Language

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Archonsod said:
It's usually a syntactic problem rather than a lacking word or concept.

I think one place where that is not true is if you look at cultures vastly different, and in particular (for my interest), ancient cultures. For example, the ancient Greek word polis. The traditionally accepted translation tends to be something like "city-state", but in reality we have no word that can in fact summarise the concept of the polis. Not only is it more complex than any one or hyphenated english word(s) seem to be able to satisfy in translation, it is almost more complex than we are able to understand in many years of scholarly work. all in one ancient greek word :smile:
 
http://rolcats.com/194
[quote author=Throbert McGee on February 26, 2009 at 11:26 pm]
The last line of this poem reminds me of a proverb that Ann Landers and Dear Abby were fond of printing in their newspaper columns:

“A problem shared is but half a trouble.”

In fact, the Russian word for “to share” (“razdelit”) makes this point more clearly than the English word, because the Russian etymology quite clearly suggests “to divide up.” The word for the arithmetic process we call division, as in 12 ÷ 3 = 4, is even related: “razdelenie”.

In other words, the poem’s message is not that the cat and dog will have hunger, cold, and pain IN COMMON, — but that the hunger, cold, and pain will be seemingly CUT IN HALF by sharing them.[/quote]
I hope the fact this was from rolcats.com doesn't put anyone off too much.  :razz:  I thought this was interesting when I read it last year.  It's stuck with me ever since.  You'll have to check the URL to see a picture of the cat and dog Throbert's referring to.


Hey, I thought of another one from my time on Hawaii:  Haole

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haole
A common popular etymology claim is that the word is derived from "hāʻole", literally meaning "no breath". Some Hawaiians say that because foreigners did not know or use the honi (the Hawaiian word for "kiss"), a Polynesian/Hawaiian greeting by touching nose-to-nose and inhaling or essentially sharing each other's breaths, and so the foreigners were described as "breathless." The implication is not only that foreigners are aloof and ignorant of local ways, but also literally have no spirit or life within.
Native Hawaiians often used this word to address a white person, usually in a derogatory fashion, but it's often a butchered version of the word and sounding instead like "howlie"; which isn't too surprising since "As of 2000, native speakers of Hawaiian amount to under 0.1% of the statewide population." http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hawaiian_Language
 
Archonsod said:
It's usually a syntactic problem rather than a lacking word or concept.
Yes, but the Eskimos have many various words describing (even if it's slightly) different kinds of snow, because they saw a lot of it, used the proper kind of it as igloo material and thus the nuances about it was important for them.
In Hawaiian language there's no word meaning 'weather', because the weather is always sunny and therefore not worth talking about.
In Japanese there's no word meaning 'menopause', since Japanese women don't have it that distinctly, for consuming a lot of soy and soy products (they contain herbal estrogen).
In some African languages, if someone sees a mountain and knows that there is something 'behind' (with our conception) it, (s)he says "... is in front of the mountain" (I think it's because of their totemic beliefs preventing them from having a "perceptional egocentrism" about the mountain and the thing).

Side Note: I'm no expert but I like thinking about languages.

EDIT: However, lack of conceptions and words is easier to solve than grammatical and syntactic rules' interdictions and requires a lesser overhaul.
 
The Conspirator said:
In Hawaiian language there's no word meaning 'weather', because the weather is always sunny and therefore not worth talking about.

Is that true? What do they make smalltalk about then?  :eek:

Schadenfreude has to be the best example, as who doesn't enjoy the misfortunes of others? The Germans also have Weltschmerz - the feeling you get when the whole world is against you, I believe.

In my part of Ireland, we use the word 'tight' to express disapproval of, but also a grudging admiration of, something. Not tight as is close-fitting, or drunk. That said, we also use the word 'doll' to refer to women (not in a derogatory fashion, some Scots still use it too), but in the Guys'n'Dolls sense.

So a typical phrase would be, "Did you see Joe last night? He was in tight shape; drank 24 pints of Heineken and still got off with a fine doll. Then he got in a fight with the cops and she stormed off. He's a tight case." *Shakes head

I guess that's all dialect though.

 
Josef_the_Pretender said:
I guess that's all dialect though.

Probably. But still interesting.

