a desire to maintain a traditional culture on the side, not as the primary form of expression. No one will face drawbacks to their choice of secondary language beyond those of their primary language.
Posted by JAC | Link to this comment | 10- 1-06 12:32 PM
I was curious about his deployment of the equality of expressive power principle, and wrote a bit about it here:
http://www.thevalve.org/go/valve/article/linguistic_diversity_an_asset/
In what was intended to be a reductio but doesn't quite make it. But still.
Posted by Jonathan | Link to this comment | 10- 1-06 12:34 PM
Saluton, JAC! Mi nomi?as Jackmormon. ?u vi parolas Esperanton? Bone, ?is la revido. Pacon!
Posted by Jackmormon | Link to this comment | 10- 1-06 12:45 PM
A culture's oral traditions and written histories are very worthy of preservation, but I think many can be translated. I am mostly wary of the trade-offs to keeping a very small language active, as that requires it to be the primary language of an entire community and, in a very important way, cuts them off from surrounding societies. Not everyone has a gift with languages that allows them to become easily biligual or trilingual.
This is pretty much entirely wrong. Translation is always imperfect at best, particularly when the two languages differ structurally to a great degree (as is the case with English and Tlingit). And everyone does actually have the ability to become easily bilingual, provided they learn both languages from birth; there are examples of stable multilingualism lasting for centuries. So no, preserving a language doesn't require cultural insularity.
Also, a world language wouldn't do any good, since within a couple of generations it would just split off into different dialects anyway and eventually those dialects would become mutually incomprehensible and we'd be back where we started.
Posted by teofilo | Link to this comment | 10- 1-06 12:55 PM
8: Just trying to mix things up a bit. "Defending Goldstein" is fighting words.
Posted by bitchphd | Link to this comment | 10- 1-06 1:05 PM
B, does this mean you're going to slap me with your cock?
Also, JAC, this
A culture's oral traditions and written histories are very worthy of preservation, but I think many can be translated
misses my point, which is that the languages themselves are interesting in themselves, as part of the resources for research in linguistics, for example. It's not only about content preservation.
Posted by FL | Link to this comment | 10- 1-06 1:11 PM
21 - For practical reasons, any language that became universal would have to be a currently used primary language. That's the only way it could have the vocabulary and speaker base necessary for being usable as a day-to-day method of interaction.
Also, a world language wouldn't do any good, since within a couple of generations it would just split off into different dialects anyway and eventually those dialects would become mutually incomprehensible and we'd be back where we started.
Australia is thousands of miles off the shores of the US and the UK, it's still done a pretty good job since the 1800s of keeping a similar language. Same with English spoken in India since the Raj (though admittedly that's only been a couple generations, tops). With the amount of intercommunication in today's world, I'd be very surprised if we couldn't keep some semblence of a universal rule set that would allow communication to go unimpeded. Of course regional accents and slang would occur, but that's a far lower hurdle to understanding a new person than an entirely new language.
Posted by JAC | Link to this comment | 10- 1-06 1:14 PM
Also, JAC, this misses my point, which is that the languages themselves are interesting in themselves, as part of the resources for research in linguistics, for example. It's not only about content preservation.
Yes, and a lot of people keep languages alive for precisely that reason. However, if you are fluent in two tongues, one that is only used by the small ethnic group you are related to, and one used by everyone else on Earth, which one are you more likely to use? Which one will your kids use, especially if they grew up outside your ethnic community?
Once a primary global language exists, if it ever does, I think a lot of other languages will die out or become very marginalized. There are probably other people than me who would be unwilling to learn another language simply to gain access to a small body of one group's tradition. And who the hell are linguists to insist these people put in all the effort and time to keep their language alive simply so it may be studied (however interesting and enlightening that study may be)?
22 - I know that, sadly, translation is imperfect at best. I know that a fair amount of tradition will disappear, but it was also tradition that was really only accessible to a small core of people who: a) knew or learned the language in question, which takes years of immersion or study and b) were interested enough in their cultural history to pursue the oral and written traditions in depth (not that many, even just guessing from the number of English majors there are at universities).
I am not denying the inherent value of the diversity of language and the traditions they preserve and perpetuate. I certainly support maintaining the traditional tongue as a second language, if you have the means and interest to do so. However, it's my belief that once any language gains universal primacy, it will become the de facto primary language of pretty much every person, if only because nearly all interaction outside the household will occur in it. After a few generations of the traditional tongue being a secondary language that requires special study, not too far from Latin or classical Greek today, I would be surprised if they really remain that common outside language specialists.
Posted by JAC | Link to this comment | 10- 1-06 1:27 PM
But even there, Hawaiian is only spoken as a native tongue by 0.1% of the population. Its resurgence has been due to a desire to maintain a traditional culture on the side, not as the primary form of expression.
How meaningful is this number? You might as well point out that the number of Hawaiian speakers has risen threefold or more since the early 90s, which would put it among the fastest-growing languages on the planet. Sure, it's only the primary language for a couple hundred people on Ni'ihau, but try telling them it's "on the side." It's certainly not being forced down their throats by linguists, and it'd be a lot more vital now elsewhere in Hawaii if it hadn't been actively suppressed. In that regard -- that the renewed vitality of the language has everything to do with redress for general cultural suppression -- it has something in common with many other marginalized languages, and I think that any community that wants to preserve such a language deserves the full support of the colonizing power that tried to eliminate it.
As far as universal language goes, I think it's a pipe dream, but if numbers matter, well, how's your Chinese?
Posted by Jesus McQueen | Link to this comment | 10- 1-06 1:52 PM
Once upon a time, not so long ago, modernization theorists expected that languages would homogenize due to the influence of modern mass media, globalization and so on, that dialects would disappear, and languages become far more "efficient" and rationalized. This has not happened. There's evidence in the case of English to the contrary: that mass media have actually reinforced regional dialects.
I mention this because I have some sympathy for what I think I understand Benn Michaels to be saying here, and I think his point is reinforced somewhat by the strong analogies in the discussion between biodiversity and linguistic diversity.
In the longue duree of human history, languages change, get absorbed into others and die out all the time. Does that make the linguistic history of humanity a case of endless tragedy? An endless compendium of resources lost to the linguist, and nothing more? It's as if one set out to say all extinction of all kinds at all moments in the history of life on Earth is a bad thing because any extinction at any moment removed some small, crucial piece of existing biodiversity at that moment. If that's true, then evolution itself is a bad thing; the price of new species is extinction. The price of linguistic variety and the expressive range of language is that some languages change, some languages combine, and some cease to exist.
So to get particularly upset about languages disappearing today takes more than just being upset about the phenomenon of languages disappearing. The phenomenon is at a minimal morally neutral; I'd go further and say it's a positive good, because it is part and parcel of what makes human language the powerful, changing instrument that it is.
To be upset by a language disappearing (or a species going extinct), you need to offer an argument that a given language in the here and now is disappearing for reasons which are abnormal in the history of linguistic evolution. That's an argument you can make in biological evolution pretty successfully, that we're in the middle of an "extinction event" and that those periods, while broadly normal in the history of life, are nevertheless pretty negative in their impact on life forms existing during such events, and also, such events are different in scale and character than "ordinary" extinction.
I'm not sure you can make a precisely similar argument about languages. Linguistic change in human history often has a lot to do with major dislocations or disjunctures in human society: migration, war, environmental catastrophe, colonialization, cultural frontiers, changing family or kinship patterns, new trade opportunities. The present is bigger in scale, but not different in type. Especially if it turns out that globalization doesn't produce in any simple way homogenization, if underneath it all, the drive to diversify and differentiate languages is as strong as ever.
Posted by Timothy Burke | Link to this comment | 10- 1-06 2:11 PM
The present is bigger in scale, but not different in type.
To be sure, but the scale really is vast. In some ways what we're seeing now is just the end result of European expansion over the past 500 years; languages have been dying all along, but we're reaching the point where many of the last holdouts are finally giving up.
Posted by teofilo | Link to this comment | 10- 1-06 2:16 PM
No, he's not kidding, as the larger argument (thanks, Dr. B!) in the book indicates. (And Jonathan, what's with not pimping the event? C'mon now, you signed the boosterism clause, same as the rest of us.) That said, Michaels' larger complaint is that people wed language to culture incoherently: you can preserve a language even when a culture disappears, just as you can preserve a culture even when a language disappears. You can even recreate a language and pretend you've recreated a culture, like the Israelis did. What he's attacking, then, is the idea of cultural essentialism and what it necessarily entails: linguistic and racial essentialism. More later, as I'm writing about this in detail for the event. (See, not that hard!)
Posted by Scott Eric Kaufman | Link to this comment | 10- 1-06 2:38 PM
Posted by eb | Link to this comment | 10- 1-06 2:38 PM
Shorter 31: On the internet, no one knows if you're a dog in Wendish.
