Hard News: A Full Sense of Nationhood
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Ahhh....nothing like a discussion with Waitangi Day as the original topic to keep the blood pumping during digressions/threadjacks.
Perhaps that's why I usually start drinking early on Feb 6th.
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Ben, I do think you have a colonial mindset from what you have said here. But sadly I must depart now for a while to do some of that pesky stuff we call work or mahi or what have you.
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But I can already.
Dude, you speak English
Jeebus, could you be any more parochial? I meant I can understand people who speak languages other than English or Italian, and be understood by them. This takes some sort of cake, really.
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David, I don't want to wipe out languages, nor would that be a consequence of learning a new language.
Ben, the suggestion that learning a new language does not pose a threat to endangered languages is simply not true. In fact, the opposite is true. Probably the single biggest threat to most endangered languages is another more dominant language (e.g. English in northern Australia replacing Aboriginal languages, Spanish in the Andes replacing indigenous Andean languages, etc).
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Colonial mindset? Not really. I just want a universal language. I'd hoped it would be Esperanto, and learned quite a lot of it, but the more I researched the less convinced I became that it will work.
Which takes me to the alternative - that a natural language becomes the universal language. I'd be just as happy if it was Chinese, but currently the most likely candidate seems to be English. That may be fortunate for me, but it will surely be fortunate anyway, for me, being a native speaker of the language of power. I'm thinking of the other people, those who find it hard to learn English, and who are frowned upon by pedants for speaking it poorly. They have far more than me to gain out of a universal language.
For it to work, it would actually have to be English speakers doing most of the work, since they would need to accept simplifications in their own native tongue. I don't actually think it would require any kind of large project, just a change in attitude towards tolerance in English of new, simpler, foreign influenced forms. And a willingness to use them.
Jeebus, could you be any more parochial?
I certainly could. And you could be a lot less, since your claims of being able to speak to everyone were limited to the English speaking world, Italy, Spain and France. Everywhere else, you can't make yourself understood worth a bar of shit and that doesn't seem to bother you in the slightest.
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It seems to me that Ben's argument(s) centre around an assumption of equivalence for all languages - i.e. that all languages are inherently the same thing, just with different vocabularies - and that the aim of language is communication of information, thus each have the same needs/requirements and are therefor interchangeable. Ben will no doubt deny that this is what he meant, and I'll admit that it's not explicitly stated, but I just read through 5 pages at once rather than as they are posted and that's the subtext I've come away with.
IMHO, language serves many functions in a culture and/or society. It is created by the culture just as much as it creates the culture. It entertains as much as it informs, it can serve to define the limits of a society (taboos etc) and it can be used as a barrier just as much as it can aid inclusion (see Gio's) post about immigration rules)
An example of this is Te Reo Māori. Before I started learning Te Reo, I had pretty much assumed that same thing - that it was a matter of learning new words and how they fit together. I'll also admit I had a hard time understanding how the Māori world fit together and why Treaty discussions were so fraught. I remember mentioning to a Māori workmate some news item about the Māori Queen. She snorted and said: "She's not my queen. Bloody Tainui queen!". This was my first inkling that some iwi just don't get along ;-)
<anecdote>I studied using the http://www.teataarangi.org.nz/}Te Ataarangi method which is total immersion, no english spoken, and uses the old Cuisenaire rods to teach numbers and colours (by guessing, mainly, just how children learn). It then moves on to matters of relationships (e.g. "your rods, my rods, our rods, oh wait there's more than two of us - we need a different word") and when I realised that Te Reo Māori revolves around the relationship of one speaker to another, or to possessions or environment, it all started to click and I saw that tikanga Māori also can be understood in terms of relationships, including the Māori relationship to history. </anecdote>
The language is an outgrowth and expression of the culture, and vice versa. That is why it is so vital for Te Reo Māori to be revived and used - not because people would be "heartbroken" at the loss of another language, but because tikanga Māori will not survive without it.
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And you could be a lot less, since your claims of being able to speak to everyone were limited to the English speaking world, Italy, Spain and France. Everywhere else, you can't make yourself understood worth a bar of shit and that doesn't seem to bother you in the slightest.
I can understand them in translation, and they me, as I'm sure you had understood perfectly well.
Incidentally, we already know how this lingua franca thing is going to happen, because it's well underway already. And so it happens that the literature that comes out of the non English speaking world gets translated into Italian (for a market of 60 million people) far sooner than in the English speaking world, which is quite content with finding out who somebody like Borges is twenty or so years after everybody else has. Or that calls films made in other languages 'arthouse' (and has a special oscar category not for films made in other countries, but for films not in English).
Have fun with the rest of this conversation, everyone.
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David, I didn't say there was no threat of wipeout. It is just not the purpose.
As for how lamentable it is that languages die out....well yup. It is. But that's not enough reason to not try to communicate with your fellow man better.
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Damnit, there is so much specious reasoning on display here it's difficult to know where to start.
How about when the writer is dead, or otherwise unavailable?
Then we're stuck with their ambiguity, whether they were grammatical or otherwise. I think the standard thing to do is try to find other references to the same ideas by the author.
A central tenet in theories of interpretation of literary works is that a literary work is autonomous - the author is not required to travel round with their books explaining what they meant.
According to hypothetical intentionalism, this means that explicit statements by the author as to what their work means are ruled out.
The meaning of a literary work is what an appropriate reader (one who is familiar with the literary tradition the work is part of, the social context of its creation, and relevant biographical information about the author) is justified in attributing to the author.
Note that this means the author's meaning might be different to the work's meaning, i.e. that an appropriate reader might be justified in attributing a meaning that is different to the author's actual meaning, and in that case the real meaning of the work is the reader's rather than the author's.