Conspirator, why did you edit away the last bit of your last post? It was okay :wink:

Has anyone heard about that linguist Daniel Everett? He spent a lot of time in the jungle somewhere in South America and learned the language of a 300-people-folk, the Piraha. Himself being a former disciple of Chomsky and universal grammar, he now tries to topple Chomsky from his throne and claims that there's no universal grammar determining language and its acquisition. He says that language is a cultural phenomenon, totally depending on the surrounding of humans and not on biology and evolution.

The Piraha's lifestyle is so much cut off from civilization that they live a very 'simple' life. They are intelligent, but tend to think more practical than abstract. This seems to afflict their language, since they don't have words for more abstract things or concepts that are remote in space and time (not many numbers, no words for great-grandfather)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daniel_Everett#Cognitive_Fire:_Language_as_a_Cultural_Tool
 
Hengist said:
Josef_the_Pretender said:
I guess that's all dialect though.

Probably. But still interesting.

Conspirator, why did you edit away the last bit of your last post? It was okay :wink:

Has anyone heard about that linguist Daniel Everett? He spent a lot of time in the jungle somewhere in South America and learned the language of a 300-people-folk, the Piraha. Himself being a former disciple of Chomsky and universal grammar, he now tries to topple Chomsky from his throne and claims that there's no universal grammar determining language and its acquisition. He says that language is a cultural phenomenon, totally depending on the surrounding of humans and not on biology and evolution.

The Piraha's lifestyle is so much cut off from civilization that they live a very 'simple' life. They are intelligent, but tend to think more practical than abstract. This seems to afflict their language, since they don't have words for more abstract things or concepts that are remote in space and time (not many numbers, no words for great-grandfather)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daniel_Everett#Cognitive_Fire:_Language_as_a_Cultural_Tool
I just read some of the Everett stuff, and, although it's interesting, I think he is perhaps conflating his rejection of his religious faith in christianity with his rejection of his faith in, broadly speaking, Chomsky.
For a start, the fact that the Piraha are a small group immediately raises the question of an in-bred genetic mutation in the "language genes" they possess. He point blank refuses to undertake any form of DNA analysis on them, for no better reason than saying "People have asked me to do DNA tests, but my research has already been attacked for being borderline racist, because I say that the people are so different. So the last thing that I want to do is be associated with DNA testing. Somebody else can go there and do that." Without even bothering to undertake DNA analysis, he has decided that the culture determines the language rather than any genetic predispositions to language. That, to me, is a weak position if you are asserting that the prevailing ideas of language as a universal genetic tendency are wrong. From his descriptions, their "culture" seems no more hermetically sealed and isolated than does their gene pool, if they have interacted as much as he says with the outside world.
The dispute over the absence or presence of colour words in their language also seems strange. Surely if i say "this berry is "like blood", that car is "like the sky"" it's obvious that I do not mean in any way except colour. So "like blood" is a colour word for red and "like the sky" is a colour word for blue, not "in fact are just descriptions" as Everett asserts. Otherwise, we must think that our word "orange" is not a colour word, but a description of "like an orange".  I'm not convinced that there is a meaningful distinction between a "colour word" and a "decription" anyway.
He may, of course be right, and it is only good scientific practice to question, and challenge, and think about any prevailing orthodoxy in scientific thought. But the little I have read by him suggests more strongly a man rejecting his previous life choices than a man puncturing a tendentious hypothesis.
(All the above is stated by me  from my position as an ignoramus in the field of linguistics, anthropology, and pretty much everything else).
 
Interesting topic!

In Swedish we have the word "lagom", which we often use.

If for example someone is serving you food and asks how big a portion you want, you could reply "lagom". Which means that you don't want a too huge portion, but not a too small one either, you want one that is just the right size. Which of course is very hard for the person serving you to know what exact amount that would be. Anyway, read the wikipedia article and you will have a greater understanding of the word. 

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lagom

EDIT: Damn you Bulle!
 
Gule said:
Interesting topic!

In Swedish we have the word "lagom", which we often use.

If for example someone is serving you food and asks how big a portion you want, you could reply "lagom". Which means that you don't want a too huge portion, but not a too small one either, you want one that is just the right size. Which of course is very hard for the person serving you to know what exact amount that would be. Anyway, read the wikipedia article and you will have a greater understanding of the word. 

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lagom
Too late!
 
tommyboy said:
I'm not convinced that there is a meaningful distinction between a "colour word" and a "decription" anyway.

