Suboptimist
I’m not quite a pessimist. I’m more of a suboptimist.

(9:17:56 PM) Jackie Van Buren: ok, how about this. I was thinking about our comparisons and how you were wrong and tennis and baseball are actually far different from tables and chairs
(9:18:12 PM) Robert Sykes: Elaborate.
(9:18:17 PM) Jackie Van Buren: tables and chairs are more like in a complementary distribution, while tennis and baseball are like in an overlapping distribution
(9:18:36 PM) Jackie Van Buren: you see?
(9:19:06 PM) Robert Sykes: Let me think about how that’s wrong, just a sec.
(9:19:28 PM) Jackie Van Buren: ok. I’m prepared to fight
(9:19:57 PM) Robert Sykes: First, your analysis fails to explain how baseball and tennis can be considered overlapping. Having a ball in common doesn’t really cut it.
(9:22:07 PM) Jackie Van Buren: ok, because they can easily be found in place of each other. they are both sports and you can have one without the other. for example, let’s say you want to play a sport and you say, we can choose between tennis or baseball. or perhaps we could even play both. they overlap in their uses
(9:22:55 PM) Jackie Van Buren: but tables and chairs, you can’t have one without the other. you will never find a chair in a table’s position or vice versa. (and we’re not talking about exceptions here, like sitting on a table)
(9:23:14 PM) Jackie Van Buren: they complement each other and have exclusive environments
(9:25:27 PM) Jackie Van Buren: it’s imperfect, but whatever
(9:28:30 PM) Robert Sykes: There is one caveat in that arguement. You can’t separate the fact that tables can act like chairs from their existence in an argument about exclusivity, if we decide to compare it to something with some degree of gradience like you sport example. Also, the very fact that we can play both shows that they’re the same argument. As you said, and as data from say, users of sport show, we can like both at the same time, but if I like tennis, I can’t dislike baseball based soley on my preference for tennis. I can not like it because it’s tedious, professionals are overpaid, and a host of other reasons.
(9:29:07 PM) Robert Sykes: I can like chairs because they are more comfortable to sit on than tables, for example, but it’s ludicrous to dislike tables based on that fact.

[...]

(9:38:52 PM) Robert Sykes: You get the last word.
(9:38:59 PM) Robert Sykes: I’m like Bill O’Reily.
(9:39:14 PM) Jackie Van Buren: that only angers me and makes my argument worse
(9:39:22 PM) Jackie Van Buren: hmm maybe that’s why he is so irritating
(9:39:41 PM) Robert Sykes: Oh, dear. I apologize.
(9:39:47 PM) Robert Sykes: Well, make a quick final word.
(9:39:59 PM) Jackie Van Buren: hold on hold on I have to think
(9:39:59 PM) Robert Sykes: I have to edit for length, after all.
(9:42:37 PM) Jackie Van Buren: you don’t have to choose between tables and chairs, is the thing. It’s not about disliking one to the exclusion of the other. On the contrary, you shouldn’t have to choose between them. They go together. On the other hand, you must choose between baseball and tennis at a given time, though they can still be found in the same environments. You can play both, but not at the same time, though you can still like both

If you’re curious about the continuity of the argument, so are we. This discussion took place roughly a week following the initial argument. We weren’t sure what the original issue at hand was. Preference, playing, something more general…?

A couple things on my mind today. Has anybody (in Utah) heard the referendum 1 (school vouchers) ads on the radio? I find them really irritating. It makes me wonder if there are options aside from “Yes” and “No” on the ballot. The logic the ads are employing is pretty ridiculous. For example, from the “Yes” side: “More money for public schools.” How? Seriously, how? Giving money that could be used for public schooling to people to use in private schooling equals more money for public schools?

From the “No” side: “…Teachers at private schools don’t need a teaching certificate or even a college degree.” How is that even relevant to the discussion? It’s not, it’s just a swipe against private schools and a misconception of what a teaching certificate is, a credential required only for teaching in government schools in Utah. The college degree thing is trumped up. Most private school teachers have degrees. The ones that don’t probably won’t be found teaching math, science, or English either.

The other thing is Julie Beck’s LDS General Conference talk. I know, I’m late to the game here, but I don’t pay attention to General Conference, so I have to catch all of the uproar second hand. I recall some complaints over at FMH about it. As I read it, yeah, I found a few examples of what I would consider an antiquated attitude of what women should do, like:

Mothers who know are nurturers. This is their special assignment and role under the plan of happiness.5 To nurture means to cultivate, care for, and make grow. Therefore, mothers who know create a climate for spiritual and temporal growth in their homes. Another word for nurturing is homemaking. Homemaking includes cooking, washing clothes and dishes, and keeping an orderly home. Home is where women have the most power and influence; therefore, Latter-day Saint women should be the best homemakers in the world. Working beside children in homemaking tasks creates opportunities to teach and model qualities children should emulate. Nurturing mothers are knowledgeable, but all the education women attain will avail them nothing if they do not have the skill to make a home that creates a climate for spiritual growth. Growth happens best in a “house of order,” and women should pattern their homes after the Lord’s house (see D&C 109). Nurturing requires organization, patience, love, and work. Helping growth occur through nurturing is truly a powerful and influential role bestowed on women.

Really though, aside from this and the children thing she said, it wasn’t that inflammatory of a talk. Kind of I’m tired of talking now. I think I need to go to class anyway. Why couldn’t Helen Keller drive? Sorry, sorry, I had to say that.

And this [short] post has nothing to do with her.

I was just thinking as I do phonology homework at 02:00 how I can sometimes feel like analyzing the meta-structure of language is really pointless.

Also, it’s intoxicating.

I am that end of having a cold where you feel okay for the most part. The only remnant of it is the 80 cubic feet of mucus in your head that makes you feel like you’re blowing your brain out when you blow your nose. Also, I hate doing group work.

