GalacticCactus Forum
Forums => English & Linguistics => Topic started by: Porter on April 09, 2007, 08:03:44 AM
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So*, I'm finally reading Language Myths, which Jonathon was kind enough to loan to me.
I find it very interesting, but it's also bugging me a few ways.
For example the idea that English is better suited to discussing nuclear physics tha Maori is refuted with the basic argument "Poppycock! You only say that because of its rich inheritence of words and phrases which make it easy to discuss scientific notions in general, and nuclear physics in particular."
Well, duh. That's what makes English better suited to the task.
Of course, their real point was that English isn't inherently superior to the task -- over time, Maori could develop a perfectly adequate vocabulary just like English did. This, to me, is something I'm perfectly willing to believe, but the author didn't seem willing to make any concession to the myth's POV.
Maybe it was for political/P.C. reasons that he was unwilling to do so. In the introduction, IIRC, it equated considering one language superior to another with racism and sexism. That struck me as really odd -- if it's true that one language isn't superior to another, why don't you just show it to me logically instead of trying to get me to respond emotionally with this talk of racism and sexism?
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I believe that was one of the chapters that I found somewhat disappointing. I don't remember all the arguments, so I'll have to go off of what you said and what I remember.
It is true that it's harder to discuss something in a particular language if that language lacks the proper vocabulary words. For most ordinary discussions, this is probably not a problem, but for something highly technical like nuclear physics, you might very well have difficulties. You'd either have to coin or borrow new words or use a lot of circumlocution.
However, the root of the myth is that some languages—namely, those spoken by primitive tribes—are incapable of expressing complex, abstract, or nuanced ideas. This often goes hand-in-hand with the idea that such languages have no grammar (working under the assumption that "more grammar"—whatever that means—means more ability to communicate).
There's also the idea that languages are better suited to communication about particular subjects, as though they are people with their own unique talents. There's a great post on Language Log about that here (http://itre.cis.upenn.edu/~myl/languagelog/archives/004199.html). The idea that French is better for legal writing than German or English or any other language with a specialized legal vocabulary is pretty ridiculous.
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However, the root of the myth is that some languages—namely, those spoken by primitive tribes—are incapable of expressing complex, abstract, or nuanced ideas.
Yeah, I got that -- I just thought his point was unfortunately weakened by extending it beyond credibility.
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Agreed.
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What? I came in here for a good argument. (http://www.jumpstation.ca/recroom/comedy/python/argument.html)
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Oh, so you think you can just show up on a forum and say, "Hey, monkeys, argue this topic for me!" Well, sorry to disappoint, but this monkey dances for NO ONE. :pirate:
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Of course, their real point was that English isn't inherently superior to the task -- over time, Maori could develop a perfectly adequate vocabulary just like English did. This, to me, is something I'm perfectly willing to believe, but the author didn't seem willing to make any concession to the myth's POV.
That's almost the exact opposite of the point that the Bill Bryson book about the English language makes.
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Which one—Mother Tongue, or Made in America? I've heard bad things about the first, and I don't know anything about the latter.
Also, what do you mean by exact opposite? That English is superior because of its vocabulary?
Edit: I just read some of the reviews of The Mother Tongue on Amazon. Hoo boy. This book sounds like a disaster. But then again, it was written by a journalist. <_<
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Mother Tongue. I wasn't positive that was the name, and I was running out the door to lunch when I wrote that earlier post.
Essentially, he makes the case that English is uniquely suited to be what it's becoming (the common language of the world). Because of its versatility, longevity, and flexibility. I'm afraid I can't explain it without screwing it up, but it's an interesting read.
I'd be happy to send it to you when I finish it, if you like.
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Mother Tongue is one of the books to which, according to the introduction, Language Myths was written as a response.
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Essentially, he makes the case that English is uniquely suited to be what it's becoming (the common language of the world). Because of its versatility, longevity, and flexibility. I'm afraid I can't explain it without screwing it up, but it's an interesting read.
Oh, gag. That really is akin to racism in a lot of ways. You could make equally valid arguments about why whites are uniquely suited to run the world—and you can easily make a lot of good counter-arguments to show why they're false.
