Sociological Linguistics

[Robert Whiting]

On Tue, 18 May 1999, Patrick C. Ryan wrote:

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

Yes, I've noticed how, for example, in the history of writing
systems, the earliest writing systems were incredibly simple
logographic systems consisting of only several hundred to several
thousand signs and that reading and writing was so simple that it
was a specialized occupation that required many years of study to
master.  This simple system gave rise to a more complex system
of syllabaries which needed a couple of hundred (or even less
than a hundred) signs to express the same information.  Finally,
this gave way to the most complex system of all, the alphabet, in
which the tens of thousands of words in a language can be written
with around 30 signs and is so complicated that it takes all the
resources that the average 5-year-old can muster to learn it.

>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.

It is rather the other way around.  What you mean to say is that
your studies take this as an axiom and therefore fall apart if it
is not true.  But since you cheerfully admit that no linguist
accepts your studies, this is hardly proof of the truth of your
axiom.  And as far as I'm concerned, anyone who claims that there
is no semantic difference between "cat" and "cats" is
disqualified from talking about common sense.

>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.

But if, as you have claimed elsewhere, there is no semantic
difference between the singular and plural forms of a given
noun (cat/cats), then being able to mark the plural makes no
difference in meaning and there can be no difference in the
level of ambiguity.  Either one of your statements or the other
has to be wrong (since this is a logical "or," they can also
both be wrong, but they can't both be correct).

>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.

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.

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

And please do not introduce your own personal opinions and
prejudices into the discussion under the guise of "common sense"
(even though, according to Einstein, that is what common sense is).

Bob Whiting
whiting at cc.helsinki.fi