GalacticCactus Forum
Forums => English & Linguistics => Topic started by: Noemon on December 11, 2007, 09:52:45 PM
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I was talking to somebody today about languages, and they asserted that modern English was more versatile than other languages. Their argument was that because of its history--germanic roots, heavy French influence thanks to William the Conquorer, long exposure and close proximity to Celtic languages, and its adoption as a trade language in modern times--English allowed greater nuance of experssion, in general, than other languages do. This doesn't seem...likely to me. I mean, all languages that are relatively healthy and mature today have had significant exposure to other languages, and probably in similar sorts of circumstances. And while English certainly is an important trade language, it's certainly not the only one. Borrowing and coinage happen in all languages, pretty much at the rate that new ideas are learned from other cultures or come up with natively, and if there is a topic of particular interest to speakers of a given language, they'll generally develop a more nuanced vocabulary to deal with that subject (German with philosophy, for example). The person I was talking to is a polyglot, though, whereas I'm monolingual (more or less), so they have much more practical experience with other languages (all Romance, though) than I do. Am I just misinformed?
If there's anyplace I can turn for thoughts on this, it's here. :) So...thoughts?
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How can English be more versatile? The subjunctive is in danger of being killed of by benign neglect, no one respects the "less" v. "fewer" distinction . . . !
;)
If they meant that English has more synonyms and more individual words than many other languages, I believe that has some basis in fact. (One source (http://oncampus.richmond.edu/academics/journalism/chal.html) that seems to support my recollection)
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I don't like that there aren't words in English for things that I want to say, so I have to describe them instead of name them.
But I guess you get that in other languages as well. In every language other than English there are tons of things I don't know the names for, but that's because I don't know those languages.
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I don't like that there aren't words in English for things that I want to say, so I have to describe them instead of name them.
There's a certain point at which that just gets silly to have a new word for every nuance of meaning instead of using basic words and using them to describe. Defenestration (Jon Boy's example, and a fun word to know) comes to mind.
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I'm not talking about nuance of meaning. We have no word for your spouse's family. We have to call that relationship "mother-in-law", "father-in-law" etc. We have no word to distinguish between blood-relation aunt or uncle vs. one by marriage. We have to say,"my mother's sister" or "my mother's brother's wife" to clarify the meaning. We can distinguish between boys and girls, aunts and uncles, grandmothers and grandfathers, mother and fathers, but not between male and female cousins.
We don't have a word for that dent on your upper lip. For Pete's sake! It's right in the middle of your face! How come we never got around to naming that? We have a name for all the other parts of the face.
We have no word for that homey feeling that you get when you come in from work, take off your shoes, and can finally be at ease.
We have no word for that comfortable lazy feeling that makes us feel as if it is too much effort to reach for the remote control to change the channel, so we just linger in that state watching something we don't like rather than disturb it. Because once disturbed, it is hard to achieve again. What's the name for that feeling? There is none in English.
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English also lacks words to describe flavors. We don't have a word to describe that puckery chalkiness that you get from eating an unripe persimmon. We don't have a word to describe the characteristic taste of meat, besides "meatiness", which isn't really right. We don't have a word to describe the explosive sensation you get from eating horseradish or wasabi. It's not "sharp" or "bitter" or "hot". It's something else that we don't have a name for.
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If they meant that English has more synonyms and more individual words than many other languages, I believe that has some basis in fact. (One source (http://oncampus.richmond.edu/academics/journalism/chal.html) that seems to support my recollection)
That was definitely a large part of their argument. Thanks rivka!
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Is that (the article rivka linked to) right? Does English really have 6 times more words than French, 5 times more than Russian, and ~3 times more than German?
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One evidence of this would be that an English to French Dictionary is much thicker than a French to English dictionary.
But precise word counts are a tricky thing to come by.
I heard a "Word of the year" on the radio today (just before the news that Alex Trebek had a heart attack) which was "root" meaning to do well in a videogame or something like that.
One argument for language being alive is that it responds to survival pressures and mutates. English is simply a mutant. My Latin teacher called it "The Bastard Tongue" (when she wasn't singing mocking songs about me during my all too frequent absences, I mean, I did miss 40 days that year.) I think of it more as Franken tongue, or possibly Tur-Duc-tongue. It's the club sandwich of languages.
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We can distinguish between boys and girls, aunts and uncles, grandmothers and grandfathers, mother and fathers, but not between male and female cousins.
