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

I am always amazed to see how many people who are self-described liberals and “tolerant” people are members of the Facebook group “I judge you when you use poor grammar”, or any other incarnation of thereof. Language is often described as the last human characteristic that is an acceptable basis of discrimination and prejudice. In reality, the variety of English (or any language) a person speaks is largely beyond his or her control. The people whom the enlightened and educated members of these groups are judging are those who speak a dialect of English other than their own. In other words, any variety of English that is not the variety spoken by the urban, intellectual, middle-class and higher ruling elite. Additionally, their choice to discriminate on a linguistic basis runs deeper, revealing prejudice against the poor non-white. Very progressive.

Okay, I’ll get off my high horse for a while. I’ve long been in the market for a smartphone. I’ve been researching for about a year and a half, and I think I may have come to a decision. Let me give you the rundown.

· Samsung Blackjack. This was one of the first phones I considered. After trying it out at a shop, I found it too cumbersome to use. Also, it uses Windows Mobile, which I’ve never been a huge fan of.

· Blackberry (Pearl or Curve). These seemed like a perfect choice for a while, with a plethora of options and plans. Unfortunately, the Pearl has become the new trendy phone. The Curve is well, bland.

· Palm Treo. I am sick of the Palm OS. Enough said.

· Apple iPhone. I’ll admit, I was a skeptic at first, but after trying out my brother’s iPhone, I became convinced that this is the phone for me. I am debating whether to adopt somebody else’s used iPhone or to wait until summer to get a 3G capable model. Whatever I choose, I imagine it will happen before I start school again in the fall.

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.

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.

For my Islamic Law class this past semester, I wrote a short essay about Muslim linguistic philosophy in light of modern linguistics. For some reason, I don’t have the final draft, but I do have the first draft. I don’t really want to go through and edit it, so I will post a PDF of the paper and the sources. Read it.  Or don’t.  It’s probably pretty boring.

Good news everyone, I have something new to be annoyed by.

First of all my faithful reader(s) should note that I am either a feminist or at least sympathetic to feminism, however something happened today that almost made me want to go home and brood while listening to one of the Reverend’s misogyny mixes. For the first time in my life, I came upon an idiosyncratic spelling of women. It was spelled womyn.

This is one of many alternative spellings employed by some more radical feminists, others include femal < female and humyn < human, etc., and I find it really irritating. The intention of these spellings is supposedly to fight back the subordination of women through language containing words like “-man/-men,” i.e., classifying women as a subset of men. That’s not what these words do. It’s a complete, unadulterated accident that woman bears any similarity to man and female bears any similarity to male, and so forth. Woman comes from O.E. wimman < wifman, which was a compound of wif ‘woman’ and man ‘person’ (the word for man was originally wer). Female comes from Latin femella ‘woman’ and male comes from Latin masculis ‘man.’ Human from Latin hominis ‘human.’ Oh dear, what’s a gyrl to do against facts like these…

A couple more points: let’s pretend that the above words were coined with the intention to subordinate women. In that case, changing the spelling wouldn’t do anything, since we would still pronounce the words the same way — the root remains the same. This is just a ridiculous attempt at pop-Whorfianism, trying to remove grammatical gender in order to liberate women. If you don’t know how the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis works, don’t cite it. Oh, and did you know that Farsi (spoken in Iran) lacks grammatical gender? Women there are the most liberated on the planet.

Anyway, my summer is looking pretty decent, though it’s getting kind of busy all of the sudden. I am trying to get some Arabic, Hebrew, and Syriac work in on the weekends, and I started reading The Lord of the Rings again. P.S. Only a few people will understand why this is funny (ZOMG mage nerf!)

A couple of business matters. I would like to congratulate the following people for the following reasons: Emily for getting accepted to veterinary school, and Noah for getting engaged. I also want to promise that I will update more like I used to. I am over the hump of this semester, save for the papers I have to complete for the end of the semester. That sounds counter intuitive. Anyway, what’s important is that I am on spring break, I got a haircut, and despite how painful my left lateral tooth feels, the dentist says my teeth are in ship shape.

I’ve decided that the class I looked forward to most, the class I appear to be doing the best in, is the class I hate with all my soul: structure of Arabic. Three hours going through data set by data set isn’t very challenging or all that rewarding. Unfortunately, it is the one class I can never afford to miss. Once a week…I miss one class I miss an entire week of class. Also, the instructor doesn’t email our assignments until a) the night before class, or b) the morning before class. I have class non-stop on Tuesdays, so that isn’t very helpful.

The other day in historical linguistics w discussed grammaticalization with us. Grammaticalization is pretty ill defined, and like all things ill defined, it is controversial. A few definitions stand out from the rest.

Christian Lehman (1995[1982]:v): “[Grammaticalization is a process which turns lexemes into grammatical formatives…”

So, basically, it turns words like ‘will’ as a verb of wanting into a future tense marker.

Elizabeth Closs Traugot (1991: 2, 5): “Grammaticalization refers tho the dynamic unidirectional historical process whereby lexical items in the course of time accquire a new status as grammatical and morphosyntactic forms. “

So, now it’s a fancier process. Anyway, the next one is the best

Paul Hopper (1998:147-8): “Grammaticalization can be thought of as a salvation narrative. It is the tragedy of lexical items young and pure in heart but carrying with them the fatal flaw of original sin; their inexorable weakening as they encounter the corrupt world of Discourse; their fall into the Slough of Grammar; and their eventual redemption the cleansing waters of Pragmatics.”

