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?"
Time for me to go sleep furiously.
162 looks like it's meant as a response to my 154, so I'll just say this before I go: I'm as fond of Saussure as the next guy, but I think you're just not going to get anywhere with bald declarative statements about what's aesthetically important to other peoples' appreciation of language or poetry. That sort of thing is for them to tell you, not for you to tell them. Since it's a widespread cross-cultural commonplace to find sound, and not just a web of structuralist relationships of signification, intrinsically important to aesthetics, it seems obnoxious to insist that all these people must be wrong about what they think their preferences are.
Okay, pdf, so what happens to poetry in your monoglot utopia?
Is it sleeping furiously?
I sure ought to be.
I say we book pdf on a speaking tour of First Nations communities to tell them that their languages are of no cultural importance. They like that kind of thing.
Goddammit, I should've known someone would beat me to "sleep furiously."
Sun's gonna come up soon. Like a big bald head.
Goodnight!
See? Everyone forms an idea of what "sleeping furiously" means! (It wasn't just the copious amounts of cheap merlot!)
170: I'd be pretty surprised if the rods and cones migrate to accommodate a pair of fucked-up glasses.
"I think you're just not going to get anywhere with bald declarative statements about what's aesthetically important to other peoples' appreciation of language or poetry"
Tell that to cognitive scientists. They do this sort of explaining all the time.
174: Sorry, no cites. But here's one example about how arbitrary the emotional reactions associated with words can be.
Fuck.
Luck.
180: I've always thought that was a particularly bad example sentence, actually.
176: People figure out which of the new words rhyme and use them. (Maybe the word for "orange" will be used more effectively.) Decades of usage establish complex connotations and colorings of various words, which are exploited to great effect by people with poetic talent. What's the challenge for me here?
Cogsci is all well and good, but they're either psychologists dicking around at philosophy or philosophers dicking around with psychology, generally, so expect that it's not always the most decisive of disciplines.
182: Tell that to cognitive scientists.
"Bald declarative statements that fly in the face of what we can actually discern is happening," I should have said.
What happens to the poetry that already exists?
175: One last snark before I, too, sleep freezingly (boiler man comes in the morning): Which of the following forms will pdf acknowledge to have aesthetic merit:
Song with lyrics
Song with intonations (lala, etc.)
Instrumental
Clearly, only the first, right?
The colorless green ideas sleeping part is good.
186: Well, the point is what is apparently happening and what are actually happening can be amazingly different, as demonstrated by a number of striking experiments. For example.
187: It gets lost, except to polylinguists. But consider that the same is true for any really old poetry, or to a lesser extent, fiction. How about modern Americans appreciating Beowulf?
What happens to the poetry that already exists?
It's like The Giving Tree. It will be sad, but boys grow up.
I'm not reading this whole thread, but from up top, there was something regarding different dialects--educated honky, inner city slang, etc.--being different in meaningless ways, the choice between them being arbitrary. This is wrong.
Not to say "white honky speech is superior to all other speech"--it isn't--or "we must all speak the same"--we shouldn't. But the different ways we speak convey real meaning. We do different things with the different kinds of language, and that can't be ignored.
There's something stilted about official english as compared to various dialects. It can put people at a distance. It can also be very precise. These are good tools to have. Other ways of speaking offer other tools. But there's a reason why the distant, precise kind of language dominates public discourse. It isn't arbitrary.
188: Similarly, I must not appreciate chess or sex.
Seriously, WTF? Music is not language, though they're closely related.
It gets lost, except to polylinguists.
Surely you can see how this would bother some people.
Every time I try to get out...
182: You really don't get it, do you? You've just proven yourself wrong twice with two simple words.
First, per your 162, use of either of those words in a poem could only be effective for evoking the other, yet you plainly think that their linked sounds are misleading or counterproductive.
Second, do you really not understand the difference in sound between those two words? Have you said them out loud? As with cones and rods, you may have forgotten that physical bodies are involved in the situation - liquid/coronal initial sounds are radically different from labiodental fricatives. Hence, fuck and luck should sound, and mean, distinctly.
Well, yes. That's a transition cost. I never asserted that the ongoing costs of linguistic differences are greater than the transition costs within a small or medium timeframe, though. I have not, in this thread, advocated anyone switch to an interlingua, nor do I recall ever doing so on the internet.
