Why Do Educated People Use Bad Words? →
eush:
Tony McEnery, a professor of English language and linguistics at Lancaster University in Britain:
The campaigns of the late 17th and early 18th century that linked bad language with moral degeneracy, low education and general brutishness were incredibly successful in forming views of bad language that endure in the English language to this day. They were also successful at establishing the nascent middle classes of the English speaking world as a locus of purity and hence a locus of power.
Now follows a gratuitous use of the word ‘fuck’.
Class it up a little: “Le fu—.”
I’m an educated person; this is why I say dang nabbit.
English speakers also tend to weaken or omit final coronal consonants, a process that linguists call t/d deletion: thus [lɛf] for left. Although t/d deletion is stigmatized, in fact all normal English speakers do it some of the time, at least in some contexts. As a result, fixed expressions that start out as participle+noun are sometimes re-analyzed so as to lose their -ed ending. This happened long ago to ice(d) cream, skim(med) milk, pop(ped) corn, wax(ed) paper, shave(d) ice, etc. It’s happened more recently (I think) to ice(d) tea, cream(ed) corn, and whip(ped) cream.
— Language Log » The population memetics of un-ed-ing — Whoa. I had never noticed this phenomenon, but I love it already.
yes, that article about Rating The World’s Languages was a joke from SpecGram, a satirical linguistics journal.
| & 7 notes
JLSSCNC: Rating the World’s Languages →
One of the sillier ideas of modern linguistics is that one language is as good as another, that no language is clearly superior to any other. Acceptance of this ridiculous theory forces us into such positions as denying that the Deep South dialect of American English is an abomination, or refusing to condemn Russian for its preposterously high level of palatalization. Obviously, then, the canard of linguistic equality has to be abandoned by anyone wanting to be a realistic student of language; luckily, more and more linguists are abandoning it. Hence, it is now possible to begin elementary work in meaningful typological classification of languages: not typology which restricts itself to uninteresting structural description without value judgments, but typology which will allow us, ultimately, to rank all known human languages, living and dead, from best to worst. This paper details the results of a preliminary analysis along these lines.
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.
…barring any overseen circumstances…
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Neat eggcorn in the wild.
