Something for all the linguists out there An interview with linguist Alexandra Aikhenvald."His mother had been the only person he could speak Baré with. After she died he kept it alive by talking to himself when he was drunk. So the language had been almost literally pickled in alcohol until I recorded it."
12 comments Two things:
Of course, Finnish is probably harder.
One language harder than the other?!? Where was she trained? As humans we're made to acquire language, a baby born anywhere grows up speaking and understanding its language. No language is more difficult than another. They all have rules, and memorized parts, and can be acquired by a normal human baby in the same amount of time.
If these so-called "exotic" languages die, we'll be left with just one world view. This won't be very interesting, and we'll have lost a vast amount of information about human nature and how people perceive the world.
Ummm... more like we'll have lost one possible permutation of Universal Grammar. A different language doesn't reflect a different worldview. Any language can express the exact same sentiment. It looks strange to us to have to "put a little suffix onto your verb saying how you know something", but that doesn't mean people who speak those languages have some inherent need for truth or verifiability, it's just a rule in their language. Do French speakers believe chairs are inherently feminine?
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Sorry, I don't mean to be nit-picky. She sounds like a great person, and she's doing fascinating work. The article was probably edited funny, too. But, I've been instructed to have a pretty specific view of language, and I can't help but believe this view. Language isn't talking and stories, it's a cognitive ability like vision, or math, that's innate and mental. In this technical sense, there are at least as many languages as there are speakers, because everyone has their own set of grammatical rules and a lexicon.
Oh, and Tariana rhymes with my name. Which further proves that it all comes back to me, in the end. (Previous proofs available upon request) | | |
While i do believe in the innate ability of humans to acquire knowledge, I also entertain the possibility that
some languages are more difficult to learn as second languages.
Additionally, I'm not so sure that languages say nothing about the culture from which they have sprung. I believe that there are words that simply do not translate because they are very culture specific. For example, the word for "plough" written in the Vedas is said to non-Sanskritic which indicates that the writers borrowed
the word and the invention from some other culture. This does give us some nature of their society and its history.
While it may be true that language is deeply personal, it is also the result of shared experience. In order to understand one another we need common terms and systems. In this light, then perhaps language is a means of recording the interchanges within and between communities and societies. | | |
Spoken and written language, there is no doubt, records human history, society, and changes. Borrowed words do indicate, as you said, innovations in culture. But that's looking at words and records, it's looking at language in a different way. It's not the language (as in the structure) that is telling you about the culture, it's what they're using words to talk about. I don't mean to deny the validity of that way of looking at it either.
I also agree with you that some languages are more difficult to learn as second languages, depending on what language you have. But you have to have that base for comparison, no language is in itself more or less difficult.
I have to paraphrase my professor on this: for a physicist, there's no such thing as a chair or a potato, physics isn't equipped to talk about these things, just about forces and mass points etc. So for a physicist, the distinction between potatoes and chairs isn't relevent or interesting. For a theoretical linguist, language is the system of rules and stored lexicon that exists in the brain as an initial state at birth, and is shaped into whatever system of knowledge allows the speaker-hearer to use whatever language they were born into. In this sense, it's interesting to see what sort of structures are used, as this gives insight into what the initial state, and the method of acquisition, is.
Our eyes are made to reflect light and this allows us to see. You can also talk aesthetics, and what different cultures find beautiful, but this is looking at the visual system in a different way, how we use the ability to see. | | |
| I hate to say 'I told you so', Chronomorph, so I'll just say 'Potato Chair'. | | |
Ok, that's fine. I agree with you on those points. My point is that although the blog contained "linguist" in the title and Aikhenvald may be a linguist, its not necessary to view the the loss of the language from purely a linguistic perpective. If you had prefaced your statement with "from the linguistic perspective" or some such thing then it would have been clearer.
If a cattle farmer looks at the clear cutting of the jungle and says,"that's just fine," there would probably be quite a few biologists who would contest that statement.