That would easily be solved by adding gender to all words, like primo/prima.
I'd rather the occasional inconvenience of having to use two words to say "female cousin" than then the constant inconvenience of remembering whether my shirt is a boy or a girl.
We don't have a word for that dent on your upper lip. For Pete's sake! It's right in the middle of your face! How come we never got around to naming that? We have a name for all the other parts of the face.
Isn't that called the cupid's bow?
We have no word for that homey feeling that you get when you come in from work, take off your shoes, and can finally be at ease.
We have no word for that comfortable lazy feeling ...
Speculation: I'm not sure that individual language words can keep hold of that much subtlety. If there were such a word, unless it were rooted pretty strongly in our shared cultural understanding (and it's possible for only so many words to do so), people would start using it for things a shade off from what you're talking about. Pretty soon its meaning would really be nothing more than contentment, and we already have that word.
I heard a "Word of the year" on the radio today (just before the news that Alex Trebek had a heart attack) which was "root" meaning to do well in a videogame or something like that.
The word of the year is actually woot/w00t.
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I'm thinking of the word love. That's a word that has so many meanings that it's almost useless as a word. "I love you" can mean so many things in so many situations that unless you know the context of the statement, you have no idea what that phrase actually means.
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Is that (the article rivka linked to) right? Does English really have 6 times more words than French, 5 times more than Russian, and ~3 times more than German?
I don't know how accurate the numbers are, but I have definitely heard them many times. I guess one question is how complete dictionaries tend to be in each country. Keep in mind that France has a government agency that determines which words are acceptable, so pretty much all slang would presumably be omitted from their official dictionaries.
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I wonder if it's really fair to count all of the Oxford Unabridged as part of the English Language. If you take a small group of well-educated people like, say, the folks in this thread, the percentage of words in the OU that are known well enough for us all to be able to communicate with each other with them is going to be tiny.
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I guess "w00t" just made it into Websters today...
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We have no word for that comfortable lazy feeling that makes us feel as if it is too much effort to reach for the remote control to change the channel, so we just linger in that state watching something we don't like rather than disturb it. Because once disturbed, it is hard to achieve again. What's the name for that feeling? There is none in English.
I call it zoning.
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I ran across this bit in wikipedia about an apparent deficiency in English. The fact is, English has many many words for "know" but none of them are used discretely to mean specific kinds of knowing. I'd also question if the uses of these words are discrete in the languages described:
Many (but not all) philosophers thus think there is an important distinction between "knowing that" and "knowing how", with epistemology primarily interested in the former. This distinction is recognised linguistically in many languages but not in English.
In French (as well as in Portuguese and Spanish), for example, to know a person is 'connaître' ('conhecer' / 'conocer'), whereas to know how to do something is 'savoir' ('saber' in both Portuguese and Spanish). In Greek language the verbs are ??????? (gnorízo) and ???? (kséro), respectively. In Italian the verbs are 'conoscere' and 'sapere' and the nouns for 'knowledge' are 'conoscenza' and 'sapienza', respectively. In the German language, it is exemplified with the verbs "kennen" and "wissen." "Wissen" implies knowing as a fact, "kennen" implies knowing in the sense of being acquainted with and having a working knowledge of. But neither of those verbs do truly extend to the full meaning of the subject of epistemology.
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To address the first post, I'd call that sort of view of one's language highly linguocentric. If you made those sort of statements about the English people rather than the English language, people would call you a racist.
In my experience, people who make those kinds of statements about the perfectness of English usually don't have much experience with foreign languages. Sure, we may have a larger vocabulary than other languages, but that's only one way to measure a language. Our language is rather impoverished when it comes to grammatical cases and verb conjugations, for one thing.
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We don't have a word for that dent on your upper lip. For Pete's sake! It's right in the middle of your face! How come we never got around to naming that? We have a name for all the other parts of the face.
Isn't that called the cupid's bow?
I believe that's used to describe the shape of the upper lip, not just the dent. The only word I know for the dent is "philtrum." Of course, I always forget it and have to look it up again, so I guess I don't really know it.
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pooka: In French, connaître and savoir are indeed distinct. I believe the same is true of the German wissen and kennen, too. English used to have the distinction between wit and know, but wit fell out of use and know took over.
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We don't have a word for that dent on your upper lip. For Pete's sake! It's right in the middle of your face! How come we never got around to naming that? We have a name for all the other parts of the face.