I'd be happy to send it to you when I finish it, if you like.
Sure. I'll probably hate it, but I think sometimes it's valuable to read bad arguments to better appreciate the good ones.
Porteiro: I think I remember that now that you mention it.
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That really is akin to racism in a lot of ways.
This analogy was one of the things that put me off with Language Myths, but I'm having trouble articulating exactly why.
It's not like I have a bone to pick -- if anything, I'd say that English is a pretty poor choice for a lingua franca if for no other reason than because of its irregular spelling.
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This analogy was one of the things that put me off with Language Myths, but I'm having trouble articulating exactly why.
Perhaps because language is not something intrinsic to a person, as race is? That is, you can change your language (theoretically, at least), but not your race? If that's the case, then I'd agree. "Languagism" is not as bad as racism, but it usually goes unnoticed and is often celebrated or encouraged.
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Bryson says that the irregular spelling is falling out of style as we speak.
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Maybe a little bit, but I don't anticipate seeing enuff accepted as a valid alternative spelling in my lifetime.
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What did you mean by 'irregular spelling'? I don't think any language is immune to misspellings.
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Irregular spellings and misspellings are not the same thing. A misspelling is simply spelling the word in a way other than the established one. Irregular spelling is spelling that is not phonetic (or at least not consistently so).
It's probably true that all languages have a little bit of irregularity in their spellings, but that's because pronunciation evolves and leaves the established spelling behind.
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In Portuguese, the pronunciation and spelling have an extremely high correspondence. Exceptions to this are rare, especially in comparison to English.
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That's what I thought you meant. In that case, I disagree about enuff. I wouldn't be surprised to see that as a valid spelling in my lifetime.
It chills my bones to think that, but the way l33t speak is going I wouldn't be surprised at all.
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I wouldn't have any problem with a well-thought-out system of spelling reform in America (or across all English-speaking countries). I mean, it would be a difficult changeover, but I wouldn't think that English was going to pot or anything like that. Leetspeak is a different issue, though.
I also don't think spelling reform is going to make it very far. The handful of differences that separate American and British spelling are pretty mild in comparison to enuff. More recent attempts like thru and tonite failed pretty miserably.
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In what way have they failed? Seems to me that they're still gaining ground.
I'm pretty strict about spelling, for example, but I use thru and tonite when I text message. YMMV, of course.
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Leetspeak is a different issue, though.
How so?
I also don't think spelling reform is going to make it very far.
I agree. It just ain't-a gonna happen.
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Perhaps they are gaining ground—I don't have the historical data to show one way or the other, though. But I do know that I never see them in edited works like newspapers or books. As long as that is the case, they'll be considered marginal at best.
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Leetspeak is a different issue, though.
How so?
Leetspeak is the replacement of regular letters with other symbols or combinations of symbols. How is that in any way the same as spelling reformation that makes English spelling regular and phonetic?
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OK, I agree with you there. I was thinking of general IM-speak, not purposely obfuscated leetspeek, which I h8.
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Perhaps they are gaining ground—I don't have the historical data to show one way or the other, though. But I do know that I never see them in edited works like newspapers or books. As long as that is the case, they'll be considered marginal at best.
But wouldn't those two be the last places you would see reformist spellings?
How about alright? Do you see that one in newspapers, cause I do?
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But wouldn't those two be the last places you would see reformist spellings?
I don't think so. Most of our American spelling reforms came from Noah Webster, a dictionary maker—hardly a grassroots campaign. I think that a newspaper in Chicago tried using thru and nite early in the 1900s, but they gave up on it a little while later. In most countries, spelling reform comes from the top down—some sort of government organization. I'm just speculating, but I imagine you'd see them show up first in edited, published works and then trickle down to ordinary people.
How about alright? Do you see that one in newspapers, cause I do?
I don't know if I've seen it in newspapers. Maybe I have, but I don't remember. I know it does show up sometimes. I use it myself, even though (and sometimes because) it makes Rivka wince.
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Trickle-Down Spellonomics!
