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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?<br>
<br>
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? <br>
<br>
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. <br>
<br>
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. <br>
<br>
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?" <br>
<br>
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!)<br>
<br>
In my opinion, the mainstream media is one of the biggest obstacles to language
preservation. <br>
<br>
<br>
phil cash cash wrote:<br>
<blockquote type="cite"
cite="mid6497B253-41FD-11D8-B4C3-0003936727C2@dakotacom.net"><b><!-- Verdana --><!-- CCCC,0000,3333 -->Linguistics</b><!-- Times --><font
size="+1"> <br>
<br>
</font><b><!-- Verdana --><font size="+1"><font size="+1">Babel's children
<br>
<br>
</font></font></b><!-- Verdana --><!-- 9999,9999,9999 --><font
size="-1">Jan 8th 2004 | LEIPZIG </font><font size="-1"> <br>
<!-- 9999,9999,9999 -->From The Economist print edition <br>
<br>
</font><!-- Arial --><!-- 9999,9999,9999 --><font size="-1">Corbis</font><font
size="-1"> <br>
<br>
</font> <!-- Arial --><font size="-1"> <br>
</font><b><!-- Verdana -->Languages may be more different from each other
than is currently supposed. That may affect the way people think <br>
<br>
</b><!-- Verdana --><font size="-1"><font size="-1"><a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="http://www.economist.com/science/displayStory.cfm?story_id=2329718">http://www.economist.com/science/displayStory.cfm?story_id=2329718</a></font></font><b>
<br>
<br>
</b>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. <br>
<br>
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.
<br>
<br>
<b><!-- Verdana --><font size="+1">Plumbing the grammatical depths</font></b><!-- Verdana -->
<br>
<br>
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. <br>
<br>
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). <br>
<br>
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. <br>
<br>
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. <br>
<br>
<b><!-- Verdana --><font size="+1">Word, words, words</font></b><!-- Verdana -->
<br>
<br>
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. <br>
<br>
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. <br>
<br>
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. <br>
<br>
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.
<br>
<br>
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. <br>
<br>
<br>
<!-- Verdana --><font size="-1">Copyright © 2004 The Economist Newspaper
and The Economist Group. All rights reserved. <br>
</font><br>
</blockquote>
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