Anyway, can anybody guess what I am summing up here? I’m too tired and lazy to type it myself, so I cut and pasted this from somewhere else.

· There are patterns in all natural languages (i.e. human languages) that cannot be learned by children using positive evidence alone. Positive evidence is the set of grammatical sentences the language learner has access to, that is, by observing the speech of others. Negative evidence, on the other hand, is the evidence available to the language learner about what is not grammatical. For instance, when a parent corrects a child’s speech, the child acquires negative evidence.

· Children are only ever presented with positive evidence for these particular patterns. For example, they only hear others speaking using sentences that are “right”, not those that are “wrong”.

· Children do learn the correct grammars for their native languages.

That’s right, it’s the age-old epistemological problem linguists face, poverty of the stimulus, claiming that Language is unlearnable for children given the lack of evidence presented to them during the acquisition phase, thus it is evidence for some kind of linguistic nativism.

The validity of the argument isn’t debated. The conclusions of it, however, are contested in some far reaching, dark, undiscovered corners of linguistics and cognitive science. Those who accept poverty of the stimulus as evidence of nativism cite human Language’s recursive nature. That is, a grammar can generate a sentence to infinity, and still be grammatical. Therefore, language is unlearnable. Evidence cited for the second premise is Subject-AUX inversion. Since I don’t feel like explaining what that is, let’s simplify/straw-man it and say that children only hear correct evidence of how to do it (”You can come to my house, Can you come to my house?”). The third piece of evidence cited is that children ultimately learn the correct grammar of their language.

I have problems with all of these. First, I don’t see how we can say language is truly recursive. I can say things like, “The cat is in on the couch, in the house, on the street, …” ad infinitum, but ultimately you wouldn’t be able to handle information. It is thus ungrammatical (or at least irrelevant to grammar). Chomsky would argue that this has to do with limited memory capacity in our brains to handle infinitely generated sentences. If this is the case, and with language being for communicative purposes, it’s still illogical to claim that infinitely recursive sentences are grammatical. Besides, when do children ever hear these? lolchomsky

The subject-AUX inversion claim, that children only ever hear the correct production of it, is also problematic. People makes slips of the tongue all the time. Children hear their parents make performance errors all the time, but they hear more correct forms. Stochastic learning, maybe?

Finally, children all learn a grammar, but we also know that each individual speaker of language X’s grammar is different from another’s. Okay, I’m actually tired of talking about this.

I other news, I’ve decided on my research project for phonetics: attention paid by non-Arabic speakers to vowels preceding pharyngeals. You know, seeing how well they pick up on contrast from transitions into following consonants. Also, I started playing the EVE Online. The world’s prettiest spreadsheet. Someday I will blog on that.

My brain hurts!

A gem from today’s issue of the Salt Lake Deseret Morning Tribune News:

It is hard to find a better example of academic nonsense than the assertion by two linguists (Forum, Sept. 27) that the disappearance of archaic languages is “the most serious crisis facing humanity today.”

Not AIDS, pollution, global warming, terrorists, poverty, disease, or a shrinking water supply is a crisis, but rather the loss of the organized grunts of six savages in Timbuktu threatens mankind.

Like burning witches at the stake, phlogiston and the flat-Earth theory, languages are a cultural artifact, and cultural artifacts disappear because the world is a better place without them. While language is essential to civilization, languages, by promoting tribalism, threaten mankind.

The most successful, most peaceful, periods in history were those where a lingua franca ruled - Latin, Mandarin, and today, English. The only problem with losing a few languages is that it is not enough.

Keith Baker
Heber City

I’ll not get into the…weird things he says in…basically the entire letter. If you’re interested, I commented as Xalil. The letter was in response to a letter written by chair of the University of Utah Linguistics Department, Ed Rubin, and director of the Center for American Indian Languages, Lyle Campbell:

We commend The Tribune for publishing “Thousands of languages on brink of extinction” (Sept. 19) and calling attention to this important issue.

It is widely acknowledged as one of the most serious crises facing humanity today, posing moral, practical and scientific problems of enormous proportions of which most people are unaware. The Center for American Indian Languages (CAIL) and the faculty and students of the Department of Linguistics at the University of Utah are currently involved in the documentation and revitalization of 10 endangered native languages of the Americas.

For more information on these ongoing projects and on endangered languages of the Americas in general, see www.cail.utah.edu. We hope others will share these concerns and will join us in supporting these efforts.

Ed Rubin
Chair, U. of U.
Department of Linguistics
Lyle Campbell
Director, CAIL
Salt Lake City

Notice where Keith Baker’s letter misquotes the other. Never did Rubin and Campbell say it was the worst crisis. Period. Poverty, crime, and AIDS aren’t problems. They said it was one of the worst crises, for much of the same reason that poverty, crime, and AIDS are on the list. The languages of others, you know, those organized grunts of savages in Timbuktu, are being wiped out along with their cultures. Most of the people affected succumb to poverty, crime, and AIDS. I guess I have trouble believing that a hick living in Heber can feel threatened by indigenous languages.

So, my fall break started Friday. I don’t really intend to do anything with it, save for maybe catch up with The Office. I missed all of last season, so I am watching it via Netflix’s new instant watch thing. It’s great. In other news:

I decided what to do for my advanced phonetics/phonology research project: I am studying pharyngeal harmony in Palestinian Arabic, seeing if there is acoustic, in addition to the obvious articulatory grounding behind [i] blocking the spread of pharyngealization. I had another idea, but I think it will take a few years to gain the expertise necessary. To oversimplify a little, it basically would have amounted to an empirical study of UG. It could have been wacky.

I am updating my biography, finally. Check it out. I will update more with the extra time I have this week.