I saw that and found it pretty strange too. Surely it's not the case that Black English is a strict superset of Standard English.
I don't think the intent is to say that Black English is globally more complex than Standard English, just to say that it has complexities that Standard English lacks -- it's an overlapping circle in the Venn diagram, not a subset.
Sure, but then couldn't you counterpose to this particular use of "up" some other particle-like word from standard english and say, hey, if you stuck some some foreigners in an English class in Properville, they'd probably wind up using it incorrectly?
Language like "complicated in a way even Standard English isn't" seems fawning.
The impression I got, anyway, was that McWhorter was trying to inculcate, not the belief that Black and Standard Englishes each have complexities the other lacks, but rather just the belief that the former has complexities the latter lacks.
AND HERE'S ANOTHER THING I disliked about the article: "puttage".
3: Sure you could.
5: I didn't read it that way, and reading it that way would be inconsistent with other things I've read from McWhorter.
Black English encompasses standard English, and then adds a bunch of additional constructions on top of it. So I think that does make it more complicated.
Redneck English probably does the same thing.
Yeah, I don't think it's something he actually believes. But I do think the article suggests it, nevertheless.
4:Since McWhorter is black, I don't think "fawning" is an appropriate description of what he is trying to do in that article.
Black English encompasses standard English,
I don't think so -- I'd have to think for a bit, but I believe there are Standard English grammatical distinctions that aren't preserved in Black English.
Well, if Standard English is the intersection of all Englishes ...
I agree it's a little overstated, but I think that's the intent: He is trying to teach us that ebonics is not "wrong" or "improper" English, so he exaggerates how complex and awesome it is. Or maybe he's not exaggerating, and the "intimate up" really is more complex than the subjunctive case or something. If I were intimate with him, I'd be all up in his business about it.
Language like "complicated in a way even Standard English isn't" seems fawning.
Given that one of the standard criticisms of Black English (or any slang, really) is that it's "sloppy" (whatever the hell that means) or that it bespeaks a lack of intelligence, though, it seems to me like a reasonable way to put it.
(And John McW's been one of the more visible proponents of the "Black English is just as good as Standard English" position going back to the mid-'90s, at least. He's probably a bit tired at this point of having to still make the argument.)
[i]Yes[/i]! In yo [i]face[/i], Standard-for-The-Man-English! Our intimates be all up [i]in yo face[/i]!
My italics tags have an internally consistent structure that isn't bad or wrong, just different.
So Pixar's Up was totes down with the gente, right guys? Right?
I believe there are Standard English grammatical distinctions that aren't preserved in Black English
Perhaps there are standard English constructions not widely used, but I'd be surprised if there were constructions that were not preserved at all... Black English, after all, does exist amidst a sea of Standard English, and I think the vast majority (at least in modern times) of those conversant in Black English are also conversant in Standard.
The particular "up" he's talking about is interesting -- I've got a reasonably okay ear for when it sounds right and when it doesn't, but I wouldn't ever have thought of the rule for it as being about intimacy. Once it's described that way, though, it does make sense.
I am trying to think of other examples when "more complicated" rather than "complicated in a different but equal way" doesn't mean "better" to a certain educated set. Depth of meaning and greater adaptability(?) of a toolset is usually highly valued.
Or is it? It isn't to me, sitting under my tree
19: Perhaps there are standard English constructions not widely used, but I'd be surprised if there were constructions that were not preserved at all.
I think this is confusing English as spoken and understood by black people with Black English/AAVE the dialect. Pretty much any black person in the US is going to speak and understand Standard English perfectly fluently, whether or not that's the dialect they speak at home or with friends.
So, e.g., Black English doesn't conjugate verbs so that they agree with the number of the subject: Standard English has I walk/you walk/he or she walks, where Black English has I walk/you walk/he or she walk. That's not an error, but it's a grammatical distinction that Standard English makes and Black English doesn't, despite the fact that pretty much any black person would be able to manage the Standard English verb conjugation without difficulty.
McWhorter is slyly doing some ethnography, for the usual purpose ethnography is done. God knows he understands the uses of ethnography.
22:Aw, c'mon. "Capable of expressing more meaning, in better ways than you whites can manage" is exactly what he is saying, or wants to say without getting caught on it.
I wouldn't ever have thought of the rule for it as being about intimacy
I'm not sure that's really a hard and fast rule, at least as I hear/use it locally. I don't think anybody would blink an eye at "I was up at the airport last week" versus "I was over at the airport last week". But maybe I'm revealing my essential honkitude with this comment.
22: I see what you are saying, but I think that posits a strict delineation between Black English and Standard English that doesn't exist. In as much as people speak both, slip in and out of both through the course of a conversation, or speak something in-between the two, I think its a broad overstatement to pick any Standard English, and say "this is not in Black English." Because I think "walks" is in Black English (I've heard my black friend use it!), its just not the dominant construction.
To make his claim, doesn't McWorter also need to show that Standard English lacks this kind of intimacy marker? Sure Standard English doesn't use "up" this way, but it does use other words,
Think about "old" (or ol') as in "I was at the ol' water hole." It sounds a little off in a sentence like "I was at the ol' dentists office" (to use McWorter's example). You'd have to have some serious mouth problems to be that intimate with your dentist.
Does Standard English include informal English as spoken by white people? I'm whiter than a goth mime, and I don't use "up" that way, but I definitely use "ol'"
He's probably a bit tired at this point of having to still make the argument.
I was actually surprised that he does still have to make it, but I live in a bubble, I guess.
But I have to get back to Japanese...
...with its three completely different writing systems, mixed and matched in everyday usage; its lack of plurals, pronouns and most tenses; its idiographic and calligraphic potentialities; the constant ambiguity and metaphoric potential of its homophones; its built in politeness and status forms; it's openness to new characters and new compounds...
it's a "more complicated" language, therefore the Japanese are just better than us. But it's okay to not be the best. Just accept your place.
/just kidding
I was up at the airport last week
But this doesn't look like the AAVE use, this looks like something most Americans, at least, would be capable of saying.
25: Yeah, this is where I realize that I don't have a linguist's vocabulary for talking about this stuff. I'd want to describe what you're talking about as code-switching, rather than as one dialect entirely including the other, but I don't have the academic background to back that up with anything.
22: I think this is it. It would be more accurate to say that most African Americans speak both dialects, rather than to than that AAVE encompassed SE.
Living in Atlanta, I often had the experience of picking up a wrong number and if the on the other end spoke first, I might have as much of a chance of understanding them as one of the deeper Scots English accents linked here. Once I spoke, and they realized they had accidentally gotten some white guy, they would switch over to (accented) Standard English.
I'm actually something of an expert on the uses of "up".
He's probably a bit tired at this point of having to still make the argument.
No he should have to keep working the argument, even if it is not necessarily in the form I would prefer.
It is the kind of argument worth having.
Is a larger vocabulary "better" than a smaller one? I say no, even as one of you with a massive reading vocabulary.
Refute me without recourse to elitism.
G'day.
Redneck English, when I was growing up, used "up" in the same way. And it wasn't from copying blacks because there weren't any to be seen anywhere close.
26: It doesn't match up perfectly. "Ol", as you're using it, is a straightforward adjective, meaning something closer to 'familiar' than to 'aged', but just an adjective. 'Up' is a preposition, which alters the grammar of the sentence in a different way. You can express pretty much any idea that can be expressed in any language somehow, but the structures are going to be different.
30: I'm also out of my depth with the linguistic semantics. Presumably experts in the field have had this conversation before. I wonder what they concluded?
I think it'd take some pretty exceptional circumstances for any natural human language to be less complex than another. There was a fascinating piece on RadioLab about how speakers of earlier versions of Nicaraguan Sign Language had trouble with basic mental concepts that was cleared up when they learned the version of the language spoken by third and fourth generation users. But unless you are dealing with a language that is literally in its infancy or is spoken by people in a radically different environment, I can't imagine that you'd get real differences in total complexity.
32 is one of my favorite comment threads anywhere on the internets.
Once I spoke, and they realized they had accidentally gotten some white guy, they would switch over to (accented) Standard English.
Black kids I went to high school with in north Florida could deliberately speak so that no one white around them could understand what they said. Except being high school students, they were terribly indiscreet about glancing in the direction of the person they were deliberately excluding.
34: I dont' know if redneck English is the same as southern English, but the language of poor southern whites has been intertwined with the language of African Americans for a long time. As I understand it, there is a big debate about how much black English owes to African languages and how much it owes to southern English.
35: It doesn't have to match up perfectly. If both dialects have intimacy markers, then they both have the same expressive power.
And it wasn't from copying blacks because there weren't any to be seen anywhere close.
I've heard that both Black English and Redneck English borrow a lot from the dialects of early Scotts-Irish settlers - that is, the lower class of whites who would have been employed as slave overseers, and who would thus have been the ones to transmit their variation of English to the black slaves.
Do Scottish dialects use the intimate up?
I can't imagine that you'd get real differences in total complexity.
I am not sure what this could even mean, unless it meant that the totality of signs could convey a greater depth and variety of meaning.
But c'mon, show some nerve. McWhorter is saying blacks have two languages while us whites have only one, precisely like a twit saying "You mean you don't know French? Oh poor dears."
Be honest for once. You won't be joining the Klan if you call him out.
Bob is trying to stir shit up up in here.
I'm with 41. I don't see why one's being adverbial and the other's being adjectival would lead to a difference in the complexities of their proper use.
41: I don't think there's any particular argument that one dialect globally has more expressive power than another, just that different dialects have different grammatical subtleties. To stick with the current example, if you're speaking AAVE, it's a natural thing to do to mark a reference to a location with an intimacy marker; in SE, you can convey the level of intimacy you have with a location if you want to, but you're just as likely not to.
44: Must be one of those days ending with a 'y'.
in SE, you can convey the level of intimacy you have with a location if you want to, but you're just as likely not to.
That doesn't make it not a natural thing to do, when done.
'Tis a fine barn, but sure 'tis no pool, English.
48: Would 'default' have been a better word than 'natural' there? I'm not sure that I'm accurately representing AAVE by saying the intimate up is a default where appropriate, but it's at least higher frequency than using something like 'ol' to mark intimacy in SE.