That's a very good point.

tommyboy said:
He may, of course be right, and it is only good scientific practice to question, and challenge, and think about any prevailing orthodoxy in scientific thought. But the little I have read by him suggests more strongly a man rejecting his previous life choices than a man puncturing a tendentious hypothesis.
This is also a good, yet very speculative point. Yes, one may think it also has to do with his career/life.
tommyboy said:
(All the above is stated by me  from my position as an ignoramus in the field of linguistics, anthropology, and pretty much everything else).
This is a very humble point.  :wink:
 
"He is lagom tall." That's great.  :lol:

The lagom ..... mentality has been fingered as a challenge to economic growth and the reason for Sweden's apparent lack of outward patriotism.

Interesting.

Hengist said:
The Piraha's lifestyle is so much cut off from civilization that they live a very 'simple' life. They are intelligent, but tend to think more practical than abstract. This seems to afflict their language, since they don't have words for more abstract things or concepts that are remote in space and time (not many numbers, no words for great-grandfather)

Hmm, how would that work? Even if your highest number was 5, wouldn't you be able to conceptualise 5 x 5, and so on towards infinity? Though, if you weren't able to conceptualise 25, then it would be a bit of a struggle from then on. Also, they probably have no word for 'infinity'.  :razz:
 
Corvus said:
The traditionally accepted translation tends to be something like "city-state", but in reality we have no word that can in fact summarise the concept of the polis.
Yes we do. Polis. Ancient Greek was long dead before we coined the term :razz: Actually State and Polis are fundamentally the same concepts, the difference is that the English meaning has shifted (you'd get this problem comparing any dead language to a living one); it's rare these days for example to separate city and nation states, thus our concept of "state" is also interchangeable with "country".

The Conspirator said:
Yes, but the Eskimos have many various words describing (even if it's slightly) different kinds of snow, because they saw a lot of it, used the proper kind of it as igloo material and thus the nuances about it was important for them.
Yes, but we can adequately describe those nuances, we simply don't form a conglomerate of them. German language offers the same since you can continually bind nouns to get the much maligned ubernouns. It doesn't create something you couldn't directly translate into another language, it's just no other language offers that capability within it's syntax so in order to make sense you often have to break it down.

The Conspirator said:
In some African languages, if someone sees a mountain and knows that there is something 'behind' (with our conception) it, (s)he says "... is in front of the mountain" (I think it's because of their totemic beliefs preventing them from having a "perceptional egocentrism" about the mountain and the thing).
That's where you start getting into the weirdness. You can do the same with Japanese since their approach to subject is different. The phrase "Anata no pen desu ka" translated literally and preserving the Japanese syntactic structure would be "Owned by you Pen this is?", which once we reformat to English syntax reads "Is this pen owned by you?" or more simply "is this your pen?". The essential meaning and concepts haven't changed, but the order in which they are presented has.
As for menopause etc, Japanese don't have a word for computer either, that's because they're proper nouns rather than concepts. I mean technically English has no word for menopause either, since it's a conglomerate of Greek like most medical terms (using English syntactical rules, just to make it even more strange).

tommyboy said:
That, to me, is a weak position if you are asserting that the prevailing ideas of language as a universal genetic tendency are wrong. From his descriptions, their "culture" seems no more hermetically sealed and isolated than does their gene pool, if they have interacted as much as he says with the outside world.
Genes can determine whether you are capable of language, but not the form that language will take. A child born of European parents will learn Japanese just as readily as it's "native" tongue if exposed to it early enough. The only real difference genetics could make with regards to language is if they introduced some form of impediment or mutation of the vocal chords which made certain sounds impossible or difficult to produce; even if that were the case though you'd still be looking at something like the Japanese "L / R " difference rather than a complete lack of certain words.
Otherwise, we must think that our word "orange" is not a colour word, but a description of "like an orange".  I'm not convinced that there is a meaningful distinction between a "colour word" and a "decription" anyway.
That depends. We're only familiar with colours as anything other than adjectives since we've been able to identify them as a specific frequency of the electromagnetic spectrum. Prior to that, and in everyday use, they are indeed adjectives and we are saying "like an orange" when we use it as an adjective - we're referencing it's particular property of being orange which it shares with the namesake fruit. It is however an interesting distinction, since most languages do turn colours into labels in and of themselves. However, this is of course dependent on experience. I very much doubt a culture which had spent it's entire existence at the bottom of a coal mine for example would have any need or use for a word to describe white, since the odds on them ever encountering enough separate white items to make it worth having a unique word to describe their colour is somewhat remote.
Come to think of it, the same was probably true of orange for a long while. Hence why the wavelength 622 - 597 of the electromagnetic spectrum is now named after a fruit.
 