190: Are you implying that there's a similarly striking experiment that demonstrates that people who think they're reacting to the sounds of language are not, in fact, doing so?
pdf, for your consideration: Jabberwocky? Seems to be enjoyable. Seems to be poetry. Seems to be playing around with phonemes, given that most of the words are made up. The poem's not distinct from English; that's part of its point.
But it would be hard to argue that the reason I like the poem is because the sound of "mome rath" signfies a meaning to me.
And then there's idioms, like "arguing oneself into a corner..."
196 -> 194.
197: I'm not saying people aren't reacting to the sounds. I'm just making hypotheses about *why* the sounds have the effects they do. You might think it's something intrinsic to the sounds, but I don't see any reason to consider that the null hypothesis.
194: Also consider the advantages of having all the worlds poets be using the same language, and thus making their poetry more accessible than it could otherwise ever possibly be.
193: WTF? You've claimed - repeatedly, and when given a chance to back down from such a stupid claim - that the sole aesthetic value of word-sounds in one's native tongue is in their meaning, and the meaning of related word-sounds. Therefore, instrumentals and tone-songs can't have any aesthetic value. If instrumentals can have aesthetic value - sound good - without symbol-mapping, then why on earth can't words?
No one here but you has made that last claim, but you've made it/defended it at least 3 times.
198: I always felt that "mome rath" sort of evoked a sort of moleish type of thing, which I assume could be the shared "mo". Similarly for most other nonce words and portmanteaus in the poem. They got their color from words that shared sounds.
200: A more accurate view of language.
195: I don't understand your hostility. The point I was making with those words is that there's nothing intrinsic to the sounds about their emotional affect.
I've been wondering when we would get to Esperanto.
201: Make that 4 times. The reason "pretty-sounding words sound pretty" is the null hypothesis isn't merely because it's blindingly obvious, but because it has direct analogy: wordless tunes, whether instrumental, whistled, or intoned. Since it's trivially true that "pretty sounds sound pretty," it's not a very bold step to "pretty-sounding words sound pretty."
Needless to say, you really shouldn't debate about the significance of "pretty sounds sound pretty," since that'll just get you right back into the culture-swamp.
202: The only sonic difference between different word sounds don't have any non-arbitrary relationship the way they're used in language. The sonic difference between different tones in music have mathematical relationships, like various ratios and harmonic matching and whatnot that are the source of their aesthetic value. A few of the latter type of relationships can be exploited for aesthetic effect when using intelligible language. Rhyme is one example. Another is lyrics or poetry that doesn't have any discernible coherent literal meaning. But those are the exceptions.
201: I suspect the poets would rather have the advantage of having a rich, diverse range of tools for expressing their craft. There's those pesky aesthetics trumping "efficiency" again.
I'm finding this just incredibly bizarre but I don't want to gang up on pdf. So, leaving for real this time.
203: I'm sorry - truly sorry, I don't recall being agitated by your comments before - about the hostility, but you've said almost nothing here that isn't, IMO, some combination of foolish, blinkered, or obtuse.
And, indeed, I still think you're utterly wrong that "there's nothing intrinsic to the sounds about their emotional affect." Fuck sounds harsher than luck. So you're wrong, or you're tone-deaf (or you didn't choose your example carefully enough, but in an extended debate, the onus is on you to do just that).
207: Rich, diverse, and mutually unintelligible? There's nothing fundamental about French or any other language that English or any other language couldn't potentially provide. There's no extra useful diversity to be gained by completely separate sets of vocabularies.
Yes, "fuck" sounds harsher than "luck". And "crap" sounds harsher than "fuck" by the same aural criteria.
I wonder where pdf's system would fit in Byron's punning rhyme of:
ladies intellectual
and
hen-pecked you all
?
The point I was making with those words is that there's nothing intrinsic to the sounds about their emotional affect.
That's not actually what you've been arguing; you've been arguing that the emotional affect of the sounds is generated by their meaning (thus, presumably, mostly expressible in translation), not by the sounds or rhythms themselves.
There's probably nothing intrinsic (i.e., biological from On High) about the rhythm common to limericks being playful; but surely the rhythm conveys that without reference to meaning.
