Language is not the problem in our understanding of reality, the problem is discourse. What may or may not be adequate to a given social, historical, and ecological reality is the dominant discourse of a given society, a discourse crafted out of the infinite potential of the language(s) in use. Time is a factor also. What separates our talk from that of the middle ages is not so much how we talk — linguistic changes in grammar, spelling, basic vocabulary, and so on, real as these may be — but radical changes in what we talk about and how we do it.
— Wilden, Anthony. The Rules Are No Game: The Strategy of Communication. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1987. (via carvalhais)
Tonight’s class: Adult Acquired Cognitive Disorders
Topic: Functional dominance and asymmetries in the brain
In non-neuroscience terms that means tht the two sides of our brains function differently. The picture above shows an example of how damage to one side or the other impacts visual perception. The gist being: the right side of the brain processes stimuli in a holistic way; the left side breaks stimuli into details. If you damage the right side of your brain, you won’t be able to perceive a whole, but only the details. For example, in the picture above- the patient accurately drew the rectangles, but instead of a gestalt triangle, made three distinct lines. Vice versa for the left hemisphere.
In case you can’t read the caption:
“Patients who sustain damage to the right hemisphere can correctly draw the local, or component, parts of the objects, as illustrated by the correct drawing of the Zs and the rectangles. However, the overall global form is incorrect; it is neither an M (in the case of the linguistic stimulus) nor a triangle (in the case of the nonlinguistic stimulus). In contrast, patients who sustain damage to the left hemisphere can correctly draw the global form of the items but not the local, or component, parts.”
onomatopoeia follow-up
Re this post: An anonymous user took me to task (via the ask function) for jokingly offering “The Straight Dope” and then immediately jumping into structuralist linguistics. This is fair criticism, since I also criticized the incoherence of armchair experts and my post relied on some inaccessible jargon. Touche!
Anyway, the whole point about armchair experts is that unlike them, I will not make shit up. (See this post by Simen for a takedown of the experts I have in mind). Thus, rather than making shit up or having you take my word for it, I decided to be rigorous and try to explain why the original question—can languages be more onomatopoetic than others?—was not the right question. I suppose I abused the notion of Straight Dopeness when I had “no handwaving” in mind.
To clarify, the argument to my earlier post is as follows:
- The intellectual tradition of linguistics stipulates that all language is arbitrary, so right off the bat it’s hard to compare languages as being more or less onomatopoetic because onomatopoeia is not arbitrary. Onomatopoeia is imitation: Just as a stick figure stands for a person in a kind of iconic approximation so do onomatopoeia stand for non-language sounds by offering a reasonable approximation. So the tradition is not equipped to handle the question, but we can still try to think about these things.
- Suppose we asked which character set for a language could make the most detailed or the widest range of emoticons. The analogy fits because we are using part of the language to imitate something outside of it using the combination of language units. Intuitively we might think that the writing system with the widest range of shapes would be best equipped.
- However, we realize that the sounds that imitated by onomatopoeia are really simple and basic—moo, woof, oink, quack—and do not require that much acoustic detail. What’s important, it seems, is that the language system has just enough breadth/variety in the sound inventory for a passable imitation that people can agree on.
Admittedly, I rambled and handled things very much off the cuff, and the post in fact was one of those compositional processes where I discovered the answer I was looking for by writing and sorting through my thoughts. I would love to be a better writer when it comes technical linguistic matters, and I consider my blogging here practice towards that end. But this is a tumblelog—a scrapbook for ephemeral conversation and stuff I find online—so let’s not take things so seriously!
Of course, I do wish there were simple answers and explanations for linguistic phenomena but this is almost never the case. The notion that language can be easily explained and the allure of simplistic explanations however strike me as a recipe for bullshitting and the propagation of bullshit.
re onomatopoeia
I know nothing—and I mean nothing—about linguistics. Which means I constantly have stupid questions about the subject, such as:
Is there any objective standard according to which we can say that one language is more onomatopoetic than another? Because it sure as hell seems to me that Spanish trumps English on that front (except for ‘oink’).
Also: What might it say about the cultures in or through or across or by which languages develop that one might be more onomatopoetic than another?
There is no such thing as a stupid question when it comes to linguistics—language matters tend to be plagued by the incoherent blather of reactionary armchair experts—thus I have no problems fielding any questions on language and giving you The Straight Dope.
One of the foundations of modern structuralist linguistics is the Saussurean sign which says that there is an arbitrary relationship between the signifier and the signified. What this means is that there is nothing iconic or “stop”-like about the shape and make-up of a stop sign. That is, a red octagon with giant white lines and curves has nothing to do with the act of slowing down and ceasing forward motion. This assumption that there is an arbitrary relation between form and meaning, as I understand the history of linguistics, pushed us towards the abstract, symbolic and computational study of language forms (since there was nothing iconic or inherently meaningful about words and sounds) and this was a good thing.
But as a result of arbitraryness, your question about comparative onomatopoetic capacity is somewhat incoherent. That is, by assumption all language is arbitrary, so it’s not possible to be “more or less onomatopoetic”. But we recognize that onomatopoeia, like reduplication or phonesthemes, flirts with iconicity (by which I mean, standing for something in a clear, non-arbitrary way) and sound symbolism, and it would be unprincipled to throw out the question entirely.
There is also, however, the dangerous ethnocentric subtext to your second question: If we assume that all language is imitative in origin—I’m thinking of cavepeople on cartoons—then a language that is more fit for onomatopoetic imitation is more iconic and more “primitive” than the more “developed” languages that do not readily facilitate such imitation. So let’s just be mindful and try to think about sound imitation scientifically.