It's funny, it seems obvious and natural to me that one dialect would have subtleties that another lacks, but it seems as if this is controversial.
It's funny, it seems obvious and natural to me that one dialect would have subtleties that another lacks, but it seems as if this is controversial.
I don't think anyone disputes that.
Rob is questioning whether this subtlety isn't shared.
My Canadian relatives have some of this use of "up." You can be "up at the cabin" or "up at school" and so forth.
All of the examples of "incorrect" usage cited in that article sound perfectly natural/correct to me. I don't know if that means my english is very white, or beyond black.
Try a different example: I mostly speak SE, but an urban East Coast, specifically NYC variant. And one thing my dialect does that non-NYC SE doesn't is distinguish between things or people that are arranged in a linear fashion in space, and so are "in line", and people who are waiting in an ordered arrangement to be served or take a turn at something, who are "on line". Outside of NYC, both are "in line".
Now, people who speak a non-NYC variant of SE don't have any difficulty in conveying the difference between the spatial arrangement of people about to do the Electric Slide and the turn-taking arrangement of people waiting to speak with a bank teller even though both are "in line" -- the NYC distinction doesn't add any complexity of meaning to what can be conveyed. But it does make a grammatical distinction that non-NYC SE doesn't.
And I'm sure that every regional dialect has similar subtleties, I just know the ones I'm familiar with.
I don't know if that means my english is very white, or beyond black.
I don't hear color.
I'd be interested to see what McWhorter has to say about similar uses of "over", as in I stay over north [I am currently living on the north side of town.] Certainly, there's a parallel in some dialects of SE that are spoken primarily by white people. Yah, we was over to Vern's t'other day. [We visited Vern at his home the other day.] And yet, there seem to be connotations in the BE/AAVE usage that are not present in the latter example.
with its three completely different writing systems, mixed and matched in everyday usage; its lack of plurals, pronouns and most tenses
This is several different kinds of not right, including outright wrong.
Of course, New Yorkers get very confused between who is on line, and who is online. So it's a trade-off.
The article misleads a little by emphasizing the absence of verticality, as that is shared by other English uses of up. The non-AAVE uses of up folks are citing here are generally about relative position; it's a place holder for "up the road/way." McWhorter is pointing out that the "up in/at" use in AAVE is about one's personal relation to a place. It's less a signal than a semi-conscious expression.
52: The usage We were up North/up at the cabin/up at the lake is so typical of Minnesotan dialects as to be a frequent object of mockery. In that case though, even if you were by chance traveling east, west or south to arrive at your destination, I think the connotation that one goes "up to" these places because they are archetypically north of settled areas suggests that it is a much different usage than McWhorter's "intimate up".
I did not know about the NY "on line"/"in line" distinction! I thought people just said "on line" exclusively over yonder.
In Hebrew you go up to Israel, and down when you leave Israel. Anywhere you travel outside of Israel is level.
Interestingly though, I think I've heard Were ya goin' down to the Cities this weekend? just as often as I've heard Were ya goin' up to the Cities this weekend?, seemingly regardless of the spatial relationship of the speaker's hometown to the Twin Cities. Especially among my relatives who live slightly north, but mostly a considerable distance east of Mpls/St. Paul.
44:You yourself started out well at 4.
McWhorter is doing ethnography. You do not counter or analyze ethnography as fact, because ethnography is not about facts but about narrative. If you do attempt to use "facts" to discuss or counter an ethnography, you are automatically creating a counter ethnographic narrative, a "fiction."
To quote Victor Crapanzo again
In all three instances the events described are subverted by the transcending stories in which they are cast. They are sacrificed to their rhetorical function in a literary discourse that is far removed from the indigenous discourse of their occurrence. The sacrifice, the subversion of the event described, is in the final analysis masked . . . by the authority of the author, who, at least in much ethnography, stands above and behind those whose experience he purports to describe.
I am actually much more admittedly open to ethnographic narrative than most intellectuals, since, ya know, the "truth of a proposition or narrative resides in its utility" and as in some sense a nihilist or perspectivist, can take and abandon positions at will.
Washington cut down the cherry tree. The Japanese are all kami. Republicans are scum.
But I don't feel a need for "Black people are better than me." I think they are equal.
I don't know if anyone has mentioned it yet (because i'm too lazy to read all 50 previous comments) but as a former linguist I must say...
McWhorter missed a linguistic civics class. Yes, what he said here is a problem. All living languages are equally expressive; all are complex. Yes, AAVE has this "up" feature that SAE lacks, but there are other grammatical features that SAE has, that AAVE lacks.
From a linguists perspective, AAVE is just a variety of American English, which is a variety of English. It's not particularly interesting as varieties go, but it's super interesting in terms of how important it is to contemporary American culture, and how it exposes people's racism and glorification of Standard (which is a MYTH).
But anyway, McWhorter also missed the linguistics civics classes where we learned that all languages are worthy of study and analysis. McWhorter has published his opinion that letting endangered languages go extinct is not so bad, which is fucking abhorrent. I'm annoyed that he gets attention for his shitty opinions. He's basically the Richard Rodriguez of sociolinguistics.
Have I overstated my case?
Teo might know something about this. Is there a way we can get his attention?
Hey, I hear the rangers up in Chaco Canyon wear dorky hats!
57 is an assertion, not any kind of argument. The usual tribal authoritarianism of liberals,
44:You yourself started out well at 4.
Oh, totally. I posted this whole thing to see if I could stir up any good reactions.
Teo might know something about this.
Hey Cecily, can you email Teo about this?
66: Hey, I hear the rangers up in Chaco Canyon wear dorky hats!
Something-something about the geography of the Four Corners Area.
Blah, blah blah Cornell, blah blah.
Neb adds software to enforce a ban on xkcd links.
68:And I totally thought that was why you posted it.
But I am intrepid or foolhardy.
71: I think you're mocking me for over-using "totally", which is problematically sexist.
Since I'm off to go jogging, let me say that 69 is teasing Cecily, not Teo or Helpy-Chalk.
65 is definitely right about the fact that SE is not what is glorified. Hillbilly and/or white trash accents and dialects are actually culturally preferred in most parts of the US. Even regionalisms like Pittsburghese and the Upper Midwest accent are celebrated, even if they are lightly mocked.
57:Okay hell, I'm trying to learn. Enlighten me.
with its three completely different writing systems, mixed and matched in everyday usage; its lack of plurals, pronouns and most tenses
One of the first things I was shown was an ordinary common sentence containing kanji, hiragana, and katagana. Each are, most simply, syllabaries, each signify the same syllables, and as I understand them, anything Japanese, excluding the wonderful subtleties of kanji, can be written in any one of them exclusively. In other words any spoken Japanese can be written entirely in katagana. It would be "incorrect" Japanese, but it would be understood.
Was it the second half?
For instance, as I read the Kodansha, I am finding that most of the common hiragana particles have kanji equivalents, archaic and unused.
71:Think what pleases you. It never crossed my mind.
I am not a linguist or an ebonics specialist. But it's clear from looking at McWhorter's examples that he fails to appropriately make his case. Of the four examples he gives, three had the identical "up in my house" construction. The only one that's different "sittin' up at Tony's" doesn't necessarily imply intimacy; it's sounds the same as Jimmy Pongo's "up the road" shorthand.
And where is the intimacy in "up in my grill"?
77: It's a fierce intimacy. Also, I don't think I've ever heard "up in my grill" except as it is preceded by "all". Not that this means it isn't current somewhere, but just that that place is not South Minneapolis.
The only one that's different "sittin' up at Tony's" doesn't necessarily imply intimacy
Well, ok, I admit I don't know who you are, F, but how do you know that?
78: What "up in my grill" and "up in my house" appear to have in common most of time is not intimacy, but trespassing/aggression.
"All up in my grill" sounds intimate to me -- not in a positive way, but someone who's up in your grill is at least leaning into your personal space.
77,
"up the road": "up" is a preposition.
"up in my grill": "up" is an adverb.
The adverbial use in AAVE doesn't indicate a spacial position; it indicates a degree of intimacy. I agree with you that McWhorter fails to make his case, but as a (former!) linguist I can hear the phenomenon he's talking about. I am probably going to fail to make the case as well; it's hard in a comments section.
Also, it can be difficult to grasp/believe if you don't have a familiarity with AAVE.
To be clear, McWhorter is exceptionally well educated and widely published, and I cannot stand him; his statement about relative complexity between AAVE and SAE is sloppy--undergrad sloppy. And his previous publications about endangered languages makes me want to kick him in the gut.
77: You really can't determine someone else's usage and meaning from your own.
Bob-san, it's just that it's imprecise and made you sound as though you were making a ridiculous point. The kana syllabaries look completely different, but they denote the same set of sounds (as you know). They're not "mixed and matched" with kanji but rather used in combination according to well-understood rules. Nouns lack plural endings generally, but Japanese expresses plurals. It also uses pronouns, some of which are the singular pronouns with a plural ending. Verbs (or verb equivalents, more accurately) are highly inflected; they don't express tense in the same way, true, but the language expresses tense in ways other than verb endings.
Wasn't trying to jump on you. There's as much obnoxious language chauvinism in Japan as anywhere else, including in the work of linguists.
I don't. I'm talking out my ass here.
Which leads us to the AAVE convention, among comedians, of using X's ass as synecdoche for X.
am I a loan in 53--did the "miststeatments really strike everyone else as Wrong?
re: 42
Do Scottish dialects use the intimate up?
No.
But Scots does have a word like 'ben', which the DSL defines as:
"In or towards the inner part or end of a house"
But which just generally means to be in an inner or intimate part of a place/situation.
http://www.dsl.ac.uk/getent4.php?plen=4023&startset=3171636&query=Ben&fhit=ben&dregion=form&dtext=dost#fhit
and
http://www.dsl.ac.uk/getent4.php?plen=16275&startset=2279616&query=BEN&fhit=ben&dregion=form&dtext=snd#fhit
Do Scottish dialects use the intimate up?
More the intimate "down", I'd say. (As do English dialects for that matter). You'd go down the pub, or down the park, or down anywhere where you went habitually and felt at home. Would you go down the High Court? Only if you were an advocate, I think.
Y'ALL GONNA MAKE ME LOSE MY MIND UP IN HERE.
re: 91
Yeah, good point.