Look, pdf, if all you're saying is that meaning is more important functionally than form in language, even in aesthetic contexts, and that the same meanings can potentially be expressed by all languages, then I agree. I don't see why you keep talking about it in terms of efficiency and the benefits of monolingualism, though.
213: Thanks for catching that, Cala.
210: "There's nothing fundamental about French or any other language that English or any other language couldn't potentially provide." I can't use any language but [Homeric] Greek to get "rhododactulos Eos" and have it mean what it does. So a truly lovely, langorous phrase that evokes the coming of dawn gets chucked for... what again?
Good night. With any luck,
I can still get a fuck
From my freezing frau.
You know what I've realized that's odd? I respond much better to politicians who talk quickly. I think they sound more trustworthy, and less like they're talking down to you. I think is partly a Northern bias, though it doesn't completely track with that. I can think of exceptions--Kerry talked slower than Bill Clinton.
Maybe Obama sounds white--though I don't know that he totally does, not at all times--but he definitely sounds like a northerner.
214: Because I was initially trying to show the latter using the former to bolster my 15. When that didn't pan out, it sort of took on a life of its own.
Seems to be a question of values, then.
215: Who said anything about chucking? Like I said, I'm not advocating anyone switch languages.
I think pdf is arguing in good faith, but I'm not getting it, which is really frustrating, because I'm trying to understand. This is what I didn't get at all:
I'm assuming that all humans share a space of possible word-meanings
But then (a) I haven't done more than skim Derrida and (b) it seems the party's breaking up anyway.
218: Maybe--do you have an idea about which? I don't see any reason for anyone not to be able to acknowledge both the cons of linguistic diversity, whether or not they think the pros outweigh them.
213: I'm pretty sure that while "meaning generates all of the affect of sounds" is a stronger claim than "sounds have no intrinsic affect", that they're not incompatible.
220: I'm not sure what to explain about it. (And it's always nice to have people take me in good faith.) Basically all I mean is to negate string Sapir-Whorf; I think if you're familiar with the theory you should be able to understand what I was *trying* to say. (Maybe it was phrased poorly.)
Not incompatible, but arguing for the first doesn't give you the second.
Language is form that creates meaning. Different forms never create the same exact meaning. There is something intrinsic in sound and rhythm apart from the meanings we have given them: it's on the basis of the intrinsic qualities that we chose the meanings. It's far too complicated for you to figure out by comparing "fuck" and "luck."
I sympathize with your plight here, pdf. I think if you read more great sonorous shit you'll change your position.
I would think that it does. If meaning generates *all* of their affect, then there's nothing left over to be intrinsic. But I'm not sure that I argued the "all" part. And I'm not sure I'm willing to, but I'd say that whatever's left over isn't that significant.
Taking a great sonorous shit might also cause one to change one's position.
"it's on the basis of the intrinsic qualities that we chose the meanings"
New words are rarely assigned meanings for their sounds, but instead by extension or combination of the old meanings.
I often have to change positions in order to facilitate a great sonorous shit.
I've only skimmed the thread, but has anyone mentioned history? It might be fun to have an abstract debate about whether sounds affect sense and meaning, but as a matter of fact, different languages have developed different metaphors and narratives and frameworks for describing similar phenomena. Different languages function as different perspectives, which contribute to a broader (and maybe therefore deeper) understanding of what it is to be human, to be in the world, all the good stuff that those of us who aren't computer programs care about. And if it's true that the language in which we express ourselves has some substantive effect on what we end up saying, these different perspectives can serve us in the future, as well. My favorite part of the muslim marriage ceremony is the bit from the Koran that says (paraphrasing), "I made you different so that you could learn from one another."
221
It's the don't give them an inch lest they take a mile theory. Also some people don't like the whole idea of thinking in terms of tradeoffs or costs vrs benefits.
The other odd thing is that it's perfectly possible to be fluent in two languages. I can see that there's a use to having one lingua franca, but why on earth should it be instead of rather than in addition to everything else?
Also, the idea that you can make equally good poetry in any language once you've got the rhyming dictionary memorized is ridiculous. English is just plain harder to rhyme well than many romance languages. This is why the best translations of some works are prose--because you can't have the rhyme and meter and the right words.
I think it may also be why, while there is wonderful poetry in English, it tends to be limited in length. It's too hard to keep it up for the length of a whole play or a whole story. (It's also possible that the ascendancy of English writing happened after epic poetry had gone out of fashion).