We think of onomatopoeia as the process of imitating nonhuman sounds using the sounds of human language. This rules out things like raspberries and tongue-clucks since these are universally not used in language sound systems. The tools at a speaker’s disposal therefore are things like stops, vowels, fricatives, nasals, or whatever else in the sound inventory. The question therefore is to what extent—or perhaps at what resolution—a particular language sound system can capture a nonlinguistic sound.
Intuitively, it therefore seems that a language with more consonants and vowels would be better off, so here’s an insightful list of cross-linguistic onomatopoeia. Looking through these examples, I get the sense that all language needs to accommodate most of those examples are some vowels and at least two classes of consonants—stops, glides (y,w), liquids (l,r), nasals (m,n,ng) and fricatives (s,z,f,v,sh). Each class of sounds has its own properties that are useful for imitation: stops interrupt the speech stream and make natural boundaries, fricatives provide turbulent noise, nasals provide humming, and so on. Phonological breadth therefore boosts imitative capacity, as there are more tools at one’s disposal.
But then again, we are dealing with simple sounds whose onomatopoetic imitation becomes conventional and standardized: I’m thinking of oink which sounds nothing like a squeal but that’s how we communicate that noise in English. This kind of standardization reinforces the notion of arbitraryness: All you need, it seems, for onomatopoeia is a set of sounds to perform a passable imitation and a language to codify and reinforce the onomatopoetic mapping. This latter point seems most important to me: Even with a shortage of speech sounds, an imitation can stick and be useful in communication only when everyone agrees on it.
Knowledge Bomb
Trivia question for the grammar nerds: When is “the” not an article?
When it is an adverb, as in the following:
- The bigger they are, the harder they fall.
- …and no one will be (none) the wiser.
- Raynor really is a weirdo, the more I think about it.
The usage requires a comparative, that is an adjective/adverb modified by more or the affix -er.
[NB: This has been in my drafts folder for a while. I’m not sure where I meant to take this point or why I meant to wrinkle your brains.]
A language is a system of discrete infinity, a procedure that enumerates an infinite class of expressions, each of them a structured complex of properties of sound and meaning
—
Linguistics and Brian Science by Chomsky (via smokethenmirrors)
In which Noam puts on his theoretical computer science hat…
hiddieman: Minimal pears.
I do believe that all ho’s can’t fuck with me and it seems that apparently that they just wanna be me …
eush:
Cut me some slack, I’m only a fake linguist! This one is good so far, and right at my level, but I am wary of any book with Internet shoehorned in the title.
Tristn, what books would you recommend for someone interested in linguistics and language but with not much formal training?
To be fair, I only ragged on Crystal because I had to write reviews of three of his books and Language and the Internet was just depressingly superficial and dated. He would get stodgy about how there’s too much crap on the internet, and he practically worshipped Wired and hackers. It was a Gen-X mess.
Crystal still is a good place to start (it didn’t get that nice Penguin edition for nothing), as is Steven Pinker’s The Language Instinct. My big kick as of late has been Douglas Hofstadter though he’s more about cognition and formal structures than language. You could also look for the Language Log’s book Far From The Madding Gerund at your library. If were ruling out formal textbooks, Wikipedia of course is good.
unfriend vs defriend follow-up
alexwhines sent me an article by the linguist Ben Zimmer on the prefix un- and its prevalence in recent years:
The recent un- trend has also seeped into the world of advertising. KFC is marketing its new Kentucky Grilled Chicken with the tagline “UNthink: Taste the UNfried Side of KFC.” The cellphone company MetroPCS challenges you to “Unlimit Yourself,” while its competitor Boost Mobile wants you to get “UNoverage’D” and “UNcontract’D” (ridding yourself of burdensome overage fees and contracts). Even victims of the financial downturn can seek solace in un-: ABC broadcast a special report in May telling viewers how to get “Un-Broke.”
Zimmer claims that decades of undo commands have fostered “expectations that any action can be taken back”. This is a kind of cultural shift, and he cites uses of the reversal un- in literature and song where undoing is impossible:
- Jane Eyre: “I had learned to love Mr. Rochester; I could not unlove him now.”
- Macbeth: “What’s done cannot be undone.”
- Lucinda Williams: “Unsuffer Me”
- Toni Braxton: “Un-Break My Heart”
- Lynn Anderson: “How Can I Unlove You?”
In these literary uses, indeed, what’s done cannot be undone, so the prefix expresses that some state of affairs cannot be reversed. However, the creative uses of the reversal un- prefix make the opposite point: You can unlimit yourself, you can become unbroke.
It would be inappropriate, I think, to take seriously the idea that the information age has changed our understanding of how the world works, that CTRL+Z has conditioned us to consider any action undoable. Instead, the novel uses of reversal un- reflect the prominence of electronic media in our lives. Zimmer concludes:
What sets latter-day un- verbs apart from these historical examples is that the “reality rewind” is no longer a flight of counterfactual fancy: it’s built right into the interfaces that we use to make sense of our shared virtual worlds.
Facebook, for instance, allows you to register approval for a posted message in a very concrete way, by clicking a thumbs-up like button. Toggling off the button results in unliking your previously liked item. Note that this is different from disliking something, since unliking simply returns you to a neutral state. This kind of instant reversibility is now an inescapable facet of our digitized life — like it or un-.
This “neutral state” seems significant to me. cureforbedbugs says that defriending is a permanent clean-up kind of action like decluttering or debugging. This fact clues into the IRL consequences and hurt feelings that come from severing a relation in a social network. But as far as the software is concerned, friending is just a relation between two objects, so there is always a neutral state and users can arbitrarily unfriend and refriend each other. So I wonder how the speakers who prefer “defriend” think of the predicate: in terms of software or people? permanent action or reversible setting? Or maybe they haven’t thought about it. I suspect the latter—I’m not inclined to Sapir-Whorfian generalizations.