Posted by eb | Link to this comment | 10- 1-06 2:39 PM
I am favorably-inclined toward language-preservation, if you exclude the archaic Monty Python dialects of the American language, but from one point of view, if a culture itself is dying, preserving the language is pretty minor, and from another point of view, if everyone who knows a language is in bad shape objectively, preserving their native language might not be the best place to start.
People strongly interested in this topic ought to stop by languagehat.com from time to time. He's got something up right now about the Berber revival in Algeria or Morocco.
Posted by John Emerson | Link to this comment | 10- 1-06 2:56 PM
32 -- So we can learn a little Pikúni, then: Imazí-imita: 'almost a dog'
Posted by CharleyCarp | Link to this comment | 10- 1-06 3:11 PM
Minnesota won, so Detroit has to win to get the title. Tied at the bottom of the 11th.
Posted by John Emerson | Link to this comment | 10- 1-06 3:13 PM
Ha!
Posted by John Emerson | Link to this comment | 10- 1-06 3:49 PM
So to get particularly upset about languages disappearing today takes more than just being upset about the phenomenon of languages disappearing.
I think I get the point of this, and my agreement is as qualified as your 'upset' is with 'particularly.' Like species extinction, language extinction seems tragic to me, but it's as a social justice issue that it gets me particularly upset. Which is why I brought up the Hawaiian example, which represents some measure of resistance against an imperialist takeover barely a century old.
35: And Minnesota takes the division. What a game -- my respect for the Royals' taking down Detroit in their last game of the season is tempered by their role in the Red Sox' disastrous collapse. And by the fact that they suck.
Posted by Jesus McQueen | Link to this comment | 10- 1-06 3:50 PM
Jesus, from another thread: Do you happen to know Kay Reid?
Posted by John Emerson | Link to this comment | 10- 1-06 3:52 PM
As far as universal language goes, I think it's a pipe dream, but if numbers matter, well, how's your Chinese?
Eh, not so great, though Mandarin would probably be the one language on Earth I currently see as worth the effort of learning, if I get around to that someday.
Still, even from a numbers standpoint, although Mandarin has more than twice as many native speakers as English (though this does lump together a lot of local dialects that seem more different from one another than any English dialects I've come across), I would be surprised if more people worldwide had low-level literacy in Mandarin than do in English (and yes, I know that Ethnologue claims this is precisely the case, I'm still very suspicious unless I saw how they came by those numbers).
Posted by JAC | Link to this comment | 10- 1-06 3:55 PM
I kind of like this quote:
When you lose a language,
you lose a culture, intellectual wealth, a work of art.
It's like dropping a bomb on a museum, the Louvre.
Posted by M/tch M/lls | Link to this comment | 10- 1-06 4:00 PM
Editorial
I was beaten to the Valve link, but Miri/am Bur/stein wrote something about the Canon and reprint practice that seems somewhat related and interesting, even tho I don't think I completely understand it. It struck me because I have a constant contact with Project Gutenberg, and the incredible depth of minor stuff they are preserving raises questions for me. Not is it worth it, but what does it mean? What does 100 amateur travel journals about 19th century do to a researcher, what does it do to just someone just looking for something to read, or a subject to explore?
"Information Overload" has been a subject at least since "Future Shock" but I think we are reaching some kind of tipping point.
I may have just complicated the thread.
Posted by bob mcmanus | Link to this comment | 10- 1-06 4:06 PM
Should be "19th century Australia"
Posted by bob mcmanus | Link to this comment | 10- 1-06 4:06 PM
I think Mandarin would make a great world language, if only they switched to a Romanized orthography. All those symbols are just gratuitous. I pity the Japanese. One symbolic alphabet and three phonetic ones.
Posted by pdf23ds | Link to this comment | 10- 1-06 4:22 PM
I wonder, if I have kids, what languages they should learn besides English. Spanish, definitely. Maybe Japanese or Mandarin. But schools don't often teach Japanese or Chinese.
Sad calaface.
Posted by Cala | Link to this comment | 10- 1-06 4:39 PM
I think Mandarin would make a great world language, if only they switched to a Romanized orthography.
This doesn't sound too bad. Hanyu Pinyin is even phonetic, which would be a big help. My biggest problems with Mandarin as a world language are the orthography, since individual characters for each word takes ages to learn and can't be figured out from the spoken form, and the tonality, since I think tonal languages are less "abusable" than spoken English. Even among native speakers, I've heard Vietnamese complaining about the occasional tone-deafness of some people, and how much you just have to figure out from context if the tones are undetectable or incorrect.
Posted by JAC | Link to this comment | 10- 1-06 4:45 PM
B, does this mean you're going to slap me with your cock?
Dear god, no. More like the withering stare. I am nowhere near as crass as Mr. G., and far more secure in my masculinity.
Posted by bitchphd | Link to this comment | 10- 1-06 4:55 PM
38: I know a couple of Reids from Reed, but no Kay. It's possible I met her elsewhere in life, but since my daughters destroyed portions of my brain in their infancy, much data has been irretrievably lost.
39, 43. Yeah, mine too. In my limited experience, Mandarin's definitely worth the effort, if you're okay with a steep learning curve in the beginning. Phonetically, it's a bit of a challenge; there's also the writing system, which to me was taxing, but more than fascinating enough to make up for the relentless routine of rote memorization. I can't imagine Romanizing it, though; especially in Japanese, you'd end up with heaps of homonyms and no visual clue to distinguish them. Japanese, incidentally, uses two syllabaries (which are very easy to learn) and the Roman alphabet (in a very limited way) in addition to Chinese characters. It's really only the characters that present much difficulty, though some have many readings, so achieving high-level literacy is a struggle.
When I was teaching English in Japan, I had a class at IBM whose members were almost exclusively from the Kanji Support department, back in the day when it seemed that Japanese orthography might be too inefficient for modern information systems. Now you can get Japanese language support -- and support for dozens of other languages including Hawaiian -- built into your Mac OSX.
Posted by Jesus McQueen | Link to this comment | 10- 1-06 4:55 PM
This has probably been covered already, but I think his point is that whatever scholarly interest and value a given language may have, its value to those who might have spoken it but didn't is small. When the last speaker of Wendish died, something was lost to human knowledge, but no human being was any the worse off.
Posted by LizardBreath | Link to this comment | 10- 1-06 4:57 PM
Japanese orthography might be too inefficient for modern information systems
An interesting way to look at it. Damn you, language. Adapt to my tool!
(ATM)
Posted by Nakku | Link to this comment | 10- 1-06 5:00 PM
Exactly. I'd bet money that there will be translation software adequate to general purposes long before the Chinese adopt Romanization. They're poised to kick our asses anyway, so I'm brushing up on my characters.
Okay, that was totally not meant to be a calligraphy joke, so I'm leaving it as written.
Posted by Jesus McQueen | Link to this comment | 10- 1-06 5:07 PM
48: I work on documenting a dying language - when the current oldest generation in three villages dies, the language will be dead. Most of the people, young and old, feel a sense of regret at this, and they want Something To Be Done. (Not enough to revitalise the language, I think in this case, but enough to feel bad about it).
When the language dies, this ethnic group will be further disconnected from what makes them 'different' in the region and Indonesia as a whole, and compared to larger groups like Bugis or Balinese, they will be 'missing' a level of identity. The extent to which that is a problem is debatable, but it is some form of loss, they will in some sense be worse off, and they recognise this.
Posted by Nakku | Link to this comment | 10- 1-06 5:23 PM
Oh, it's not nothing. But I think Michaels has a point that it's not much. Non-Erse speaking Irishmen and women aren't suffering for the lack of their own language-- that doesn't make the movement to teach Irish in schools a foolish or worthless one. But it's not something worth trading much material prosperity for.
Posted by LizardBreath | Link to this comment | 10- 1-06 5:29 PM
But why believe it to be a trade?
Posted by Nakku | Link to this comment | 10- 1-06 5:33 PM
It certainly needn't be. I'm not arguing that language preservation efforts should stop, and I don't think Michaels is. Just that they are not of vital importance.
Lots of worthwhile things people spend their lives on aren't of vital importance. The argument is that, maybe, preserving a language is more like working on the history of jazz guitar than it is like eradicating malaria.
(This sort of argument is, even when true, incredibly obnoxious -- saying to someone whose life is jazz guitar that "Well, you aren't exactly eradicating malaria, are you?" is asking to get a very hostile response, and reasonably so. But it's still, on some level, true.)
Posted by LizardBreath | Link to this comment | 10- 1-06 5:41 PM
Well, up to a point I guess I'd agree - I'm not one for weeping and gnashing my teeth about it. But the 'vital importance' point is odd - how many of us do stuff which is of 'vital importance'?
Posted by Nakku | Link to this comment | 10- 1-06 5:46 PM
Which I guess come back to FL's original point.