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While reading, I keep running into situations where they present evidence, and then pull out of a hat a conclusion that, as far as I can tell, is not supported from the evidence they've presented. It makes it look like they've been looking for evidence to support their conclusion instead of forming conclusions based on the evidence, but I suppose that it might just be that each one of these essays is really short and there just isn't enough space to really develop their arguments. Also, it might be that if they really developed their arguments, it would be way over my head. Nevertheless, these essays do not inspire confidence in me for their arguments nor their methods.
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Minor nitpick. In the chapter about whether some languages are harder to learn than others, it says that since writing systems and spelling are considered "outisde" language, they won't be considered, since it's possible to switch from one writing system to a completely different one without changing the language. This is a convincing point, except for the fact that one of the earlier chapters in this same book about language was all about spelling. It made me wonder if they didn't want to include that aspect of language in this chapter because it doesn't support their conclusion.
I'm not convinced that is the case, however, because the chapter does continue to show some ways in which certain languages are easier to learn than others. Maybe they didn't address writing systems because there wasn't enough space to do so, and just gave a lame excuse.
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I've probably been more annoyed by the chapter "Do Women Talk Too Much?" First of all, that hardly seems like a question that linguists are uniquely qualified to answer, but we'll let that slide.
First they produced evidence that it's actually men who talk more in relatively formal settings such as board room meetings, classrooms, discussions created to talk about specific subjects, etc.. Then we get this quote:
So on this evidence we must conclude that the stereotype of the garrulous woman reflects sexist prejudice rather than objective reality.
Well, that very well may be the case, but there's no way you can conclude that from the evidence you've shown. The stereotype of the talkative woman (which really seems to be a thing from from generations past, in my experience) is mostly centered around familiar, informal settings such as within the family. So far you've only discussed relatively formal settings where type-A personalities tend to dominate talking time. Let's not be so quick to play the sexism card, OK?
Only after making that conclusion does it even bring up the idea of talking in less formal settings. No surprise here, but it turns out that women talk more in informal, relaxed settings.
The book makes sure to mention, though that "men still talked more in nearly a third of these informal studies". Why do they say that men talk more in nearly a third of these studies instead of saying that women talk more in over two-thirds of these studies? I suspect it's because that would make it sound like they were supporting an obviously sexist and wrong myth. :sarcasm:
Later, they made a truly fascinating point that people's perception of how much women talk in semi-formal situations is drastically skewed -- women can be talking less them men as far as time lengths are concerned, but the perception will be that women are taking up more time than the men. Fascinating stuff -- tell me more!
Then they say:In other words, if women talk at all, this may be perceived as 'too much' by men who expect them to provide a silent, decorative background in many social contexts.
o_O. That didn't seem called for.
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Like I said before (though this was a little while back), I was rather disappointed with the book as a whole. Some chapters were good, but most were a little weak, and at least a few were pretty bad. The thing that saved it for me was that I could fill in some of those holes with stuff I learned in class. But since the book is intended for non-linguists, it kind of fails in that regard.
Some Languages Are Harder Than Others
There is at least a little truth to this one, especially if you take writing systems into account. It does make it easier to set aside writing (which is artificial and in many ways distinct from spoken language) and just consider the spoken language. The reality is that for most people around the world, it's easier to learn a language that's close to your own. That's why it's easy for English speakers to learn Spanish, French, or German, harder for us to learn Russian or Hindi, and harder still to learn Finnish or Dyirbal or Cree.
Some people say that it's false to say that one language is more complex than another, but this is not entirely true. Creoles, which are full-fledged languages that arise from pidgins, are rather simple in their syntax and inflectional systems. Complexity in those systems usually arises over time, and creoles just haven't been around long enough to have accumulated all those little grammatical oddities.
Also, languages that are very widely spoken tend to lose some of their rough edges, while languages that are spoken only by a village or tribe tend to hang on to those difficult aspects. In the book I'm reading right now, John McWhorter's The Power of Babel, he says that speakers of Cree are still putting the finishing touches on learning the grammar at age 10. For most people worldwide, they've got the spoken grammar down by age 5. It's just a matter of learning vocabulary from that point on.
