The black person who hears that will be bothered because, insofar as he identifies as black, he's being rejected (or accepted for rejecting himself, which hurts even more).
You have such insight into the soul of the black man, Mr. Cleaver.
Can't you wait until, say, comment three to rag on me?
I assume that it's a good thing to have a single mainstream manner of communicating in a country.
This is where the argument is going to be.
This is where the argument is going to be.
Really? Seems like it should uncontroversial, but I've been surprised before.
Yeah, that bit's a little problematic: I'd say not so much self, as community and history. Which matter a lot. My Black Friends say more to them than to white folks (which I think is probably true, for obvious reasons).
The best luck I've had with the whole "mainstream discourse" issue is to be pretty upfront about what it is, and to get rid of the value language around speaking "correctly" or "like an educated person." Once you start talking about different rhetorical traditions as simply being different, and offer examples--in academia, this kind of speech is what counts, but in high school, it'll get you beaten up--along with an explanation that, if anything, the more rhetorical modes you command, the more power you have, students tend to get past a lot of the baggage.
For that reason, I object to the "good thing to have a single mainstream" rhetoric statement, btw. It's not good to automatically advantage folks who are monolingual, and it's not good to define "white, educated, professional" as "mainstream," and it's not good, in fact, to promote monolingualism.
Word.
Anytime after comment three and you're good, Tom.
honkonormatively speaking
That's the funniest thing I've read in days.
it's not good to define "white, educated, professional" as "mainstream,"
But we don't have a choice about this.
Not having a choice doesn't make it good. All you have to do is say, "it's unfortunate that that's the way it is, but that's the way it is." Which isn't the same as saying it's a good thing.
7
You haven't been paying attention. Look at the English as official language fights.
Bitch, it would be straightforward to apply your argument to diversity of actual languages as well as dialects. Do you think the argument applies there as well? I would say that the language barriers between, say, Americans and Chinese are a *big* problem, as well as between various European countries. And I think the same issues that make linguistic diversity undesirable on a global scale make it undesirable within the US.
2: I think agree with much of what you've said. At a minimum, I think you're right that it's a good think to have a single mainstream manner of communicating, as long as it's very open. And, over the last ten years, "white" English has seemed to be so to me.
But I find discussions of these sorts of things fairly floppy in a way that works on some nerve of mine. Things are changing quickly enough (or the results are showing up all of a sudden) that everything seems, at best, sort of true. Add to that differing rates of change in different economic strata and different parts of the country, and then the various subgroups. Floppy.
Put it this way: I'm not sure Obama is or was insulted by "articulate," even if Biden meant "sounds white." But I'm not sure Obama can say that b/c it might reasonably be insulting to other African-Americans who don't have a whole series of characteristics that he has. And maybe he has or feels a responsibility to be offended on their behalf. And it's all just very weird to me.
Look at the English as official language fights.
Yeah, I know about that, but I didn't expect it to be controversial with this crowd.
linguistic diversity undesirable on a global scale
...Wha?
15: That linguistic diversity has drawbacks doesn't make it undesirable, and to so suggest is uncomfortably close to calling for cultural imperialism and/or genocide.
Racist.
And maybe he has or feels a responsibility to be offended on their behalf.
I had almost that very sentence in there and took it out, figuring I'd gone on long enough, but yeah, I think you're right.
15 is nonsense. I'm not incapable of *understanding* black rhetoric, I just sound like a dumbass if I try to imitate it.
That plus the "language barriers are a problem, so multilingualism is Bad" is a stupid and usually racist argument. I'll elaborate b/c I'm going to go order Chinese food and can't get into a big discussion about it now, but yeah, guess what, communication between different people sometimes runs into confusion. Not brains on sticks. This is good. More to the point, it's not exactly like translation is impossible. I've got zero problem with privileging people who speak more than one language, and it's damn nice, actually, to have different ways of communicating things. Language isn't transparent. It's bound up in culture. You want us all to be exactly the same, go join the Matrix (or whatever).
Plus, politically, you want a one-language solution? Whose? There's where the racism (and for that matter, classism) comes in.
16: Biden meant "sounds white", consciously or not, with intent to insult or not. At best he was thoughtless.
Hell, I'm offended, and I'm pretty damned white.
You have such insight into the soul of the black man, Mr. Cleaver.
Eldridge or Ward?
Seriously, what's up with this "single mainstream manner of communicating." In what forum? Political speech isn't academic speech isn't literary speech isn't good speech-making speech isn't good friendly speech. We aren't bots, people.
it's not good to define "white, educated, professional" as "mainstream,"
Really? Aside from the "white" part (which, I think for most people, is just a restatement of "educated, professional", a separate problem), why is privileging education a bad thing?