Archonsod said:
tommyboy said:
That, to me, is a weak position if you are asserting that the prevailing ideas of language as a universal genetic tendency are wrong. From his descriptions, their "culture" seems no more hermetically sealed and isolated than does their gene pool, if they have interacted as much as he says with the outside world.
Genes can determine whether you are capable of language, but not the form that language will take. A child born of European parents will learn Japanese just as readily as it's "native" tongue if exposed to it early enough. The only real difference genetics could make with regards to language is if they introduced some form of impediment or mutation of the vocal chords which made certain sounds impossible or difficult to produce; even if that were the case though you'd still be looking at something like the Japanese "L / R " difference rather than a complete lack of certain words.
Yep.
As I understand it, the prevailing model in linguistics is that proposed by Chomsky, Pinker et al whereby built in to the structure of the human brain is a "Universal Grammar" or language instinct, which explains why as children we can master the complex rules of grammar and syntax and meaning pretty much automatically. As you rightly say, any child will learn any language it is exposed to, without any special effort above and beyond that required for its "native" language. If we assume this brain structure to be genetically pre-determined, it might be possible for a genetic mutation to produce a brain structure whose Grammar is not Universal, and whose language lacks certain things like recursive structures, distinct colour, numeracy, etc leading to the type of language Everett claims the Piraha to have, which seemingly offers evidence to disprove the Universal Grammar idea. If the mutation remained local, to the 350 or so Piraha tribe, the language would reflect the differences in their "language gene(s)". But Everett seems to be sure that it is the culture of the Piraha which determines their language, despite not having checked for DNA anomalies.


Archonsod said:
tommyboy said:
Otherwise, we must think that our word "orange" is not a colour word, but a description of "like an orange".  I'm not convinced that there is a meaningful distinction between a "colour word" and a "decription" anyway.
That depends. We're only familiar with colours as anything other than adjectives since we've been able to identify them as a specific frequency of the electromagnetic spectrum. Prior to that, and in everyday use, they are indeed adjectives and we are saying "like an orange" when we use it as an adjective - we're referencing it's particular property of being orange which it shares with the namesake fruit. It is however an interesting distinction, since most languages do turn colours into labels in and of themselves. However, this is of course dependent on experience. I very much doubt a culture which had spent it's entire existence at the bottom of a coal mine for example would have any need or use for a word to describe white, since the odds on them ever encountering enough separate white items to make it worth having a unique word to describe their colour is somewhat remote.
Come to think of it, the same was probably true of orange for a long while. Hence why the wavelength 622 - 597 of the electromagnetic spectrum is now named after a fruit.

This is where my ignorance of the subject really starts to show, but to me, a compound thingy "like an orange" that in context only ever means "reflects and absorbs the same range of visible frequencies as the fruit", or "like blood" that means "the same colour as blood" must eventually become a proper word in its own right which is the word for that colour. Nobody now thinks a TeleVision is a "distance viewer", it's compound origin has mutated to Teevee or Telly. So if as Everett says, the Piraha have no words for colours, only compound phrases which describe colours I cannot help but wonder if english has no word for the colour "gold", or "orange", and if "blue" originally meant "sky" and "green" meant "grass"? 
But honestly, I'm a little out of my depth on this subject.
 
Archonsod said:
The Conspirator said:
Yes, but the Eskimos have many various words describing (even if it's slightly) different kinds of snow, because they saw a lot of it, used the proper kind of it as igloo material and thus the nuances about it was important for them.
Yes, but we can adequately describe those nuances, we simply don't form a conglomerate of them. German language offers the same since you can continually bind nouns to get the much maligned ubernouns. It doesn't create something you couldn't directly translate into another language, it's just no other language offers that capability within it's syntax so in order to make sense you often have to break it down.
I didn't overlook it and exaggerate the 'lack':
The Conspirator said:
EDIT: However, lack of conceptions and words is easier to solve than grammatical and syntactic rules' interdictions and requires a lesser overhaul.
But I got proven wrong in other aspects, I can see that.