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I wasnt going to post again in this thread but a couple of gems from BenWilson need laughing at:
"I dont actually think it would require any kind of large project, just a change in attitude towards tolerance in English to newer, simpler, foreign influenced forms. And a willingness to use them."
Do read a couple of histories of the English language, BenWilson, and then contemplate just how likely it is that this will *ever* happen.
"As for how lamentable it is that lanuages die...well yup. It is. But that's not enough reason to not try to communicate with your fellow
man better."Does your fellow man actually want to communicate with you in a creolised bastard form of English though? I rather suspect that 99.9% of humanity want to keep their own linguistic riches, develope them, and continue happily using translators & translation devices if they want access to other languages.
This human is out of this thread permanatly now, but thanks for the LOL moments. Kia ora tatou-
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Damnit, there is so much specious reasoning on display here it's difficult to know where to start.
That's the way he rolls, muthafucka. ;-)
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Patrinfikulo ;-)
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:-D
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Not that I want to stop this thread from crawling into a corner to quietly bleed to death, but
where we some time fulfill the roles of 'pron gal' and 'Italian gastronomy guy'.
I totally reckon Giovanni and I should get costumes.
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I totally reckon Giovanni and I should get costumes.
I'll courier down a tin of green paint.
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where we some time fulfill the roles of 'pron gal' and 'Italian gastronomy guy'.
I totally reckon Giovanni and I should get costumes.
Okay, this is in Italian, sorry, but you'll probably get the gist of it. It's the trailer for a film about a superhero called Tutta Patata (patata means potato but in Genoese it also means... ah, but why spoil it?)
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I'll courier down a tin of green paint.
Better still, a tub of wasabi... some wag is certain to try & lick it off... tee hee....
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some wag is certain to try & lick it off
Wogs, too. The first time I had sushi, I mistook the wasabi for avocado and the ginger for ham. Good times.
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@Islander
Does your fellow man actually want to communicate with you in a creolised bastard form of English though?
English is a creolised bastard language, though. That is its history. And that's always been its strength.
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The first time I had sushi, I mistook the wasabi for avocado and the ginger for ham.
It's a rite of passage, I think.
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Mark,
I certainly do not believe in the equivalency of all languages. I am also bilingual, don't forget. But I do believe in the value of shared language. Then we don't need to rely on translation.
Gio
As I'm sure you appreciate, translation is often not an option. When you want to know where the toilet is, and someone can't understand you or be understood, it's really easy to see how useful it is that you share a language. If you want to read their literature or watch their films, then translations and subtitles work OK, although it is rather wasteful for them to have to do one for every language, for every work.
David
According to hypothetical intentionalism, this means that explicit statements by the author as to what their work means are ruled out.
That is one theory. It is not a fact. The existence of this theory does not make my reasoning specious.
To me it sounds like a bullshit theory, too. As I see it, the meaning of what an author writes is what they intended it to mean. They may have expressed it poorly for some particular audience, but that doesn't mean the audience get to claim the work and say it meant something other than what the author intended. That is like saying that Nietzsche was advocating Nazism, just because the Nazis willfully interpreted it that way. Or that it doesn't matter what I think I'm saying, only what you think I'm saying. That is a path to refusing to understand other people, rather than trying to. It seems especially likely to make it extremely difficult to express new ideas.
Islander
Do read a couple of histories of the English language, BenWilson, and then contemplate just how likely it is that this will *ever* happen.
I haven't quantified how likely I think it is. I've only said how desirable it is.
Does your fellow man actually want to communicate with you in a creolised bastard form of English though? I rather suspect that 99.9% of humanity want to keep their own linguistic riches, develope them, and continue happily using translators & translation devices if they want access to other languages.
I've said all along that the condition for success is the desire of people to communicate with others from around the world. Plenty of people have no such desire and will be happy to stick to the small subset of humanity with whom they can communicate. I like to think this attitude will fade away over time. Maybe I'm wrong. We shall see. I'm doing my bit, by accepting "non-standard" English any time I see it, so long as it's clear, and trying where I can to speak in simple ways. There may be a lot of people who appreciate me doing just that, but who don't have the courage to utter one word about it, out of fear of a misplaced comma inverting the meaning, or rendering it ridiculous. If you're out there, rest assured, I'm not that mean.
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English is a creolised bastard language, though. That is its history. And that's always been its strength.
Nothing to do with the armies and the economic might, then?
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As I'm sure you appreciate, translation is often not an option. When you want to know where the toilet is, and someone can't understand you or be understood, it's really easy to see how useful it is that you share a language. If you want to read their literature or watch their films, then translations and subtitles work OK, although it is rather wasteful for them to have to do one for every language, for every work.
Stephen's cartoon... not working... somebody's too damn wrong on the Internet...
If you want to go to the toilet, you don't really need for the Armenian peasant to be speaking English. You'll find it. Personally, I don't recall ever failing to find the toilet in Greece or Yugoslavia. Besides, it's always the second door on the left.
although it is rather wasteful for them to have to do one for every language, for every work.
It's lovely of you to be so considerate about other people's money. But you know, we'll keep dubbing and subtitling films into our own languages, if it's all the same to you.
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Erm... I realise my accidental building of strawmen hasn't contributed that much to this thread, but looks like it's now gone from an enticing donkey's breakfast to a major fire hazard, and I'm out...
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English is a creolised bastard language, though. That is its history. And that's always been its strength.
Nothing to do with the armies and the economic might, then?
More to do with endless repeats of M*A*S*H & Friends, I think.
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