Anyway, I'd argue that rhyme is much less imporant to poetry than meter is (and easier to execute).
Anyway, some confessions. I've never had much of a visceral reaction to poetry. Not tone deaf, just perhaps less sensitive to it than average. But on the other hand, I'm very musical. I have a really good ear for some things.
Maybe--do you have an idea about which?
People who like language and are interested in it (myself included) tend to get pretty emotional about arguments that various linguistic phenomena are superfluous or inefficient, especially when they come in the context of an argument that differences between languages are "problems" that should be "solved." "Those aren't bugs, they're features!" we cry. The fact that the benefits to multilingualism are subjective and aesthetic doesn't really help us in our struggle with the forces of cold, cruel logic and efficiency.
Now, as far as Sapir-Whorf and all that, you haven't been saying anything radically different from the scholarly consensus among linguists, but the framing of the argument as it began colored people's reactions and made us assume that you were actually advocating worldwide monolingualism on a practical level, which you apparently weren't.
Sorry, pdf, I completely misspoke in 225. You seem to be implying that one's options are "meaning alone creates emotional affect" or "it is intrinsic to the sound." I think almost everyone here is disagreeing with you on the former, but not committed to the latter. To the extent that you think your opponents are committed to it being 'something about the sound itself', you seem to be mistaken.
One of the reasons we like poetry might be just that we like the sounds. It might have nothing to do with meaning at all, and still be just a contingent fact.
Have you ever read a poem in a language you don't fully understand, but could pronounce and found it beautiful?
Yes, what ogged said. And in addition, a young couple trying to communicate, knowing only very little of each other's native tongue. Do we want to live in a world without that sort of thing?
233: Well, the huge amount of effort it takes to learn a new language is worth considering.
I agree that poetry in some languages is harder to do than others.
"I'd argue that rhyme is much less imporant to poetry than meter is"
That reminds me of this.
"(and easier to execute)."
Really? That surprises me.
"colored people's reactions"
teo is teh racist.
Anyone who thinks the aesthetic qualities of speech sounds don't matter should listen to some of the vowels I've been synthesizing. Yeesh.
Synthesizing? Like in My Fair Lady, but with technology?
Well, the huge amount of effort it takes to learn a new language is worth considering.
Keep in mind that ability to learn languages varies a lot; it's significantly less effort for some people than for others.
240: "vowels" s/b "bowels"
Sonorous, indeed.
Most of the vowels actually sound pretty good, but they're a far cry from natural speech.
That's pretty cool, téo. What's the point of this project?
236: What I was responding to was the idea that qualities intrinsic to the sound have a substantial influence on the meanings that get associated with the sounds. I didn't think anyone was advocating that they were even a dominant consideration, let alone the primary or exclusive one.
The only exceptions I can think of to my position either assume an existing aesthetic (neologisms gaining popularity based on how pretty they sound) or are still pretty arbitrary (easier to say words with lots of frictives and plosives when you're angry, thus natural selection leads us to the harsh consonants of swear words).
Other examples of white people using "black preacher" techniques in public speaking: Bill Clinton's "send me" riff on Jeremiah for Kerry's nomination, and every mid-song sermon Bono has ever done.
246: Thanks. It's a class assignment.
Do you have to catalogue all the sounds ever, or in a certain region, and do you have to try to say the sounds yourself?
The rain in Spain falls mainly on the plain!
The assignment is to record oneself saying certain vowels (not all of them) and then make synthetic versions. Some vowels are harder than others; [u] is particularly difficult. I'm not quite done, but I think I'll call it a night.
That's so cool! I wish my field was interesting.
Taking a great sonorous shit might also cause one to change one's position.
However, should any snooper decide to dig me up, I make a final bequest under the provision of the Human Tissue Gift Act of 1971. I leave my arse-hole, and all necessary integument thereto appertaining, to the Faculty of Philosophy; let itbe stretched upon a steel frame so taht each New Year's Day, the senior professor may blow through it, uttering a rich, fruity note, as my salute to the world of which I now take leave, in search of the Great Perhaps.
As I understand you, you are merely repeating the word "orphan" to show that you understand me.
re: 247
"The only exceptions I can think of ... are still pretty arbitrary (easier to say words with lots of frictives and plosives when you're angry, thus natural selection leads us to the harsh consonants of swear words)."
