FUNKNET] analysis: unhappiness

Geoff Nathan geoffnathan at wayne.edu
Mon Sep 13 13:36:40 UTC 2010


----- Original Message -----
> From: "A. Katz" <amnfn at well.com>

> You might as well say that a person cannot possibly avoid watching TV
> once
> he's exposed to it, as say the same about language. But people can
> survive
> just fine without television, and unless someone shows them how to
> make a
> TV set, most people will never figure out how to build one. The same
> goes
> for language. We're great at using it, not so great at generating it
> out
> of thin air with no ambient culture.
> 
> --Aya

Those who are familiar with my work know that I'm anything but a Chomskyan, but I'm sorry, there's an enormous difference between the acquisition of language and the acquisition of the knowledge necessary to build a television set (or the brodcasting and recording technology behind it). As generativists have pointed out since the early sixties, nobody is explicitly taught language, yet we all acquire it. Conversely many are intensively taught elementary physics, engineering etc. and  DON'T aquire it. This is a difference in kind, not in degree. 
This is not to say that culture is taught either (of course nobody learns in school the correct distance to stand apart from an interlocutor, or how many milliseconds of silence in a conversation constitutes a 'pregnant pause'), but these are different kinds of knowledge from academic knowledge explicitly taught in some cultures and not in others. 
All cultures have correct social distance rules, syntactic structures and other tacitly acquired knowledge, but not all cultures learn physics, or which mushrooms are edible and which fatal.
I'm looking forward to reading Dan's book too, but I find 'tool' an inappropriate metaphor for a cultural artifact that is never explicitly 'taught', is learned without effort in all cultures regardless of level of technology and is never improved by explicit experimentation or accidental innovation--there will never be the linguistic equivalent of a 'better mousetrap'.
I prefer Rudi Keller's view that language is an object of the 'third kind'--an artifact that is neither wholly natural nor man-made, but that develops as a spontaneous order, without being designed, and with 'improvements' developing in different directions from the intentions of the developers. See his book 

Sprachwandel. Von der unsichtbaren Hand in der Sprache. 2. Auflage Tübingen 1994

or, for those, who, like me are Germanically-challenged, 

On Language Change: The Invisible Hand in Language, Routledge 1995, translated by Brigitte Nerlich.

Geoff


Geoffrey S. Nathan
Faculty Liaison, C&IT
and Professor, Linguistics Program
+1 (313) 577-1259 (C&IT)
+1 (313) 577-8621 (English/Linguistics)



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