Nasolacrimal groove.
Edit: no, wait, that's something else.
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pooka: In French, connaître and savoir are indeed distinct. I believe the same is true of the German wissen and kennen, too. English used to have the distinction between wit and know, but wit fell out of use and know took over.
I got used to using those two words (actually, it was conhecer and saber, but same diff), and honestly, I haven't missed having that distinction in English.
One thing that I really did miss was the second person plural, which is why I started using y'all. I lived my whole life in Texas and Oklahoma without picking up on that word, but two years speaking a Romantic language and I loved it.
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dkw: Infranasal depression? (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philtrum)
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ffft. Your mom's an infranasal depression.
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:cry:
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I always get one this time of year.
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The word of the year is actually woot/w00t.
I was surprised not more people comment on this, which Porter posted on page 1.
Found this interesting little Comment (http://news.google.com/news?btcid=6c09982686b3894b) on Google News about it. Thought it was an interesting read about how they decide these things.
(and that links to this little gem (http://languagemonitor.com/) with lots of interesting trivia)
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Listening to this episode of A Way With Words (http://www.podcastdirectory.com/podshows/1914625) (link to the mp3 file (http://podcastdownload.npr.org/anon.npr-podcasts/podcast/139/510028/14943284/KPBS_14943284.mp3)), which Mike over on SR mentioned recently, I learned the name of the dent in the upper lip is philtrum (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philtrum).
According to wikipedia, infranasal depression also is correct.
Philtrum come from the Greek philtron, which originally mean "love potion". Nobody really knows why the Greeks named the infranasal depression "love potion".
There are words similar to philtrum in many other languages.
And now we know.
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I knew about "philtrum", but I figured that it was medical jargon, and I don't count jargon as proper English.
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I don't believe I've ever used it or heard it used outside of conversations like this one.
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Yeah, but how many conversations have you ever had, besides ones like this, where there was a need for such a word? For me, I'll bet I can count them on one hand.
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What makes a word jargon?
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In medical type jargon, there is no part of the body, no matter how itty-bitty, that doesn't get a name. They even named some stuff "innominate" which means the part of the body without a name.
In fact, if I recall correctly, there are four things in the body called "innominate" -- a vein, an artery, a bone, and a part of the brain.
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Jargon is a vocabulary used by a specialized group. There is legalese, which has its own vocabulary of jargon and is, I suspect, what makes people hire a lawyer (for the interpretation as much as the knowledge of the law); medical jargon which is perfectly intelligible to medical types and difficult for outsiders to understand, yadda yadda ya.
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Jargon is a vocabulary used by a specialized group.
By that definition, cranium and penis* are jargon, since those words are used in the medical field. But I doubt you'd say that they're not proper English words.
*I assume that those are are used as technical terms in the medical field, but I don't actually know. The particular word doesn't matter -- there are many words for parts of the body which are used in common English and as technical terms by medical professionals.
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By "jargon" I refer to the technical terms that are not in general usage.
For instance, when I'm at work, I call those holes at the bottom of your nose "nares". When I'm not on the job, they are "nostrils". But whether or not I'm using jargon, I call that stuff sprouting off the top of a head "hair". "Nares" would be jargon, "hair" not.
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I suspect that the reason why we don't use the word philtrum enough for you to consider it "proper" English is that, unlike other cultures, we don't have a tradition explaining its origins, and therefore the word (or need for it) practically never comes up outside of technical discussions, where it can be dismissed as mere jargon.
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By "jargon" I refer to the technical terms that are not in general usage.
Yup. I think the key is that it's generally restricted to a certain group.
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But I think it's only restricted to a certain group because they're generally the only ones with cause to talk about it. It's hardly a failing of the English language.
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Right. Of course, it might be that other people talk about such things, but professionals need a more concise or specific term to distinguish it from other things.
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Philtrum come from the Greek philtron, which originally mean "love potion".
"Philtron" sounds like some kind of superhero robot. A sexy superhero robot.
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"Philtron" does sound sound like a lovebot.
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Right. Of course, it might be that other people talk about such things, but professionals need a more concise or specific term to distinguish it from other things.
Agreed. That happens all the time, where a jargon word is used in lieu of of common word either to be more specific or to strip away connotations.
But in this situation, if there were a more common English word for the philtron, I'll bet that somebody here would have heard of it.
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Do all languages have jargons or are jargons a particular demonspawn of English?