Posted by Nakku | Link to this comment | 10- 1-06 5:50 PM
s
Posted by Nakku | Link to this comment | 10- 1-06 5:50 PM
Michaels would say that culture doesn't exist outside of certain practices; if the practices survive but the language doesn't, the culture--i.e. the practices of which it's composed--survives. His argument's incredibly unsentimental, but remember that he makes it in a context of cultural diversity versus economic equality. He believes that "the trouble with diversity" is that it allows conservatives to respect other cultures while doing nothing about other classes. His example from the Boston Globe article is particularly good on this point: so long as one respects the poor as a culture, one need not do anything to alleviate their poverty. It's a win-win situation for conservatives, who can 1) seem considerate by respecting diversity while 2) doing absolutely, positively nothing.
Michaels' arguments sound strange outside of their comparative framework, and I admit to going "Huh? What?" when I read that one this morning, since it seemed far more inflammatory than explanatory.
Posted by Scott Eric Kaufman | Link to this comment | 10- 1-06 6:01 PM
Jazz guitar is more important than eradicating malaria. Nineteenth-century program music is not only less important than eradicating malaria, but in fact is almost as bad as malaria itself.
"Night on Bald Mountain" is not noneteenth-century program music.
Posted by John Emerson | Link to this comment | 10- 1-06 6:02 PM
Also, my "prelude" (read: link-dump) for the WBM event auto-posted while I typed the previous comment.* It includes a link to LB's earlier post, but not this one. It will, soon enough.
*I figure if I associate myself with Walter strongly enough, FL will someday write a post admitting that I'm the reason he read something or other.
Posted by Scott Eric Kaufman | Link to this comment | 10- 1-06 6:05 PM
Michaels would say that culture doesn't exist outside of certain practices; if the practices survive but the language doesn't, the culture--i.e. the practices of which it's composed--survives.
That seems odd when cultural practices can be rather difficult to separate from language - the use of speech levels in Balinese being a rather obvious example.
Posted by Nakku | Link to this comment | 10- 1-06 6:09 PM
SEK: too obvious to say, maybe, but the language is part of a practice. I suppose in the book there's a way of distinguishing the constitutive practices from the contingent? $5 says that the Tarksi t-schema enters into the WBM reply early on.
Posted by FL | Link to this comment | 10- 1-06 6:10 PM
Well, this is why he argues for linguistic equivalence: anyone can say anything in any language. While it may be more or less efficient to say "The Dear Esteemed Gentlemen Mr..." than it would be to say the same thing in a language with inflected honorifics, it could be done; and, if it were of cultural importance, it would be regularized such that one called one's grandfather "The Dear Esteemed Gentlemen Mr..." and one's father "The Dear Gentlemen Mr..."
Posted by Scott Eric Kaufman | Link to this comment | 10- 1-06 6:13 PM
Pre-empted by Nakku. After half a second more thinking, I wonder how shared language affects individual judgments of community/culture membership.
Posted by FL | Link to this comment | 10- 1-06 6:14 PM
Not that I know what a Tarksi t-schema is, but I doubt it. Nothing on that level of detail is mentioned in the relevant chapter of the book -- the argument is much more "So long as people are reasonably prosperous and have some culture they regard as their own, who gives a damn what it is?"
Posted by LizardBreath | Link to this comment | 10- 1-06 6:15 PM
anyone can say anything in any language
Yes! I knew it. How exciting. Look, now I'm an English professor.
Posted by FL | Link to this comment | 10- 1-06 6:16 PM
66 - FL, you're one up on me. Also:
Do you mean "How do specific languages do it differently?" or "How does the lingustic/cultural interplay work?" Because if it's the latter, well, if no one speaks a language anymore, the point's moot. If it's the former, well, I can't answer it, but I'm sure someone could point to neuro-linguistic research on whether inflection influences different parts of the brain than hierarchially-structured adjectives do. (Damn, my terrible writing skillz tonight made that sound snarky. Didn't mean it to.)
62- Nakku, like LB, I'm not sure what the "Tarski-t schema" is, and Google only pulls up things involving math. A quick background, maybe?
Posted by Scott Eric Kaufman | Link to this comment | 10- 1-06 6:22 PM
Supporting Scott: Erse is not in the best shape, but Irish culture not only survives, but has made its mark in the world far beyond what Irish numbers would suggest.
Posted by John Emerson | Link to this comment | 10- 1-06 6:22 PM
There's a book out by Wixman about the languages of the Caucasus. Basically Georgia, Armenia, and Azerbaijan have more language diversity than all of the rest of the Middle East and Europe combined.
There isn't a corresponding cultural diversity. There's an enormous amount of trilingualism (on up), and a lot of intermarriage. The significant diversity there is according to religion, location (mountain or lowland), urbanization, education, and maybe ideology.
Posted by John Emerson | Link to this comment | 10- 1-06 6:26 PM
I was in the midst of typing up a thingy about Davidson and Tarski when I found this, which is helpful, if you want to read more. Second half is where the relevant action is.
Posted by FL | Link to this comment | 10- 1-06 6:26 PM
67: "Tarski-t schema". I dunno, it was Labs.
Posted by Nakku | Link to this comment | 10- 1-06 6:26 PM
Sorry about that: in short, Davidson's argument against incommensurable conceptual schemes, which uses the Tarski biconditionals to claim that anything recognizable as a langauge can be translated.
Posted by FL | Link to this comment | 10- 1-06 6:29 PM
67: Do you mean "How do specific languages do it differently?" or "How does the lingustic/cultural interplay work?"
The latter; SEK said
culture doesn't exist outside of certain practices; if the practices survive but the language doesn't, the culture--i.e. the practices of which it's composed--survives.
and my question involved how shared language (or not) was involved in judgments of shared culture (or not); the thought is our group's no longer having a distinctive language might undermine our sense that we constitute a distinct culture, the way we think of our practices, and so on.
Posted by FL | Link to this comment | 10- 1-06 6:33 PM
68: Against Scott and John: if the Irish language were more widely studied, fewer people would mispronounce my daughter's name, Siobhán.
Posted by Jesus McQueen | Link to this comment | 10- 1-06 6:34 PM
Must run now; I'll try to stop back later. This is more interesting than the NyTi piece.
Posted by FL | Link to this comment | 10- 1-06 6:36 PM
Soybun, Easy.
Posted by John Emerson | Link to this comment | 10- 1-06 6:38 PM
I can't believe that this thread is more popular than the Congressional pederast thread. Something has gone horribly, horribly wrong.
Posted by SomeCallMeTim | Link to this comment | 10- 1-06 6:40 PM
Yeah, that's what everyone says. Try this: póg mo thóin.
Posted by Jesus McQueen | Link to this comment | 10- 1-06 6:40 PM
78 to 76, but perhaps equally applicable to 77.
Posted by Jesus McQueen | Link to this comment | 10- 1-06 6:41 PM
73: That's kind of the point with the language I'm working on. Broadly speaking, not too much makes the community different culturally from their neighbours these days. The language, which is quite distinct, was the main thing.
Posted by Nakku | Link to this comment | 10- 1-06 6:45 PM
Jesus: Pogue Mahone.
My son's Pogues tribute band will probably be playing before Xmas. I may be there for that.
Posted by John Emerson | Link to this comment | 10- 1-06 6:48 PM
Way to crash my computer, Labs. I'll reboot and read the .pdf shortly. That said:
Isn't that a non-starter, though? If the language dies and the people still consider themselves a culture, then they do; if it does and they don't, then they shared a way of communicating information about their practices more than they did the practices themselves. Of course, the other part of Michaels' argument is that no one cares whether their great-great-great-grandchildren speak the same language as them, as that will have no material effect on their lives (i.e. determine whether they work in as a high-powered attorney or are enslaved in a sweat-shop).
Of course, language does matter to some degree in this determination, inasmuch as not speaking English will prevent you from beiing a high-powered attorney in Iowa. But that, Michaels would argue, is precisely why notions of linguistic essentialism should be relinquished. His example in the book is a hypothetical American decline and concomitant Chinese/Indian rise: put Americans on the losing side of globalization--no unions, so we work cheap; no health case, so we work sick, &c.--and, in his words, "Are we supposed to feel good because sure we're broke and sick, but at least we have our culture?" In this case, he says, most people would wish their great-great-great-grandchildren didn't speak English, but Chinese or Hindi.
(Now, to reboot!)
Posted by Scott Eric Kaufman | Link to this comment | 10- 1-06 6:48 PM
74 - Or if more people just listened to The Walkmen
75 - It's also way way more technical. I feel like I'd have to read up for a week or two just to know the theoretical work that you're drawing on.
I would argue that culture is certainly maintainable outside of a given language. Like Scott mentioned, certain words and phrases pick up new connotations to reflect the difficult-to-translate meanings from the old language. If all else fails, some choice words are oulled into the new language. As James Nicoll said:
"The problem with defending the purity of the English language is that English is about as pure as a cribhouse whore. We don't just borrow words; on occasion, English has pursued other languages down alleyways to beat them unconscious and riffle [sic] their pockets for new vocabulary."