I don't even know where to start responding to 21, or 19 for that matter. Let me leave it at this: linguistic differences can be bad without cultural differences being bad (to the degree those can be separated at all, and I'm aware of the limitations of that). Linguistic differences can be bad without being imperialistic or racist in any measure.
Come on B, it's not a fucking theory seminar, we all know what mainstream discourse sounds like.
It seems unlikely that we would end up with multiple equivalent manners of communicating in this country given a non-segregated society; stigma attaches to regional accents, even if they're white.
More promising, maybe, to allow (as it will) the mainstream voice to change (as it has), and to hope that the stigma attached to urban black dialects is no worse than having a Southern drawl.
23 -- oh yeah, Ward! I thought SCMT was calling -gg-d Eldridge Cleaver and trying to figure out why.
17
Because everyone here supports English as the official language?
Aside from the "white" part (which, I think for most people, is just a restatement of "educated, professional", a separate problem), why is privileging education a bad thing?
I think this is a dead end path. It's not a good or bad thing to privilege the specific type of speech; it just is privileged, as ogged said. And every person who has to actually worry about this (a) knows it, and (b) knows that the least cost response is to learn that language. (Cf. the NBA.)
30 -- I thought he meant because everyone here is predjudiced against Mexicans.
30: I bet most people are against that b/c (a) it's unnecessary, (b) the motives of those who support it are suspect, and (c) the greatness of English lies in it's unofficial nature.
It's offensive because as a term of praise it communicates, "You sound like one of us, and that's a good thing," in which is implicit the belief that sounding "black" is bad.
Right. It's basically a microcosm of that wearily predictable moment where a white friend will turn to you and say some version of "You're the whitest black person I know!" as though they think it's a compliment. Not that big a deal in the greater scheme of things, but the kind of thing one is obligated to needle people for.
15 is a little mystifying, I have to admit. pdf, you are aware that people who live in multilingual countries have a tendency to learn more than one language, right? And that there are countries with more than one official language that function perfectly well? Why on Earth would linguistic diversity be "undesirable"?
29: I was referencing Eldrdige, working of "soul" in my comment.
28: But segregation (due to self-selection) is unavoidable, and only undesirable when drawn along certain boundaries. (And always undesirable when enforced by law.) For instance, we want our really smart people to be able to segregate themselves together to come up with really good new ideas. Different niche/hobby groups and such will always have divergent language.
26: My entire point is that linguistic differences provide benefits as well as drawbacks, and so it's unacceptable to me to assert that linguistic differences are undesirable.
34 before I saw 26. But I really am curious.
And I so want to use an analogy here.
27: We do indeed, and my point is that not thinking about it is uncool.
25: Well, that depends pretty heavily on what you define as "educated," doesn't it? A lot of folks with PhDs are incredibly stupid about basic feminism or Latino history or Chinese history, for that matter. The "professional" part is also an issue; historically, the major impulse behind teaching national literatures (as opposed to Latin and Greek), regularizing grammar and spelling, and the idea that the liberal arts make one a "better person" is pretty bound up with nationalism, capitalism, and the middle class's grab at the social capital of the aristocracy they were replacing.
the greatness of English lies in it's unofficial nature
You almost got me to correct you there, SCMT. Good job.
Oh Lord, this again? Maybe I'll just let B handle it.
37: What sort of benefits do you have in mind? I'm not coming up with any.
34: One reason (of many): the time it takes to learn the other languages is time that wouldn't have to be wasted if the other communities used the same language.
Maybe I'll just let B handle it
She's too far away, Teo -- you should be looking for somebody there in Teoville. Try the laundromat.
34
For the same reason that having metric and english units is undesirable, more to learn and the possibility of confusion.
42: No, no, don't! Please! Linguist bat signal, linguist bat signal!
Political speech isn't academic speech isn't literary speech isn't good speech-making speech isn't good friendly speech.
All of the first three can be described, however, as educated, professional speech; there's differences, certainly, but they all share the same class markers and educational levels, and that correlates with 'whiteboy'.
That doesn't seem to be the kind of difference that ogged is talking about (surely he doesn't think one can write IT policy in free verse), but of the sort of speech and writing patterns that strike one as 'not our type.'
"regularizing grammar and spelling [...] is pretty bound up with nationalism, capitalism, and the middle class's grab at the social capital of the aristocracy they were replacing."
OK, how is spelling reform anything *but* an attempt to increase the egalitarianism of mainstream language?
