Sociological Linguistics

[Patrick C. Ryan]

[ moderator re-formatted ]

Dear Larry and IEists:

 ----- Original Message -----
From: Larry Trask <larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk>
Sent: Thursday, May 20, 1999 8:36 AM

[PR]

>> Everything in life of which we have knowledge shows a development
>> from the simple to the complex.

[LT]

> Not so.  Blatantly not so.

> A good counterexample is dedicated parasitism, in which the parasite
> loses all structures required for locomotion, perception, self-defense,
> pursuit of prey, and whatnot, and is reduced to a mere sac of tissue
> able to do nothing but to absorb nutrients from its host and to
> reproduce.

[PR]

And is that parasite one-celled? Was it there at the beginning of life on
earth?

Degeneration of certain functions is always possible. Take Chinese as an
example. The language from which it is derived did have a plural.

[LT continued]

> Languages are also good counterexamples.  The earliest recorded or
> reconstructible languages are in no way simpler than contemporary
> languages.  And perhaps no recorded IE language possesses an
> inflectional morphology as complex as that of PIE.  Does this make the
> modern languages in any way inferior to PIE?

[PR]

It always gets back to "better/worse", "inferior/superior" for the
sociologically oriented. For them, different is a pejorative. Perhaps
ambiguity is better, quien sabe?

[PR wrote]

>> My own studies and common sense decree that, at some point after the
>> onset of linguistic communication, languages were simpler than they
>> are now; and hence, less explicitly expressive.

[LT coninued]

> It is not possible to make "studies" of the languages of our earliest
> ancestors, since no data exist.  As for "common sense", well, I take
> Einstein's view: `common sense' is merely a label we apply to something
> we believe only because we want to believe it.

> Our linguistic methods allow us to penetrate no more than a few thousand
> years into the past, even in the most favorable cases, and they reveal
> earlier languages in no way "simpler" than modern ones.  We have no way
> of reaching back to the remote antecedents of language, tens or hundreds
> of thousands of years ago, and we can't guess what these were like.

[PR responds]

Yes, Larry, we know this is your belief. But, although one cannot convince a
believer, let me mention a few things for those readers who still have open
minds:

1) All present languages potentially provide "data" for the languages of our
earliest ancestors if monogenesis is accepted; one can study IE, can one
not? even though we have no attestation of it beyond what we can
reconstruct;

2) Let us not say that "polygenesis" is against common sense; let us rather
say that polygenesis is intellectually on a par with _believing_ that the
earth was created in six days;

3) I am not the only person who believes that languages of much greater
antiquity than that allowed by the flawed mathematics of glottochronology
and lexicostatistics --- linguists, not amateurs like myself.

>>[PR wrote]

>> As just the simplest example, a language which is unable to
>> designate the plural form of a noun, is bound to introduce an
>> *ambiguity* into a statement that a language which can does not
>> exhibit.

>[LT wrote]

> Not remotely true, I'm afraid.  You are confusing grammaticalization
> with expressive power.  A language can express distinctions of number
> perfectly well without grammaticalizing some of these distinctions.

> English is not more ambiguous than Classical Arabic or Fijian because,
> unlike them, it does not grammaticalize dual number.  We use words like
> `both' or `two'; they use inflected forms of nouns or pronouns for the
> same purpose.  There is no difference in expressive power.

[PR writes]

If I had meant to include "dual" as a category, the absence of which
introduces ambiguity, might I not have written that --- just another
straw-man argument from the master debater.

>[LT coninued]

> The North American language Kwakiutl grammaticalizes visibility:
> different pronouns must be selected depending on whether the referent
> is, or is not, visible to the speaker at the moment of speaking.
> English does not do this.  Does this fact make Kwakiutl "more
> expressive" or "more complex" or "less ambiguous" than English?

[PR responds]

Yes, it makes Kakiutl more expressive.

[LT continued]

> The tense language English requires `I saw Susie yesterday'; a tenseless
> language like Mandarin Chinese has, literally, `I see Susie yesterday'.
> There is no ambiguity: there are merely different choices as to which
> information should be built into the grammar, as opposed to being
> expressed otherwise.

[PR responds]

Now one can say in English: 'I saw Susie'. What is the equivalent literal
translation in Mandarin?

[LT continues]

>> As another, certain languages have morphemes that have a much
>> greater range of semantic inclusion than other languages. This also
>> is a source of potential ambiguity that is not shared by languages
>> that have differentiated semantic ranges more finely.

> Not so.  English has only a single past tense, and `Washington crossed
> the Delaware' can denote any temporal period between a moment ago and
> the beginning of time.  Some other languages grammaticalize much finer
> distinctions of past time: a moment ago, within the last hour, earlier
> today, yesterday, recently, within the last few months, within the last
> few years, many years ago, before I was born, and so on.  Is the African
> language Bamileke-Dschang superior to English because it distinguishes
> five different past tenses in contrast to our single one?

[PR answers]

You may repeat that 'English has only a single past tense' until the Fenris
wolf swallows the sun, and you will convince only yourself and your friends
who hold it dogmatically.

B-D is, in this regard, more expressive than English; and also less
ambiguous.

>[LT additionally]

> Is it less ambiguous?

>>[PR wrote]

>> Please do not introduce "feel good" sociology into an ostensible
>> linguistic discussion.

>[LT continued]

> I know nothing about sociology of any kind, but I do know that there
> exists no case for claiming that any living, attested or reconstructed
> language is more or less complex than any other, or more or less
> expressive, or more or less ambiguous.  That's just a plain fact.

[PR responds]

Your ignorance of sociology is probably an important component of why you
are unable to distinguish between scientific beliefs justified by reasoning
from data, and your "positions".

Pat

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