Posted by JAC | Link to this comment | 10- 1-06 6:54 PM
FL, I'm scanning a copy of this chapter, so if you want one and would like to participate in the event, send me an email. (We'll find some way to credit you when Holbo turns it into a book.) Now, to the scanner!
Posted by Scott Eric Kaufman | Link to this comment | 10- 1-06 6:56 PM
Persons wishing for a more easily-digestible analogue of the Davidsonian argument to which FL adverts should consider locating this paper.
Posted by ben wolfson | Link to this comment | 10- 1-06 7:08 PM
31 is funny to me because my Bavarian friends referred to Hochdeutsch as "Preussisch" -- I had no idea there actually was a language called Prussian, and which was not even a dialect of German.
Posted by Clownæsthesiologist | Link to this comment | 10- 1-06 7:12 PM
Jesus: I would have guessed "seeohbahn". How's it pronounced?
Posted by ben wolfson | Link to this comment | 10- 1-06 7:13 PM
Shuh-vahn, if the woman I know pronounces it right. Rather like a Southerner saying 'Chiffon'.
Posted by LizardBreath | Link to this comment | 10- 1-06 7:16 PM
88 - Yeah, I've generally heard it with a little more "b" sound than that (if that makes any sense), but that's how the vowels sound.
Posted by JAC | Link to this comment | 10- 1-06 7:20 PM
Byrne's argument about Mini-English completely fails to win me over.
Posted by ben wolfson | Link to this comment | 10- 1-06 7:22 PM
I believe that one shouldn't give one's child a name that is guaranteed to be mispronounced by almost everybody the child will meet over the course of her entire life.
Posted by Cryptic Ned | Link to this comment | 10- 1-06 7:23 PM
It's not hard to pronounce if you're used to it, but than again I have a cousin named Niambh. (Neave.)
Posted by LizardBreath | Link to this comment | 10- 1-06 7:24 PM
My principle would also forbid the use of the name "Niambh" anywhere other than particularly insular areas of Ireland. This also applies to Welsh names and insular areas of Wales.
Posted by Cryptic Ned | Link to this comment | 10- 1-06 7:28 PM
It's not at all hard to pronounce, but it's exceedingly hard to figure out how to pronounce it based on its written representation. Unless, of course, you know a little about its writing system of origin, but "almost everybody" won't.
Posted by ben wolfson | Link to this comment | 10- 1-06 7:29 PM
The problem is that Irish is an oral culture, so the Irish make great litigators and poets, but thay can't spell for shit. Words were spelled sort of randomly the first time, and then memorized every time afterwards.
Posted by John Emerson | Link to this comment | 10- 1-06 7:30 PM
88 -- that's how the Siobhan of my acquaintance pronounces her name.
Posted by Clownæsthesiologist | Link to this comment | 10- 1-06 7:31 PM
My problem is with the name Aoife. What, they couldn't have fit a 'u' in there as well?
Posted by Nakku | Link to this comment | 10- 1-06 7:34 PM
91: Thhhpb. My name is always mispronounced, phonetic though it is. I like the name. It's not my fault people can't read phonetically (or just ask).
Posted by bitchphd | Link to this comment | 10- 1-06 7:35 PM
It's not at all hard to pronounce, but it's exceedingly hard to figure out how to pronounce it based on its written representation.
That's only true if you're fluent in English but not fluent in the Irish language.
Seriously, I imagine that any American whose parents name her Niambh will have the following conversation at least 10,000 times in her life:
Office worker: "Okay, and give me your first name."
Niambh: "Neave. That's spelled N-I-A-M-B-H."
Office worker: "Oh, so...so...the A, the M, the B, and the H are silent?"
Niambh: "No, the A is silent, and the M is silent, and the B becomes a V when you add an H to it. It's Irish."
Office worker: "Wow, were you born in Ireland? A lot of immigrants change the spelling of their names when they move here so people aren't constantly misspelling and mispronouncing them."
Niambh: "No, I was born here. My parents just love Irish crap."
Posted by Cryptic Ned | Link to this comment | 10- 1-06 7:36 PM
68 - Missed it earlier, but it's pronounced "Sh?-vaughn" (rhymes with "prawn"). Then again, I entered grad. school a Joycean/Irish Modernist, so I'd suck unimaginably harder than I already do if I didn't know that. So the deaf guy can pronounce that name and hereby declares your point thoroughly trounced...er, wait a minute, what was your point? Too busy grandstanding to notice. (Damn, I'm a dick.)
85 - Gee, ben, thanks. (Fortunately, ben's a bigger one.)
91 - Unpronouncable's alright. The danger's in having it rhyme with certain anatomical features. (Like...)
Posted by Scott Eric Kaufman | Link to this comment | 10- 1-06 7:36 PM
Actually I just realized that I have been assuming "Niambh" is a female name. I have no evidence for this assumption except that I dimly remember that some people spell "Maeve" in a way that looks sort of like that. ("Maoidbh"?)
Posted by Cryptic Ned | Link to this comment | 10- 1-06 7:37 PM
That's only true if you're fluent in English but not fluent in the Irish language.
As I said. And as most people one encounters are likely to be.
Posted by ben wolfson | Link to this comment | 10- 1-06 7:38 PM
Hey now, there's nothing wrong with unpronounceable names.
Posted by teofilo | Link to this comment | 10- 1-06 7:39 PM
And some people might actually like and want to maintain their ethnic identities. My New Zealand friends' Maori kids' names are v. hard to pronounce for North Americans, but common enough in New Zealand. On the other hand, there are perfectly good English names that are difficult or impossible to pronounce in, say, Spanish.
Posted by bitchphd | Link to this comment | 10- 1-06 7:40 PM
It's not really all that difficult to explain to people how one's name is spelled and pronounced. I don't particularly mind it, and I'm pretty sure I prefer it vastly to having to be one of three Jennifers all the goddamn time.
Posted by bitchphd | Link to this comment | 10- 1-06 7:42 PM
And some people might actually like and want to maintain their ethnic identities.
Of course that's true, but the fact remains that having a name like "Niambh" is going to be a giant pain in the ass in certain situations. There must be more pronounceable names that come from the same heritage.
On the other hand, there are perfectly good English names that are difficult or impossible to pronounce in, say, Spanish.
In that case, a person who expects their child to be surrounded by people who speak only Spanish should think twice about naming their child one of those things.
Posted by Cryptic Ned | Link to this comment | 10- 1-06 7:43 PM
Can't believe I missed this thread. First, worth pointing out that a lot of the mourning over languages done in the US is mourning over Native American languages, and there's a lot of righteous guilt behind it. It that context, "Meh, no biggie," is annoying.
But on the broader point, I thought Teh Invidious Postmodern Theorists had managed to convince everyone that language isn't just a tool for communication, but the medium in and through which we come to conceptualize ourselves and our world. The fact that English has words for "sorry," "regretful," "chagrined," and "chastened" is one reason we can feel, in a meaningful way, the difference between those very similar emotions. When a language dies, we'll never know what else has been delineated, and how else we might understand things. We're all poorer for it. It might be, in any given instance, that economic gains are more important than the preservation of a language, but that's what makes it tragic.
Posted by ogged | Link to this comment | 10- 1-06 7:44 PM
I don't particularly mind it
"Rhymes with 'itch'."
Posted by LizardBreath | Link to this comment | 10- 1-06 7:46 PM
It's not really all that difficult to explain to people how one's name is spelled and pronounced. I don't particularly mind it, and I'm pretty sure I prefer it vastly to having to be one of three Jennifers all the goddamn time.
Okay, I defer to you, since when I do a Google Image Search for my first and last name combined and surrounded by quotation marks, I get over 2,000 results, less than five of which are me.
But I've always gotten the feeling that people get annoyed when people are constantly mispronouncing their name (Polish last names in particular), and I wouldn't want to consciously inflict that on someone by giving them an unpronounceable first name.
Posted by Cryptic Ned | Link to this comment | 10- 1-06 7:46 PM
And what about people who mispronounce their own names? Huh? Am I right?
Posted by ben wolfson | Link to this comment | 10- 1-06 7:48 PM
Ned, maybe we should work on your feelings about Polacks.
Posted by John Emerson | Link to this comment | 10- 1-06 7:48 PM
107: This isn't an area in which I have strong feelings one way or the other, so I'm just saying here what I understand Michaels to be saying. What I believe his point to be is "Sure. Something indefinable is lost when a language is lost. But if no person, individually, can be identified as worse off because of it, who gives a damn?" It's a loss to scholarship, but scholars can study something else.
Posted by LizardBreath | Link to this comment | 10- 1-06 7:50 PM
It was nice of Ogged to bring up both conceptual schemes and the philosophy of emotion just as I was walking out the door.
