Daily Meh is an edited stream of consciousness, by Simen.

Linguashmucks

This is a translation of a post in and about Greek, specifically, about text speak and its not being the end of western civilization. I think it’s wonderful both for the insight into Greek and for the universal aspects.

Now, if you don’t get the joke, pull up a seat, and let me remind you of a thing or two about the Immortal Greek Tongue. Who knows, we might have a laugh together.

So, we here in this country of stones have been cursed, to have had some utter loafers live here before us. These loafers didn’t know what else to do with their time, so they sat around and came up with philosophies. And any number of related sciences, too. As if it wasn’t bad enough that they came up with those philosophies, the bastards went and left behind some written texts—just so they could torment their descendants with them. These written texts were later taken up by Civilised Humanity, to their great admiration. (Insert exclamation point here.) Of course, Civilised Humanity then burnt most of those texts, in case they fell into the hands of unsuspecting serfs and gave them any curious notions. The ancient texts that weren’t burned were copied by pious monks, with the appropriate level of care to ensure there were no deviations from Christian morality. (And if there were any, then so much the worse for the deviations.) This bunch of stuff more or less passed on to Modern Greece as “Ancient Greek Literature”. And they turned our brains to chicken wire with it in High School, because it was compulsory to teach it to us from the original. (Original my ass.)

At any rate, There’s two things you should keep from this story:

1. The pathological relationship of Greek citizens with the Ancient texts: texts they flipped off in school, and flip out on in middle age.
2. The hysterical idealisation of the Ancient Greek language, because many of its words are used in modern Western science.

Now, I love the image of Greeks flipping off texts in school and flipping out on them in middle age. I don’t know Greek, but I imagine that’s a really clever translation. The author’s main point about text speak seems to be that it’s simply natural change — real people using real language to do what language is for, communicating — which tends toward efficiency:

And while:

• Greek teachers presume to do a linguist’s job, imposing arbitrary grammatical rules;
• authors write however the mood takes them, either using local dialect, or following the vernacular of their suburb, or even inventing a language of their own;
• the State communicates in a farrago of Demoticising Puristic;
• the Church stays faithful to Old School Puristic—

the citizens of the country speak their own language. Which makes sense, right?

Dynamism, Legacy of the Visigoths

“Dynamic” is technical jargon used by programmers, meaning “good”. It derives from the Latin dyno mite, meaning “I am extremely pleased”, and is first recorded in the historical work Bona Aetas of noted Roman sage and pundit J.J. Walker. Its meaning evolved in the 4th century after monks copying an obscure manuscript on programming linguistics in their ignorance tried to deduce its meaning from context.

In this (occidental) manuscript, the Lingua Lambda, the author described how he had stumbled across Miranda, an early ancestor of Haskell, a typed language that had found its way to the West from the Orient, and which, though crude in some ways, supported many fine features and was, in fact, lauded as the language for discriminating hackers. The author wrote an essay about this language, describing its features, and noted (Miranda dyno mite!) how pleased he was with it…

Language rows between Slovakia and Hungary: Hovorte po slovensky!

The Economist:

Language laws may protect minority rights or infringe them. Slovakia’s new law, which comes into force on September 1st, is under fire for its harshness. It imposes fines of up to €5,000 ($7,000) on those who break rules promoting the use of Slovak in public. Hungarian-speakers, who number around a tenth of the population, mainly in the south of the country, see that as a direct attack on their right to speak their mother-tongue. So do politicians in neighbouring Hungary. A long-running dispute between two of Europe’s most prickly neighbours is turning nasty.

Slovakia’s left-leaning populist government has been needling Hungary since it took power in 2006. It sidelined plans for a joint Hungarian-Slovak history textbook last year and has publicly endorsed the Benes Decrees, which expelled most Germans and many Hungarians from the then Czechoslovakia after 1945, as a punishment for their supposedly Nazi sympathies. The new law tightens rules about speaking Slovak in dealings with public officials: not just police officers or teachers, but also, say, doctors. Exceptions apply to monoglots, or in districts where the minority makes up a fifth or more of the population. Hungarian-language schools must conduct their administration in Slovak. The new law also lays down detailed instructions for the way in which memorials and plaques may be inscribed.

EU Observer:

In brief, around ten percent of the population of Slovakia is Hungarian-speaking, beyond which there are Ukrainian, Roma and other minorities. For all practical purposes, the new law eliminates all the minority languages from the public sphere. Yet even here there is a further discrimination - the small Czech minority is exempt from its restrictions.