All of the first three can be described, however, as educated, professional speech; there's differences, certainly, but they all share the same class markers and educational levels, and that correlates with 'whiteboy'.
And they all need to be learned, even by educated white people.
47: I'll back you up, but I don't know how much good it'll do. Nothing seems to have sunk in from the last time we did this.
Well, someone else is going to have to handle the "but learning more than one language is inefficient" argument, because I just don't even know where to begin with that one.
If I were dedicated to finding double-entendres in everything Teo said, 52 would provide me with grist for my mill.
49: Briefly, the idea that it's only "reasonable" to think that if we only all spoke the same language, we wouldn't "waste our time" and would do something more productive, like creating widgets or commanding robot armies or god knows what.
34: Another reason. Say I want to go about learning about modern Chinese culture, in detail. How much success do you figure I'd have per unit of effort if learning the language could be done without any effort, versus the actual 1000-5000 hours of study it actually does take?
Assuming from the outset that learning another language is "wasted" time rather begs the question, doesn't it? I spent time learning French in school, for instance, as most Canadian kids do. Living as I do in the Texas of the North, I don't have much opportunity to use it, but I certainly don't look on the time I spent learning it as "wasted."
As for the benefits of linguistic diversity, they're inseparable from the benefits of cultural diversity. It's a question of the aesthetic side of life, not administrative efficiency. Wouldn't it be more efficient if people didn't "waste" time cooking all sorts of different cuisines instead of just consuming standard-issue nutrient pills? Maybe, but that misses the point completely.
56: And man, this is just getting kind of weird. Chinese languages are part of the culture, man; if you actually wanted to learn about the culture, why wouldn't you want to learn the languages?
And I'm not sure what you mean with the thousands of hours of study. People mostly learn languages by speaking them with people who speak the languages; classroom study is only part of the process.
I took Pdf's stance to mean: In a multilingual world, yes, learn languages. You can't get around otherwise. But wouldn't things be a lot more efficient if the tower of babel had never been built?
Which is a reasonable point.
51: Um, no shit? I don't mean to be rude, so please don't take it that way....but what's your larger point? That even educated people need to learn how to tailor their writing style to their audience?
That it isn't innate in white kids? (God, I hope I didn't need *that* lesson.)
I'm at sea.
58: Of-fucking-course it's not wasted time. Millions of people speak French. I'm saying that if every French person suddenly started speaking a version of French that was much easier to learn than French is, that was perhaps even mutually intelligible with English, but otherwise unchanged, that the difference in effort is an inefficiency that would be avoided in an ideal world.
Humm. It seems like the contentious assumption here is that the details of a language aren't intrinsically tied up in the culture of the language. Here's a though experiement we can start with. How different would English be if you switched the "p" sound with the "b" sound--that is, if every word with the "p" sound had a "b" sound instead, and vice versa, and yet everything else was unchanged? (We can even assume that the symbols for those sounds are switched as well. Linguists forgive me for abusing terminology.) Would there be any necessary changes? I don't think any rhymes would be affected, so poetry would be unchanged. Maybe a few puns would be affected, I'm not sure. None of these are changes that affect any culture in any substantial way.
A monolingual world would certainly be more efficient, but efficiency isn't the only consideration out there.
59: I think you misread my hypothetical. I said if learning Chinese took no effort (i.e. could be done in a few hours, and classroom or no classroom, it does take thousands to master it) how much easier could I learn about Chinese culture? You could still spend as much time as you wanted studying the language, but it would be in the capacity of a native speaker studying their own language, and I don't think that diminishes the experience of doing linguistics at all.
efficiency isn't the only consideration out there
If ya know what I mean, nudge nudge...
Okay, sorry, I'm done.
56: Couple of points. As I understood your original point to B, you take her to be arguing that dialects aren't problems, and you think that that argument would extend to languages, and you think there are clearly problems with having to attempt to communicate thoughts developed in one language into another.
I'm not sure how this shapes your response to B, but on your learning Chinese point: it's languages and culture all the way down. The two don't come apart. Grammatical structures and rules really do shape the thoughts that you can express. You could get everyone to talk in some common language, but the price would be a lot of incommunicable thoughts.
63: I'll repeat my question to DS*: what are any *intrinsic* advantages of linguistic diversity?
*I just realized you and Doctor Slack are the same person.
pdf's base assumption - natural language should be abolished, and Esperanto enforced - is so [trying not to say "stupid," trying not to say "stupid"...] off-point that I'm going to leave it alone.