Phonaesthesia is a big phenomenon in English [and I assume in other languages]. Take a set of words like:
crunch, crash, crumple, crack, crush, cripple
or another set like:
slip, slide, slime, slosh
The phonology of these words carries semantic connotations, these words form loose phonological and semantic families. It's just not the case that we could flip the sounds around arbitrarily and they'd work just the same. Anyone blind to the phonaesthetic properties of language is, as has been said already in this thread, on crack.
Also, one doesn't have to believe in strong Sapir-Whorf to think that different languages or different dialects of a language convey meaning in different ways. Anyone who speaks two widely differing dialects of the same language knows that there are things that just don't easily translate between the two although one can attempt literal, and often complex, circumlocutions.
Most educated Brits who aren't from urban or suburban middle-class southern england are capable of code-switching between their local vernacular and dialect and 'educated' English.* I'd be very surprised if many of them thought nothing would be lost by just dropping the local vernacular, dialect and pronunciation in the interest of communicative efficiency.
* With Scots and Geordies perhaps at the extreme end of that bell-curve ...
I think among poets it's commonly believed that the physiological process of producing particular sounds is important in the effect of particular words. Nims has a chapter on this in _Western Wind_, and I can see Pinsky saying the same thing. I think the language would be weakened if we said "buff of air".
But probably more important is having a rich variety of sounds and sounds per meaning - one of English's great strengths in poetry is its hybrid German and Latin vocabulary.
I haven't made a survey but I would guess that there's plenty of fine poetry written without any consideration of sound and making little use of it.
48: I think one can write almost anything in free verse. Using a regular meter makes some things impossible - I tried writing the intro to my thesis in iambics but phrases like "symmetry breaking" or "required correcting the beam energy to account for the moon's orbit" were too hard to rework.
258: Right. Not sure why I didn't mention onomatopoeia. Probably because I didn't want to bother googling it to find out the right spelling.
"different languages or different dialects of a language convey meaning in different ways"
Thought I already acknowledged this pretty well, in 117.
Crap, crap, crap. I had this really neat idea for a blog post, and then I stopped to crank a quick one out so I'd remember this thread and forgot the idea.
re: 117 Really, I thought 117 missed the point (sort of).
The fact that language X can convey concept p in 1 word while language Y needs 100 words and a diagram is a non-trivial difference between X and Y. And is precisely one of the things that those opposing the 'one language to rule them all, and in the darkness bind them' argument think matters.
262: Well, I guess it didn't *acknowledge* how much those things matter. Maybe there was another comment that did? I dunno. Anyway, I'm fully aware of the importance of that sort of thing: one of the main reasons I don't advocate Lojban (for recreational or special-purpose use) more is because it really isn't that *useful*, since the vocabulary is still so small, and making up good vocabulary is hard.
Actually, doesn't 112 count as an acknowledgment?
Haha! I remembered what I was going to post on. (I think.)
258 says stuff I was thinking about writing 259. I think Nims talks about flit/flick/flame/fly/...
I use the word "articulate" to describe all Americans of whatever race. It's a code word which communicates to my fellow Europeans the message "be careful. this bloke's a moron. he doesn't sound like a moron, but he is. in america, they teach public speaking to everyone, even the morons, so they don't always sound like morons. but this guy is."
In related news, "smart" is a word which means "an American who is quite intelligent in a really smug and unreflective way". As in "Larry Summers is the smartest guy in Harvard".
Daniel Davies is a smart, articulate bloke.
As I've said before, Davies' claims to be short, dark, and dirty are not grounded in truth. I suspect that he was switched in the cradle.
There's another issue too, oraliy as such. Eloquence is mistrusted (for example Irish or Arab eloquence from an English point of view). Bono may have cribbed American black preaching, but there are Irish examples too.
Articulateness is still a form of orality, even though it's more precise and restrained than eloquence.
The people who really rule the world are bureaucrats, managers, economists, engineers, geeks, and legacy rish boys who can't fit two sentences together and have nothing but contempt (sometimes mixed with fear) for anyone who can. (Actual and not rare expression of this: "Why should I learn to write? My secretary has an MA in English").
So the articulate black is still one step away from power. He's not a geek yet.
