Visualising Infinity: The Trouble With Languages

» bridget1 - A Mother Tongue

Would it be fair to say that the belief in an original language implies a belief in an original ancestor, populating the globe from one Garden or place? Just curious.

The problem of communication across languages was tackled by the filmmakers of the CBC mini-series Big Bear (Canadian History and Culture #2). They ended up creating a mock language for the newcomers which was incomprehensible to the First Nations characters and to the audience. Then they had the Cree speak English. An interesting approach to the problem of telling a story from the narrative position of a group whose language is unknown to the audience.

-- posted by bridget1

» pseudoerasmus - You really should have thought harder before you wrote this late

The observation that separate languages exist in a continuum, just as do the "races", or the colours in the colour spectrum, or numbers in the number line, is simply false. It's a bad, slipshod analogy.

Locating exactly where “French” speakers stop and “Spanish” speakers begin in time and place is impossible. In between are a good dozen other languages, or versions of one or both.....

Muscovite usage tradition differs from Siberian, but also from Korean, Dené, Maori, and !Kung. The difference varies, certainly, but there are no points along the language continuum where dividers can be irrefutably defended.

Romance languages exist in a continuum both because they're descended from a common source (provincial Vulgar Latin) and because the areas in which they are mostly spoken are contiguous, fostering constant mutual pollination. But how can, say, Pontic Greek be said to exist in a continuum with French and Spanish and their intermediate varieties when it is located in a completely different branch of the Indo-European family tree? What does Pontic Greek blend into, which eventually blends into something else, which in turn eventually blends into the "usage traditions" of the Pyrenees?

The continuum you're positing is a simple logical error of supposing that a common ancestry implies a continuum between languages. It does not. If the intermediate "usage traditions" between, say, Japanese and Swedish are long dead (if they existed at all), then there's no continuum. Period. They are separate languages, with all the force and meaning applying to "separate".

-- posted by pseudoerasmus

» pseudoerasmus - The problem I have is not with the observation that these catego

Also, I still find it amusing and ironic that the very Henderson who piously intones that the "dialect model" is a weapon, recently toed the abominable Beijing propaganda line that Cantonese, Fujianese and Wu (the language of Shanghai) are "dialects". This, despite the fact that these languages differ from one another at least as much as do the French of Paris and the Spanish of Madrid.

Also, would Henderson please cite a source for the claim that Hitler made claims on England, Norway, Holland and other countries "on the grounds that these countries speak dialects of German"? As far as I know, Hitler had no territorial claims on England (as opposed to merely seeking the defeat or withdrawal of Britain from the war), and his claims to Germanic countries were based on a common "race", not language.

-- posted by pseudoerasmus

» GroundhogDave - Everything depends on source

The question is what the distinction is. French is a language, according to most. But what is French? Is is the tongue used in France? In Quebec? In Cajun country? In Africa? Which one is French? Who's English is correct? Canadians? Americans? Irish? Scottish? Welsh? British? Speakers of English often assume that English is one tongue, but there are probably more different "dialects" of English than of French. There are at least two different "dialects" of Spanish spoken in Spain. Are we to assume one is Spanish, and the other a "dialect" of Spanish?

Presuming dialects and languages presumes that one is right and the other "wrong". Hitler could have claimed England based on the fact that his belief in his perfect Aryan race involved physical as well as linguistic categories. Hitler's ideal "race" looked a certain way, had a certain style, was an approximate height, had a certain kind of religious belief, they even had a certain familial lineage. And yes, he even believed that they spoke a certain language (or derivation of it). Hitler believed that there were many people who were part of his "master race", which included people in the Americas, people in England, people in Scandinavian countries, and a number of German citizens. (Not all. Some.) He believed these people were descendants of the ancient race of nomads who had travelled through Persia, Greece, India, and Egypt, leaving two primary "gifts" for those to come after them -- the idea of a single monotheistic God, and Hinduism in it's most basic origins.