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I'd guess that anytime a society has enough specialization, jargons will naturally develop.
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Jargon is incredibly useful, allowing you to concisely say precisely what you mean.
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It's useful for that, but it also serves other purposes. Jargon is a way of creating a sense of community among a specialized group. It is also a way to keep outsiders from joining that community.
It has linguistic and sociological connotations.
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Sociolinguistic connotations, even.
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Oy! What's with the jargon?
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:lol:
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In one of my classes, I no longer remember which, we talked about how there were several classifications for specialized speech, of which jargon was one. There were dialects, langues and ergots.
I suppose you could call that meta-jargon.
I'm seeing nothing on ergots online that has to do with language. I'll have to check and see if it's in a book anywhere when I get home.
Oh, here were go: A dialect that is associated with a particular social class can be termed a sociolect. Other speech varieties include: standard languages, which are standardized for public performance (for example, a written standard); jargons, which are characterized by differences in lexicon (vocabulary); slang; patois; pidgins or argots. The particular speech patterns used by an individual are termed an idiolect.
I finally checked dialect in wikipedia. "Cant" is another one. But it appears French, at the very least, suffers from specialty dialects (as opposed to geographic dialects.)
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I believe there is a difference between ergot and argot. The former is a drug derived from a fungus that grows on grain. The latter is a term for slang, derived from the French.
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Yeah. I think there was also something called ergot on a sci-fi TV show back in the 70's.
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Here's an interesting little blog post (http://www.languagehat.com/archives/002975.php) on loving American English. Just thought I'd share.
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"Philtron" does sound sound like a lovebot.
This was... a femfatalatron, an erotifying device stochastic, elastic and orgiastic, and with plenty of feedback; whoever was placed inside the apparatus instantaneously experienced all the charms, lures, wiles, winks and witchery of all the fairer sex in the Universe at once. The femfatalatron operated on a power of forty megamors, with a maximum attainable efficiency - give a constant concupiscense coefficent - of ninety-six percent, while the system's libidinous lubricity, measured of course in kilocupids, produced up to six units for every remote-control caress. This marvelous mechanism, moreover, was equipped with reversible ardor dampers, omnidirectional consummation amplifiers, absorption philters, paphian peripherals, and "first-sight" flip-flop circuits...
"The Fourth Sally, or How Trurl Built a Femfatalatron to Save Prince Pantagoon from the Pangs of Love, and How Later He Resorted to a Cannonade of Babies" from The Cyberiad by Stanis?aw Lem (1974 Avon Books translation)
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I often wonder whether Lem or his translator is the more talented writer. Can you imagine having enough grace in two languages to be able to render a translation like that?
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I know, translators are like the unsung heroes of literature.
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Aren't they?
By the way, Sheila, it was The Cyberiad was the Lem book I was trying to remember the name of last weekend. I was about to volunteer to stick it in the big box o' stuff that's going to be making its way to you next week, but a quick check of my shelves reveals that I no longer own a copy. I expect that I loaned it to somebody or other at some point and just never got it back.
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It's one of my favourite books. I found a scan (http://vision.bc.edu/~dmartin/teaching/cs101/2006s/Lem1974.pdf) of The First Sally (A), or Trurl's Electronic Bard, so yall can get an idea of what it's like.
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It's among mine, although it's been a few years since I've read it.
What are some of your other favorites?
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by Lem: Solaris, Memoirs Found in a Bathtub, and The Investigation
Italo Calvino: If on a Winter's Night a Traveler, Cosmicomics, T zero, The Cloven Viscount
Mervyn Peake's Gormenghast books
Pale Fire by Nabokov
Tove Jansson
Foucault's Pendulum by Umberto Eco
Michael Moorcock: The Dancers at the End of Time and the Cornelius stories
James Blaylock: The Last Coin and The Digging Leviathan
The Incal by Moebius and Alexandro Jodorowsky
Doom Patrol and The Invisibles by Grant Morrison
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That's an ecclectic mix!
The only Calvino I've read is Baron of the Trees, and while I liked it, I somehow never read any of his other stuff. If you were to have to pick, which of those four would you recommend that a person start with?
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Cosmicomics! (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cosmicomics) It's a collection of stories told by Qfwfq, the oldest person in the universe. He remembers being a dinosaur, he remembers what it was like before the big bang - it was awfully crowded.
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Looks good! I'll see if my library has a copy.
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What would you recommend, Noemon?