Another possibility - "articulate" is used to express a special kind of respect for the rare politician who can explain complicated policies or abstract ideas in a way that communicates them clearly, persuasively and intelligently, and is not meant in this context as any kind of racial slur.
Don't believe me? No offense, but GFE. Google search: "Bill Clinton" articulate. People generally did not think, "Gee, Bill Clinton's a white guy. It's not at all surprising that he can speak so well, so of course it'd be superfluous or even condescending to call him 'articulate.'" They called him articulate all the time because this was his signature talent. He could rattle off five-point plans that clearly and intelligently expressed his ideas. And, he could speak about abstract ideas in a way that reliably moved audiences and made them want to believe in him.
No doubt some African-American listeners are suspicious of the label because it's been misused before in utterly different contexts. Calling someone who's been disfranchised and consigned to an inferior occupation by bigotry "articulate" -- as though that talent were a surprise -- would be offensive, and it has been used that way in other places. But that's clearly not the case for Obama, and to suggest that "articulate" has not been used to refer to white male politicians (or CEOs) is just plain wrong.
It's hard to speak clearly and well about complicated policies or abstract ideas -- I'd imagine the people who visit this site write often enough to know that -- and those who can do it well deserve respect. I think "articulate", as applied to public speakers, is meant to call attention to the ones who have that talent -- and to contrast them with tongue-tied cretins who make you groan every time you see them stepping up to the microphone. Men like Joe Biden, for example.
Damn, this was interesting and I missed most of it. To react broadly to the post and thread:
(1) I think Ogged gets it right and wrong: yes, 'articulate' is code for 'sounds surprisingly white', but part of what's maddening about it is the implicit 'See, "inarticulate" is a fair description of anyone black who doesn't sound surprisingly white. No matter how artfully and successfully you use language to convey your thoughts, if you don't sound white you're not articulate.' It's like 'good' hair -- all it really means is hair that looks like most white people's hair, and there's nothing wrong with that in itself; the problem is the implication that having hair that doesn't look like white people's hair is 'bad'.
(2) I'm actually pretty sympathetic to the idea that having a dominant dialect for professional/formal uses that everyone should learn regardless of their native dialect isn't a bad thing, for all sorts of ease of communication reasons. (Has everyone read this David Foster Wallace essay on the subject?) That's entirely different from saying that being a native speaker of another dialect should mark you as socially undesirable or of low intelligence. If I understand how things work in Germany, (which I probably don't), the regional dialects are much further apart than we get in dialects of American English, bordering on kind of hard to mutually understand. Everyone learns Standard German, or whatever the English is for Hoch Deutsch in school, and that's the dialect used formally, without significant social penalty for being from someplace where they don't speak it at home.
(3) I think part of the insult implied in 'articulate', is that people who don't get the 'articulate' label are often not speaking a different dialect (I think AAVE is the current way people designate what used to be Black English). To move away from secular saints like MLK who no one could possibly say anything negative about, someone like Al Sharpton gives a hell of a speech, and when he's giving a speech is generally speaking Standard English, not AAVE. (I assume he's code switching, and is perfectly capable of speaking AAVE.) The things about his manner of speaking that make it perfectly obvious to any American, regardless of whether they've ever seen or heard of him, that he's black are really fairly subtle: differences in intonation and vocal production, different choices of rhetorical tropes, and so on.
Someone who describes Obama as 'articulate' and not Sharpton (and I'm sure Sharpton's been described as 'articulate' sometimes) isn't simply praising Obama's capacity to give a rousing speech, or to speak Standard English, because Sharpton has both of those. They're praising Obama's capacity to speak in a manner that gives no evidence at all that he's black, which Sharpton can't or more likely won't do. And that does seem, when you drill down into it, like a racist thing to praise someone for. (Not that everyone who says 'articulate' is racist, if you just don't know you're a perfectly fine person, and even if you've got something racist going on in the back of your head, join the club, so do most of us.)
This isn't a judgment on Obama at all -- he speaks the way he does partially because he wasn't raised speaking AAVE, and there's not a thing wrong with that. But there's something wrong with handing out praise on the basis of what your dialect of origin is.
But surely Biden's remark was a reference to Obama's political appeal, to the very widespread exitement about him. And part of that appeal is very much due to his speaking, deliberately and naturally in a broader, dare I say more inclusive way.