The Law, recently passed by parliament, is highly detailed and penetrates deep into the everyday lives of the linguistic minorities. It seeks to regulate any and all meetings, gatherings, associations and other forms of communication by insisting on the parallel use of the “state language”, Slovak, whenever and wherever members if the minority get together in public, and “public” is very broadly defined. Thus, if a group of Hungarian-speakers establish a literary circle, say, their proceedings would have to have a parallel Slovak translation, whether anyone actually needed this or not.

Minority-language schools are obliged to run their administration and documentation in Slovak and the same applies to the health service. The armed forces, the police and the fire service are to be monolingually Slovak. This last, by way of example, creates interesting scenarios - thus in a Hungarian-speaking area, the firemen are very likely to be all Hungarian-speakers, but when putting out a fire, they must speak Slovak to each other and also, of course, to the owner of the house where the fire is.

The weirdest of all is that all public inscriptions must be in the state language; this may be accompanied by other languages and, although the Law is vague on this, it looks as if it is to be applied retroactively. The implication is that gravestones must all be recarved, unless they are already in Slovak.

Really? If this is correct, it’s thoroughly fucked up. As a lover of languages, it’s always sad to see someone campaigning for the death of a language (even if it’s just in one area); as a lover of human rights, it’s always sad to see ethnic discrimination.

It was only a few decades ago that the Norwegian state ceased its despotic assimilation policy of sending off our Sami population to boarding schools where they were punished harshly for using their own native language. This kind of thing is thoroughly despicable on so many levels (so despicable, in fact, that I’m leaving in the redundancy).

How does our language shape the way we think?

There is a fascinating hypothesis called the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis that says language has a profound effect on the way we see the world. Sapir-Whorf places the causal arrow at language, towards thought: we observe that speakers of different languages act and speak differently in many different ways, such as when it comes to spatial orientation, color, gender, social organization, and so on, and infer that these differences are decided by their languages. The strong version of this hypothesis says that language absolutely determines the way you see the world, perceptually and conceptually. A bit weaker, but still quite strong versions of Sapir-Whorf are currently back in vogue, as this article attests.

The problem is that most of those who argue that language has a profound effect on some aspect of thought mistake correlation for causation. When you observe that people speak a particular way and also act a particular way, there are three distinct possibilities: speaking that way caused them to act that particular way; acting that particular way caused them to speak that particular way; or some third, unrelated phenomenon caused both the behavioral and the linguistic patterns. Most S-W proponents jump directly to the conclusion that it’s the language that’s causing the thought patterns, and completely ignore the possibility that in fact the culture the speakers are living in is causing both thought and language.

This article pretends to address that objection, but ignores it completely in several of the examples:

Follow me to Pormpuraaw, a small Aboriginal community on the western edge of Cape York, in northern Australia. I came here because of the way the locals, the Kuuk Thaayorre, talk about space. Instead of words like “right,” “left,” “forward,” and “back,” which, as commonly used in English, define space relative to an observer, the Kuuk Thaayorre, like many other Aboriginal groups, use cardinal-direction terms — north, south, east, and west — to define space. This is done at all scales, which means you have to say things like “There’s an ant on your southeast leg” or “Move the cup to the north northwest a little bit.” One obvious consequence of speaking such a language is that you have to stay oriented at all times, or else you cannot speak properly. The normal greeting in Kuuk Thaayorre is “Where are you going?” and the answer should be something like ” Southsoutheast, in the middle distance.” If you don’t know which way you’re facing, you can’t even get past “Hello.”

The result is a profound difference in navigational ability and spatial knowledge between speakers of languages that rely primarily on absolute reference frames (like Kuuk Thaayorre) and languages that rely on relative reference frames (like English). Simply put, speakers of languages like Kuuk Thaayorre are much better than English speakers at staying oriented and keeping track of where they are, even in unfamiliar landscapes or inside unfamiliar buildings. What enables them — in fact, forces them — to do this is their language. Having their attention trained in this way equips them to perform navigational feats once thought beyond human capabilities. Because space is such a fundamental domain of thought, differences in how people think about space don’t end there. People rely on their spatial knowledge to build other, more complex, more abstract representations. Representations of such things as time, number, musical pitch, kinship relations, morality, and emotions have been shown to depend on how we think about space.