EDIT: If people speaking the same language somehow learn about new things, this 'lack' won't matter even if it exists, especially in this era. However, it would be uncommon in older ages.
 
tommyboy said:
This is where my ignorance of the subject really starts to show, but to me, a compound thingy "like an orange" that in context only ever means "reflects and absorbs the same range of visible frequencies as the fruit", or "like blood" that means "the same colour as blood" must eventually become a proper word in its own right which is the word for that colour. Nobody now thinks a TeleVision is a "distance viewer", it's compound origin has mutated to Teevee or Telly. So if as Everett says, the Piraha have no words for colours, only compound phrases which describe colours I cannot help but wonder if english has no word for the colour "gold", or "orange", and if "blue" originally meant "sky" and "green" meant "grass"? 
But honestly, I'm a little out of my depth on this subject.

One problem concerning this "circumscription or proper lexical item"-issue is probably that - as you thought already - many expressions like adjectives originally were descriptions and would not have been rendered as proper "words".  They were more and more frequently used and then made their way into the lexicon as a fixed entry. Lack of knowledge about the word's etymology adds to this.
The orange-thing is perhaps a relatively recent development and thus a properly used adjective yet still recognisable as a former "description".

When Everett now observes the Piraha expressions which serve the function of an adjective with a totally synchronic perspective, he is of course more prone to label those "no proper words".

Whoever can deduce any sense from what I wrote now, can see that I tend to side with tommyboy and say this may be a weak point of Everett's theory.
 
tommyboy said:
As I understand it, the prevailing model in linguistics is that proposed by Chomsky, Pinker et al whereby built in to the structure of the human brain is a "Universal Grammar" or language instinct, which explains why as children we can master the complex rules of grammar and syntax and meaning pretty much automatically.
Heh, Chomsky ain't a geneticist. Genetics can determine how receptive the language centre of the brain is by altering how easily connections form, but it can't give you pre-written connections. You could say there's a "universal grammar" in the sense that certain concepts are natural due to the way our brains work; for example the concept of "self", but I'd say that was more to do with reality than genetics. While you could probably muck about with the DNA and remove said concept of self, what you'd get at the end of it would be recognisably insane, from our perspective anyway.
But Everett seems to be sure that it is the culture of the Piraha which determines their language, despite not having checked for DNA anomalies.
It's impossible to mutate what you don't have. A mutation of the language centres would affect how well you could learn a language, but not the form of the language. The only kind of anomaly which would do that would be one affecting cognitive function; which generally we'd recognise as autism or a similar disorder. I don't think you'd need a DNA test to tell if a tribe of people were autistic. Most of our language is simple labelling, in order to influence that you'd need to alter our ability to link a label to it's concept.
Although a tribe-wide mutation may influence it indirectly. If the entire tribe is colour blind for example their concept, and thus language, for dealing with colour would be somewhat different from our own. It's not a genetic influence on the language centre itself though, so much as influence on the perception of reality.
if "blue" originally meant "sky" and "green" meant "grass"? 
Quite likely, although not English; English get's it's colours from Latin, which probably got them from elsewhere and back into the proto-languages.
 
there are a lot of words like that in Turkish...I'm not going to hurt my brain trying to remember what I can not translate. But there is one very very significant.
The word "lan" is used tens, maybe hundreds of times in daily language. It is certainly slang, you do not use that in formal speech. But it is an overused word. ANd I really do not know how I tell it to you because it does not actually have a meaning.  :neutral:       
 
I don't know any Turkish, but I also have heard of the word "lan" and that it's used quite frequently.
Perhaps it's a particle like German "so" or English "like" with an emphasizing or pause-filling function.

I experiecned it twice that people very often used words that were basically semantically empty but had pragmatic meaning or were just used out of routine.

The first was an Austrian (border to Switzerland) who finished almost every sentence with a question-like "oder" (or) and even raised his voice as if to make a rhetorical question out of each statement he gave and thus emphasize what he said.


The second was an Irishman in Donegal, he used the same principle but with the word "okay".
 
Hengist said:
The second was an Irishman in Donegal, he used the same principle but with the word "okay".

Hmm, I'm from that neck of the woods, and I would like to posit the theory that he was just acting like a tremendous cock. It's not a localised phenomenon, but some kind of reflex when he felt he talking to foreigners\idiots to make sure he was understood. Or he was a prick. I dislike him extremely already.

Funny with the Swiss guy; recently I find myself trailing off in sentences like that: "What would you like to do, go to the cinema, or...", or "Would you like to apply this software, or.."
Dunno if it's insecurity or what, but I need to get that looked at.
 
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