Hard News: A Full Sense of Nationhood
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In *written* English, correct punctuation can be crucial - in writeen Maori, aside from macrons, not so. I have a passing familiarity with French (just about past, actually) and I dont know any other languages.
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Giovanni has been working his way to HelenKellerish but Jolisa started it.
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Islander, the idea that language always gets more complex is simply not true. There have been massive simplifications in many languages in the world many times in history. The language used to describe measurements, for instance, was massively reduced by the invention of the metric system. The old words still exist but they are fading away like so many forgotten words that have outlived their usefulness. The invention of the dictionary massively reduced the number of spellings and pronunciations of words by virtue of people seeing a point to having a common way of doing it. The invention of writing itself served to immortalize words beyond the Chinese Whispers game that humanity had been playing for all the millenia before history.
I'm not sure what "If We Could Talk To The Animals" has to do with anything, unless by Animals you mean other people who can't speak our language. Biblical visions of a world of common language could actually be one of the few visions they have that might actually come true. Just because it was a dream then, and still is now, does not mean it always will be. Everything we have ever invented started as a dream. So these appeals are not really swaying my hope that such a thing could happen. I doubt they ever will if not enough people want them to.
Linger, the range of social signals is not really that great compared to what is possible by referential meaning. That is why animal languages are not particularly rich. It is entirely possible that humans of every make could learn to share these signals, if they wanted to. To a certain extent, via body language, we already do.
To both Linger and Islander, I reiterate: I don't know if a universal language for general communication will ever actually take off. But I do believe that it would be a good thing if it did. It would be one more level playing field to liberate humanity from the fact that we can't choose where we are born, or to whom. Currently, depending where you are born, you find yourself unable to communicate adequately with most of the world, without a great deal of effort and luck. However prosaic it may seem to preserve such a situation, I doubt many people who were given the opportunity to easily learn to speak to basically the rest of humanity, would turn it down. And it would be easy, if almost everyone could speak it. You would learn it from your parents, just like your native language.
There are probable losses if something like that actually did occur. The main one would be that people who already enjoy huge advantages from their luck in learning one that is used by the powerful, would no longer have anywhere near such an advantage. Some languages might die. These losses don't seem to outweigh the benefits, though.
In case it's not clear, I include English as a candidate for the universal language. It's not the only candidate. Nor would it have to be 'English as we know and speak it now'. If English were easier to learn, it would be a stronger candidate, IMHO.
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Would the English language get to the point where it starts splitting off like Latin did into French/Spanish/Italian/German/Yugoslav/Romanian? As if English didn't have enough irregularities already.
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Benwilson:
The invention of writing itself served to immortalize words beyond the Chinese Whispers game that humanity had been playing for all the millenia before history.
A little more than a "Chinese Whispers game", perhaps. In NZ the pre-literate age has only recently passed, which I believe gives us a rather special opportunity for insight. The early missionary Father Servant's excellent Customs and Habits of the New Zealanders 1838-42 has a fascinating account of the methods used by Maori in the Hokianga to commit vast slabs of information to memory. The feats achieved by this now largely lost method of preserving Whakapapa were, by literate standards, truly prodigious.
The discussion earlier in this thread about karakia and the importance of ceremony more than hinted at the value of recalling our pre-literary heritage. I believe that an awareness of such things is essential to appreciate the real value of a written language.
I don't know if a universal language for general communication will ever actually take off. But I do believe that it would be a good thing if it did.
I assume that you have some familiarity with the history of Esperanto. Your vision seems to have a lot in common with that of Ludwik Zamenhof.
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...being able to convey gender in the stem of nouns and adjectives.
How does that work, by the way?
Much like actor and actress in English, except in Italian and other romance languages the stems can be applied to most nouns or adjectives via a set of rules. As if in English there was a rule that allowed you to infer the feminine doctoress from the masculine doctor.
In *written* English, correct punctuation can be crucial - in writeen Maori, aside from macrons, not so.
Latin didn't have punctuation at all, and being case-based you could swap the order of words pretty much at will. But then you'd get the odd chestnut, like the famous (written) answer by the sybil to the soldier about to embark on a mission: "ibis redibis non morieris in bello". Which, depending on where you put the pause, either means "you'll leave, you'll return, you won't die in battle", or "you'll leave, you won't return, you'll die in battle". (Thanks a bunch, sybil!) To connect with the discussion upthread, in Italian we have the saying "to be an ibis redibis", which means writing a piece of official documentation like Craig's letter from the IRD.