A while back on Hatrack, Lalo said something about how if aliens came down to Earth, they'd learn Spanish first because it's the easiest, most logical language. It's precisely this sort of statement that the chapter is trying to refute. Spanish may have a very simple phonology and mostly regular spelling, but it still has grammatical gender and a boatload of verbal inflections. But for the most part, for most people, the difficulty in learning a language depends on how close it is to your native language.
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When we were hiking in Zion National Park, we ran into some people from Denmark. We mostly spoke to the twenty-something man (I'm guessing his English was better than the woman's . . . his mother's?). He said that he knew German as well as English. I don't remember how it came up, but he said that English had been much easier for him to learn because we often have a word for a concept that would take a phrase to say in German (and some other languages he spoke). I wouldn't have thought this would make the language easier to learn, but apparently it did for him.
Aren't German and Danish more closely related than English and Danish? Do you have any input on this little anecdote, Jonathon?
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Women Talk Too Much
First off, for a really thorough and fascinating treatment of this subject, I'd highly recommend Deborah Tannen's You Just Don't Understand. It's also written for a general audience, but she goes into a lot more depth and detail than the chapter in Language Myths. The only problem I saw with it is that she uses a lot of examples from literature, but most of her examples come from real life, so it doesn't weaken her point too much.
The myth in its canonical form is that men use 7,000 words a day and that women use 20,000 (the numbers may vary in different versions, but women always use between two and three times as many). These numbers were apparently fabricated out of thin air.
The truth is that on average, there aren't very significant differences between how much men and women talk. I don't remember what the book says, but I suspect that many of those studies showed that they're about equal, not that women talk more in two-thirds of them.
Remind me, is there an example in there about a teacher who felt like he was spending 90 percent of his time just trying to get the girls to talk 50 percent of the time? Or did I read that elsewhere. 'Cause that was pretty eye-opening, I think. There definitely is a perception that women talk too much, and it's still alive and well today.
There have also been a bunch of Language Log posts on this subject (in response to a horrible pop pseudo-science book called The Female Brain. They're more technical than either the Language Myths chapter or You Just Don't Understand, but that's mostly because they use a lot of statistics, not because they use a lot of linguistic terminology (if I remember right, anyway). I can dig up some links to some of the better posts on the topic if you'd like.
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When we were hiking in Zion National Park, we ran into some people from Denmark. We mostly spoke to the twenty-something man (I'm guessing his English was better than the woman's . . . his mother's?). He said that he knew German as well as English. I don't remember how it came up, but he said that English had been much easier for him to learn because we often have a word for a concept that would take a phrase to say in German (and some other languages he spoke). I wouldn't have thought this would make the language easier to learn, but apparently it did for him.
Aren't German and Danish more closely related than English and Danish? Do you have any input on this little anecdote, Jonathon?
Nope. Not really, anyway. Danish is a North Germanic Language, while English and German are West Germanic. English does have a fairly significant North Germanic influence due to the Viking invasions during the late Old English period, though. But German is a historically conservative language, while English is a much more liberal one. I don't know where Danish falls.
But I don't know how much this plays into what he said or if it does at all. I know hardly anything about Danish, so I have no idea whether it'd be easier for a Danish speaker to learn German or English.
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Remind me, is there an example in there about a teacher who felt like he was spending 90 percent of his time just trying to get the girls to talk 50 percent of the time? Or did I read that elsewhere. 'Cause that was pretty eye-opening, I think. There definitely is a perception that women talk too much, and it's still alive and well today.
Yes -- this is the part that where I responded "Tell me more!". Here's the passage from the book:
Another study reported that a male science teacher who managed to create an atmosphere in which girls and boys contributed more equally to discussion felt that he was devoting 90% of his attention to the girls. And so did his male pupils. They complained vociferously that the girls were getting too much talking time.
I'd like to know more specifics about this. Were the boys trying to participate more than the girls were, so that when a boy raised his hand, he had a very low chance of being called to speak, but a girl raising her hand had a very high chance of being called on? I can see how that could produce a skewed perception of how much attention the two groups were given, without it necessarily being attributed to sexism.
