Unlocking the secret sounds of language

[jess tauber]

What Scott said about English and relative lack of terms for feelings made me start thinking....

Yahgan has vast numbers of short, lexicalized terms for feelings, yet very few equivalently short terms to describe people who create such feelings in us (though you can create these by deverbalization and compounding). Yahgan is serializing, but case marking. The feeling terms are largely descriptive (like 'long face', 'pursed lips', etc.) of visible symptoms of internal states. So far as I know Yahgans did not generally use such terms pejoratively as was the fashion up in the Pacific Northwestern culture area.

In Eurasia we see a large swath of languages which seem to have the English pattern of relatively few lexicalized feeling terms, but a very large number of short, lexicalized insulting descriptives. These languages are embedding.

At first blush one would seem to have the makings of a pattern- the question is whether it is real, or merely a flight of fantasy. IF there is something going on more than one typological factor may weigh in on the patterning. But I had noticed for some time now that this kind of distribution within the lexicon seemed to be working in tandem with the distribution of ideophones and other forms of iconicity.

It would be interesting to know whether some sort of  'general attitude' - empathetic versus adversarial- colored such lexicalization preferences. Even the sound symbolism seems slaved to such things- /m/ in root-final position often has the associated notion of cumulation, gathering. But in Chinese the implication is mostly that this is 'immoral'- that it is drawn without the approval of the previous holder, when considering the entire set. Yet in Austroasiatic one sees instead approval in the same types of situations- tacit allowance of the same act. Someone rummaging through your fridge as either unwelcome theft versus host-sanctioned midnight snack.

I would venture that where insults are common generosity may be partly self-promotional, and theft reacted to with viciousness. Where insults are uncommon perhaps generosity is just par for the course, and one earns no special credit for it, and theft would be just another fact of life. Protocapitalist versus protocommunist tendencies.

So the question would be whether insulting behaviors are part of a larger strategy of building barriers between individuals and groups, both emotional and economic, leading to stratifications which then show up in the very structure of the language (and/or vice versa). It would also be interesting to know whether other behaviors go along with this- for instance clothing used to demarcate rank, earned merits, etc. (just as accents are in language). Yahgans used very little clothing, which was largely functional except for the occasional decorative trinket- but they had a large repertoire of body and face painting motifs, the latter denoting their feelings. Lack of permanent goods made cumulations of wealth and power impossible, very few specialists as well.

It may be that as languages evolve their larger mix evolves too- clothing is becoming more expressive with time in our culture, and less so a mark of class and job. Body decoration is becoming more common and diverse- often expressing emotional state (look at use of makeup). Clothing is literally a barrier, the skin and hair literally an externalization of the body. Similarly I'd expect more emotion terms are on their way- though they may have to be fed from more concrete physiological ones.

Well, too much to look at closely in a single lifetime- maybe someone will be motivated to take a stab at it.

Jess Tauber