SEK, if you want to send me a PDF, send me a PDF. I'd like to take a look, but I'm not sure I'll have anything interesting to say about it.
Posted by FL | Link to this comment | 10- 1-06 7:52 PM
having a name like "Niambh" is going to be a giant pain in the ass in certain situations.
Sure; and so is having a name that's as common as mud, where people are going to be calling you "Bob A" all the time to distinguish you from Bobs B, C, and D. Not to mention the worn "jokes" and rhymes about your name.
a person who expects their child to be surrounded by people who speak only Spanish should think twice about naming their child one of those things.
Says who? I mean, what damn difference does it make to you what someone else's name is? Jeez.
Posted by bitchphd | Link to this comment | 10- 1-06 7:53 PM
I wouldn't want to consciously inflict that on someone by giving them an unpronounceable first name.
Cool; don't. And I won't talk about how people should give their kids unique names, 'kay?
Posted by bitchphd | Link to this comment | 10- 1-06 7:55 PM
There's a funny story about Zappa's kids, but I forget it.
Posted by John Emerson | Link to this comment | 10- 1-06 7:55 PM
87: LB and SEK get it right. We didn't deliberately seek out an unpronounceable name; the naming process was contentious and protracted, to the point that S's sister was McQ****** Baby No. 1 for a couple days in the hospital. I thought it was a more familiar name than it really is, until someone told me that (based only on the pronunciation) it was really cool we'd chosen a 'black' name. Nor were we trying to emphasize any Irish heritage, though taken together we're predominantly of Irish extraction. The ancestors on my dad's side might appreciate the gesture toward the preservation of Irish orthography, but I'm guessing my grandfather Mario couldn't have cared less.
Posted by Jesus McQueen | Link to this comment | 10- 1-06 7:56 PM
Says who? I mean, what damn difference does it make to you what someone else's name is? Jeez.
I think you're missing the point of that "should". It doesn't, I assume, matter a whit to Ned, but it may well matter to the person whose name is constantly be mispronounced. Think about Homer considering possible names for Bart based on the ease of schoolkids coming up with mocking soundalikes.
Posted by ben wolfson | Link to this comment | 10- 1-06 7:57 PM
Is there any doubt that, of all the Zappa kids, Moon Unit has the best name?
Posted by ben wolfson | Link to this comment | 10- 1-06 7:58 PM
112: Part of the issue here is that it's all well and good for people like Michaels to make claims like that, but he doesn't actually know what it's like to be in the position of someone whose language is dying; his language isn't going anywhere. So it seems a little callous.
Posted by teofilo | Link to this comment | 10- 1-06 7:59 PM
Yeah, and if it matters to that person, they can take it up with their folks. They don't need Ned passing rules for them. I suspect that most kids end up having tastes and values that more or less reflect their parents'; families that value individuality or ethnic background or whatever will have kids that do the same, and families that value names that are common and easy to pronounce will raise
boringkids that value those things too.Posted by bitchphd | Link to this comment | 10- 1-06 8:00 PM
Ned isn't passing rules for them!
I think you are being comically hyperbolic now.
Posted by ben wolfson | Link to this comment | 10- 1-06 8:04 PM
119 is exactly right.
Posted by bitchphd | Link to this comment | 10- 1-06 8:06 PM
122: Who, me?
Posted by bitchphd | Link to this comment | 10- 1-06 8:06 PM
121 - seems to make intuitive sense; although, how come so many siblings are completely opposite of each other as adults?
Posted by TD | Link to this comment | 10- 1-06 8:07 PM
Jesus, Mary and fucking Joseph, as they say on the old sod. My surname, which should be perfectly intelligible to anyone with the barest grasp of English orthography, has been mispronounced all my life. BFD. Anyway, Siobhán is perfectly pronounceable; I pronounce it several times a day with varying inflections.
Thanks for having my back, B. PK is also a perfectly pronounceable name.
Gotta go.
Posted by Jesus McQueen | Link to this comment | 10- 1-06 8:07 PM
Ned, hang tough. The lackeys of the dominant paradigm will try to put you down, but be secure in the knowledge that you are in the right.
Posted by John Emerson | Link to this comment | 10- 1-06 8:09 PM
No, no. We're the lackeys of the non-dominant paradigm. The ones who want to maintain weird names that aren't pronouncable by, you know, "everyone."
Posted by bitchphd | Link to this comment | 10- 1-06 8:11 PM
The dominant paradigm says that parents can name their kids any way they want. But Ned and I care about children.
Just as much as Foley, but differently.
Posted by John Emerson | Link to this comment | 10- 1-06 8:14 PM
You know, there are plenty of cool names for kids that are both easy to spell and to pronounce. Example: I am naming my first daughter Ghengis.
Posted by strasmangelo jones | Link to this comment | 10- 1-06 8:15 PM
I want to know if there are any adults who wish they had a more pronounceable name. Bet there aren't many.
My name is mispronounced pretty much every day; I just correct people, and move on. It's not really that much of a problem.
Posted by m. leblanc | Link to this comment | 10- 1-06 8:15 PM
Genghis. And "Ebola" would be a lovely name for a girl.
Posted by John Emerson | Link to this comment | 10- 1-06 8:16 PM
But Ned and I care about children.
Whereas B thinks that you care about bland names. It's good that you combat this slander.
Posted by ben wolfson | Link to this comment | 10- 1-06 8:16 PM
"Ebola" is a bland name?
I call it cutting-edge, albeit easy to pronounce.
Posted by John Emerson | Link to this comment | 10- 1-06 8:17 PM
I'm going to name my first and second children Obedient(us/a) and Coelacanth.
Posted by ben wolfson | Link to this comment | 10- 1-06 8:17 PM
Coelecanth is a good unisex name.
Posted by John Emerson | Link to this comment | 10- 1-06 8:18 PM
There seems to be this idea among people with common names that having an unusual name is some sort of curse that parents should go to great lengths to spare their children from. Seriously, it's not bad at all. Yes, you do have to correct the pronunciation and spelling, but that's hardly a major problem.
Posted by teofilo | Link to this comment | 10- 1-06 8:19 PM
120:
He's a Jewish and a French-Canadian, so I think he may know the emotional spectrum associated with dying/dead/revivified languages. Of course, that also misses Michaels' point: if your children are hungry all the time, it doesn't really matter what language they complain in, does it?
I say that glibly, sure, but it's true: the left has fetishized identity, meaning that while the sum-total of respect for people living below the poverty line has increased, their well-being hasn't.
Really, all I'm trying to do is focus the attention away from the faux-nostalgia Ogged mentioned; because sure, we could indulge in mourning the loss of something only we have the requisite privilege to mourn. But anyway, which of you fuckers is man enough to go toe-to-toe with me and AEDPA? You! You? That's what I thought, fool...
Posted by Scott Eric Kaufman | Link to this comment | 10- 1-06 8:21 PM
More moral equivalence from teofilo.
My sister-in-law's name is Hobie, after the "Hobie Cat", which is a kind of sailboat. She liked her name fine.
However, she is an especially strong person, and the Unfoggetariat tends to raise sensitive, emo kids.
Posted by John Emerson | Link to this comment | 10- 1-06 8:21 PM
I'm going to name my first and second children Obedient(us/a) and Coelacanth.
Your second child will be sad you named her after your computer.
Posted by strasmangelo jones | Link to this comment | 10- 1-06 8:22 PM
Scott, I mostly agree with you, but our last slanging match was fun.
Posted by John Emerson | Link to this comment | 10- 1-06 8:22 PM
Hobie cats are good boats. And Hobie is actually a pretty cool name, come to think of it.
I want to name a kid Salamander. Mr. B. likes Tsunami. I also really love the names Mercy and Dolores, but I don't think I can bring myself to inflict a freakish religious name on a kid, pronouncable though it may well be.
Posted by bitchphd | Link to this comment | 10- 1-06 8:25 PM
Which one, John? Seems like there have been so many.
Posted by Scott Eric Kaufman | Link to this comment | 10- 1-06 8:25 PM
Until just now I had never made the connection between "dolores" and "dolor".
Posted by ben wolfson | Link to this comment | 10- 1-06 8:27 PM
"Maeve" is often spelled "Maebh." It's not that weird; it's just a couple weird letter rules.
I might think it a little weird if the parents were going around exclaiming how authentically 'Celtic' they were (1/16th on one side!) and that's why they named their daughter Saoirse. (Does anyone else know people who decide whimsically that they're authentically something because they found out about a great-grandmother who was something?) But I think I'd be more annoyed if they'd anglicized it to Sairsha, because what's the point of picking an interesting name if you're going to muck it up?
Seriously, though, there's a lot of non-anglo names floating around, and we all learn to pronounce them even if it takes a 'I'm really sorry, could you say that again?' a few times. My tastes run toward classic boring whitepeople names, but that's just my tastes. Don't think that'll make my kids boring, though the philosophy will likely take care of that.