Very interesting, but this seems like a prime candidate for a cultural explanation. Consider this: how did the Kuuk Thaayorre language come to use north, east, south and west where we use relative terms like left and right? Did the terms just spontaneously emerge, and then the speakers learned to keep track of their absolute position at all times just to keep up? A more plausible explanation is that being able to keep track of absolute position was such an important trait for survival that it permeated the culture, including the language. Since no one is even attempting to empirically test whether the causal arrow is pointed from language to thought or the other way around, and since it’s unclear what would constitute an empirical test of the matter, we must fall back on a priori reasoning, and on the face of it, it seems to me that it’s more plausible that a culture collectively developed a good sense of direction because those who didn’t died, and then it spread into the language, than that the language spontaneously developed a different set of spatial concepts and then the culture was forced to use these concepts to communicate.

More plausible is the example with gender: speakers of gendered languages, such as Spanish or German, will tend to describe words that are masculine in their language with words for qualities associated with masculine traits, and similarly describe feminine words with feminine traits. This is a stronger case for (one instance of) S-W for several reasons: it persists in English, a language without grammatical gender; there is no obvious possible cultural explanation here; and, more importantly, grammatical gender is much more prone to randomness and not as closely tied to ways of living as for example spatial navigation. Generations of students have been puzzled that e.g., German das Mädchen, the girl, is neuter, not feminine. This is probably by analogy with other words that end in the diminutive -chen — -chen words are always neuter. This happens a lot when it comes to grammatical gender, but is hard to imagine when it comes to spatial concepts: a random fluke in the language that is not caused by any kind of cultural shift causes speakers to think differently about the concepts the word refer to. A grammatical shift that is purely linguistic caused shifts in patterns of thought.

The problem with this article is that it celebrates the above as an example of the huge influence of language on thought. “The fact that even quirks of grammar, such as grammatical gender, can affect our thinking is profound.” Well, it is, but the effect isn’t as profound as some would have it. By this point in the article, we’re supposed to take this as one of a long series of examples that corroborate S-W. In fact, it’s the single example in the article that unambiguously supports an instance of S-W!

I think language affects thought, but I think thought affects language far more. So far, the evidence for the opposite has been underwhelming. (The color example, too, is more complicated than it’s made to appear.)

Of course, researchers who believe in S-W approach every correlation as if it were causation in their favor, and skeptics, like me, approach every correlation as if it were simple accidental and not in favor of S-W. More nuance is clearly needed, and less sensationalism.

Broken Koans and other Zen debris

I know almost nothing about Buddhism, but I found this “broken koan” poignant: a student is complaining that other students, through various means, gain enlightenment, but he has been doing these things for two years, and things don’t make any more sense to him. The teacher replies:

Well you see, for most people, and especially for most educated people like you and I, what we perceive and experience is heavily mediated, through language and concepts that are deeply ingrained in our ways of thinking and feeling. Our objective here is to induce in ourselves and in each other a psychological state that involves the unmediated experience of the world, because we believe that that state has certain desirable properties. It’s impossible in general to reach that state through any particular form or method, since forms and methods are themselves examples of the mediators that we are trying to avoid. So we employ a variety of ad hoc means, some linguistic like koans and some non-linguistic like zazen, in hopes that for any given student one or more of our methods will, in whatever way, engender the condition of non-mediated experience that is our goal. And since even thinking in terms of mediators and goals tends to reinforce our undesirable dependency on concepts, we actively discourage exactly this kind of analytical discourse.

I think I, and a lot of other people, are stuck thinking too much. Overanalyzing. Never being fully present in a moment, because our minds are also busy analyzing the moment as it’s happening. And how the fuck do we get out of that quagmire? Resistance is futile. Whatever we decide to do is going to be a method, and the whole point is not to look at the world through methods or analysis, but to simply live it. I’ve been meaning to write about that feeling, and may still do so, but writing about it is kind of futile, since writing about it is the kind of overthinking that I want to avoid. In the meantime, the broken koan will have to do.

Proto-World and the Language Organ

Mark Rosenfelder challenges both the idea of a language organ and a single origin for language. He has written a number of great articles debunking linguistic quackery that I like to link to ocassionally, and seems like a very reasonable fellow overall, so if you’re interested in this sort of thing, I suggest reading and evaluating it before writing it off.

8 Racist Words You Use Every Day

Someone needs to teach Cracked.com’s writers about the etymological fallacy, meaning as use, and the concept of descriptive linguistics.

Of course, one should always take everything on that site with, like, three and a half tons of salt.

The Linguistic Diversity of Aboriginal Europe

Don Ringe describes what we know — after reading the post, anyway — about the languages of Europe before the spread of Indo-European.