<quote>The early missionary Father Servant's excellent Customs and Habits of the New Zealanders 1838-42 has a fascinating account of the methods used by Maori in the Hokianga to commit vast slabs of information to memory. The feats achieved by this now largely lost method of preserving Whakapapa were, by literate standards, truly prodigious.
Boy, am I going to have to get my hands on this...
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Here you go. A ripping good read, too,
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Fantastic, I'll get it tomorrow. Thanks Joe.
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Joe, pretty awesome. When oral history is all you've got, prodigious feats of memory would be required all the time. But it's still Chinese Whispers, just slower. The size of your body of knowledge preserved in this way is bounded by what a human has time to commit to memory. The rest is lost. Any time you forget or mis-remember, information is lost. Still awesome, though.
Joe, I'm very much familiar with Esperanto, and learned a reasonable amount of it out of sheer admiration for the idea. But I'm not that optimistic about it's chances of fulfilling Zamenhof's dream. It's more of a stepping stone, a way of showing that it is at least possible to develop a simplified language that is rich. It's still a candidate for a universal language, but the number of people speaking it is the problem. There's a critical mass it needs to reach, which I don't think it is anywhere near, before people might start learning it for practical purposes rather than idealistic ones.
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Yeah, I'm not advocating Esperanto in any way. It's a fascinating bit of history, and until I'd taken the trouble to discover more about Zamenhof I'd assumed he was a well-meaning crank. In the context of his time what he achieved was remarkable. BTW my octogenarian mum still recalls a little of the language from classes she took in the late '30s, back when Esperanto was a means to avert world conflict.
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Ben, oral cultures develop knowledge experts, the same as written ones do - and often wrapped up in religious or leadership roles.
Storytelling is one of the technologies that enabled canoe fleets to explore the vast Pacific while our European forebears were still worried about dragons. Both cultures come together in this land, but we tend to devalue the strength of that oral heritage.
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Would the English language get to the point where it starts splitting off like Latin did into French/Spanish/Italian/German/Yugoslav/Romanian? As if English didn't have enough irregularities already.
Seems pretty resilient so far. The English spoken in most other parts of the world is very recognizable. I think technology is mostly responsible for that though, the explosion in communication in modern times. You could say it's already happened though, that English spin-offs exist, like pidgins, and all the blend languages like Chinglish, Spanglish, etc. English speakers will struggle to understand much of those languages.
I think for English to go the way of Latin, English speaking culture would need to go a similar way. Total destruction of their dominance of the world would be required. Which could still happen, and is the reason why I don't think English is the only candidate.
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It's totally plausible to me that in 100 years or so we could have a fairly standard written English, and an artifical spoken English for entertainment, but a lot of local varieties that are mutually incomprehensible. That's pretty much the situation for Arabic, and it's what happened to Latin too. The original language doesn't fall out of use or change much, but in different domains dialects or whole new languages take over.
(I am re-reading Nicholas Ostler's "Biography of Latin" again so this stuff is fresh in my mind).
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If you were giving instructions to an assassin, would it actually matter if you wrote "Kill the king not, to fear is good" as opposed to "Kill the king, not to fear is good"? Or how about not punctuating the sentence at all, for that extra hint of plausible deniability?
Yes. Or it would if you were foolish enough to write down instructions to an assassin.
But the debate is only really interesting where an element appears in the written language, but is not necessarily reflected in the spoken language. Its/it's. Two/to/too. Not the case with a comma, which makes sense to appear written, as it's a pause when spoken.
If it can be figured out orally via context, why does it appear written down?
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If it can be figured out orally via context, why does it appear written down?
Because in writing you lose the marvellously subtle and not so subtle cues of verbal intonation.
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What I took from Catherin Servant's account of Hokianga Maori practices of preserving whakapapa was that ceremony was essential to such techniques. The mention earlier in this thread about the importance of karakia in focusing attention to matters at hand is, I believe, a survival of this technique, and a very useful one, no less so in a literate world. Such things are more than mere piety, and offer a special insight into the nature of how we came to our present state of language.
Pre-literate practitioners of committing information to memory appear to have been critically aware of the pitfalls of "mis-remembering". For example, in the schools of the Hokianga people described by Servant, if a mistake was made in a recitation the session would be immediately cancelled, and only reconvened when conditions such as the moon's phase were appropriate. Without attempting an understanding of how such things may have been done we have no way of even beginning to quantify just how much may have been preserved or lost.
