Sociological Linguistics

Eduard Selleslagh edsel at glo.be
Tue May 25 10:14:35 UTC 1999


Robert Whiting <whiting at cc.helsinki.fi> wrote:

[snip]
>Spoken language expresses meaning through sound.  This means that
>an effective language has to be able to express the entire real
>and imagined world through sounds used conventionally to convey
>meaning.  How each individual language does this is of its own
>choosing and whether it uses analytic or synthetic means does not
>make it "simpler" or "more complex" than another language that
>uses a different method.  If one language expresses relationships
>between verbs and nouns through nominal desinences and another
>expresses them through an extensive system of prepositons or
>postpositions, the one is not necessarily simpler or more complex
>than the other; they are simply two methods of achieving the
>same result.  Overall, every language has to be able to express
>the real and imagined world of its speech community.  Simplicity
>in one linguistic area will normally be compensated for by
>complexity in another.  If the language doesn't mark the
>difference between singular and plural in nouns overtly, there
>will be some other mechanism in the language to express the idea.

>Finally, no natural language can entirely eliminate ambiguity
>through grammatical means no matter how many case endings or
>verbal inflections it develops.  The real and imagined world is
>simply too large for this to be true, and natural languages just
>do not work this way.  Context is the ultimate disambiguator of
>meaning.  We understand things by their context.  And I do not
>refer solely to the grammatical context of a word in a sentence,
>but also to the socio-cultural context in which an utterance is
>made.

[Ed Selleslagh]

Very nicely put. I might add, however, that this socio-cultural context may
vary widely in breadth: it is obvious that in western industrial society
there are far more things to talk about and concepts to express than in the
limited world of an isolated tribe. That does not imply that the language of
the latter is simpler or less complex (usually, it's quite the opposite, as
perceived from within the western IE-landscape), but only that its scope, as
determined by that of their socio-cultural context, is more limited.  As
soon as a society is exposed to a wider context, it develops (or 'steals'
from others) the necessary linguistic means to cover it.  E.g. all Europeans
did so during the Renaissance and the colonial period: English is an example
of that.

I believe that complexity of a language, whatever its definition, is roughly
constant (except maybe at the beginning of language development, 120.000
years or so ago) and the same for all languages, although there can be
important internal shifts within a language from one domain to another, e.g.
from inflection to syntax, especially when one domain (not the whole
language) becomes so complex that an ever increasing part of the population
makes more and more mistakes, e.g. false analogy, confusion of cases, etc.,
and effectively begins to break it down. My reason for believing that is
that I also believe, on the one hand, that during development from infant to
adult, all humans learn to fully use their innate language skills, under
peer pressure if necessary, and on the other hand I accept the monogenesis
of present-day humans. And that has nothing to do with an ideological belief
in equality or pop sociology.

[Totally apart from that, and just as a side remark, my favorite theory is
that language(s) started as isolating (normally monosyllabic), then
developed words for abstract ideas and words for linking them, and then
became agglutinatng by attaching 'link words' and other words (e.g. personal
pronouns) to 'noun/verb/... words', until the affixes fused with them and
thus resulted in inflection. In the next stage (apart from phonetic changes)
inflection became increasingly complex and finally desintegrated to be
replaced by syntax, effectively resulting in an isolating language again
(cf. Chinese; English is well on its way). After that, the cycle can start
all over again, but I don't think it already happened anywhere.]

Best regards,
Ed.



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