-- posted by GroundhogDave

» rkhen - Hi JM, nice to see you again.

Well, the scientist in me gets very nervous when asked to draw moral or social conclusions from a scientific paradigm. After all, in the end, paradigms are only "what explains the most at the moment," and like other rules, made to be broken. Then too, history has recorded some truly horrible misapplications of "science." Social Darwinism, by which alleged Caucasians attempted to prove that they were biologically superior to other alleged races, is just one example.

However, the poet in me joins you in allowing compelling ideas to blow my mind. In fact, there are archaeologists who claim that every person on earth is descended from a single female hominid, whom they call Eve. (In the tradition of Leaky's Lucy, except that Eve is only theoretical.) This is not creationism; the scientists in question formulated their theory independently of any philosophy other than the scientific method, and have made no claim whatsoever about the moral implications of their conclusions.

At the risk of having an archaeologist expose my ignorance of the nuances of Eve theory, they seem to have applied rather the same "calculatus eliminatus" approach that historical linguists applied when they advanced the Mother Tongue theory. The "Eve-ists" followed a DNA trail that worms its way through all people, narrowing progressively until it gets lost in the mists of time, many millions of years ago. They theorise that at the very end of it, if ever they could get there, there is a single mother. Seems unlikely, but the evolution of life itself is all but impossible, statistically-speaking.

I think people can indulge in an innocent "what-if" or two, as long as they remember that's all it is.

I also enjoyed " Big Bear." I especially liked the fact that many whites spoke "Cree" (actually English) with the same "heap big" accent that Natives have been saddled with in so many movies. It really put things into perspective. From a linguistic point of view, I appreciated the depth of understanding the fake language gave us about the white characters, so that they were individuals and not just "them." By using the invented language for English and English for Cree, we were able to see that some whites spoke Cree very well, and we trust, knew Cree culture well enough to understand Big Bear's perspective. Other whites spoke terrible pidgin "Cree," leading us to understand that they had little clue, and perhaps little desire to have a clue, about who they were dealing with.

Thanks for stopping by, JM. It's fun to kick these ideas around.

-- posted by rkhen

» rkhen - Precisely, Dave.

Your point about whose French is French and whose English is English is the first loose thread in the rat's nest that obscures the central truth about language: ultimately it's a continuum, not a set of organically-distinct languages.

One point you didn't make, but might have, is that if you go backward in time, the language issue becomes even more hazy. At what point does French emerge? What about those traditions that don't win the "competition" to be French? What language were they? And the ones that merge over time into a another tradition different from both old and modern French? What are they, and when did they stop being French? And then there's the traditions _absorbed_ by modern French after we've decided modern French appeared. How could it still be French, now that it's different? You can drive yourself nuts like this.

Here's another problem: modern English, French, and German all share a relatively recent common ancestor, sometimes called Frankish. Now we have to ask, at what point did English stop being Frankish? And what was it after it wasn't Frankish, but before it was English? And which of the two languages is the real inheritor of Frankish? And what about all the words in all three languages that trace their ancestry to languages other than Frankish?

If you're already sick of this snarl, thank your lucky stars I haven't mentioned the fact that there were three regional usage traditions _within_ Frankish, largely unintelligible to one another, and all three of the modern languages I've cited contain elements from all three Frankishes. So which is descended from the "real" Frankish? And what _was_ the "real" Frankish.? And so on, and so on....

Bottom line: the lines can't be drawn. And as you have also pointed out, if we insist on a linear descent model for modern languages, we soon arrive at insisting that we're both writing in Sanskrit, which is ridiculous.

The different-language model is an acceptable fiction, indeed a necessary one, as long as we all remember that it's just a convenience. It's when social or political conclusions are drawn from this fundamentally-flawed idea (like the Hitlerian philosophies you cite) that they become unacceptable.

Thanks for stopping by, Dave. You've brought up valuable points.

-- posted by rkhen

» GKCruey - Sociolinguistics