On the larger point, my grandfather used to say, when searching for a word to explain what he meant, 'The French have a word for it', meaning just that some languages are richer than others in their expressive power. Which is a long way of saying I agree with 107.
Posted by Cala | Link to this comment | 10- 1-06 8:28 PM
I want to name a kid Salamander.
Hey!
My dog is named for a Samoan goddess. I liked the name enough that I figured I needed to use it up on a pet in order to keep my kids safe from impulsive naming.
Posted by LizardBreath | Link to this comment | 10- 1-06 8:28 PM
it was really cool we'd chosen a 'black' name
Interesting -- when I first met the Siobhan of my acquaintance, in the several-week period between when I learned her name and when I saw it spelled or asked how it was spelled, I wondered how such a white chick as she had gotten a black name.
Posted by Clownæsthesiologist | Link to this comment | 10- 1-06 8:29 PM
Nuestra seņora de los dolores. I think there's quite a lot of traditional Catholic names that come from a title ascribed to Mary.
Posted by Cala | Link to this comment | 10- 1-06 8:31 PM
Foreign names are mispronounced even if phonetically spelled.
My son's best friend for a few years was named Sithapou Somboumkhanh. It's not quite phonetic (Sit-a-poe Soo-buh-conn). Kids always figured it out orally, but teachers were comparing the written and the oral forms and never got it right.
Posted by John Emerson | Link to this comment | 10- 1-06 8:31 PM
PK is also a perfectly pronounceable name
"PK" was the nickname by which an Indian friend of mine in college, who considered his full name to be unpronounceable to an American, went.
Posted by Clownæsthesiologist | Link to this comment | 10- 1-06 8:33 PM
I wouldn't give a kid a virtue name because that's just tempting fate. Unless it was Clementine, because Fate can't read Latin.
Posted by Cala | Link to this comment | 10- 1-06 8:33 PM
144 -- surely you are not going to tell me you never read Nabokov's Lolita?
Posted by Clownæsthesiologist | Link to this comment | 10- 1-06 8:36 PM
Chastity Bono is pretty chaste, if the standard is penetration (as the Baptists believe it should be).
Posted by John Emerson | Link to this comment | 10- 1-06 8:37 PM
152: He was on drugs that time.
Posted by John Emerson | Link to this comment | 10- 1-06 8:37 PM
154 -- you mean Nabokov, or Wolfson?
Posted by Clownæsthesiologist | Link to this comment | 10- 1-06 8:39 PM
if your children are hungry all the time, it doesn't really matter what language they complain in, does it?
That's just it; does it? I don't know. My kids aren't starving, and my language isn't dying, and the same is true of Michaels. I'm just saying it would be nice to hear from someone who is actually in that situation before we start talking about what's more important to them.
Posted by teofilo | Link to this comment | 10- 1-06 8:39 PM
That's just it; does it? I don't know.
I couldn't possibly guess, either.
Posted by strasmangelo jones | Link to this comment | 10- 1-06 8:43 PM
It wouldn't surprise me if it did matter a great deal.
Posted by Cala | Link to this comment | 10- 1-06 8:44 PM
"PK" was the nickname by which an Indian friend of mine in college,
This was also the case with an Indian guy at my high school.
The only Nabokov I've read is The Defense.
Posted by ben wolfson | Link to this comment | 10- 1-06 8:46 PM
156, 158 - Yes, "it" probably does matter...but what is "it"? Part of Michaels' point is that "it" is an incoherent cultural identity predicated on unscientific racial logic, an idea of cultural transmission which can't be proven, and an intuitive notion that language is connected to culture. As his fast hold on a retro-Marxist idea of class betrays, he's into demystification, believing that sometimes people don't know what's good for them.
Posted by Scott Eric Kaufman | Link to this comment | 10- 1-06 8:50 PM
156-8: Maybe. I've got to say that if I have $X to give to charity, and my choices are (1) a program for making sure that a dying language continues to be taught or (2) a program devoted to the material well-being of poor children in the ethnic group with which the language is associated, I wouldn't have much trouble sending all $X to program 2, and without more persuasion I'd think someone making a different decision was being frivolous.
Posted by LizardBreath | Link to this comment | 10- 1-06 8:51 PM
As LB proves, you can either get wrapped up in WBM's polemic and become as hated as he is, or write sensible things. Pony up those shit-lists, people, I know I'm on 'em...
Posted by Scott Eric Kaufman | Link to this comment | 10- 1-06 8:52 PM
156, 158: Jesus, are poor people so alien to our experience that we have to speculate about them as though they were purely hypothetical? I haven't had health insurance in four or five years, and I know that I'd swap out English for Spanish for the ability to buy medicine or visit the dentist again. Language is important but it's not that important.
Posted by strasmangelo jones | Link to this comment | 10- 1-06 8:52 PM
I might end up disagreeing with Michaels in some cases. Language loss internationally is sometimes associated with depopulation, subjugation, and the destruction of whole cultures. The language serves to an extent as the proxy for the people. In US muticulturalism, there are other things going on.
Posted by John Emerson | Link to this comment | 10- 1-06 8:55 PM
I don't know why everyone's framing this as an either/or thing. Surely there's room for language preservation programs in addition to providing for the material needs of the population in question.
Posted by teofilo | Link to this comment | 10- 1-06 8:58 PM
I really think that we picked up Michaels from the wrong end, though he did bring it on himself.
Posted by John Emerson | Link to this comment | 10- 1-06 9:01 PM
I have nothing against Michaels's broader point, but I don't see why it means it's a mistake to care that (not if) languages are dying all around us.
Posted by teofilo | Link to this comment | 10- 1-06 9:03 PM
it" is an incoherent cultural identity predicated on unscientific racial logic, an idea of cultural transmission which can't be proven, and an intuitive notion that language is connected to culture.
Goodness, human beings might be unscientific, non-ideal rational actors. Lots of incoherent cultural identity matters to people, even poor people.
Posted by Cala | Link to this comment | 10- 1-06 9:08 PM
sj, how is your 157 different from 156 and 158?
Posted by Cala | Link to this comment | 10- 1-06 9:09 PM
I don't know why everyone's framing this as an either/or thing. Surely there's room for language preservation programs in addition to providing for the material needs of the population in question.
I think a lot of the actual people involved see it as an either/or thing. Every article about language loss seems to include quotes like "Yes, I would love it if my son could speak Dzunza Lower Pokomo with his grandparents, but if I want him to succeed I need to make sure he goes to a Swahili/English school." These fears may be unfounded, but a lot of the time the people whose participation is necessary to preserve the language are the very people who feel the language is incompatible with economic success.
Posted by Cryptic Ned | Link to this comment | 10- 1-06 9:10 PM
Actually, Michaels is saying that language doesn't necessary really mean as much to actual people as language-preservationists think.
Posted by John Emerson | Link to this comment | 10- 1-06 9:10 PM
170 should finish with "Are those people wrong?"
Posted by Cryptic Ned | Link to this comment | 10- 1-06 9:11 PM
There's a historically significant demographic of parents who do not want their kinds to learn the parents' native language. Many immigrant familes were like that.
I ran into Swedish-Americans whose parents felt that way. The parents didn't hate themselves. They hated Sweden. Sweden could be a hell-hole before 1900.
Posted by John Emerson | Link to this comment | 10- 1-06 9:13 PM
kids
Posted by John Emerson | Link to this comment | 10- 1-06 9:14 PM
Emerson's 166 is right. The intellectual value of natural languages isn't what WBM is talking about in his larger project, though the NYT piece doesn't make that as clear as it might be.
Most of the people I've heard complain about the disappearance of languages have been linguists-- are there really people out there who make such a deal of language for the reasons WBM is attacking?
Posted by FL | Link to this comment | 10- 1-06 9:14 PM
These fears may be unfounded, but a lot of the time the people whose participation is necessary to preserve the language are the very people who feel the language is incompatible with economic success.
This is true, and I assume it's what Emerson is referring to in 171, and it can frustrate linguists to no end.
Posted by teofilo | Link to this comment | 10- 1-06 9:16 PM
the left has fetishized identity
I'm not entirely kidding when I say that it would be nice to have a sort of timeline of the left, explaining what the left knew and when the left knew it, because I have the feeling I checked out of the left for a while and a lot of important stuff got decided in my absence. This is another way of predicting that when the list of WBM's targets is provided I will find them pretty uninteresting.
Posted by FL | Link to this comment | 10- 1-06 9:22 PM
I liked the name enough that I figured I needed to use it up on a pet in order to keep my kids safe from impulsive naming.
I had a rat named Chastity in college for exactly that reason.
I don't buy this stuff about the left fetishizing identity. The identity thing was a brief moment in leftish intellectual history; at this point, it's the right, not we, who are really hung up on it in the essentialist way that usually gets seen as, well, essentialist. And wrong.