But I think that pdf made an earlier mistake that took us way off-topic. The alternative to "talking white" isn't ebonics - it's speaking like Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. This is explicit in O's post, and what makes it correct. Now, if pdf wants to argue that MLK would've been better off speaking like, I dunno, an accountant, then I'll sit back and enjoy the show, but otherwise, his/her initial point is simply wrong. We are not better off as a culture, or a nation, with only one vocabulary, one accent, one patois. Southern oratory is different from New England is different from Midwest (think Prarie Home Companion, for Luther's sake!).... It's all good. We respond to it differently, but only a schmuck would argue that they're all inferior to... I don't know what.
So tell us, pdf: what style of oratory will be mandated in your Utopia?
60: But wouldn't things be a lot more efficient if the tower of babel had never been built?
"More efficient" as opposed to what, though? Even if we grant that "efficiency" should be a priority (which I don't, necessarily), bultilingual countries aren't notably inefficient at any greater rate of frequency than officially monolingual ones. That's a bit of a problem for this thesis, isn't it?
67: So this is going to come down to an argument about Sapir-Whorf? Need I say that that kind of psycho-linguistic relativism is controversial?
Wait, wait, we're getting mixed up. There's the argument about multilingualism, but that's distinct from the question of multiple rhetorics within a single language. Jesse Jackson's rhetorical style, which situates him distinctively within the African-American preaching tradition, is very distinct from, say, Howard Dean's, but both men are educated speakers of English.
69 -- but surely MLK was called "articulate" by his contemporaries?
69 reiterates a good point: "single mainstream mode of communication" doesn't entail "the same one we have now, or our parents had." Headcount: do MLK's speeches seem like amazing, but mainstream, oratory to you? They do to me.
69: Don't think I made that mistake. From the beginning I've been acknowledging that linguistic differences and cultural differences are intertwined. I just think that the amount of unavoidable linguistic difference to support all of the cultural difference (and oratory styles) that we currently appreciate is probably substantially less than the linguistic variation that you actually see within any one language.
70: Multilingual countries implies kids grew up speaking several languages. Things get markedly less efficient if you're not a native speaker. I'm picturing the grad students at my old department teaching discussion sections, and the frustration of the undergraduates, (who had unreasonable expectations of fluency, to be sure.)
Also I'm going to take the high road and just IGNORE that you ACTUALLY said bultilingual. (kidding...)
77: Any one of the top languages. Small languages with small cultures probably don't have as much internal variation, simply due to the small population.
do MLK's speeches seem like amazing, but mainstream, oratory to you?
They don't to me. The rising and falling syntax, the repetitions and refrains---this is way outside my cultural reference. I respond to it, but in a way I don't entirely understand in the moment or trust. Of course, it's safe when I'm responding to MLK because, well, he's dead.
70: Consider this. If I understand correctly, European countries have longer, and slightly delayed, periods of primary education. Those extra couple years could be the cost of the extra language proficiency.
Not even going that deep, pdf; just that there's a reason why philosophers and scholars read texts in the original, and that's just that translation is imperfect. If we all switch to Esperanto (or whatever) tomorrow, we'll lose a lot of modes of expression. We might be more efficient here on out, but at what cost to all previous knowledge?
81: Actually, I'm not sure about that. Apologies in advance if it's not true.
Some European countries are so advanced that fetuses gestate for up to a year, I'm told.
82: Well, of *course*. I don't see how transition costs are an argument that linguistic diversity isn't inefficient.
80: Hmm. To me it does code anything except 'damn, I wish I had the ability to write like that.'
Oh, and about the diversity, guess again.
85: It's not a transition cost; it's an inability to express what had been expressed. That's not efficiency, just data loss.
87: A culture with fewer current or historical (depending on what sense of "culture" you're using) participants.
"bultilingual" s/b "multilingual"
62: I'm not saying that culture and language are in a one-to-one relationship. Language, also, is constantly in flux. But as to what the intrinsic advantages of linguistic diversity are -- it's hardly the kind of thing you can quantify, any more than the advantages of diversity of cuisines can be reliably quantified. The advantages involved are aesthetic, quality-of-life things; a world without The Click Song would be the poorer for it, but life would continue. A world without Italian food would be the poorer for it, but life would go on. But could I make a case for why people should sacrifice their own quality of life -- their own languages, or cuisines, or musical traditions -- based on any notion of "efficiency"? No, I couldn't. And I doubt you can either.
This is starting to sound a bit like Esperantism, isn't it.
79: Utterly wrong. "Small languages with small cultures probably don't have as much internal variation" utterly ignores the thousands of languages spoken on New Guinea - something like more languages there than in the whole rest of the world. But, of course, they're not utterly, French-German different; they are much closer to being small languages with great variations.