"Comin' doon the park?" [or "perk" or "payrk" depending (allegedly) on religion]
91 and 93 still sound like prepositions, rather than adverbs.
Also, while I'm no expert, I don't think that the AAVE use of "up" is common in hillbilly/appalachian dialects, which is where you'd expect to find direct borrowings from the Scotch-Irish/Borderlands/"loveable ginger bigots" (hat tip: Dsquared).
I'm sorry, that should be "lovable drunken belligerent ginger bigots."
re: 94
Yes, they are prepositions in that context. Although 'up in Bob's house' seems analogous.
It's interesting that there's the converse usage, of 'up'.
'Where's Bill?'
'Up the toon.'
McWhorter has published his opinion that letting endangered languages go extinct is not so bad, which is fucking abhorrent.
Ok, I'll bite. The disappearance of languages seems bad, I guess, but why is it so bad? I can see that the process by which it happens often involves a myriad family tragedies, where grandparents can't understand their grandchildren and so on; but this is also true of immigration. What makes the loss of the language itself so awful, as opposed to just being kind of a shame?
Or rather: since what's really at issue here is, what should be done about disappearing languages, I certainly don't think the answer is "save them by any means necessary!"
One thing that I find interesting about AAVE is that there are reportedly almost no regional variations; that is, the African-American speech of New Orleans is almost the same as that of South Central as that of Harlem as that of rural Alabama. There's no very obvious reason to me why that should be the case (yes, I know about the Great Migration), but apparently it's true.
95
Depends on what you mean. "up at x's" is incredibly common, but not so much "up in x's"
Please, you can't use the word "hillbillies" to describe just any old ginger bigots, only those who live in a specific area of the USA. It's an Appalachian Controleee.
Meanwhile, little Lucretia, who is crazeee for Princess Kate, has just expressed the utmost surprise on learning that Wills and Kate were at university together and have been going out for twelve years. The cause of her surprise? "I thought he just picked a woman".
YEAH, YEAH, I'MA UP AT BROOKLYN, NOW I'M DOWN IN TRIBECA
Meanwhile, little Lucretia, who is crazeee for Princess Kate, has just expressed the utmost surprise on learning that Wills and Kate were at university together and have been going out for twelve years. The cause of her surprise?
"A royal went to university?"
This thread makes me want to throw neither up nor down.
52: Especially in Upper Canada.
Up the Old Kent Road, of a Saturday night, one might go up the West End, or up the Junction, hoping to pick up a bird and (presuming she didn't just say "up yours!") to perhaps get up her dress. Hoping, of course, that you didn't get her up the stick, in which case you would be right up the spout.
Re: 105
I thought a couple of them have been. They just wouldn't have gotten in in a fair competition with us plebs.
104: Do we really want to take a song that says "concrete jungle where dreams are made of" as a reference for how anyone actually talks?
(Also, how the hell is Brooklyn not down, by customary New York standards of direction?)
Up the duff, rather than up the stick, no?
Up the duff means the same as up the stick; I wouldn't expect you to know that of course, as you're from Oop North.
100: Well, not in terms of pronunciation.
True. The actual North, rather than just past Birmingham.
Never heard 'up the stick', though, fwiw.
113 -- I sort of think I can hear pronunciation differences, too, but apparently they're extremely minimal.
99
Linguists are still researching syntax; how languages organize constituents into sentences.
Endangered languages tend not to be well documented. When a language goes extinct, it's distinct method of organizing constituents is lost. Something that might tell us about the human brain and human thought is lost forever.
It's analogous to the extinction of species in the rainforest; to a biologist it's a catastrophe.
When I was in college they were talking about parameters and typology; and people were making some bad assumptions based on the "big" languages; without the other languages, they didn't have all the information. All languages are worthy of study and analysis.
So what needs to be done to preserve endangered languages? "Save them at all costs" is the immediate thought of someone in an ethnic/linguistic majority. But the real answer is this: let parents talk to their kids in their endangered languages.
That means: end discrimination against linguistic minorities and forced assimilation, provide real bilingual education--not bullshit ESL disguised as bilingual ed, or what ever the equivalent is in other societies.
These seem like easy, cheap things to do, but linguistic-majority populations have proven over and over again that the suck at it. Kids that do not speak a majority language are often treated like they have some kind of disease, instead of being seen as potential bilinguals.
Some endangered language populations are already too small and the linguistic environment too toxic to pass on a language to kids. That's too bad, they're as good as gone.
McWhorter's attitude about letting endangered languages die is a) assholesque and b) bad science. I understand having to explain this to a non-linguist, but the fact that McWhorter is all "let 'em die" is unfathomable.
Black English has a more complex system of tenses and aspect than standard english:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/African_American_Vernacular_English#Tense_and_aspect
You can say all the additional information expressed by these tenses in standard english but you can also avoid saying this additional information if you want.
I am sure that linguists hate people trying to get certain languages crowned as the king of the languages, but I am also pretty sure that there is no conservation of complexity law with respect to languages.
McWhorter has also advocated teaching Shakespeare in modern English translation. I might not call that fucking abhorrent, but I'd say that it's profoundly wrongheaded.
I don't know what vernacular 88 was written in, but let's hope it dies out.
That means: end discrimination against linguistic minorities and forced assimilation, provide real bilingual education--not bullshit ESL disguised as bilingual ed, or what ever the equivalent is in other societies.
And I'm on board with all of this, as well as trying to record lots of the languages for study. I was actually going to use the endangered species analogy myself, but, aside from their being banned, I thought it might seem offensive; but here, too, my view is "well, yes, extinction is bad, but so are other things, and it's not abhorrent to make trade-offs here sometimes."
Anyway. I really don't know nearly enough about the actual politics of language-use and urban/rural migration (which I would, naively, expect to be deeply entwined issues) in, say, Papua New Guinea to really say anymore, so I'll stop now.
note 1: "Standard English" is a pretty weird way to refer to a dialect. It's not clear to me, from the thread, what (if anything) is being referenced. "Standard American English" is a specific, described variant of English and I would assume that's the referent dialect here except for some references to regional variants (non-NYC Standard English) at which point I am confused. SAE is a standard, and doesn't have variants. Variant dialects, including those used in NYC and elsewhere, are not (insofar as they are distinct from SAE) considered to be "standard".
note 2: letting endangered languages go extinct is not so bad, which is fucking abhorrent
I, also, don't really care about this, although I am well aware that many linguists disagree. My personal opinions are that
(a) languages always go extinct eventually. There's no way around it. Your language will die.
and
(b) the realities at play in language politics are way complicated, such that (often) the people trying to protect and save a language or dialect are not the people who speak that dialect, and the ways that the savers try to use to save it are straight up oppressive to the speakers who would really like to learn a more broadly useful language
but
(c) of course I support people being able to use the language they prefer to use, and I also support education of everyone about what languages are like and how no language is better or more complicated or more expressive than any other language, and how it is wrong to assume intellect or skill or other things based on which dialect someone uses
I'll sign on with Cecily in 123. I'm relieved that someone qualified seems to believe these things, too!
122: I think references to Standard English were probably meant to be references to Standard American English throughout, but the whole not-knowing-what-we're-talking-about thing got in the way.
On the regional variant bit, again, I just don't know the right way to say it. I believe the way I speak is fairly close to SAE. But I've got a couple of regionalisms characteristic of my location, like the on/in line thing. And lots of other people are in the same boat, mostly SAE but with different minor regional differences.
note 3: the linked article seems like pretty standard dumbing-down of uncontroversial linguistic stuff to me. It's presented as new and interesting, with exclamation points and faux-naive enthusiam, because of the assumed audience. The people who think AAVE is somehow lesser than SAE are not linguists. The kinds of sentences and examples and hyperboles used to explain to the untrained masses that certain dialects, while different than SAE, are not necessarily lesser, are pretty obvious oversimplistic banalities. This doesn't have anything to do with the state of the field as far as linguistic understanding of AAVE/SAE/other American dialects goes.
126- right. Everybody speaks their own slightly different variant: idiolect. And every regional/socioeconomic/age-related/gender-related/register/etc variation is slightly different. "Language" and "dialect" are both abstractions with no actual realization, but they also obviously have lots of meaning to people, which makes the whole thing very confusing to talk about.
The thing I would emphasize is that the differences between "SAE, but with slight variations" and "AAVE" and whatever incomprehensible dialect Heebie's classmates used, are all just matters of degree. There's no line between "this is the same dialect" and "this is a different dialect" or even "this is the same language" and "this is a different language".
Along these lines, I couldn't help but think in connection with this:
118: McWhorter has also advocated teaching Shakespeare in modern English translation. I might not call that fucking abhorrent, but I'd say that it's profoundly wrongheaded.
that we were, after all, talking just the other day about which translation of Beowulf was best.
Of course, letting go of Shakespearean English (only 400 years old) is not quite the same as the vast majority of people having let go of Old English. Not quite, on any number of fronts. Still, though, while I agree that teaching Shakespeare in modern English translation is wrongheaded, I'm not entirely sure I can argue against it with the full force of conviction.
(I'm probably being really irritating and bossy and pedantic here. I blame the fact that I just graded all my LIN 101 exams, where the topics covered were bilingualism and language contact and variation, and where the answers were hilariously/heartbreakingly wrong in a nontrivial number of cases.)
Er, "along these lines" was to the discussion of extinction of languages, obvs.
123 -- I'm not a linguist and haven't thought much about these issues, but not worrying about language extinction because "all languages become extinct eventually" doesn't seem like a very good argument -- surely the concern is that features of modern life, including mass communications and national educational systems -- are making smaller languages become extinct at a faster rate than we've seen in the past. And while I wouldn't support coercion in the name of dying languages, some form of resistence/putting weight on the other side of the scale doesn't seem like a bad idea.
130: You're not. Philosophy of Languages types in grad school used to amuse ourselves themselves (by irritating others) running around saying "There's no such thing as a language! I am serious. No, really."
124: Yeah, I mean, speaking as an anarchist of long standing, the British Royal Family is just kinda gross and sad. All those people would be so much happier without all that aristocracy crap overlaying their private lives. Some of them, of course, are right gits, as I believe they say in Blighty. But most of them don't seem any better or worse than the average person of their wealth and social class.