Lastly, Aikhenvald was speaking about learning Finnish as a non-native speaker so I think that her comment is totally valid, regardless of whether or not a baby could learn it easily. | | |
Sure, her comment was probably related to second language learning, like I said I was being nitpicky.
And you're right, loss of language is a huge problem and it's valuable to look at from many different perspectives, including a (theoretical) linguistic one. I didn't mean it to sound like the only thing we'd lose is another example of what shape the Universal Grammar can take.
I was just grinding my axe (?) against people who think that different language-speakers actually view the world differently, because of their language. | | |
| Coolio, its been a pleasure. | | |
No language is more difficult than another. They all have rules, and memorized parts, and can be acquired by a normal human baby in the same amount of time.
Really? This seems far-fetched to me. Let's take Finnish and Spanish as examples. Finnish is more gramatically complex than Spanish. Are you saying that normal Finnish babies can assimilate Finnish at exactly the same rate as Spanish babies assimilate Spanish, that at every step of the way, these babies can make equivalent gramatical sentences? I'm no expert, but it seems quite far-fetched.
I was just grinding my axe (?) against people who think that different language-speakers actually view the world differently, because of their language.
Well.. it's chicken and the egg, isn't it? Do our thoughts frame our language, or does language limit our thoughts? How does that ol' theory go, that if a language can't express a concept, then the culture doesn't have that concept? Is it the language's fault that the culture doesn't have the concept? No. I suppose you could argue that if the culture comes up with a new concept, then the language will grow to accomodate that new concept. That's fine.
But language is a means by which concepts are passed on to the next generation, by which children are indoctrinated. Language is a brainwashing. If all a kid has every known is "ours", why would the concept of "mine" ever occur to him? To me, this does make language at least partially culpable.
Oh god.. not the axe! | | |
I'm not an expert, either. I haven't done much on acquisition, but from what I know, children become fluent (or, "achieve adult grammars") at the same age, and they do seem to make similar types of mistakes (or, "follow the same types of rules that differ from adult grammars") along the way. There's actually a whole branch of linguistics devoted to studying "Child Grammars", as a cohesive linguistic phenomenon, although my professors tell me it's bunk (mostly because of the methodology they use). But I am speaking in gross generalizations here. And again, grammatically complex is hard to determine.
Also, language is an innate ability, and it has language-specific rules. That is, there's a part of the brain dedicated to language and language alone, it's not just that humans are generally smart and therefore have language. Therefore, we do want to say that it's in some way independent of thought. We store words as linked to concepts, but the concept has to be there first, I think, and then get labelled. And there is no language that can't express a certain concept, even if it doesn't seem to have been expressed already, or isn't covered in a single word. Yes, if I grew up in Montreal a hundred years ago, I wouldn't have the word or concept "internet". That's not a limitation of my language in any way.
A metaphor I like is looking at conceptual space as a piece of paper, and words as making cuts in that paper. Different languages will make the cuts in different places. Sri Lankan Tamil doesn't seem to have a unique word for "hand", it seems like they express it as "inner arm" (palm) or "outer arm" (back of hand).
There's a degenerative brain disease called Primary Progressive Aphasia, that hasn't been studied much because it's rare and hard to classify. It's really awful; the affected person gradually loses their ability to speak and understand language, then the other cognitive functions go. One case study stopped understanding what people were saying, then didn't make sense himself (this is over a span of like 8 years, he was in his mid 50's when it started). However, he still played computer chess every day, and would watch the news even though he didn't know what they were saying. This seems like good evidence for a distinction between thought and language, if you're willing to say that playing a complex strategy game like chess requires thought. | | |
| Whoah... I played chess against that guy! It was kind of embarrassing--he beat me! It got awkward when I IM'ed him "Congratulations", and he replied "Ekjsd kjds". | | |
| Apparently one of the only coherent things he could say before his death was "Bry-ann". His wife thought it was some sort of curse, against his brain. | | |
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