Babel's Children (fwd)

Wed Jan 14 18:41:41 UTC 2004

Whenever I read something like this article, I think of Whorf's
statement that Hopi has no words whatsoever for time--something that
turned out to be a fantasy. Why are people still interested in proving
Whorf right, when he himself  seemed to be completely unable to get
basis facts straight?

This article writes of a language with no verb tenses and no articles,
as if this were some amazing discovery.  Actually, many languages lack
verb tenses and articles.  They usually have other features that perform
many of the functions of verb tenses and articles, but that a linguist
has discovered a language without verb tenses or articles per se--why is
this news?

As for having no part-of-speech, I suspect that what he really means is
that the same word may represent different parts of speech, which,
again, is quite common.  I would guess that the language he is studying
is an isolating language in which part-of-speech is indicated mostly by
syntax, like thousands of other languages around the world.

It's not difficult for me to believe his statement that linguists, when
studying other language, are influenced by the languages they already
know.  However, this whole article seems to be feeding into the same
tired, unscientific, and ultimately destructive myths, such as the
Grammarless Language (why don't we get any details on the grammar this
language DOES have, rather than does not have?), the Primitive Language
which contains Ambigious Statements (as if the meaning of most sentences
was not dependent in part upon context).  Does the linguist suppose that
the speakers of this language have to guess what others are talking
about?  That they have some kind of mystical communication system that
allows them to understand anyway?  That Indonesians are "always late"
because their language does not require time to be marked?  Funny, I've
lived in Taiwan, which uses languages in which time-markets are
optional, yet people are very timely, and I have relatives in Mexico, in
which most people speak Spanish, a language where time-marking is
required, and yet being late seems to be much more acceptable there than
in Taiwan.  OK, so the guy was joking when he said that, but the whole
attitude betrays the same kind of "mystical savage" stereotype that
Whorf was so fond of--they are late because their language doesn't allow
them to think about time in a precise manner.

Whorfism has not only fallen out of favor and has never been backed up
by rigorous studies, it has also been used, again and again, to support
the idea that indigenous languages are inprecise, incomplete means of
communication which will never suffice for the modern world.  Yes, I do
know that Safir, Whorf's teacher, was trying to do exactly the opposite:
 point out the value of indigenous languages by pointing out their many
complex and unique features, but Whorf completely warped what the
legitimate point that Safir was trying to make.  When I talk to people
about language preservation, it amazes me how often they dredge up some
half-remembered reference to Whorf that they read about during college
"Isn't it true that Hopi can't refer to time in any way?  Well, really,
it would be nice to preserve it, but how can they actually use it in
today's world if they can't even talk about when something happened?"

To be fair, whatever this linguist has actually written was probably
distorted horribly by the writer of the article, as usual.  Just look at
the title:  more Babelism (linguistic diversity = a curse of God!)

In my opinion, the mainstream media is one of the biggest obstacles to
language preservation.

phil cash cash wrote:

> Linguistics
>
> Babel's children
>
> Jan 8th 2004 | LEIPZIG
> From The Economist print edition
>
> Corbis
>
>
> Languages may be more different from each other than is currently
> supposed. That may affect the way people think
>
> http://www.economist.com/science/displayStory.cfm?story_id=2329718
>
> IT IS hard to conceive of a language without nouns or verbs. But that
> is just what Riau Indonesian is, according to David Gil, a researcher
> at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, in Leipzig.
> Dr Gil has been studying Riau for the past 12 years. Initially, he
> says, he struggled with the language, despite being fluent in standard
> Indonesian. However, a breakthrough came when he realised that what he
> had been thinking of as different parts of speech were, in fact,
> grammatically the same. For example, the phrase "the chicken is
> eating" translates into colloquial Riau as "ayam makan". Literally,
> this is "chicken eat". But the same pair of words also have meanings
> as diverse as "the chicken is making somebody eat", or "somebody is
> eating where the chicken is". There are, he says, no modifiers that
> distinguish the tenses of verbs. Nor are there modifiers for nouns
> that distinguish the definite from the indefinite ("the", as opposed
> to "a"). Indeed, there are no features in Riau Indonesian that
> distinguish nouns from verbs. These categories, he says, are imposed
> because the languages that western linguists are familiar with have them.
>
> This sort of observation flies in the face of conventional wisdom
> about what language is. Most linguists are influenced by the work of
> Noam Chomsky--in particular, his theory of "deep grammar". According
> to Dr Chomsky, people are born with a sort of linguistic template in
> their brains. This is a set of rules that allows children to learn a
> language quickly, but also imposes constraints and structure on what
> is learnt. Evidence in support of this theory includes the tendency of
> children to make systematic mistakes which indicate a tendency to
> impose rules on what turn out to be grammatical exceptions (eg, "I
> dided it" instead of "I did it"). There is also the ability of the
> children of migrant workers to invent new languages known as creoles
> out of the grammatically incoherent pidgin spoken by their parents.
> Exactly what the deep grammar consists of is still not clear, but a
> basic distinction between nouns and verbs would probably be one of its
> minimum requirements.
>
> Plumbing the grammatical depths
>
> Dr Gil contends, however, that there is a risk of unconscious bias
> leading to the conclusion that a particular sort of grammar exists in
> an unfamiliar language. That is because it is easier for linguists to
> discover extra features in foreign languages--for example tones that
> change the meaning of words, which are common in Indonesian but do not
> exist in European languages--than to realise that elements which are
> taken for granted in a linguist's native language may be absent from
> another. Despite the best intentions, he says, there is a tendency to
> fit languages into a mould. And since most linguists are westerners,
> that mould is usually an Indo-European language from the West.
>
> It need not, however, be a modern language. Dr Gil's point about bias
> is well illustrated by the history of the study of the world's most
> widely spoken tongue. Many of the people who developed modern
> linguistics had had an education in Latin and Greek. As a consequence,
> English was often described until well into the 20th century as having
> six different noun cases, because Latin has six. (A noun case is how
> that noun's grammatical use is distinguished, for example as a subject
> or as an object.) Only relatively recently did grammarians begin a
> debate over noun cases in English. Some now contend that it does not
> have noun cases at all, others that it has two (one for the
> possessive, the other for everything else) while still others maintain
> that there are three or four cases. These would include the nominative
> (for the subject of a sentence), the accusative (for its object) and
> the genitive (to indicate possession).
>
> The difficulty is compounded if a linguist is not fluent in the
> language he is studying. The process of linguistic fieldwork is a
> painstaking one, fraught with pitfalls. Its mainstay is the use of
> "informants" who tell linguists, in interviews and on paper, about
> their language. Unfortunately, these informants tend to be
> better-educated than their fellows, and are often fluent in more than
> one language. This, in conjunction with the comparatively formal
> setting of an interview (even if it is done in as basic a location as
> possible), can systematically distort the results. While such
> interviews are an unavoidable, and essential, part of the process, Dr
> Gil has also resorted to various ruses in his attempts to elicit
> linguistic information. In one of them, he would sit by the ferry
> terminal on Batam, an Indonesian island near Singapore, with sketches
> of fish doing different things. He then struck up conversations with
> shoeshine boys hanging around the dock, hoping that the boys would
> describe what the fish were doing in a relaxed, colloquial manner.
>
> The experiment, though, was not entirely successful: when the boys
> realised his intention, they began to speak more formally. This
> experience, says Dr Gil, illustrates the difficulties of collecting
> authentic information about the ways in which people speak. But those
> differences, whether or not they reflect the absence of a Chomskian
> deep grammar, might be relevant not just to language, but to the very
> way in which people think.
>
> Word, words, words
>
> A project that Dr Gil is just beginning in Indonesia, in collaboration
> with Lera Boroditsky, a researcher at the Massachusetts Institute of
> Technology, is examining correlations between the way concepts are
> expressed in languages and how native speakers of these languages
> think. This is a test of a hypothesis first made by Benjamin Lee
> Whorf, an early 20th-century American linguist, that the structure of
> language affects the way people think. Though Whorf's hypothesis fell
> into disfavour half a century ago, it is now undergoing something of a
> revival.
>
> Dr Boroditsky's experiment is simple. People are shown three pictures,
> one of a man about to kick a ball, one of the same man having just
> kicked a ball, and a third of a different man who is about to kick a
> ball. They are then asked which two of the three are the most similar.
> Indonesians generally choose the first two pictures, which have the
> same man in them, while English speakers are likely to identify the
> two pictures that show the ball about to be kicked--an emphasis on the
> temporal, rather than the spatial, relationship between the principal
> objects in the picture.
>
> Dr Gil believes that this might be because time is, in English, an
> integral grammatical concept--every verb must have a tense, be it
> past, present or future. By contrast, in Indonesian, expressing a
> verb's tense is optional, and not always done. In support of Whorf's
> idea, Dr Gil half-jokingly cites the fact that Indonesians always seem
> to be running late. But there is more systematic evidence, too. For
> example, native Indonesian speakers who also speak English fall
> between the two groups of monoglots in the experiment. Dr Gil supposes
> that their thought processes are influenced by their knowledge of both
> English and Indonesian grammar.
>
> Demonstrating any sort of causal link would, nevertheless, be hard.
> Indeed, the first challenge the researchers must surmount if they are
> to prove Whorf correct is to show that English and Indonesian speakers
> do, in fact, think differently about time, and are not answering
> questions in different ways for some other reason. If that does prove
> to be the case, says Dr Gil, their remains the thorny question of
> whether it is the differences in language of the two groups that
> influences their conception of time, or vice versa.
>
> Dr Boroditsky and Dr Gil are not intending to restrict their study to
> ideas about time. They plan, for example, to study gender. English,
> unlike many other languages, does not assign genders to most nouns.
> Does this affect the way English-speakers think of gender? Languages
> also differ in the ways they distinguish between singular and plural
> nouns. Indeed, some do not distinguish at all, while others have a
> special case, called the dual, that refers only to a pair of
> something. Descriptions of spatial relations, too, vary, with
> languages dividing the world up differently by using different sorts
> of prepositions. The notion that grammar might affect the way people
> think may seem far-fetched, and even unappealing to those who are
> confident of their own free will. But if Dr Gil is right and there do
> exist languages, like Riau Indonesian, without nouns or verbs, the
> difficulty of conceiving just that fact points out how much grammar
> itself shapes at least some thoughts.
>
>
> Copyright © 2004 The Economist Newspaper and The Economist Group. All
> rights reserved.
>

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