I think reactionary elements within the UK security forces are probably just still sore about that Class War cover mocking the fire at Windsor Castle.
There's no way around it. Your language will die.
Speakers of the dominant language and speakers of the dying language feel differently about this, of course. And while the politics are complicated, it seems only fair in some cases for the dominant culture to make an effort to extend the life of suppressed languages as some small measure of restitution and preservation.
129: Totally different!
116: While I am all for efforts to preserve all extant languages, it seems to me as though your argument here is conflating to very different concerns.
The first is that if certain minority languages die out, it will be a significant loss to the sum total of human knowledge. Couldn't agree more.
The second is that, the causes of many minority languages dying out are in fact the repressive forces of capital and the state, which tend to privilege monoculture and in so doing, bring to bear an inhumane tactical regime that has the effect of blotting out linguistic and cultural diversity. Also in complete agreement there.
Of the two problems, it should be obvious, the latter tends to concern me much more deeply than the former. Which is not to say that the former is not a concern, but merely that I'd love to see it recede into irrelevance due to efforts to redress the latter.
132: This is slightly outside of my areas of expertise, but I don't think it's true that modernity is having a deleterious effect on languages with low numbers of speakers. In most of the world, people are multilingual, and languages with low numbers of speakers have lasted for very long times under the right circumstances. Language death/endangerment has always been due to politics and economics, and there has always been a tension between minority language users and socioeconomic success.
Endangered languages are generally endangered because (a) they have few native speakers and (b) they have relatively low status. People who speak such languages generally want their children to learn other languages, so that the children will be able to achieve more material success than the parents. In these circumstances, children who are natively bilingual often raise their own children either monolingually in the more dominant/socially prominent language, or bilingual in the dominant language and another higher-status language.
It is possible to prohibit minority-language speakers from learning the majority language, which would obviously mean more native speaker of that language, and less chance of language death. But this is usually in direct opposition to the desires and wellbeing of the speakers themselves, who are making a conscious decision not to speak their (minority) language because of the political and economic benefits of using the majority language.
As a linguist, yes, it is very nice to have lots of data from lots of different languages. As a person, though, I think people have every right to let a tiny dialect die out so that their children can earn more money.
Multiculturalism isn't working out quite the way we expected.
123
I agree wholeheartedly with all three of your points.
You don't care about endangered languages; here are two reasons that I do care:
1) Scientifically, a language extinction is a loss of data; to be cavalier about it is antithetical. I'm sure there are animal species dying all over the planet; species that will not give us a miracle cure for cancer, but biologists are not publishing papers saying "letting them die is not so bad.... it happens." When they die, that avenue of study is lost forever; that is a loss to science.
2) I was a victim of an English Only policy as a kid growing up in the USA, and I was told by a Philippine linguist that my parents' language is now endangered. I can't go back in time and become a native speaker of that language, but I can tell the world to STOP BEING DICKS TO SPEAKERS OF MINORITY LANGUAGES.
If you think that that language is dying a natural, amoral, popular death of old age, rather than being forcefully indoctrinated and assimilated out of existence, you are a fool.
Maybe if you don't have a minority language in your family you don't feel it as acutely as I do. I didn't need bilingual ed or bilingual literacy, I only wish some idiots didn't fucking repeat to my parents that ignorant fucking bullshit about multilingualism being detrimental.
My parents language is going to die; that heritage was my birthright. I understand if you don't care, but McWhorter can go fuck himself if he thinks he can tell me it's no so bad.
It may or may not be interesting to note that this whole discussion is playing out in realtime not only with respect to English, but with respect to ASL and other signed languages-
The US is the only country (so far) to have a college or university dedicated to deaf education. Additionally, many (most?) other countries do not have any laws requiring access or interpreters or anything like that for deaf students, at any level of education. The result of this is that many (most?) deaf people in the world, if they are going to do college/postgrad work, do it in the US.
To do the college/postgrad work in the US, these people have to learn ASL. Then they (maybe) go back to their countries. Or they stay here, and get used to having ASL interpreters.
Deaf people complain, internationally, about the arrogance of American deaf people assuming that there will be ASL interpretation (or about international conferences in the US only providing ASL interpretation), and there are many examples of Americans going abroad to teach (Peace Corps and other) deaf children, using ASL instead of the local sign language. I have seen presentations at conferences about "ASL: endangered or endangering?".
However, I have also done work in foreign parts with deaf children, who wanted me to teach them ASL. I wanted to study their signed language. If I taught them ASL, it would contaminate their real native language. If I did not teach them ASL, they would be at a definite disadvantage when it came to trying to get funding and acceptance to go to college in America.
139- I absolutely support STOP BEING DICKS TO SPEAKERS OF MINORITY LANGUAGES
However, I don't support promotion of minority languages (for linguistic research data purposes) over the rights of the speakers of those languages. Sometimes the two are not in conflict, in which case, super! Unfortunately often, though, they are.
137
"As a person, though, I think people have every right to let a tiny dialect die out so that their children can earn more money."
That is a sad, sad situation: it assumes that a language has been reduced to the extent that it's now a tiny dialect. Maybe all of reducing that came before it wasn't so necessary.
It also assumes that being monolingual in the majority language is more profitable in life than the alternatives. It's probably more profitable than being monolingual in the minority language, but kids are sponges, why not raise them bilingual; i.e., fluent in both languages? Oh yah, ignorance.
I think people have every right to let a tiny dialect die out so that their children can earn more money.
Where does it work that way? I can't imagine that, say, the inhabitants of the Northwest Coast a century ago earned much from being culturally crushed, and I don't think they stand to earn anything from having their last living speakers die out now.
Multiculturalism isn't working out quite the way we expected.
What did we expect it to do?
141
We agree. I don't support promotion of minority languages of the rights of the speakers of those languages either.
But I do think that one of the rights of minority languages is that bilingualism and multilingualism is a totally normal and natural human condition, and that the minority language does not have to be sacrificed in order for the majority language to be learned.
144: I expected more Ethiopian restaurants around here.
Sorry, that should read:
But I do think that one of the rights of SPEAKERS minority languages is THE KNOWLEDGE that bilingualism and multilingualism is a totally normal and natural human condition, and that the minority language does not have to be sacrificed in order for the majority language to be learned.
I bet we can agree on that ;)
Where does it work that way?
Lots of immigrants in the US make an affirmative decision to only speak English with their children, to make sure that the children succeed in the US. I'm not saying they're right, but I certainly don't want to mandate that they do otherwise.
Lots of speakers of (e. g.) dying Native American languages are bilingual, but their children are not, and their grandchildren are even more not. This is not because they don't like their native language, but because it is not socially or economically beneficial for the younger people to make the effort to develop and maintain fluency in a dying language.
123
languages always go extinct eventually. There's no way around it. Your language will die.
What does this mean? Gradually changing is not the same thing as dying.
123
... and how no language is better or more complicated or more expressive than any other language ...
I don't believe this.
is THE KNOWLEDGE that bilingualism and multilingualism is a totally normal and natural human condition
That makes me feel lazy. Don't call me abnormal.
150: well, obviously, I meant "except for the dialect preferred by James B Shearer, which is demonstrably more complex and more expressive than any other".
That caveat aside, did you have any actual evidence for your disbelief, or is it more of an I-don't-belive-that-Obama-is-a-citizen sort of thing?
Lots of speakers of (e. g.) dying Native American languages are bilingual, but their children are not, and their grandchildren are even more not. This is not because they don't like their native language, but because it is not socially or economically beneficial for the younger people to make the effort to develop and maintain fluency in a dying language.
I think everyone knows that.
Lots of immigrants in the US make an affirmative decision to only speak English with their children, to make sure that the children succeed in the US
How often is that an issue with language extinction? My grandfather's family did that, but Italian isn't a dying language, and in any case it wouldn't have hurt them to have maintained a bilingual environment. Lots of people manage it just fine, and they end up with the benefit of being bilingual. There are costs involved with preserving languages—the Gaeltacht isn't making much of a profit, I'd guess—but I don't see how native speakers are helped by letting them die out.
144: What did we expect it to do?
At a rough pass, we (for some value of) hoped it would counter the trend toward a monoculture, and alleviate the pressure on people of multicultural and multilingual backgrounds to favor the dominant culture/language to the detriment of the less-dominant ... by driving a wedge between the very possibility of socioeconomic advancement and the felt need to wholly assimilate.
Which is to say in painfully convoluted form that one hoped that it might counter what Natilo described upthread thus: the repressive forces of capital and the state, which tend to privilege monoculture and in so doing, bring to bear an inhumane tactical regime that has the effect of blotting out linguistic and cultural diversity
In short, I blame capitalism.
Lots of immigrants in the US make an affirmative decision to only speak English with their children, to make sure that the children succeed in the US. I'm not saying they're right, but I certainly don't want to mandate that they do otherwise.
I was the only American born child among my parents' circle of Polish friends who spoke Polish at home, though many could understand a fair amount and were able to speak pidgin level Polish (good for grandparents, nannies, and maids). Related, my Korean-American ex, spoke no Korean and understood little. We both always found it sort of interesting that Europeans tended to ask her 'no where are you really from' and be a bit taken aback at 'state x in the US'. On the other hand I didn't get that treatment in spite of being much, much more Polish than she was Korean and having spent half my childhood in Europe. We were never quite able to figure out the reasons for this strange, illogical difference.
My grandfather's family did that, but Italian isn't a dying language, and in any case it wouldn't have hurt them to have maintained a bilingual environment.
Okay, well, assume that other families also do it, even if the native language is dying, and even though it wouldn't hurt them to maintain a bilingual environment. I doubt that either the motivating factors or the results are dependent on the status of the language in question, as far as individual choices go.
My point is that individual families make this kind of decision all the time, and that I don't want to force them not to, even if it means losing some linguistic data.
I think everyone knows that.
Oh, good.
156- I also think it's fascinating to look at birth order among siblings and its correlation with fluency. For all minority languages (including ASL) there seems to be a pretty robust relationship between birth order and gender and linguistic skill. (older siblings and girls being more likely to be fluent bilinguals than younger siblings and sons).
minority languages in the US, that should say. I am not familiar with any research about other countries, but in most other countries multilingualism is much more normalized anyway.