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But if you have a way of marking agreement between nouns and adjectives, then that allows considerably more freedom in how you can position those in a sentence without creating ambiguity (as there may still be only one noun that that particular form of the adjective could go with).
Ah, I see. Thanks. And Giovanni too.
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Sacha, again, when it's all you've got, it's going to be well developed. But it doesn't have anywhere near the properties of writing to preserve information over time. Maori noticed this immediately, which is part of the reason there are far fewer of these oral-history memory prodigies now. It's also why other people than Maori are able to know about what was in their oral history.
I remember that Socrates was bitter on the idea of writing stuff down because he thought that it led to a degradation of memory. Just as well Plato didn't agree, or we'd never even know what Socrates had to say about that, or anything else.
Stephen, I think we already have that with English. Jargon languages are utterly incomprehensible to outsiders, and most of us use those all the time. But we still have an umbrella language for general conversation. I can talk about general things to any English speaker, no matter how learned they are. It is entirely possible that the whole world could speak that language. I don't know if it will happen, though, my crystal ball is cloudy.
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Without attempting an understanding of how such things may have been done we have no way of even beginning to quantify just how much may have been preserved or lost.
That's exactly the problem with oral history. You only have to try it for yourself for a few days to see the problems with it. The first time you forget something important, you'll be jotting things down again. Otherwise they are lost, utterly lost. Totally gone.
It's interesting to hear about memory techniques though. These are sometimes useful to know. I've used them since childhood to remember things, and it helps. But it's no substitute for the total finality of actually writing it down. In fact, I usually write things down before committing them to memory, as the writing itself also helps the memory. And also, if I don't, things get forgotten, and then they're lost forever.
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And anyone who thinks punctuation conventions are little more than the orthographic equivalent of dressing for dinner...
I don't think anyone is going that far.
Also, if I were to write a note for an assassin, I'd get to the point:
"Kill the King"
or in these more enlightened days,
"Throw a shoe at George Bush"
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That's exactly the problem with oral history. You only have to try it for yourself for a few days to see the problems with it. The first time you forget something important, you'll be jotting things down again.
You don't say. Must give it a go sometime.
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Because in writing you lose the marvellously subtle and not so subtle cues of verbal intonation.
Again often, but not always. Or again, these things are not always necessary for understanding what someone is communicating.
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That's exactly the problem with oral history. You only have to try it for yourself for a few days to see the problems with it. The first time you forget something important, you'll be jotting things down again.
I'm with Joe: "oh, really?"
But the point of course is that in pre-literate societies minds were trained in all sorts of ways to cope with the lack of the capacity to jot things down. Plato famously wrote that the invention of writing would weaken the mind and lead to the decay of culture, and if nothing also he had certainly anticipated that something would be lost in the process.
I'd go as far as to say it would be a splendid topic for a PhD, except it's been done.
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Surely the only reason for any language is to be able to communicate, to convey ideas, wishes, wants, and warnings. The more complex the situation, the more complex the language. As the world became excessively complex so did the language. It gets to the point where the language becomes too cumbersome to fit its purpose.
Frinstance, "Excuse me, man who lives next to the blacksmith in the village beyond the second river after the hill. There is a large creature that is black in colour and covered in air and has very large teeth and claws................oh, never mind"
So, language has to become more simple to accommodate an increasingly complex world. Becoming more simple should not mean dropping rules that are essential to disambiguation, that would essentially increase complexity by having to remove disambiguity by other means. For instance adding another sentence or paragraph to fully explain.
Let's go back to the beach.
We see a sign."Swim Between the Flags"
A confused alien, with no understanding of, well, anything. Dives into the sand and starts flailing his arms for a while before he gets to his feet and complains, loudly, to the lifesaver."man in funny rubber hat" he cries "I cannot swim between flags, must swim in water"
"Ah" replies the lifesaver "when we say "swim Between the Flags" we mean "Swim in an area delineated by imaginary lines emanating from said flags in the direction of the sea that are positioned at an angle of 90 degrees from the imaginary line constructed by taking the shortest distance between the aforesaid flags"
"Why?" asks our intrepid alien
"Well my alien, the sharks are negotiating a free trade agreement and you, maybe, ware of the sharks"
"Why don't you just put up a sign"
"We cant afford the wood" -
3410,
"Swim in an area delineated by imaginary lines emanating from said flags in the direction of the sea that are positioned at an angle of 90 degrees from the imaginary line constructed by taking the shortest distance between the aforesaid flags"
Actually, that'd be a pretty cool sign.
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