Yeah, I don’t know what that means either.

I’m looking forward to summer. I can work on Hebrew, Syriac, and I decided that I want to learn some Anglo-Saxon. Why not, since I do plenty of useless stuff anyway. I also intend to do some more reading into historical linguistics and phonology on my own time. When is summer, anyway?

I started Monday unable to find my class, only to learn that I had arrived two hours too early. Phonology was interesting today. The professor asked everybody’s name, except me. He asked me what I go by. I don’t know what to think of that. I am also praising my deity of choice that my structure of Arabic course isn’t filled with theoretical elitists and ignorant fools thinking they are getting an Arabic course.

Anyway, I am taking the following from Lyle Campbell’s book Historical Linguistics. Perhaps I find the change of Enlgish interesting, or perhaps I find the specific Biblical passage he chose to cite fitting, as it deals with language. Really, language change is inevitable.

Matthew 27:23

Modern English The New English Bible (1961)

Shortly afterwards the bystanders came up and said to Peter, “Surely, you are another of them; your accent gives you away.

Early Modern English King James Bible (1611)

And after a while came vnto him they that stood by, and saide to Peter, Surely thou also art of them, for thy speech bewrayeth thee.

Middle English Wycliff Bible (14^th Century)

And a litil after, thei that stooden camen, and seiden to Peter, treuli thou art of hem; for thi speche makith thee known.

Old English The West Saxon Gospels c. 1050

θa æfter lytlum fyrste genealæton θa ðe θær stodon, cwædon to petre. Soðlice θu eart of hym, θyn spræc θe gesweotolað

Note, the theta represents the what would be in Old English orthography ‘thorn.’ I can’t find that HTML entity. I would comment on changes, but I think the data speak for themselves.

Also, I am working on a new layout. How does white sound?

I’ve been a little busy preparing for school, and the like, so I haven’t posted anything really substantial. Anyway, I was reading from Nicholas Ostler’s Empires of the Word, and read this passage concluding a section discussing, among other things, the prominence of Arabic and the revival of Hebrew:

The present-day globablized world world is full of Arabic. It is the language that would-be Islamist revolutionaries in Europe and the USA feel they have to learn to give authenticity to their struggle; and its ironic similarity to Hebrew, newly revived in the land of Canaan, is a standing reminder of of how the bitterest of conflicts set long-lost cousins at each other’s throats: salām contends with šəlōm, but the common meaning, ‘peace’, continues to elude them.

So, I was reading Empires of the Word by Nicholas Ostler, and I started thinking about Aramaic. Ostler states about the Aramaic Jesus of Nazareth spoke:

Jesus of Nazareth spoke Aramaic, though not of the best, by the standards of his own people. His native Galilee was generally reckoned to speak a substandard variety, a ‘North Country’ accent to the ears of the educated of Jerusalem and Judaea; famously, his disciple Peter’s accent gave him away at a crucial moment, and even in the learned Talmud there is an occasional joke at the expense of the Galilean pronunciation.

Interesting to look at the sociolinguistics of ancient Judaea, no? Anyway, Christianity has global aspirations and many of the early Christians desired to shed the Jewish identity of the sect. Two languages were chosen to spread the new faith: Greek and Syriac (a dialect of Aramaic). The choices were clearly more functional than symbolic. For the Church to spread, a language commonly known among merchants and the elite needed to be used. In the West, it became Greek, while it became Syriac in the East.

With respect to language, it’s interesting to compare the spread of Christianity and Islam. The importance of Christianity was that of teaching in a language generally understood by those who were listening, something that was later lost until the Reformation in the West, while Islam placed a premium on the eloquence of Arabic. Islam chose form over function, while Christianity took a more practical route.

Anyway, I want to send an endorsement for a post over at Jabal al-Lughat discussing etymologies of names of Lebanese towns. Fascinating.

Let me refer you to a conversation I once had with a girl (yes, I talk about this crap with girls):

Me: The moun’ins are nice.
Girl: It isn’t ‘moun’in,’ it’s mountain.
Me: It doesn’t matter.
Girl: There is a ‘t’ there. Pronounce it.
Me: No, there isn’t a ‘t’ there.

Nary a week passes when I don’t catch part of a discussion of Utah English (which is really ‘Rocky Mountain English’). The word mountain is often the topic of such discussions. The common pronunciation in the Rockies is either moun’in or mou’in. There are of course segments of the population who would never, ever dream of doing such a thing to the English language. Here is why there isn’t a ‘t’ there: the common idea of letters making up words didn’t exist until literacy became widespread. While human language (a system of sounds to convey meaning) has existed for 40,000 plus years, the earliest writing we know of doesn’t appear until 6600 BC in Jiahu, China.

You see, you can be fluent in your native language and even others while remaining illiterate in those languages. An illiterate speaker isn’t aware that the word mountain contains a ‘t,’ but he has an unconscious understanding that there are only a handful of sounds that can come in the place of what we now symbolize as ‘t.’ Someone may counter, ‘Well, they are clearly not intelligent of competent enough to know.” Okay, and to this I say, “If we take another illiterate speaker from a dialect that says mountain, are they any more or less intelligent or competent than the other? There is no ‘t’ in mountain. I am interested in text linguistics, for what it’s worth.

On another note, Apple is supposed to be a computer company. Instead of releasing the new Intel-based PowerMacs, they release another faulty mouse. If Apple insists on producing mice, then it should know that it has had more than 20 years to manufacture a decent mouse, but has failed.