These kinds of decisions aren't necessarily completely voluntary. When I was born, bringing up your kid bilingual was still seen as both not properly assimilating on the part of the parents and as potentially harmful to the child in the college educated NE milieu where my parents existed. My kindergarten teacher called them onto the carpet several times for being both ungrateful, bad immigrants and bad parents; it was a big part of the reason why she wanted me placed in the 'special' kids track. However, this attitude was changing rapidly and by the time we were leaving for Europe my teachers and most of my parents' peers thought it sort of cute that I was bilingual, even when I embarassed/annoyed my parents by insisting on speaking only Polish to them and making them translate in mixed company.
152
That caveat aside, did you have any actual evidence for your disbelief, or is it more of an I-don't-belive-that-Obama-is-a-citizen sort of thing?
It makes no sense at all to me. It seems easy to to construct pairs of languages such that one is clearly more expressive or complicated or better (by any of several plausible criteria) than the other. Suppose for example we take standard English and remove the words "left" and "right" (and any synonyms). Why isn't the modified English less expressive? Or suppose we take standard English and replace every word by that word repeated twice (so for example the sentence "this is an example" becomes "thisthis isis anan exampleexample"). Why isn't the modified English worse by the criteria of economy?
162: Shearer, for a start, we're talking about what are called (at least what I've to be referred to as) "natural" languages. Not artificially constructed ones. Among other things, a natural language is one shared by a community of speakers who use the language in the going about of their daily lives; some constructed languages can in theory *become* natural, i.e., widely shared, but at that point, it's not at all clear that the language fails in any way in expressiveness.
I should let E. Messily speak to this, though.
correction: "what I've known to be referred to as"
162: Maybe it wasn't clear, but my original statement about all languages being equally complex and equally expressive was meant to refer to actual languages, not to imaginary mutations of languages like "removing 'left' and 'right' from English" or "repeating every word twice"- neither of which mutation results in an actual language.
For the next 24 hours, I will not use the words 'left' or 'right' in protest of the English Police.
I think you mean 'left left' and 'right right'.
My point is that individual families make this kind of decision all the time, and that I don't want to force them not to, even if it means losing some linguistic data.
And my point, or part of it, is that that's not the issue. It shouldn't be the responsibility of individuals and families to preserve dying languages, but it's not as though there's necessarily any advantage to them doing so; it's up to larger institutions, including states. And I don't give a rat's ass if it's not economically favorable to prvoide people with the opportunity to keep learning Irish or Hawaiian or whatever, any more than if it's not economically favorable to preserve species and habitats and historic places from being collateral damage in the triumphant victory of capitalism.
That would just incite the English Police to violence. I'm a moderate radical.
Well, as I said before, I completely support people being able to use whatever language they want to use. What I don't support is the state telling people they have to use a particular language, regardless of whether that language is the majority or a minority language.
165
Maybe it wasn't clear, but my original statement about all languages being equally complex and equally expressive was meant to refer to actual languages, not to imaginary mutations of languages like "removing 'left' and 'right' from English" or "repeating every word twice"- neither of which mutation results in an actual language.
Ok, so you are conceding (I think) that it is possible to slightly modify natural human languages so as to make them more complex or less expressive. But by some deep and wonderful natural law every actual language (among the numerous constantly changing examples) is at all times equally complex and expressive. This strikes me as exceedingly unlikely.
By the way do past languages count as actual languages?
What I don't support is the state telling people they have to use a particular language
So it turns out we've been in agreement all along.
172: I think so!
171: But by some deep and wonderful natural law every actual language (among the numerous constantly changing examples) is at all times equally complex and expressive.
yes, basically. Many people who spent their lives studying the various permutations of human language have all come to this conclusion. It turns out that the ways languages change do not include things like removing all synonyms for left and right, or gratuitously repeating every word. Instead, the ways that languages vary from each other tend to add complexity in some areas while they elide complexity in others.
By the way do past languages count as actual languages?
yes.
What if each word were repeated three times?
Then crazy things happen.
Is is true that Americans have 90 different words for gas station?
Off off to to bed bed.
No, but they do have 90 different words for marijuana.
Exit exit stage stage, uh uh, that that way way.
God help me, I'm tempted to try to list them, but certainly can't come up with 90, though I'm sure the collective brainpower of the Mineshaft could.
1. marijuana
2. pot
3. weed
4. grass
5. reefer
6. bud
7. green
8. KGB
9. spliff
10. mary jane
Just to get the ball rolling.
||
Trolling
Watching an oldfolk movie, Gogo no Yuigon-jo, 1995, directed by Kaneto Shindo, 83, starring Haruko Sugimura, 86. Sugimura was part of Ozu's 50s troop, but was more famous in Japan for her stage work. 1st Blanche DuBois.
Anyway, Sugimura is visiting her mountain chalet and noticed weeds in the garden.
S:What hasn't X kept up the garden?
Middle-aged Caretaker:Oh, he killed himself last year. Wrote a note saying:"It's Over." He hanged himself.
S:That's how old people do it. He wasn't so old, only 83. Was he poor or sick?
C:No, not sick, and he left 25 million yen in cash at his house. He built his coffin, left the note and a big rock on top to pound the nails. All the neighbors were amazed at the 25 million yen.
S:Tell me about the rock.
So fucking perfect. That would be my question.
|>
11. herb
12. doob
13. hemp
14. smoke
15. sens
16. ganja
17. dope
18. 420
19. binger*
20. shit
*bong hit, technically.
I'm not sure 90 is realistic.
I Can't Believe It's Not Bitter Herb (Kosher for Passover)
fuck (no not a synonym)
can you say lawn like in French? (pelouse)
Does yerba count in English? Probably.
I'm not sure 90 is realistic.
I'll bet 90 is an undercount.
Killer
Chronic
Endo
There's a long list at parentingteens.about.com, but about 95% of it would cause your teenagers to roll their eyes and mock you.
Wow, comprehensive. I'd forgotten "vipe", which reminded me of this great collection.
173
... do not include things like removing all synonyms for left and right, ...
Well how about adding left and right (or some other abstract concept) to languages that did not previously have it? Do all human languages have words for right and left?
And if all past languages count as languages then you seem to be saying there were never any simpler more primitive languages at any stage in human evolution. Which also seems unlikely.
But by some deep and wonderful natural law every actual language (among the numerous constantly changing examples) is at all times equally complex and expressive. This strikes me as exceedingly unlikely.
All languages tend to be specialized to the circumstances and society in which they're being used. It's just that with their all being tools of the same species with the same cognitive toolkit, it's really hard to tell which ones are "more complex" (they tend to develop complexities as needed which are tough to compare qualitatively or quantitatively) or "more expressive" (as they have this distressing habit of borrowing freely from one another, inventing new idioms and adapting, so it's nigh impossible to observe them in any theoretically "pure" state). Abstract thought experiments are completely useless when talking about any living language, hence your frustration.
I'm pleased to unfold such deep and wonderful natural laws for you. I'm also available to reveal profound and prodigious essential truths, if you're in the market. Holla at me, nig.
Oh, an example of the complexities inherent in trying to compare "complexity": a decent post on Yahoo! Answers for once.
206 sounds right to me.
Are some languages "simpler" than others along particular axes? Probably. Some languages have a more limited range of colour-words or number-words than others. I'm told that Indonesian has a particularly easy-to-learn grammar. Etc.
"Simpler" overall is a harder case to make.
Even with the example of leaving out words for "left" and "right", it's not clear that the result is in any overall sense less expressive. You could still say "you know what I mean - the direction the sun sets (resp. rises) relative to you when you face the land of the polar bears".
I know that James stipulated that we're leaving out synonyms for "right" and "left", but if you leave out everything in terms of which one could communicate roughly the left/right concept, you might not be left with much.
206
All languages tend to be specialized to the circumstances and society in which they're being used. It's just that with their all being tools of the same species with the same cognitive toolkit, it's really hard to tell which ones are "more complex" (they tend to develop complexities as needed which are tough to compare qualitatively or quantitatively) or "more expressive" (as they have this distressing habit of borrowing freely from one another, inventing new idioms and adapting, so it's nigh impossible to observe them in any theoretically "pure" state). Abstract thought experiments are completely useless when talking about any living language, hence your frustration.
Well if wikipedia is to be believed pidgin languages are less complex than other human languages.
And if human languages develop complexity as needed one would expect humans living in more complex environments to speak more complex languages.
And living languages elides the fact that some languages are more alive than others. As a language dies one would expect it to fall behind its healthier competitors in terms of complexity and expressive power.
206: Well if wikipedia is to be believed pidgin languages are less complex than other human languages.
Fair point, except pidgins are a specialized form of jargon not native to any community that are used in the early stages of contact (for trade or barter or whatever) between peoples with no common language. To what extent they're really "languages" is debatable. If they become anybody's native speech, they cease being pidgins and problems of comparative complexity are inevitably reintroduced.
And if human languages develop complexity as needed one would expect humans living in more complex environments to speak more complex languages.
Yeah, go ahead and have fun defining "more complex environments."
As a language dies one would expect it to fall behind its healthier competitors in terms of complexity and expressive power.
A dead language by definition ceases to adapt and change. The problem of comparative "complexity" wouldn't go anywhere, but yes, "expressive power" would suffer when a language stops being adapted to new circumstances and experiences.
"boo" been mentioned yet?
any simpler more primitive languages at any stage in human evolution. Which also seems unlikely.
I barely know how to think about this. I have a craziness about language. Ambiguity is complex. Specificity is simple. Or the opposite.
Is "tall thing with leaves" simpler in expressive and communicative practice than mesobalanus (oak)? Which stimulates the imagination more? Have we subtracted meaning with science? There is a weirdness about how we pretend language works.
I mean, we all know what Wittgenstein did with "chair" and "game" don't we? I am not willing to accept that more words create more meaning. Meaning is created between, or within, self and world. Words do not mediate that interface in a comprehensible way.
I'm kinda zen sometimes.
212
Yeah, go ahead and have fun defining "more complex environments."
It doesn't seem that hard. More variation in geographical features or climate or a more complex biosphere or a more complex human society. All increase the number of concepts the language needs to be able to handle. In general I would expect this to lead to larger vocabularies.
"Simpler" overall is a harder case to make.
