Part of me loves the idea of building new languages for fun, and I've often considered learning one myself. If nothing else, I don't imagine there's a great amount of competition in the teaching space for sci-fi languages like Klingon and Avatar's Na'vi.
But every time I get close to giving it a go, I back off. Why?
We can start with the "big one": Esperanto. I've mostly specialised in Romance languages, a choice which is in part laziness. But only in part. The more I learn of the Romance languages, the more I'm fascinated by the way the languages form a continuum. Corsican, for example, has the unique feature of having two major dialect groups that have a phonology much like Italian (in the south) and far more "Iberian" in nature (in the north). In the south, double vowels are "geminated" (lengthened) as in Italian. In the north, they aren't, and a single vowel may be "lenited" (softened, weakened, lightened). So while in the south, the island name "Corsica" is said much like an Italian would expect, the pronunciation in the north softens the second C by voicing it -- making it sound identical to a G. Spanish people call the island "Córsega". Past participle endings in Italian almost all have a /t/ sound: -ato, -ito, -uto; in Spanish they have a /d/: -ado, -ido. And in the south of Corsica it's a T sound and in the north a D (both represented in the written form by the same single letter T). But of course the "D" of -ado in Spanish in some accents is weakened to /ð/ ("th" of English "the")... and if you put a single D between two vowels in Northern Corsican, you get the same sound.
When I first looked at Esperanto, I saw that it took Romance roots and Germanic roots, and it modified them in ways that were not possible within the two language families themselves. As I learn more Romance languages, I find I'm more able to deal with variations, so I can almost understand languages like Portuguese and Occitan, even though I haven't learnt them. My fear with Esperanto, then, was feeding "false data" into the language function -- polluting the natural spectrum that I am acquiring with points that would mislead my brain and reduce my ability to understand one language from another.
It's an unprovable assertion, and no-one's going to be able to prove otherwise with enough certainty to make me risk it.
My latest temptation was the idea of using a simple language such as Toki Pona as a test case for a language learning application/framework that I've been trying to develop. I figured that its minimalist featureset and its completely formalised, regularised grammar would make it a simple and quick language to program and test.
But what scared me off this time was V.S. Ramachandran's notion of "synkinesthesia" -- the idea that language is about shape at some level. When thinking about pronouns and demonstratives, I always remember watching Ramachandran on TV demonstrating the "pointing" that a speaker will do with their lips when using many of these words. I was helping someone learn Gaelic over the summer, and she could never remember her "here,there,yonder" distinction, so I pointed out to her that "seo" feels close (the tongue stays in the back of the mouth), "sin" points forward a bit (palatalised N) and "siud" is far away (dental T, tongue nearly leaves the mouth). It seemed to help her (at the time, at least).
But that's something that no conlang I know of covers. Perhaps there are conlangers incorporating Ramachandran's ideas -- it's an idea I've toyed with myself in the past -- but then again, it's still just theory.
Any conlang can only encode what is known in theory, and will miss many of the subtleties of real languages that have evolved through natural usage and change. It may even miss one of the really core ideas of real language.
It's the same, then, as my original concern about Esperanto, but the system isn't one of sound changes and a few superficial syntactic differences: no, what I'm worried about now is that I train myself out of recognising the underlying principles of natural language by teaching my brain an artifical language that doesn't exhibit them.
Showing posts with label ramachandran. Show all posts
Showing posts with label ramachandran. Show all posts
02 November 2012
25 October 2010
Why English is a poor international language.
English is now the international language of trade and commerce, but it's not fit for purpose. That's not to say any other language genuinely is either. For all the spelling quirks, inconsistent borrowings and weird pronunciations in English, the most important problem, to my mind, is the result of the natural evolution of language.
Language evolved to be spoken, for face-to-face communication. It's only modern technology that has allowed remote communications (written and by telephone) to really take off.
Languages take advantage of the face-to-face medium implicitly. We have three grammatical "persons". The first is who is speaking, the second is who is being spoken to, the third is anybody else -- absolutely anybody else.
To me, this is one of the concrete physical underpinnings of language, which is not as abstract as some would like to think.