And, I'll admit, probably pretty inefficient, having something like 1000 speakers per language/dialect.
I'll also note that different parts of Germany speak mutually unintelligible dialects, but everyone speaks Hochdeutsch (High German). You don't often hear the Gemrnas mocked for inefficiency or maudlin sentimentality (plus, you definitely 'get' regional differences expressed through language - Vorarlberg has cute aspects to its culture that are well expressed in some cutesy expressions; 'cute' isn't the best word here, but it'll do).,
I don't see how transition costs are an argument that linguistic diversity isn't inefficient.
No one's arguing it isn't inefficient.
89: I think that the fact that near-perfect translation between two languages is humanly impossible certainly does not demonstrate that thoughts in one of the languages are inexpressible in the other.
I get what 92 is saying. But there are contexts: programming, math, where efficiency is prized and near-universal languages are used for ease across cultures. I don't see why this isn't more shades-of-gray to everyone.
When it comes to recording Grandpa, by all means he should speak in his native South Florida Retirement Home Dialect.
they're not utterly, French-German different
I think (without being sure) that the various languages of Papua New Guinea include entirely separate language families, which is to say utterly, French-Finnish different.
93: Maybe so, but it was just a parenthetical to my point. I was just trying to quantify my sense of how much linguistic variation is unavoidable using examples.
Maybe small cultures can meaningfully refer to cultures which were recently formed historically. Hence the language has accumulated fewer mutations, so to speak.
I'm sensing that the rhetorical strand of this thread is losing ground to the linguisticopolitical, but, Cala, there really are very different oratorical traditions within English. The "I have a dream" speech uses "I have a dream" as a refrain within fairly tightly plotted verses; the repetitions build a momentum that require serious technical control in cadence to pull off effectively. Jesse Jackson, in some of his speeches, works the same technique, and apparently, John Edwards was trying out a similar effect in his "Will you stand up" speech at the recent Democratic hooha this weekend. Which is interesting.
95 -- yes it does; if every thought that could be expressed in language A could also be expressed in language B, then it would be possible to translate an A text into B perfectly.
95: If it's humanly impossible, who, on your model, is doing the expressing? Supposing by "impossible", you just mean "very very hard", doesn't it at some point become more efficient and data-preserving to learn the foreign language (especially if started young?)
92: The problem I have with that argument is that it really requires you assume there's something intrinsic to the experience of a language about things like phonemes and graphemes and small points of grammar. I just don't think there is. On the other hand, there *is* something intrinsic about sweet vs. sour vs. bitter.
97 Yeah. French and German are the same. There's a lot more diversity in Papua.
96: I'm not saying it isn't shades of gray. I'm just saying the contention that linguistic diversity is undesirable doesn't make any sense to me.
103: The problem I have with that argument is that it really requires you assume there's something intrinsic to the experience of a language about things like phonemes and graphemes and small points of grammar.
You've lost me here, I'm afraid. It looks like you're trying to say there's no intrinsic difference in the experience of speaking languages with different grammars and phonologies ("small points of grammar") but I'm not sure that's what you really mean. Could you rephrase?
This is a McLuhan moment. Someone cites languages in PNG and Lo! Nakku shows up. Neat.
Though come to think of it I think Nakku's field work was elsewhere in Indonesia. Borneo?
100: I'm not denying that there are different rhetorical traditions; just that what is considered "mainstream" is not at all fixed. Edwards is a very good example of that. Harder to get much more mainstream than a serious Presidential candidate, but he's not shy about using that style of oratory.
"Mainstream" is big enough and fluid enough to cover lots of different styles of expression. I'm not sure I have a larger point, except that if what is mainstream is fairly fluid, coaching a kid to learn different rhetorical styles doesn't entail renouncing his own regional/cultural traditions.
I don't think my argument relies on near-perfect translation being theoretically possible between two languages of a limited lexicon, though. I don't think meaning comes in atomic units, and some languages have words, phrases, or sentences that have to direct analogue in other languages, and are very hard to express, and sometimes even very hard to explain at all. Language *does* accumulate information that is extremely hard to reproduce in a more explicit form. I don't think that goes against my arguments here.
110 Sulawesi.
I'm usually here. But I can't usually comment on threads with any rude words in them, because my internet-sharing neighbour's NetNanny software blocks them.
pdf, I don't understand your 95. By "translation", of course, I don't just mean matching up words with words (and I don't think you do, either), so if it's humanly impossible to render a perfect translation, shouldn't it also be humanly impossible to render a perfect expression? What I was wondering is how you're holding the former but not the latter.