Particularly when you consider that irrespective of their mother tongue, children tend to acquire language at the same age everywhere in the world, and that experiments looking to see if slips of the tongue are more common in some languages than others have found that no, they're not. There's lots of evidence that languages are all about equal in complexity (not that I expect any of it to convince James).
It doesn't seem that hard. More variation in geographical features or climate or a more complex biosphere or a more complex human society.
You haven't actually given this any thought, have you? Quick question: which is more "complex" an environment, New York City or Papua New Guinea? Show your work.
215
... There's lots of evidence that languages are all about equal in complexity (not that I expect any of it to convince James).
About equal was not the claim. In some sense all (healthy) humans are about equal in intelligence but that doesn't mean it is impossible to say some people are smarter than other people.
About equal was not the claim.
Fine, amend it to "so close in complexity it doesn't make sense to talk about".
Note that this is *not* true for orthography; there are definite differences in complexity there. But we're talking about spoken language.
Part of what makes this a silly argument is that to have it we'd need to quantify complexity of a language. I have the impression (which someone with more knowledge could correct, but I think I'm right) that English has an unusually large vocabulary because of all the duplicate words where we've got an Anglo-Saxon term for something and a Norman French term for the same thing that both survived. If you want to do the 'shooting randomly at the side of a barn and drawing targets around the bullet holes" thing, you could identify a larger vocabulary as 'more complex' and declare victory. Or start making laundry lists of grammatical things like the NYC English on/in line distinction, and call the language with the most peculiar features 'more complex'.
But what linguists mean, when they say that no natural language is more complex than any other, is that they haven't found any language that's different in its capacity to express complicated concepts. There's no phenomenon where Italians have to learn German before they can do analytic philosophy, because the ideas can't be expressed in Italian.
There is no Russian word for "freedom."
the potential to sound like a racist ass is about 100x greater than the potential to say anything meaningful about bantu vs slavic languages or whatever.
since the map of 'more complex environment' is (by definition) the language, i think it is theoretically impossible to back up that claim.
222: true, but I somehow doubt that's going to discourage him. It never has before now.
I am also not very impressed by McWhorter's calm assertion that this intimate 'up' doesn't exist in standard English, but only in black English. As noted above, there's an intimate 'up' (or 'down') in lots of types of English.
Mota/malta (old guy sitting on the stoop in Omaha variant)
chalice
lamb's bread
sinsemilla/sinse
220
But what linguists mean, when they say that no natural language is more complex than any other, is that they haven't found any language that's different in its capacity to express complicated concepts. There's no phenomenon where Italians have to learn German before they can do analytic philosophy, because the ideas can't be expressed in Italian.
How about mathematics? Do all languages have easy ways of expressing the concepts derivative or integral or tangent line etc?
English has added a large scientific vocabulary which seem to me to make it more expressive than English before the vocabulary was added or than a contemporary language without such a vocabulary.
I might accept that a language's complexity scales with the degree to which it is unknown to an average speaker
Never pay extra for really nice speakers. Your just wasting your money.
220
Part of what makes this a silly argument is that to have it we'd need to quantify complexity of a language. I have the impression (which someone with more knowledge could correct, but I think I'm right) that English has an unusually large vocabulary because of all the duplicate words where we've got an Anglo-Saxon term for something and a Norman French term for the same thing that both survived. ...
Well you if you eliminate synonyms I expect English still has a larger vocabulary. Anglo-Saxon and Norman French probably weren't identical in terms of vocabulary. And duplicate words may have shifted meaning a little so they don't mean exactly the same thing. And you have all the words added to express concepts which arose in the modern word like "airplane", "dotcom", "monopoly", "genetic" etc.
227
I might accept that a language's complexity scales with the degree to which it is unknown to an average speaker
So languages that incorporate a lot of specialized occupational jargon would be more complex. Or which have names for more species or more geographical or climatic features. Or probably a larger vocabulary in general.
222
the potential to sound like a racist ass is about 100x greater than the potential to say anything meaningful about bantu vs slavic languages or whatever
Well how about English today to English in 1800 or 1600. Hasn't the language added more than has been subtracted?
My point wasn't that English's vocabulary wasn't really larger than that of some other languages -- I'm pretty sure that it is, once you do the work of actually defining what you mean by the size of a vocabulary in a way that allows the comparison. My point was that saying that one language is more complex than another on the basis of counting words is drawing a target around a bullet hole -- English might have a larger vocabulary, another language might have many more verb forms, there's no way to tick items off a list and say that one language is more complex than another.
What I understand the 'all natural languages are equally complex/expressive' claim to mean is that there aren't natural languages that lack the capacity to express a concept that's expressible in another language. (They might need to borrow loan words for new vocabulary, the way English has throughout its history, but there's nothing about the structure of any language that precludes the expression of any concept.)
Hasn't the language added more than has been subtracted?
This isn't a meaningful question unless you can quantify 'more'. Which I'm fairly sure you can't.
Almost all languages have words for "left" and "right". A few languages do not. Those languages have other ways of conveying direction (e. g. using cardinal directions instead).
It's impressive to me how dead-certain James is about this issue, about which he clearly doesn't actually know anything. On the other hand, one of the reasons I like linguistics is that so many facts about languages seem so unlikely. And yet there they are! Language is cool.
235: It's impressive to me how dead-certain James is about this issue, about which he clearly doesn't actually know anything.
Must be the fault of all those union teachers he had growing up.
English has a relatively large vocabulary, but it has relatively simple morphology (very few affixes, very few verb tenses, no case, etc).
Part of the reason that languages are equally complex and equally expressive is that languages are symbolic systems used my many, many individual people (who, as James notes, vary in intelligence). Cognitive load seems like it is one of the limiting factors in how complex a language gets, with the result that when languages add complexity in one area they lose it in others.
The addition of fancy technological or scientific terms is really irrelevant- for one thing, all languages add and lose vocabulary all the time, and for another, LB is totally right that vocabulary size and complexity are not the same thing.
I always liked the asinine scheme for comparison where you'd take two common (translated) texts and see which could be compressed more via algorithm.
Of course that begs a ton of questions. Especially the whole "Darmok and Jalad at Tanagra" issue.
Still, fun times.
232
What I understand the 'all natural languages are equally complex/expressive' claim to mean is that there aren't natural languages that lack the capacity to express a concept that's expressible in another language. (They might need to borrow loan words for new vocabulary, the way English has throughout its history, but there's nothing about the structure of any language that precludes the expression of any concept.)
This is a fairly meaningless claim then, like saying all houses are the same size because you could always add on rooms.
235
It's impressive to me how dead-certain James is about this issue, about which he clearly doesn't actually know anything ...
So what is your view of pidgin languages? Just as complex and expressive or not actually languages?
Of course that begs a ton of questions.
For instance, will "beg the question" inevitably mean only "raise the question", or will it retain its original meaning, too?
Not languages. They are quasi-linguistic systems.
237
Part of the reason that languages are equally complex and equally expressive is that languages are symbolic systems used my many, many individual people (who, as James notes, vary in intelligence). Cognitive load seems like it is one of the limiting factors in how complex a language gets, with the result that when languages add complexity in one area they lose it in others.
So a language spoken by a group of greater average intelligence would be expected to be more complex?
a group of greater average intelligence
Oh, good. I was waiting for us to get here.
Like who, for example, James? What kind of group did you have in mind, that you think is of greater average intelligence than the other groups?
For instance, will "beg the question" inevitably mean only "raise the question", or will it retain its original meaning, too?
I meant it in the original sense: that methodology (if one wants to be very generous in calling it a methodology) would have to assume going in that the texts encode metaphor and other memetic-stuff in the same way in order to yield results at all.
243
Not languages. They are quasi-linguistic systems.
Speaking of drawing circles around the bullet holes ...
I mean, if you just want to wave your balls around, you should do that.
245
Like who, for example, James? What kind of group did you have in mind, that you think is of greater average intelligence than the other groups?
Modern humans vrs humans of 100,000 years ago for example.
Does your claim that all languages are equally complex depend on a claim that all groups of humans are equally intelligent?
246: Yeah, and I was just being an unhelpful wank on the edge of the conversation.
For instance, will "beg the question" inevitably mean only "raise the question", or will it retain its original meaning, too?
Interestingly, the original meaning of "beg the question" is unrelated to the English words "beg" and "question", instead being derived from the subcultural vernacular of philosophy.
The statement that all languages are "equally complex" is roughly a version of the strong Church-Turing thesis. Anything you can say in one language you can say in another language with only a polynomial increase in length. Similarly all universal computers are "equally complex." On the other hand some are much bigger. The same is certainly true of languages, languages with more speakers have more specialized vocabulary and so are larger.
You might argue that "complexity" and "size" aren't the right words for these two concepts, but certainly these are important and distinct concepts that need some names.
Oh good. 252 says roughly what I wanted to say much more incisively.
249: I haven't seen any studies about intelligence tests or linguistic structures from 100,000 years ago, so I'd have to review your data before I was comfortable making a claim about the relationship between them. Feel free to share it!
Pidgins are a very special weird case. For one thing because they're unstable, as soon as you have native speakers a real language develops. You can argue about whether you want to call them languages or not, but it's just a terminological point. When people say "all languages are equally complex" they certainly don't mean to include pidgins. That may be imprecise, but it's not changing the goalposts.
Intelligence is a very complicated notion. Some aspects of intelligence are easily modeled by a continuous parameter. It's completely unclear that linguistic intelligence (or whatever you want to call the brain structures that let you learn and use language) are like that. My understanding is that it's actually somewhat plausible that modern language developed very rapidly (in a generation or so) because you either have the ability to use language or you don't. (Obviously this requires some sort of exaptation to happen.) But people really don't know. We don't even know whether Neanderthals had language or not.
We also don't know whether language developed historically once or multiple times.
(I guess in some strict sense it's developed multiple times, see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Al-Sayyid_Bedouin_Sign_Language)
Feel free to share it!
And I would like to borrow your time machine, JBS; I promise I'll bring it back like new.
