Sociological Linguistics

[Nicholas Widdows]

<petegray said:>
At the danger of being politically incorrect, I find different languages
differently "expressive".   Of course they can all express anything, but
some, through deliberate choice or through historical accident, express
certain factors, while others leave some factors vague and ambiguous.
</petegray>

The languages do? Some prominent users do; and you get cultural traditions
intimately tied with languages (such as oratory and poetry and opera). But
how Ciceronian is Plautus, how Demosthenean is Sappho? Old Norse comes
across as a stark, simple, no-nonsense linearity in the sagas, but
occasionally bursts into tortuous, glittering poetry. Voltaire and Derrida
use the same language. Sanskrit ideas somehow got translated into Chinese,
and then into Japanese, and I have no idea what nuances got minced in the
process. Any language with a few hundred years of cultural history can
probably show comparable variety.

Whatever the language has can indeed be used as raw material for the
culture. So the accentuation of English allows it to "naturally" fall into
iambic pentameter, French into alexandrines, Finnish into Kalevala metre,
Italian into Verdi libretti. OE and ON had their huge lists of battles,
seas, byrnies, and heroes, and used them to wonderful effect. Chinese could
be shimmeringly ambiguous, if they chose.

These classical cultures often had a characteristic linguistic timbre, but I
don't think the _linguistic_ constraints had much of a part in forming it.

Nicholas