108: I'll put it more explicitly. The only thing about a language that matters as far as the culture goes (in the long term) is the mapping between symbols and meanings, and to a smaller extent, the ease with which they can be recombined in the grammar. Phonetic similarity in words can lead to things like rhyme and puns, but that's just noise. Other effects exist, but are minuscule and culturally neutral.
111.---I think we agree, although it does strike me that while a white Southern guy can poach good African-American oratorical techniques while remaining mainstream, an African-American using the same techniques might get a different reception.
114: I'm assuming that all humans share a space of possible word-meanings, and that with enough effort and awareness, the meaning of any given word or phrase can be described, at the limit, in an extremely verbose way in any language.
97, 104: I didn't mean that they're ALL in one family, nor that German-French is the gamut of linguistic variety; simply that you don't have 10,000 languages that all diverged from each other over 2,000 years ago (as did German and French, with a millenium or two to spare)
Not that I'm feelin defensive or anything. Or that I'm knowledgable on the subject. Just that I'm not ignorant.
Can we restart this thread around #6, and talk about Ogged's post some?
108
How about the contention that linguistic diversity has disadvantages?
119: Does this thread demonstrate that shared language isn't all it's cracked up to be?
116: I don't really have a dog in this fight, except that Obama's "I'm against dumb wars" speech uses some of the same rhetorical repetition.
I'm with JM on the rhetorical traditions thing, and frankly surprised that Cala says that MLK's speeches (just as one famous example) don't sound black to her. That strikes me as a kind of tone-deafness. It may be beneficial in a lot of ways, but it's also a kind of erasure. JM's done a good job of starting to describe some of the "differences" in that kind of speaking; another is call and response (the audience calling back at key points of the speech), as the momentum and cadence change, his voice also rises and starts to swing a bit, etc. It's *entirely* different from the kind of formal english that's privileged as "correct"; I mean, if you had a college student who wrote an essay that kept repeating "I have a dream" over and over, you'd write something in the margin about how a clear thesis shouldn't require reiteration, or how each paragraph should treat a separate idea, or something.
115: Again, this seems to be begging the question. You've assumed away the aesthetic component of language as culturally insignificant, but since most of the actual speakers of the languages in most cultures would disagree with you, I don't see why they should take your assumptions seriously.
Thinking about the original post some more, I think that while the differences between the dialects of blacks and whites are often unnecessary, the differences do serve sociological functions, like self-segregation, differentiation, and developing a community identity, that are not at all straightforward to resolve in a manner so that those purposes continue to be served and that unnecessary communication barriers are removed.
I think an interesting question is to what extent those purposes are desirable. Is AAVE (African American Vernacular English) for the sake of not being white commendable, undesirable, or neutral?
123: On the contrary, I just think that the aesthetic component is contained entirely in the symbol-meaning mapping and the grammar, and phonemes are insignificant as far as aesthetics go.
111: I'd agree with that entirely; on second reading, I think I just misread your 28. I'm all for the idea that yeah, there are more than one rhetorical form that count as "mainstream," and anyway, they change all the time.
Code-switching is a useful concept.
I think I can answer my own 15 now. B's argument in 8 doesn't apply to bigger linguistic differences, since the linguistic differences among different American dialects are almost entirely the result of culturally significant evolution, whereas the differences between broader language groups are much less so.
125: Well, grammar and signification are certainly an inseparable part of the aesthetics of language, fair enough. Phonemes are "insignificant"? What reason could you offer someone who does find phonemes aesthetically significant (as most speakers of languages do) to change their mind?
128: What are you, on crack? The differences between Mandarin Chinese and American English are culturally insignificant?
128 So the larger the difference, the less significant the cultural implications? Aha.
127: Can you (or Teo, or someone) explain code-switching? It's a term I vaguely remember, and was tempted to use once or twice in this thread, but I'm not sure I remember what it means with any kind of accuracy.
By analogy: people wearing glasses that turn everything upside down get used to it and eventually learn to function just as if they weren't wearing the glasses. People learn to type fluently on different keyboard layouts, and see no fundamental difference between them. (I use Dvorak.)
It's probably not something I can easily convince you of--it requires communicating an intuition.
So was MLK called articulate at the time? Or only after his death, in retrospect?
131: No, it's "the more temporally removed the origination of the difference, the less likely that it has continued cultural relevance".
125 is just a bizarre thought: the aesthetics of language reside not in their phonemes - that would be sounds - but in their symbol-mapping.