Ramachandran and Hubbard put forward the case for language as a synaesthetic phenomenon. Even if this is overstating the case, their theory uses the proximity of the auditory parts of the brain with the parts involved in physical movements. Signers have often held that they are not "reading" or "writing" when they engage in a sign-language conversation, but speaking, and it has long been accepted that sign languages are genuine languages, not mere abstract codes. Other academics than Ramachandran and Hubbard that language was a series of gestures, but that they just happened to be gestures of the mouth. Ramachandran and Hubbard merely suggest a mechanism that would allow us to perceive these gestures in the absence of visual data.
But I'm at risk of digressing here, as this theory is something I find absolutely fascinating.
The 1st, 2nd, 3rd distinction is not just about people, but also more generally about location. Many languages have 3 words where English only has "here" and "there". If you think about it, "here" is "where I am". "There" is merely anywhere that I am not. However, in Gaelic, "an seo" is where I am, "an sin" is where you are, and "an siud" is where neither of us are -- a "third place", effectively. In older English we had "here", "there" and "yonder", and we still have remnants of this distinction in the phrase "this, that and the other".
This is where the physicality comes in. When we talk face to face, I can point to "you" and "me" unambiguously, but third parties would be a vague wave off to one side. Now, because you can see me, and I can see you, we know lots about who's speaking, not least of which is gender. Very few languages encode gender in their 1st and 2nd plural pronouns because it's not information that really is particularly useful. But in the 3rd person, it helps a great deal, because it helps us categorise and reduce the number of potential candidates. It lets us talk about 2 people without confusing them, if they happen to be of a different sex -- so he says, and she says, and he says...
But now on the internet, with text based communications and screen-names that are often not real names and give no clues about gender, what are we to do? In French, it's possible that someone would give themselves away by using a gender-specific adjective, but these are vanishingly rare in English. So when I refer to someone else's comments, I often end up arbitrarily ascribing a gender to them. And it's normally male, which often winds up women.
This alone can be sorted by using a truly ungendered language (Quechua as the new language of the internet, anyone?) but there's another problem that slips a lot of people by: in text-based conversations, "you" is also prone to misinterpretation.
Think about it. I can't see you. You can't see me. Am I really talking to you? Perhaps I'm talking to someone else, and calling him (or her!) "you". But you think I'm talking to you, because you're seeing that word "you" and there's no reason to think it's someone else. In the physical world, you would hear me saying "you" and you would see whether I was looking at you as I said it or not. In the internet there is no physical relationship, no "pointing", so the boundary between 2nd and 3rd person has been completely broken. This leads to confusion and unnecessary offense so often, not just on the text-based side of the internet, but in conference calls too.
I've been on phone conferences where someone's asked a question to "you", and no-one has answered because they all think it's someone else who is being addressed. In language classes, a teacher will start by asking "how are you?" to the whole class, and everyone will answer in turn, but on an internet tutorial, the latest joiner appears to assume that the question was addressed to him only, and starts a conversation.
A true "remote" language would have to have a radically different structure, and perhaps people would reject it. What would it be?
Maybe it would just be a matter of collapsing second and third into one. This is already how many IE languages handle politeness. Even in English, we are somewhat familiar with the idea of speaking about the 2nd person in the 3rd person, even if only in posh restaurants and in period drama. "Does sir want to see the menu?" "Is sir ready to order?"
Another option would be to maintain the 1st, 2nd, 3rd distinction, but (and this takes a bit of getting your head round) remove the "you" from the 2nd person singular and require that the person's name is used instead. "Do John want to see the menu?" "Are John ready to order?"
But what would have happened to language if humans had originally evolved in a conference call environment? This really messes with your head.
I suspect we would have had a 3 person distinction -- 1: me, 2: anyone on the call, 3: anyone not on the call -- but augmented by a some manner of direct address vs reference in the 2nd, so that I can ask a question to a person in the call and refer to something someone else in the call said without ambiguity. So that's actually 4 persons. I think. My head hurts.
English is now the international language of trade and commerce, but it's not fit for purpose. That's not to say any other language genuinely is either. For all the spelling quirks, inconsistent borrowings and weird pronunciations in English, the most important problem, to my mind, is the result of the natural evolution of language.
Language evolved to be spoken, for face-to-face communication. It's only modern technology that has allowed remote communications (written and by telephone) to really take off.