I don't know why you shouldn't dare say 'inclusive', but I'm not sure what it means. Sharpton (who I'm discussing only for oratorical style) gives speeches in Standard English, in a manner that is absolutely comprehensible to any speaker of Standard English. The only thing that isn't 'inclusive' about his manner of speaking is that his ethnic origins are marked in his speech. If that makes him non-'inclusive', then so is everyone else, just with regard to a different set of people who don't share those origins.
If I understand you, which I easily may not, a more accurate way of expressing the concept you used 'inclusive' for would be 'comfortingly familiar to middle-class white people'.
I think it's not accidental, nor incidental. I think the feeling that, yes, white people have that Obama is speaking to them, means to include them, is not treating them as other, is based on something real, on a real difference.
I'm with 271. Bill Clinton and John Edwards have both been regularly described as articulate for the same reasons Obama gets called articulate. If you use the word inarticulate, the first association that springs to my mind isn't anybody black, it's prominent honky George W. Bush.
271: No doubt some African-American listeners are suspicious of the label because it's been misused before in utterly different contexts.
Correct. Generally speaking, in any context where something could be a racial slur coming from whitefolks speaking about the coloureds, Black Americans will tend to err on the side of caution. Just over forty years out from Jim Crow segregation, there's still plenty of reason for them to do so (periodical reminders of which keep cropping up).
That's not to say that overreaction can't happen. As I noted above, "articulate" on its own isn't all that big a deal. But it's hardly out-of-control censoriousness to think that a lot of the people using the word about, say, Obama might in fact be using it differently than they did about Clinton. Even as an off-the-cuff stumble, for instance, it would simply never have occurred to anyone talking about Clinton to describe him not just as "articulate," but also as "clean" and "mainstream" as Biden recently did with Obama.
Small potatoes in the greater scheme of things, and if Biden's comment had ignited a "bring me the head of Joe Biden" campaign from African-American advocacy groups, that would have been overreaction. But a little barbed humour at his expense is perfectly within bounds.
266: I'm pretty sure that there's a long-standing English tradition of viewing all Americans of any color as irretrievably tainted by the prevalence of negroes in America.
Having said that: no, I don't think people need to make mention of it every time someone calls Obama "articulate." Even if there could be some implicit racial dynamics there, they're too ambiguous to be worth the effort.
I think the feeling that, yes, white people have that Obama is speaking to them, means to include them, is not treating them as other, is based on something real, on a real difference.
Sure, it's a real difference between Obama and Sharpton. But the real difference is that Sharpton was raised as culturally African American, and Obama was not. If having been raised as culturally African American is in itself politically harmful (and again, I'm not talking about Sharpton here outside of his oratorical style), then that's certainly related to racism.
Oh, and a dangling bit from the "linguistic diversity" exchange up-thread (and this was a point Shearer made as well):
I don't see any reason for anyone not to be able to acknowledge both the cons of linguistic diversity, whether or not they think the pros outweigh them.
In talking about the cons of linguistic diversity, I'd just like the "cons" being claimed to actually be convincing as such. Neither "diversity obstructs efficiency" nor "it's terribly, horribly difficult for people to learn more than one language" are very convincing objections. And as Katherine noted, there's no either/or choice to be made between having a functional lingua franca and having "linguistic diversity."
I'm with 271 & 276. Obama gives good speech well above and beyond most people's ability to do so, no matter who they are. That he attended an Ivy and law school should automatically make that unremarkable discounts all the real-world evidence to the contrary easily seen on CSPAN or the Sunday talking head shows.
If Clemetson is trying to vacuum up the last few crumbs of White Guilt left she would do better by planning for the incoming wave of Hispanic indifference.
I can't believe no one's yet cracked "Ogged's so articulate!". I've always thought so.
(Here was once the draft version of my pet theory of why honkonormative listeners are intimidated by speakers who "sound black," because Lord but I was spammy with it.)
Somewhere way back up the thread pdf (I think) asked if there were any intrinsic value in a community choosing a different style of speech. Maybe? Am I remembering that right? At any rate, I say yes: marking off the boundaries of one's own style of speech is as much a part of having community-oriented activities like Gay Games, as I've gone on about in other threads, for the purpose of building common bonds that others have tried to take away from you and establishing some cultural space in which you can take refuge as the (perhaps temporary and localized) majority.