Personally, I'm not a big fan of the sound of French, but I wouldn't try to convince its many partisans that the reason they find it pleasing is its symbol-mapping, not its, you know, sound.
The reason you can't do decent translations of most pre-modern poetry is that their entire aesthetic is bound up in how the sounds express the meaning. It's not important to communicate the idea that Dawn is rosy-fingered - it's important to mouth the sounds rhododaktulos Eos at the opening of a line about a new day.
Sheesh.
It sounds "black" or "preachery", but "mainstream", B.
And no, it wouldn't work in an essay in English class. On the other hand, what makes for a good English essay doesn't make for a good philosophy essay and vice versa; but that's doesn't banish either discipline outside the mainstream of professional discourse.
I think we're largely in agreement; what I see happening is not many parallel mainstreams, but mainstream picking and choosing some tropes and not others, and becoming broader.
So I think I'd teach it much as you would: here's the set of tools we need to teach you now to express yourself in this context. When you master it, you get to make your own rules.
137: The aesthetics of one's native language. The aesthetics of other languages are indeed affected greatly by the sound of them, but only in opposition/relation to the sounds of one's native tongue. Additionally, the more fluent one becomes in a language, the less significant the purely aural aspect of it becomes in one's appreciation.
I think what's behind 125 is the idea that language is, or should ideally be, purely transparent. Which is remarkably tone-deaf and an awfully mechanistic view of value, imho. Back to the brain-on-stick phrase earlier.
141: I think this is a remarkably inaccurate description of the views I have expressed on this thread. Which is not to say you're trying to misrepresent me, just that you're still not getting what I'm saying.
136: But the linguistic differentiation has formed the mental maps of every member of that culture since time immemorial - that would have no significance?
Your upside-down glasses metaphor shows more than you intend: our visual field is not horizontally symmetrical. IOW, we see more ground than we do sky. Whether the glasses reproduce this, thus lowering the apparent horizon below the actual horizon, or fail to, making users see too much sky, people wearing those glasses are getting inferior - not merely different, but worse - visual data.
The cultural implications of language are too subtle for simplistic analysis - French has no word for "like!" - but that doesn't mean that they don't exist.
136
That seems an odd notion. So if language A splits into dialects A1 and A2 for reasons of cultural differentiation, which then because of divergence and possibly geographical movement develop into languages B and C and so forth, by then the cultural differences won't matter any more. I don't get that.
Code-switching in linguistics just means the ability to move between vocabularies, dialects or registers as the context demands. Neutrally, it can just apply to people who know more than one language (e.g., at home and at work). But, more interestingly, in sociolinguistics (especially Basil Bernstein's work, and also some of Pierre Bourdieu's) it encompasses the idea that these codes are also more or less useful in getting ahead. Bernstein's argued that both lower-class and middle-class English kids had a restricted code they spoke at home and amongst themselves. But the middle-class kids also had an elaborated code that they could use to usefully talk to teachers or other authority-figures or what have you, whereas the lower-class kids didn't have much access to this code.
139: Right, and even "you can choose not to master it." I mean, there's nothing inherently *wrong* with not being able to write formal English; it's going to make it a lot more work on your part to communicate with some audiences--and this is largely their fault, to be sure. Sucks, but there you are. On the up side, if and when you do get to that point, you're going to have a distinct leg up on the folks who can't write any other way.
143: Do you have a source on that glasses thing?
Sure it would have a significance, but it's not intrinsic to language.
I think the last way my view of language could be properly described as is "simplistic". Or maybe the last way would be "teal".
Right, and even "you can choose not to master it." I mean, there's nothing inherently *wrong* with not being able to write formal English
Yeah, that's right. Depends on what game you're playing, so to speak. Annette Lareau's Unequal Childhoods is especially good on this point.
Ogged is right, it's a good thing to have a single mainstream manner of communicating.
Carry on, you America hating screwballs.
147: I think one good argument for reducing linguistic diversity is that it makes privileged codes more easily accessible to less privileged people, and thus increases equality.
149
It's waaay beyond teal pdf, it's chartreuse.
137 has it right.
140: Additionally, the more fluent one becomes in a language, the less significant the purely aural aspect of it becomes in one's appreciation.
Again, I think you'll find this is at variance with the actual aesthetic experiences of most language speakers. You can try to tell enthusiasts of Arabic or Persian poetry that the purely aural aspect of their languages isn't significant in their appreciation, but I simply don't think you can offer them a reason to think you're a better authority on their appreciation than they are.
145 is pretty much what I was thinking when I wrote 141 (and read 142).