Languages take advantage of the face-to-face medium implicitly. We have three grammatical "persons". The first is who is speaking, the second is who is being spoken to, the third is anybody else -- absolutely anybody else.
To me, this is one of the concrete physical underpinnings of language, which is not as abstract as some would like to think.
Ramachandran and Hubbard put forward the case for language as a synaesthetic phenomenon. Even if this is overstating the case, their theory uses the proximity of the auditory parts of the brain with the parts involved in physical movements. Signers have often held that they are not "reading" or "writing" when they engage in a sign-language conversation, but speaking, and it has long been accepted that sign languages are genuine languages, not mere abstract codes. Other academics than Ramachandran and Hubbard that language was a series of gestures, but that they just happened to be gestures of the mouth. Ramachandran and Hubbard merely suggest a mechanism that would allow us to perceive these gestures in the absence of visual data.
But I'm at risk of digressing here, as this theory is something I find absolutely fascinating.
The 1st, 2nd, 3rd distinction is not just about people, but also more generally about location. Many languages have 3 words where English only has "here" and "there". If you think about it, "here" is "where I am". "There" is merely anywhere that I am not. However, in Gaelic, "an seo" is where I am, "an sin" is where you are, and "an siud" is where neither of us are -- a "third place", effectively. In older English we had "here", "there" and "yonder", and we still have remnants of this distinction in the phrase "this, that and the other".
This is where the physicality comes in. When we talk face to face, I can point to "you" and "me" unambiguously, but third parties would be a vague wave off to one side. Now, because you can see me, and I can see you, we know lots about who's speaking, not least of which is gender. Very few languages encode gender in their 1st and 2nd plural pronouns because it's not information that really is particularly useful. But in the 3rd person, it helps a great deal, because it helps us categorise and reduce the number of potential candidates. It lets us talk about 2 people without confusing them, if they happen to be of a different sex -- so he says, and she says, and he says...
But now on the internet, with text based communications and screen-names that are often not real names and give no clues about gender, what are we to do? In French, it's possible that someone would give themselves away by using a gender-specific adjective, but these are vanishingly rare in English. So when I refer to someone else's comments, I often end up arbitrarily ascribing a gender to them. And it's normally male, which often winds up women.
This alone can be sorted by using a truly ungendered language (Quechua as the new language of the internet, anyone?) but there's another problem that slips a lot of people by: in text-based conversations, "you" is also prone to misinterpretation.
Think about it. I can't see you. You can't see me. Am I really talking to you? Perhaps I'm talking to someone else, and calling him (or her!) "you". But you think I'm talking to you, because you're seeing that word "you" and there's no reason to think it's someone else. In the physical world, you would hear me saying "you" and you would see whether I was looking at you as I said it or not. In the internet there is no physical relationship, no "pointing", so the boundary between 2nd and 3rd person has been completely broken. This leads to confusion and unnecessary offense so often, not just on the text-based side of the internet, but in conference calls too.
I've been on phone conferences where someone's asked a question to "you", and no-one has answered because they all think it's someone else who is being addressed. In language classes, a teacher will start by asking "how are you?" to the whole class, and everyone will answer in turn, but on an internet tutorial, the latest joiner appears to assume that the question was addressed to him only, and starts a conversation.
A true "remote" language would have to have a radically different structure, and perhaps people would reject it. What would it be?
Maybe it would just be a matter of collapsing second and third into one. This is already how many IE languages handle politeness. Even in English, we are somewhat familiar with the idea of speaking about the 2nd person in the 3rd person, even if only in posh restaurants and in period drama. "Does sir want to see the menu?" "Is sir ready to order?"
Another option would be to maintain the 1st, 2nd, 3rd distinction, but (and this takes a bit of getting your head round) remove the "you" from the 2nd person singular and require that the person's name is used instead. "Do John want to see the menu?" "Are John ready to order?"
But what would have happened to language if humans had originally evolved in a conference call environment? This really messes with your head.
I suspect we would have had a 3 person distinction -- 1: me, 2: anyone on the call, 3: anyone not on the call -- but augmented by a some manner of direct address vs reference in the 2nd, so that I can ask a question to a person in the call and refer to something someone else in the call said without ambiguity. So that's actually 4 persons. I think. My head hurts.
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