OT, Anne Applebaum's husband Radek Sikorski just got fired by the President / Prime Minister Kaczynski twins in Poland. Actually he quit before they could fire him.
[insert letter bomb joke here]
[insert Polack joke here]
[insert twin joke here].
I just received a penny stock spam with the subject "Do you think Bush is a gay?"
It did make me look.
I haven't been following Polish politics much, but those Kaczynski twins sure seem ominous.
It seems to me that this could be a great "double" movie, with an evil letter-bomb twin, a nice goody-goody twin, lots of Polack fuckups, and a NYC society lady wandering in and out and sending back misleading newspaper stories to the US.
Caveat: Poles are not really stupid and clumsy, and Anne Applebaum is really a highly annoying professional, not a society lady.
If Clemetson is trying to vacuum up the last few crumbs of White Guilt left she would do better by planning for the incoming wave of Hispanic indifference.
This is kinda rude. Explaining the way X issue (articulate, good hair, homeschooling, whatever) resonates in Y subculture doesn't need to be waved away as exploiting white guilt. The article didn't strike me as a guilt-trip; it seemed to be explaining something that ought to be fairly obvious, but isn't, precisely because a lot of white people find "we're all more or less the same!" less guilt-inducing than actually asking about the ways we aren't.
I did a little research, and if Applebaum were not an annoying professional, by her parentage she would be eligible to be a society lady.
I'm kind of hoping to move on to exploiting White Anomie. I hear there's some potential there.
289: If all she was trying to do was caution whites about using "articulate" she could have saved some trees and pixels. However, given her Sometimes the "articulate" moniker is merely implied..., it would appear she's taking saying anything complimentary off the table too. Asking for some sensitivity is one thing, asking for mind-reading is another.
281: But the reality of linguistic diversity today is that nearly everyone cannot communicate with nearly everyone else, and that was probably what pdf was referring to. You would probably be hard pressed to find someone who believes a global common language would be fantastic (such as myself) who also feels that no one should stay multilingual.
Of course, I'd also point out that the global language would be pretty useless if it's not taught from a very young age (it should probably be among the first classes at all public schools) since otherwise most people would not achieve proficiency.
I'm pissed that I missed out on this argument, since pdf really was ganged up on.
Also, why do skeptics even feel the need to bring up esperanto when this discussion comes up? Any invented language will obviously suck.
293: But the reality of linguistic diversity today is that nearly everyone cannot communicate with nearly everyone else, and that was probably what pdf was referring to.
And it's a fiction. In the international context, what usually happens is that the languages of powerful and prestigious countries -- or of formerly powerful and prestigious countries -- come to function as widespread lingua francae. Hence English, Spanish and French are widely spoken languages in countries which also have plenty of languages of their own, Arabic is widely spoken in the Muslim world, Asia has a burgeoning ESL industry that's now spreading into China, and so on.
Of course the more people have access to these kinds of resources, the better, and arguably not enough people now do. And boneheadedness can result from that, obviously. But that's simply not an argument against linguistic diversity; it's an argument for educational resources. Chinese and Japanese kids who learn English aren't going to stop speaking Mandarin, Cantonese or Japanese, nor can I think of any reason they should.
294: As someone who's logged around 700,000 flight miles (actual ass-in-seat miles) over the last decade and a bit while traveling around non-English-speaking countries, I can tell you that it is not a fiction. Yes, defacto common languages such as English are becoming much more common, but they are still only spoken by a very educated, cosmopolitan crowd. Doubly so if you are looking for fluency or near-fluency. It's light-years away from everyone being able to communicate with everyone else.
That said, your second paragraph is spot-on. In 293, I just meant that "linguistic diversity" was probably intended to mean "the state of languages and communication today", since I can not imagine a reasonable objection to a world where everyone spoke a common language but also knew other languages on the side.
"I can not imagine a reasonable objection to a world where everyone spoke a common language but also knew other languages on the side."
I'd agree, because of all the cultural relevance and importance those languages would still have. But still, learning them would be a pain, in exactly the same way that learning three or four different writing systems is a pain for Japanese students. So you'd hope that after a hundred or two years, the old languages would be come less and less necessary.
In fact, I think the Japanese movement for writing system reform would be a good place to see a lot of the same arguments we've had in this thread, except that very few people here know Japanese.