I don't know linguistics from apeshit, but it seems like the claim that all languages are "equally complex" is likely baloney, except maybe in the meaningless sense LB describes in 232.2. What they are is differently complex in unquantifiable ways, so there's no way to meaningful way compare their relative complexity, except along various individual axes (size of vocabulary, number of characters, number of cases/tenses, complexity of sound system, complexity of word-building system). If we agreed on some way to assign value across (and even within) all possible axes of linguistic complexity, almost inevitably (no matter what method of assigning values we chose) we'd find some languages more "complex" than others. Of course, those value assignments would becessarily be somewhat arbitrary, so the resulting scores wouldn't be especially meaningful.
255
... When people say "all languages are equally complex" they certainly don't mean to include pidgins ...
So what they actually mean is "all languages are equally complex except for the ones that aren't"?
No, James. They mean that they don't think pidgins are languages.
You can make up whatever oversimplified system you want (pig latin with no direction words and all words repeated two times) and then make claims about how that compares to other languages. You can compare pidgins to languages, too, if you want, and then make lots of claims about how the pidgins aren't as complex. That's true because it's the definition of "pidgin". If you think those are fun activities, go for it, but it doesn't have anything to do with what real languages are like.
256
... My understanding is that it's actually somewhat plausible that modern language developed very rapidly (in a generation or so) because you either have the ability to use language or you don't. (Obviously this requires some sort of exaptation to happen.) ...
So people think it is somewhat plausible that language utilizes some trait that evolved for some different reason, that was not used for more primitive languages as it evolved and was already perfected adapted for language when it started being used for language and could not be improved by further evolution in any way. This does not strike me as plausible.
It's not actually bullshit, there's a genuinely deep important observation here that grammatically all languages have a lot in common and all (non-pidgin) languages have complex universal grammars. Again "complexity" might not be the right word (if it makes you think about things like counting number of distinct phonemes as complexity), but it's a reasonable word choice (for example, it matches the use of the word in CS).
My understanding is that in addition to this "formal" sense of equal complexity, it's also that the things you mention (number of cases, number of tenses, number of phonemes, complexity of word building systems, etc.) are not correlated. Hence, there's not a reasonable basis for saying that there's some alternative notion of "complexity" which distinguishes languages.
(Caveat: I don't really know much about linguistics, just second hand stuff my dad knows from interpreting lingustics conferences. So listen to the actual experts here if they disagree with me.)
"No, that was Superman."
Don;t talk to me about heroes
Most of these men sing like surfs
Jesus was a black man
No Jesus was Batman
No, no, no, no, not at all
That was Bruce Wayne
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yHvcSjGpIuY&feature=related
264- I know! It's so implausible, and yet it seems to be what happened! Pretty neat!
and the bridge, which relevent of this thread:
Who got the biggest
Who got the biggest
Who got the biggest brain
are languages universally not the same as logic grammar?
that wasn't an argument, but a question.
it's also that the things you mention (number of cases, number of tenses, number of phonemes, complexity of word building systems, etc.) are not correlated.
More specifically, they are inversely correlated. More complexity in some areas means less complexity in other areas. More contrastive vowels goes with no tone system. More contrastive consonants goes with restricted syllable structures. Stricter syntactic requirements goes with less morphology. Larger vocabulary goes with shorter words. Etc.
(to be clear, those are all hypothetical examples, not universal rules).
264: Certainly some aspects of the evolution of language would have been used for some (non-language!!) form of communication on the way. I mean Chimps communicate (but are incapable of learning grammar). But "half a language" just isn't something that we see anywhere ever. Anyway I don't want to argue this point too hard because we actually don't know much at all here.
(Also, there are things that could have changed since language first developed, but not at the level of complexity. For example, it's possible that the first languages were sign languages and that modern vocal chords (allowing spoken languages) evolved later.)
"half a language" just isn't something that we see anywhere ever"
seems plausibly explained by human tendency toward sluttiness and genocide (and usefulness of 100% of a language)
are languages universally not the same as logic grammar?
This sentence is making me doubt all sorts of claims about language.
(Er, forgot to add the "except unstable pidgins without native speakers" caveat to the half-languages claim.)
But "half a language" just isn't something that we see anywhere ever.
Ignoring the precision of "half", isn't that what pidgin is?
Yeah, it's my understanding (deferring to Cecily who knows stuff and should correct me if I'm wrong) that as soon as you bring up native speakers of a pidgin, it stops being a pidgin and turns into a creole, which is a full language (that is, the parents still speak pidgin, but the kids speak a creole based on the same vocabulary). The grammar becomes consistent and all that sort of thing that pidgins don't have.
The point is that there's certain aspects of language acquisition which developmentally happen in children, not in adults. As a result, if you have something with no native speakers it's not surprising that it's a bit funny. Adult brains just don't have the same language acquisition abilities that young children's brains do.
(While we're talking about weird exceptions, it's worth pointing out that people argue about whether there's full recursion in Piraha.)
All the research on that seems so mired in controversy that it's hard to know what to think.
as soon as you bring up native speakers of a pidgin, it stops being a pidgin and turns into a creole
And if you add cream, it becomes a bisque.
More specifically, they are inversely correlated.
If this were empirically demonstrated (and the correlation was strong), that would indeed be very interesting. Is it? My hunch (based on similar past conversations I've had, not based on knowing anything at all myself) is that it's more just anecdotal evidence based on the perceptions of people who learn multiple languages, and that there's probably some weak correlation there, which is what you'd expect, but hardly anything that would support the idea that they "must" all balance out on net such that all langauges can be said to equally complex when viewed across all axes. It's more just that comparing the complexity of languages is impossible because we don't have any meaningful way to measure differences.
281: Yeah, though not having a full number system happens in plenty of languages, not just Piraha. There's good evidence that you have to teach people to think additively, and that without teaching people think that halfway between 1 and 16 is 4 (not 8 and a half). Basically having good notions of numbers is a mathematical discovery. (If you want to think of number systems as an aspect of the language itself, then this is a very limited setting where some languages are genuinely more complex. In some languages you actually can't say "there are 7 apples." Of course, until Archimedes you couldn't say the sentence "there are fewer than 10^63 grains of sand in the universe" in any language, so I don't think these issues should be thought of as properties of a language but rather as measuring the mathematical sophistication of the speakers of the language.)
This is the piece from RadioLab which discusses how early versions of Nicaraguan Sign Language seemed to leave its speakers with impoverished mental concepts, although they improved dramatically when the learned more mature versions of the language from later generation speakers. The story also discusses other languages that grew from small groups of deaf speakers which don't function as well as more mature languages.
I'm inclined to think that in extraordinary circumstances you do get languages of reduced complexity and expressiveness, and that these would be good models for the transition languages that must have been spoken by our ancestors as we moved from something like an animal signaling system to the full human languages we have today.
This doesn't imply, of course, that any mature natural languages used today are somehow dumber or spoken by groups of people that are of lower intelligence. I don't want to say "speakers of Hindi are stupid" or whatever. I just believe there have to be transitional forms between languages like the Vervish monkey language and human languages.
Some ways of measuring difference are (a) phoneme inventory (b) syllable structure (c) number of verb tenses (d) number of verb aspects (e) clause structure
plus more! People can and do measure differences. This is a large part of what the field of linguistics is about.
People can and do measure differences.
After stretching.
as soon as you bring up native speakers of a pidgin, it stops being a pidgin and turns into a creole
And if you add cream, it becomes a bisque.
And if you add pastor it becomes a basque.
287: I get that (which I said in 259), but there's no way to compare differences across various axes and sum them to get some aggregate complexity value.
If you add Basque to bisque, you become a cannibal (or a murderer with too many leftovers).
286: I don't know what that actual piece covers, but the Nicaragua situation as a whole is still the subject of some controversy and very little actual data has been made public. It doesn't seem completely clear what actually happened as far as the claimed no language -> pidgin -> creole -> new language development.
That said, the situation with deaf adolescents and adults being exposed to a language community for the first time is drastically different than any "normal" scenario, because as Upetgi(9) mentioned, adults' brains don't work as well as children's brains for language learning, and going through 15 years of your life with no language usually messes up your cognition and socialization pretty irreparably.
290: I mean, in theory there could be a single variable that did a good job predicting all the things we naively think of as complexity. It's not that you couldn't have a good notion of complexity that distinguishes languages, but that in practice no such notion works.
I poked around trying to find some studies, but didn't find anything great (as not an expert I don't really know where to look), but there do seem to be some interesting results out there like larger more complex societies tend to have simpler shorter words, but by contrast tend to have more phonemes.
290- but you seem to be saying that you think there are some languages that are more complex on all (most?) of the subscales, and other languages that are less complex on all/most of them. This isn't true. They balance out, across the board, mainly due to the fact that people have to be able to use them and so human cognitive-load capacity limits the overall complexity of a language at the upper end, and having a simpler language overall would reduce its expressiveness and usefulness, which limits the lower end. The result is that overall complexity does not vary much, even though particular aspects of a particular language may be markedly more or less complex than another.
The result is that overall complexity does not vary much, even though particular aspects of a particular language may be markedly more or less complex than another.
I completely buy this, but saying that "overall complexity does not vary much" is not the same thing as saying they're all "equally complex".
295: Oh. Well, that's what I meant by it. Sorry.
295: When you combine "Overall complexity does not vary much" with "There's no way to combine scales of complexity on all the different possible axes to come up with one objective measurement of overall complexity by which languages could be ranked" I think you can get to "There's no meaningful sense in which any actual language can be determined to be globally less complex than any other".
That's not an empty claim -- it could be the case that some languages were low-complexity across the board, on all or most of the possible scales of measurement of complexity, and then we could say that such languages were less complex even if we didn't have one scale of complexity to use. But it is in fact not the case (AFAIK) that there are any generally low-complexity languages out there.
To try to make the claims as precise as possible:
Claim 1: All non-pidgin (and possibly non-Piraha) languages have universal grammars which are equally complex in a formal "complexity theory" sense.
Claim 2: No one has found a meaningful variable matching our intuitive notion of overall complexity (not counting size of specialized vocabulary which obviously increases with the number of specialists who use the language) which would allow us to say with confidence that one language is "more complex" than another, with a few minor exceptions (like recent creoles seem to be slightly less "complex overall" than non-creole languages).
Both claims are often shortened to "all languages are equally complex." Like all short slogans, that's less accurate than a longer detailed claim. But I don't think it's a bad summary of the above two claims.
But it is in fact not the case (AFAIK) that there are any generally low-complexity languages out there.