Yes, I'd love it if you'd dig up those links for me. :)
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For starters, here (http://itre.cis.upenn.edu/moveabletype/mt-search.cgi?IncludeBlogs=2&search=%22brizendine%22) are all the posts that mention the author of The Female Brain, Louann Brizendine. I'll go through them later and pick out the better ones.
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How about alright? Do you see that one in newspapers, cause I do?
I don't know if I've seen it in newspapers. Maybe I have, but I don't remember. I know it does show up sometimes. I use it myself, even though (and sometimes because) it makes Rivka wince.
:P
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I'm reading Mother Tongue. Parts of it are interesting, but his sources are almost always articles written by other journalists, so he perpetuates language myths that other journalists have stated as fact.
The worst part of it is that the audio book is read by somebody with the most insufferable snobby British accent I've ever heard. I know that prejudice isn't pretty, but there it is.
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Oh, and I finished Language Myths. Thanks. There were some good parts and some bad parts, but it was worth reading.
Let me quickly share one more chapter which bugged me -- it was the one bout the myth that Appalachians speak Elizabethan English.
Now, on the face of it, this is absurd for many reasons, which the book communicates very well. First, language doesn't stop changing for any group, even if they're cut off from the rest of society. Second, the settlers of Appalachia didn't even speak Elizabethan English anymore.
So far so good.
But then the chapter spent pages railing about the fact that people keep claiming the myth as true even though there haven't been any studies to back up their claim.
But then it admits that there are no studies which show that Appalachians don't speak Elizabethan English, since it is obvious to all linguists that the myth is false.
Which means that the author is committing the very same sin that he berates others for.
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This chapter is also an example of a problem that occurred repeatedly in the book -- they'd set up an extreme, strawmanish version of the myth and debunk that, while it would be much more interesting to look and see what, if any, truth there is to the myth.
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Oh, and I finished Language Myths. Thanks. There were some good parts and some bad parts, but it was worth reading.
Let me quickly share one more chapter which bugged me -- it was the one bout the myth that Appalachians speak Elizabethan English.
Now, on the face of it, this is absurd for many reasons, which the book communicates very well. First, language doesn't stop changing for any group, even if they're cut off from the rest of society. Second, the settlers of Appalachia didn't even speak Elizabethan English anymore.
Not only this, but the ancestors of the settlers of the Appalachians never spoke the same dialect as Elizabeth and Shakespeare. They came from a different part of England.
So far so good.
But then the chapter spent pages railing about the fact that people keep claiming the myth as true even though there haven't been any studies to back up their claim.
But then it admits that there are no studies which show that Appalachians don't speak Elizabethan English, since it is obvious to all linguists that the myth is false.
Which means that the author is committing the very same sin that he berates others for.
I don't remember the chapter in detail, because it was about four and a half months ago that I read it, but I don't remember seeing this as much of a problem. If someone makes a claim with very little supporting evidence, and the claim is easily debunked with a handful of facts, then do you really need to do a study to prove that the claim is false? Also, I'm not so sure that there have never been studies on the issue, but I haven't really looked into it.
This chapter is also an example of a problem that occurred repeatedly in the book -- they'd set up an extreme, strawmanish version of the myth and debunk that, while it would be much more interesting to look and see what, if any, truth there is to the myth.
This does sum up the problems with the book pretty well. One of the worse examples that springs to mind is the "some languages have no grammar" chapter. Total strawman. The same idea was covered infinitely better in The Power of Babel.
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This chapter is also an example of a problem that occurred repeatedly in the book -- they'd set up an extreme, strawmanish version of the myth and debunk that, while it would be much more interesting to look and see what, if any, truth there is to the myth.
This does sum up the problems with the book pretty well. One of the worse examples that springs to mind is the "some languages have no grammar" chapter. Total strawman. The same idea was covered infinitely better in The Power of Babel.
While I've nitpicked about some other issues I've had, I agree that this is the big one. I wonder if it's a consequence of the format they chose -- debunking common language myths. If they choose a version of a myth that's not debunkable, then they've "failed".
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I don't think so. I think the same topics could've been covered better—better supporting facts, better arguments, and so on.