Posted by bitchphd | Link to this comment | 10- 1-06 9:27 PM
to 175, etc.: I assume that the people who really feel the disappearence of their language are those who resent the people who speak the encroaching language: i.e., occupation situations.
Posted by Jackmormon | Link to this comment | 10- 1-06 9:32 PM
I take it "fetishized" here means no more than "overemphasized," correct? Or is it the motivation for the overemphasis--that the motivation has somehow become disconnected from the original purpose of the analysis?
Posted by SomeCallMeTim | Link to this comment | 10- 1-06 9:40 PM
181-- actually, the left put a cast on identity, then took it to the steam room.
Posted by FL | Link to this comment | 10- 1-06 9:50 PM
sj, how is your 157 different from 156 and 158?
My 157 was sarcastic. I thought it was pretty obvious that material needs are more important than cultural needs.
Posted by strasmangelo jones | Link to this comment | 10- 1-06 9:55 PM
sj is teh Marxiest!
Posted by teofilo | Link to this comment | 10- 1-06 9:56 PM
176 - Isn't that what Scott, John, and myself have been saying for most of this thread? It's an obvious case of what economics calls revealed preferences. People whose family speaks a dying tongue obviously prefer the economic well-being and greater social possibilities of a widely-spoken or more elite language to the nebulous cultural value and intellectual value of their "native" tongue. If they felt otherwise, their family's language wouldn't be dying.
This does assume a lack of coercion, which can be tricky in real life. Practical concerns ensure that a lot of public schooling must be done in a more common tongue to get textbooks, qualified teachers, etc. and that much of commerce has to occur in a common tongue. That's why languages have such a massive network effect, which could be considered a form of coercion (join our language or be excluded from these fabulous advances) but it's one that will always exist regardless of the respect for cultural tradition and linguistic interest.
Posted by JAC | Link to this comment | 10- 1-06 10:11 PM
Okay, sure, but as an empirical matter those people are wrong; bilingualism isn't necessarily an economic liability. As for coercion, keep in mind that the reason many of these languages became endangered in the first place was that the US and Canadian governments forcibly enrolled kids in boarding schools where their mouths were washed out with soap if they were caught speaking their native languages. So I wouldn't exactly say that these people are freely choosing to abandon their languages and adopt English after rationally looking at the incentives.
It's sort of a moot point, anyway; these languages are all going to die, soon, and there's nothing anyone can do about it.
Posted by teofilo | Link to this comment | 10- 1-06 10:19 PM
I'm so depressed that nobody has picked up on my Esperanto joke. No, no, it's too late now.
Posted by Jackmormon | Link to this comment | 10- 1-06 10:28 PM
I picked up on the esperanto itself. Was the idea that one might face the drawback of being totally lame based on one's choice of secondary language?
Posted by ben wolfson | Link to this comment | 10- 1-06 10:31 PM
True bilingualism isn't a liability where it is feasible. But in the current day and age, where kids aren't being forcibly fed soap for speaking another language, why wouldn't people learn enough of the old language to speak to their folks? Clearly it's not worth the effort to them, or they see it as impinging on their more important ability to speak the common language effectively.
There is some cultural history dying along with each language, but it's a very inaccessible cultural history, available only to the small number willing to pursue that language. For each language that dies, at least one more language broadens its cultural histories as the group joins its native speakers. From that point forward, they preserve their culture in a form accessible to far more people, and their future cultural and artistic contributions can be appreciated on a far greater scale. This, in addition to the convenience and economic benefits, is why I see a net bonus for society every time an already large language gets even more native speakers even though it's probably causing the death of another tongue.
Posted by JAC | Link to this comment | 10- 1-06 10:35 PM
Saluton, Wolfson! No, it's just that that the idea of a universal language devoid of hegemony is utopian.
Pacon!
Posted by Jackmormon | Link to this comment | 10- 1-06 10:36 PM
I would write more eloquently about the young Germans I knew who felt deracinated because they never learned their village dialect, but I'm too tired. g'night.
Posted by Jackmormon | Link to this comment | 10- 1-06 10:38 PM
186 - Yeah, sorry, I saw the Esperanto and assumed that was the whole joke so I didn't bother to translate it. I should've realized the Unfoggederiat always stick more layers than an onion in their jokes.
Posted by JAC | Link to this comment | 10- 1-06 10:39 PM
150- I also have known a PK, who was "pankaj" I believe.
Also, what's up with the Irish names being spelled weird? When they were first written down by monks or whatever, why didn't they get it fucking right?
Posted by NL | Link to this comment | 10- 1-06 10:42 PM
I'm not really talking about young monolingual English speakers learning their heritage language; once it gets to that point the language is practically already dead. I mean languages that are still at the point where parents could choose to speak their own language around their kids so they grow up bilingual, but don't because they think it will harm them to speak anything except English. Surely you can concede that they're wrong to do that? Or at least that it's unfortunate?
Posted by teofilo | Link to this comment | 10- 1-06 10:45 PM
Nah, it would a lame joke and a petty argument, JAC; I was just feeling neglected, so, to bed.
Posted by Jackmormon | Link to this comment | 10- 1-06 10:46 PM
192: The spelling system of Irish is actually quite regular and reflects certain grammatical properties of the language.
Posted by teofilo | Link to this comment | 10- 1-06 10:47 PM
190 - JM, why didn't they learn the village language if it was that important to them? I don't mean to be glib, I honestly wonder how these languages die if people feel they are essential to their own identity.
Posted by JAC | Link to this comment | 10- 1-06 10:51 PM
Oh well, sorry we didn't mention anything. Good night!
Posted by JAC | Link to this comment | 10- 1-06 10:54 PM
I honestly wonder how these languages die if people feel they are essential to their own identity.
Cultural hegemony. I mean, Jesus, dude. This stuff isn't happening in a vacuum.
Posted by teofilo | Link to this comment | 10- 1-06 10:56 PM
Referring to events long expired in this thread: The linguistic import of the Tarski t-scheme seems a little tendentious to me. The author is basically asserting a form of the Church-Turing Thesis for natural languages which, ok, fine, but he's trying to "test" it by invoking the Tarski Undefinability of Truth [hence the t-scheme], which only holds (in that form) for classical first-order logic. [Maybe Boolean-valued classic logic but still.] Since natural language doesn't conform to first-order, the odds that this technique illuminates anything interesting are slim to none.
Posted by Anarch | Link to this comment | 10- 1-06 11:13 PM
131: I don't wish I had a more pronounceable name, but I do sometimes (despite going by "tom" my entire life) use "thomas" or sometimes "tomās", because Lebanese can actually hear and remember them, whereas "tom" is just an arbitrary single syllable that goes by so fast that no one can make any sense of it.
Which also goes to show, I guess, that the question of what names are weird and hard to pronounce is not necessarily obvious.
Posted by Tom Scudder | Link to this comment | 10- 1-06 11:23 PM
193 - They might not be wrong to do it, necessarily. Accent is considered a big indicator of class and education, and it can get fixed awfully early in some people. One of my good friends from university moved to Oxford when he was 4, but still spoke with a clear Canadian accent when I knew him at age 20. If you want your kids to be able to get along in English / Swahili / whatever the local dominant language is, they should be exposed to it early to at least get a good grasp of the phenomes. Now, as for exposing the child only to the dominant language, to the exclusivity of all tribal and local tongues, that is somewhat unfortunate. I haven't seen it happen much, and most of the people I know who grew up in East Africa (i.e. with tribal languages and a regional language overlapping) or to an immigrant family that spoke a different language than their new home just ended up bi- or trilingual. I will also readily admit that I'm on the very unsentimental side of the spectrum when it comes to language. I think it's a fantastic tool for communication, but I could care less which one I speak so long as everyone else can understand me.
198 - Well, I know that. I just want to hear what the people in that actual situation give as their reasons for not pursuing the old language. I doubt they say "cultural hegemony" in so many words. I doubt they even feel that they're giving up their old culture, as opposed to just a part of their old culture.
Here's my difficulty. There are two sides to this issue: lingual hegemony and cultural hegemony.
Linguistic hegemony is caused by the network effect of languages. The more people who speak a language, the more that is going on in that language's global "conversation", the more appealing it becomes as a primary language to those who can learn it. They in turn can contribute their cultural background, disseminate it in the widely understood new language, thus contributing further to the tongue's "conversation" and making it all the more appealing. This is a process I have no problem with, and that I think could lead to an effective lingua franca one of these days, or at least only a few super-regional languages. This, in my opinion, would be a vast bonus for everyone.
Cultural hegemony is much more imperial in nature. It can be forcible (washing kids mouths out with soap for speaking other languages, laws or community standards against worshipping other religions, etc) or it can be seductive (every complaint about American pop culture, MTV, Levis and McDonalds). Pretty much everyone is uncomfortable with the forcible cultural hegemony, and even the seductive cultural hegemony makes me a little nervous. However, I distinguish it from linguistic hegemony because I feel that most sentiments and cultural signifiers are translatable between languages in some way, so it is possible to give in to one form of hegemony without giving in to the other. Admittedly, a lot of people see the two as intimately tied and think they have to change languages and worldviews just to join a new culture, or vice-versa, but I think they're going a little overboard.