146: Interesting. Because one of the claims I make to non-traditional students is that *they're* going to be the ones with more elaborated codes, because middle class kids often seem to me to have a more limited range of possible speeches.
Then again, I'm thinking primarily of kids who are already in college, so to some extent they've mastered not only the lower-class manner of speech, but also the middle-class one, or they wouldn't have gotten that far.
147: Nothing inherently, as the rules of grammar and contemporary American formal English aren't sent down by God or anything; but there are definitely real ramifications, economically, socially, and otherwise.
I wouldn't want to tell a child that the Correct Way is the only valid way of speaking, but I'd want her to understand that choosing to master formal English is going to have very real practical benefits.
144: The differences eventually become forgotten and thus irrelevant. The word "cool" was originally a marker of counter-culturalism (I think...). It's now become so common and widespread that it's more or less lost this aspect of its meaning. In another hundred years, the cultural meaning behind that change will be completely forgotten except to historians, and the difference will no longer have any cultural significance.
145: It's OK.
Gonerill, thanks for the explanation and the book recommendation. I'm really interested in this kind of stuff, and kind of wish I'd studied linguistics as well as literature....
151: Honestly, don't you feel just a little complacent saying that sort of thing?
156 before 155. I'm thinking of elementary school and high school; if they've made it to college, chances are they're not going to shoot themselves in the squarely in the foot, or at least no more squarely than anyone else who made it in the door with bad grammar.
I'm still going to ban rhetorical questions from my philosophy essay assignments.
156: Yeah, to me that's a very important distinction. I think we do a lot of damage by not directly challenging the ways that people assign *values* to social difference--which isn't the same as denying practicality.
But yeah, Ogged is right (except for the 'single' way thing). It's good for people to have access to ways of communicating which can let them gain privilege.
It is also good for groups to have their own ways of speaking. These may sometimes even be whole different languages! Even small and weird ones. If they want to. The fact that this might mean others have to learn different ways of talking is partly a pain, but it is also the point.
155: Poetry relies on sounds that evoke, at various levels, other words with similar sounds, and the meaning of those words. It's the relation of sounds in a word to other words in the language that's important, not the actual phonemes.
It's waaay beyond teal pdf, it's chartreuse.
I'd call it colorless and green.
140: The clarification makes some sense, but still sounds an awful lot like "you can't enjoy the sounds of your own language, just their aptness for expressing thought." Which is a horrible thought, no matter how you say it.
149: Huh? You cited the upside-down glasses. That the human visual field is ground-biased is just a fact. I learned it in freshman drawing/perspective class. Makes intuitive sense if you consider it for a moment.
Is it sleeping furiously? (I argued once that this wasn't meaningless. I may have been drunk.)
Along the lines of 146:
(This may be incredibly basic; I don't know.)
I remember in a poverty workshop for high school teachers that I sat in on they talked about five levels of speech: frozen, formal, acquaintance/professional, informal, and intimate. (Don't remember exact names.) It's generally considered socially awkward to speak one level off from the appropriate level; it's considered insulting to speak two levels off.
The idea was that to move to the next social class you have to master the hidden rules, and that one of the hidden rules of middle class is how to speak professionally.
The workshop focused on how high school teachers can introduce kids from impoverished backgrounds to professional and formal modes of speech, so that they'd have more mobility later in life.
It's the relation of sounds in a word to other words in the language that's important, not the actual phonemes.
So rhyme, say, is not an important aspect of poetry in your view?
Honestly, don't you feel just a little complacent saying that sort of thing?
Not at all. There's people from a bazillion linguistic backgrounds in this country, and having a mainstream form of communication enables everyone to work with everyone else and get shit done.
Is it sleeping furiously?
It's getting there.
164: But it isn't obvious that the extensive neural rewiring that goes on with the glasses wouldn't reverse that.
Enjoyment of the sounds of your own language, which I don't dispute is genuine and worthwhile, is rooted in the words and meanings that given sounds evoke, which is a function of the arbitrary mapping of phonemes onto symbols.
Instead of asking pdf what he means, shouldn't we be asking to prove that he's not a computer program?
Obama is supposed to be a master code-switcher, by the way (ditto Bill Clinton).
Off to Whole Foods!
168 - bazillion s/b brazillian?
167: Sure it is, but rhyme is pretty much a random, unpredictable influence.
I'd like a cite on 162, actually. Are there any actual, you know, poetry scholars who agree with this statement, to the exclusion of other significance for phonemes?
Obviously, a certain kind of poet will play with sound/meaning similarities, but is the effect of the last line of Ozymandias really reliant on the sound-similarity between "despair" and "hair?"