Which isn't the same as saying there couldn't be one. Maybe some group had a real simple language, and were really happy because nobody could tell anybody else about their problems, but one day they all got killed because they couldn't say, "White men coming, we better hide for a bit."
(Er, obviously that's not "as precise as possible." I just meant more precise.)
There's a power-law exponent which characterizes word frequency in a given corpus. George Zipf noticed this first, and the idea has been used to argue that whale songs are not language. In the 90's, Wentian Li pointed out that random text generated by including the space as a character also had this frequency distribution.
A quantitative description of language is a goal that seems to attract crackpots, much as measuring intelligence does. Zipf's later work is completely nuts.
300: But surely it's evidence for the claim that there aren't any low-complexity languages out there.
George Zipf noticed this first
"Some time, Rock, when the department is up against it, when things are wrong and the breaks are beating the profs, ask them to go in there with all they've got and win just one for the Zipfer."
I don't have a problem with 298 or 299. 298 is exactly what I've been saying in this thread.
going through 15 years of your life with no language usually messes up your cognition and socialization pretty irreparably.
That's what I meant by talking about "exceptional circumstances." I thought that these sorts of circumstances could (and were) being used to make inferences about possible transitional stages of language. Sort of the same way brain lesion cases are used to make (tenuous) inferences about cognitive architecture.
Also, Cecily, I apologize for not thinking of you when i thought of Teo. Obviously you are a bigger expert here.
303: No, but if I hadn't have just pulled it out of my ass it would be evidence against the claim that there cannot be any low-complexity languages (i.e. that the human brain sets a high and a low bound for complexity within a relatively narrow range.)
Cool example: the Andamanese languages are thought to be isolated for 60 thousand years (since the first expansion of fully modern humans out of Africa) and still are fully complicated modern languages.
In the 90's, Wentian Li pointed out that random text generated by including the space as a character also had this frequency distribution.
What does this mean?
309 would be an evidence against 300.
Only in the "each additional black crow is evidence against the existence of white crows" sense.
Anyway, this conversation is turning into one of those "how do you prove a universal claim" ones. Mostly, you don't -- probably a better version of the complexity claim is that all the thousands of known languages seem to be of meaningfully equivalent complexity, and discovery of a meaningfully less complex natural language would be a huge, exciting anomaly. Not that it can be proven that it would be impossible for such a language to exist, but it'd be a big weird thing if they found one.
313: Only in the sense that you can't really prove a negative, but that is over-stating things since we can tie this into a theoretical framework. If you have a cognitive or cultural reason for expecting language to evolve in similar ways, the fact that actually independent languages evolve in similar ways isn't nothing. I don't know how many more people that isolated there are*, but that would seem to be where you'd look.
*that is, isolated and then contacted by people who write shit down. I know nobody has stayed isolated for that long.
I don't mean that it's nothing -- the reasons Cecily was giving for why the observed fact that all known natural languages are meaningfully equivalent in complexity (cognitive load, expressivity) make sense. It's reasonable and defensible equivalent complexity isn't an accident.
But it's the sort of thing where finding one counterexample among thousands of languages that fit the pattern wouldn't disprove anything -- your postulated simpler language in 300 isn't logically impossible, it just hasn't been found. If one like that was found (like the speculation about Piraha), it'd be really interesting to figure out why that language was an anomaly, but the general rule would be still be meaningful.
It's reasonable and defensible equivalent complexity isn't an accident.
I'm not claiming that the idiolect I speak is of equivalent complexity and expressivity to other natural languages, mind you.
I think what's missing from that sentence is a "to believe" between defensible and equivalent.
310.
Is the question what did he do? (calculate zipf exponent for random strings with word boundaries randomly generated) or is it what does that result mean? (Zipf exponents are less significant than at least Zipf thought, though they do mean something, viz birdsong and whale song).
None of this has anything to do with grammar. I've read Pinker, McWhorter, and Language Log; who else writes well about linguistics for educated laypeople? Is the Cambridge Encyclopedia good?
Is the question what did he do?
Yes. I don't understand this random text generation procedure you describe, or how it can produce a Zipf-like power law.
Here's the paper:
http://www.nslij-genetics.org/wli/pub/ieee92_pre.pdf
Wow. I'm sorry I missed the rest of this thread until now. One brief remark: considering empirical evidence of overall complexity to be the arbiter for expressivity is a fool's game.
267
I know! It's so implausible, and yet it seems to be what happened! Pretty neat!
I don't believe it for a minute. Is this actually widely believed? On what basis?
298
When you combine "Overall complexity does not vary much" with "There's no way to combine scales of complexity on all the different possible axes to come up with one objective measurement of overall complexity by which languages could be ranked" I think you can get to "There's no meaningful sense in which any actual language can be determined to be globally less complex than any other"
So what the claim that all languages are equal in complexity boils down to is - "we don't have a very good meaure of complexity so we will arbitrarily assign all pidgins a complexity of 1 and all other human languages a complexity of 2 and having done this we will now claim that all languages (except pidgins) are equal in complexity".
It doesn't seem, James, that you are very interested in learning anything about this issue, or understanding what the facts are like, or even understanding why people are disagreeing with you. You are welcome to believe or not believe whatever you like, but you probably shouldn't expect people to continue to engage you in discussion when your arguments consist of flat statements of disbelief and inaccurate, maximally unsympathetic caricatures of what other people are saying.
who else writes well about linguistics for educated laypeople?
David Crystal, maybe?
FWIW, I'm a bit concerned with the certainty with which some claims have been made by the linguistically informed, above. How long it took language to evolve, and whether all languages share a universal grammar aren't fully settled issues, and in some cases there isn't much in the way evidence that would settle the question [e.g. fossil records in the case of the evolution of full language use].
Hrm, I thought the latter (universal grammar shared by all languages) genuinely was settled. Though as I said, I'm not an expert and what I do know is well out of date.
On the historical point, I thought I was abundantly clear that we didn't know anything. ("We don't even know whether Neanderthals had language or not." "We also don't know whether language developed historically once or multiple times." "Anyway I don't want to argue this point too hard because we actually don't know much at all here." etc.)
324
... your arguments consist of flat statements of disbelief ...
OK I will elaborate a little on why I don't believe the account in 264.
Evolution generally makes changes incrementally. A mutation occurs which changes a gene from form A to form B. Form B gives a selection advantage and spreads throughout the population. The change is generally not too large as a large change is less likely to be favorable. You can also imagine cases that require several genes to mutate at once to obtain an advantage but again the more genes involved the less likely (and the harder to propagate through the population).
Creationists sometimes use this to argue against evolution claiming this or that feature is too complex and finely tuned to have evolved incrementally. Defenders of evolution respond (sometimes with a certain amount of handwaving) by postulating ways of developing the feature incrementally progressing through more primitive but still useful forms. This does not seem all that difficult in the case of human language, less complex versions like pidgins are still useful. And for any given level of language there is still an advantage to speaking and understanding it well encouraging the development of brain features that can also handle more complicated languages.
So it is easy enough to construct a narrative in which (once some threshold is passed) where an early primitive language spurs development of language aquisition and processing capacity (as well as improvement in voice and hearing of course) which in turn allow more elaborate languages to be used which can use still more language processing capacity. This feedback cycle could cause rapid (in evolutionary terms) development of language and language processing ability.
Given the above standard evolutionary explanation which is (as far as I know) consistent with the empirical evidence I don't know why you would believe that something much more unusual (in terms of how evolution normally proceeds) happened. This would seem to require some strong evidence that the normal evolutionary processes could not have worked. Which is why I asked (in my usual tactful way) what this evidence was.
I think exaptation is not nearly so unusual nor as nonstandard a part of evolution as you're making it out to be.
re: 326
No, it's definitely not settled. That said, there aren't, as far as I'm aware, any definite and agreed-by-all exceptions, either. I have a vague impression -- from my reading of various linguistics and anthropology blogs, and the popular science press* -- that the situation is a bit more fluid and less settled now than it perhaps was a while back. It'd take me a while to gather together links, though, sorry!
* I studied linguistics formally at one time but I moved over to philosophy so my formal education in linguistics is over a decade out of date, so it may be that I'm wrong in my impression.
I have a friend who researches linguistic universals [she's cited in the wiki article on same]; I should chase her up on the current state of the art.
328
I think exaptation is not nearly so unusual nor as nonstandard a part of evolution as you're making it out to be.
I don't think I am claiming exaptation is unusual or nonstandard, it is one of the things that allow incremental changes to develop complex features. What would be unusual would be that when a feature is adopted for a new use it is already perfectedly adapted (instead of just marginally useful with the potential for improvement) for that new use. This is unlikely on its face.
Plus, it seems to me that you should expect brain evolution to be weird in a lot of ways. For example, to some extent the brain can reallocate processing power somewhat easily (look at research on blind people's brains), so growing up in a more language rich environment can cause some non-darwinian brain changes. I think being too dogmatic about how brain evolution had to have worked is a mistake.
(Of course, you could be right. For example, it's often the case that evolution works by first having certain scaffolding which then gets destroyed later, and even if you think that modern humans can't really have half a language, it's still possible that ancient humans could.)
I'm basically with JBS on the evolution of language.
This idea that language evolved from a single, dramatic exaption seems to come from Chomsky, and is mostly motivated by Chomskian assumptions about language. Because Chomsky is convinced that no empirical evidence could ever be relevant to individual language aquisition, he finds it hard to imagine that the species as a whole could adopt some halfway language as a result of interacting with the environment. Language must be a single change for the same reason it must be innate. The idea that it is one huge exaption then gets dropped in because it is able to explain such a large jump.
But this is all driven by assumptions we don't need to make. It seems more likely that language, tool use, large scale social cooperation, and a bunch of other stuff all coevolved really rapidly, with each change pushing bigger brain sizes.
I also am fond of the idea that sex selection played a big role here, because the ladies like a smooth taking lover man.
All this with the added caveats that any ideas I have are just moderately well informed speculation, and that the best ideas out there are just slightly better informed speculation.
I also am fond of the idea that sex selection played a big role here, because the ladies like a smooth taking lover man to listen to them.
Fixed.
Well, I only do linguistics as my day job so I don't bother keeping as up to date as I should, but universal grammar (and linguistic universals generally) certainly aren't settled.