Posted by JAC | Link to this comment | 10- 1-06 11:28 PM
I think we may just be looking at this from different perspectives. I'm most familiar with this issue in the context of the US, where it most certainly is the case that kids are quite often exposed to only English and not their heritage language; there's no choice to abandon the language on their part, it's already gone. The reason for that is that their parents (or, at this point, grandparents) were very forcibly assimilated to American culture and the English language and have internalized to some degree the idea that being Indian is a handicap in modern American society, so they make deliberate efforts to keep their children from having that stigma. Obviously, not everyone thinks this way, and it varies from tribe to tribe, but it's a big problem for language maintenance efforts. These languages are going to die and soon, so the main objective of linguists is to describe them as well as possible before they do.
You seem to looking at this from the perspective of East Africa, an area about which I know little and which I'm quite sure has totally different sociolinguistic issues. Nothing wrong with that, but what holds there doesn't necessarily hold elsewhere, and I suspect the distinction between linguistic and cultural hegemony is probably sharper there than it is in many other places.
I'm a linguist, so this stuff is very important to me. Obviously not everyone cares as much.
Posted by teofilo | Link to this comment | 10- 1-06 11:38 PM
Damn, I had to leave just as you guys started duking it out. Fortunately, young teofilo was here to say the right things, and it turns out that an unexpected benefit of my pseud is that whenever anyone uses 'Jesus' as an exclamation, there I am.
JAC, I don't disagree in general; encounters with other languages have helped make English as rich as it is, but I don't see how you can make clear distinctions between linguistic and cultural hegemony.
I'd weigh in on 199, but I need a translation.
(On preview, pwned by teo)
Posted by Jesus McQueen | Link to this comment | 10- 1-06 11:51 PM
I ask all you people who are so proud of your unique names: do your names put food on the table? I bet you'd be glad to be named James or Jennifer if it meant that the engraver wouldn't mispell the name on the headstone of your early grave.
Posted by eb | Link to this comment | 10- 1-06 11:54 PM
I think 199 is basically saying that natural language != logic, which sounds good to me.
Posted by teofilo | Link to this comment | 10- 1-06 11:56 PM
You can have my unique name when you pry it from my cold, dead tombstone.
Posted by teofilo | Link to this comment | 10- 1-06 11:57 PM
Yeah, the immigrants to the US that I've known well have all been well-educated, so their kids typically knew both the native tongue and English.
The big problem was usually that many never learned their native language much beyond a childhood level, since all their higher schooling was in English and evening language classes in elementary and middle school can only take you so far. You don't need particularly high-level language just to chat with family anyway. But since they can't communicate at a highly educated level in their native tongue, they are stuck living and working in English or sounding like a fool.
I think this is a problem that's especially tough for a lot of the 2nd generation Mexican immigrants, or any other very poor immigrant groups in the US. If your parents never finished 8th grade in their homeland, and you have been educated through high school level in English, which language will you be better at? Even taking high school Spanish at a good school could lead you to a higher level of fluency than your parents in their native tongue. It's easy to see the parents' language being dropped by the next generation in favor of greater fluency in the new country's language.
But this is probably all very off-topic, and my replies have been horribly rambling on this thread. I can see why this phenomenon would really piss a linguist off, but since I just want to be able to talk to anyone on Earth, I'm going to keep reaching for that universal language rainbow. Good night everybody.
Posted by JAC | Link to this comment | 10- 2-06 12:01 AM
I'm sure by that time the soldiers of the neoliberal consensus will have turned your tombstone into an altar on which they offer up the children of the poor to the gods of diversity, chanting during the ceremony the solemn word "teofilo" to muffle out the screams.
Posted by eb | Link to this comment | 10- 2-06 12:04 AM
Works for me. Everyone wants to be remembered.
Posted by teofilo | Link to this comment | 10- 2-06 12:06 AM
Well it all depends on the specific way in which natural language is unlike logic.
Posted by ben wolfson | Link to this comment | 10- 2-06 12:07 AM
Also, it may be important to some people, but perhaps not to Michaels, that there is a difference between not growing up to speak a language that continues to be spoken elsewhere (as happens with many immigrants) and not growing up to speak a language that simply diasppears.
(There's also a difference between not beating the world at basketball and no longer playing basketball at all. What that analogy is doing in the op-ed is beyond me. Maybe I was misreading something.)
Posted by eb | Link to this comment | 10- 2-06 12:13 AM
Right, there's a difference between an immigrant group assimilating and losing their language and an indigenous group assimilating and losing their language. In fact, the sociolinguistic dynamics of the two situations are different in a lot of ways.
Posted by teofilo | Link to this comment | 10- 2-06 12:19 AM
I should probably admit that I haven't read the op-ed and don't intend to.
Posted by teofilo | Link to this comment | 10- 2-06 12:23 AM
Man, there's a direct relation between participating in Unfogged threads and, um, doing anything else. I had to do something else for a few hours, and now I have to sleep...but know this: this Firefox tab will remain open until morning, and I'll respond then. I won't cut-and-run, because then those little sheep--especially that uppity one in the middle there--well, them and us, we'll have to have a "discussion." (Plus, micromanaging book event all night, very tired...but teofilo, you should check out the event, and I say this as a linguistics major, we're not all clueless rubes. Or, at least, we used to not be, before we went to grad. school.)
Posted by Scott Eric Kaufman | Link to this comment | 10- 2-06 1:06 AM
205: Basically, yeah.
210: It's not classical (i.e. [2-valued] first-order) logic, so Tarski doesn't apply, or at least not in the usual way. There are also issues of (first-order) material implication v. relevance logics, explosion... really, natural language and classical logic don't look much alike at all. I mean, the Liar Paradox is at least expressible in natural language; most first-order logics can't even manage that much.
And FWIW the paper's point, such as I understood it, was that we could violate this "Church's Thesis For Natural Languages" if we could a) produce a sentence expressible in some natural language ("Saturnian" was the one the author picked) that b) we could know would be true for metatheoretical reasons even if c) we couldn't actually translate the thing in the first place. My response was essentially that getting b) & c) to both hold would be difficult, if not outright impossible, in natural language because it possesses a flexibility, both in truth values and the theoretic/metatheoretic distinction, that classical logic simply doesn't have. In particular, you're not going to break anything that I know of by claiming that the Saturnians have a predicate for truth, for example -- which is more or less what the Tarski t-scheme asserts -- since natural language already has one: "is true".
Posted by Anarch | Link to this comment | 10- 2-06 1:26 AM
According to the paper it's Davidson who thinks anything's illuminated by Tarski, and he thinks that a, b and c can't hold. Though the author of the paper thinks Davidson's reliance on Tarski is misplaced, apparently.
I don't really see what the relevance of this is: "you're not going to break anything that I know of by claiming that the Saturnians have a predicate for truth, for example -- which is more or less what the Tarski t-scheme asserts -- since natural language already has one: "is true"." since the point, as I'm understanding it, isn't what's expressible in Saturnian, but what we can comprehend of Saturnian. Just because you can say in Saturnian "'it is raining' is true iff it is raining" doesn't mean that we English-speakers can justifiably believe that the string of Saturnian that expresses that is even meaningful; I take that to be the point of the stage of the author's reconstructed argument about the only way to tell if Saturnian sentence S is true is to say "'womble grunk' is true iff it is raining" where "it is raining" translates "womble grunk". I guess I thought the part of the argument dealing with complete failure of translatability was making a quasi-transcendental claim about recognition of something as a language in the first place.
I still think the argument about Mini-English is pretty* weak, though in fairness it's just barely sketched.
*where "pretty" means "colossally".
Posted by ben wolfson | Link to this comment | 10- 2-06 1:45 AM
"Even taking high school Spanish at a good school could lead you to a higher level of fluency than your parents in their native tongue."
There's a big mistake here. HS Spanish is standard Spanish, whereas illiterate immigrants from Mexico speak Mexican dialect Spanish. But the parents are fluent in their dialect, whereas no one ever attains fluency in HS classes.
I believe that there's a lot of dialect interference when native speakers of Spanish study Spanish in school. Not an insurmountable problem (schools exist in many places to teach dialect speakers the standard language), but US schools, teachers and materials are almost always geared to the deends of English speakers.
Posted by John Emerson | Link to this comment | 10- 2-06 6:20 AM
Let's start a Heathers group and ignore Jackmormon until she starts crying.
I could care less which one I speak so long as everyone else can understand me: But each of is alone in this world, and no one can really know what's in the heart of another.
Posted by John Emerson | Link to this comment | 10- 2-06 7:17 AM