Language: What exactly do we communicate?

    We use language to fix memories, to construct our pasts, to invent a future. This thought came to me while reading, in a story by Malcolm Lowry, the description of a landscape I had never seen: Italy. The words Lowry used named familiar objects and experiences: tunnels, hawks, sunlit green valleys, trains, white oxen. Did, then, these words enable me to see what Lowry saw? No, they did not. For they recalled images from my memory, not his. Then I knew that if I described a train journey from my childhood, I would find myself selecting language that recalled to mind what I remembered. If the language-born image differed from memory, I would select new words, new phrases; and when I had finished my description, I should delude myself into thinking another would know what I meant by it.

     Thinking this (which took less time and language than it took to write it), I realized that we talk to ourselves. I describe my experience so that I will remember it. And because my language can arouse your memories, I can communicate an idea of a notion of an apprehension of what I experienced. (January 1976)

 (See also Steiner’s After Babel, which supplied ideas that made this thinking possible.)

Follow-up 2024: Whatever memories my words call up in my reader, they are accompanied by feelings and thoughts. We remember how we felt perhaps more strongly than the event itself. We also modify our memories every time we reconstruct them, so my words may change what the reader recalls. Our memories must pass the strictest test of all: they must be plausible, and our sense of what's plausible changes with experience and with remembering. It seems to me that the the sanest stance towards our own memories is This is how I think it happened, but I can't be sure.

Whoever reads this will agree or disagree depending on their experience of remembering, or of reading, of having their understanding or imagination altered by what they read, or what they heard someone say. That we are able to communicate well enough to work together, to continue to love each other, to agree on some notions of how the world works, all this and more seems to me an amazing accomplishment when I consider the certainty that what I intend to communicate and what is actually communicated are never the same.

Language: A close examination (The State of the Language, 1980)

 Leonard Michaels & Christopher Ricks. The State of the Language (1980) In what sense can one talk about a language as an entity that exists? What does “exist” mean? A rock exists. It’s a passive existence. Wind and weather slowly eat at its substance until it ceases to exist. An animal exists, but the processes that keep it alive also wear it out, and these plus the ravages of wind and weather eat at its substance until it too ceases to exist.
     But language? Language is something people do. It’s not passive like a rock. It’s not active like an animal. Language exists while it’s spoken. We observe as well as understand it, and those observations, sorted and classified, compared and contrasted, create a concept. Since concepts must correspond to entities, language must be an entity. That’s the logic of “concept” and “entity.” And so a language exists, and we speak about as if it changes passively like a rock or actively like an animal. A pretty delusion, but it serves to help us discuss how people’s speech habits have changed over time. Thus the “State of the Language”,  a collection of such discussions.
     Most of the essays are by academics, the rest by practitioners. The academics too often write to test or develop some theory. The practitioners enjoy recording their observations. A few indulge in satire, some catalogue and analyse so earnestly that they slip into self-satire. But all take talk about language seriously. Class, trades and professions, psychology and philosophy, the desire for novelty, the literary traditions, these and many other influences on the development and uses of language all get a look-in. All focus on how people speak and write English. All assume, mostly tacitly, that people are what they speak, no matter what they profess to say.
     In the 40-odd years since this book was published, English has become established as the world's lingua franca. Speakers of other languages have adopted and adapted English words. Native English speakers risk misunderstanding when they use their idioms and allusions. Psycholinguistics has come into its own as the study of how language both expresses and shapes experience. The phrase “human language” is now necessary because ethologists have discovered  complexities of animal communication that resemble some features of human language. The link between self-awareness and language is established, but not understood. The creation of large-language-model pattern generators (misdescribed as artificially intelligent) have prompted rethinking of what human language and intelligence are.
     “In the beginning was the word”. So begins the Gospel of John. Whatever else these essays teach us, they show that language not only makes us human, but creates the experience that we call reality.
     A collection worth keeping. ***

Communicate! (Laphma's Quarterly 05-2, Means of Communication)

     LQ 05-2 Means of Communication (2012) A nice compilation of what people have

thought, understood, or thought they understood, about human communication. It’s a mixed bag. To me, this compilation is marked more by what it leaves out than what it includes. Its focus is on what is communicated rather than how.
     There is inevitably an over-dependence on writing. Writing is a technology, and like any technology, it changes both perception and expression. What’s interesting to me is how writing changes how people construct their language. Writing fosters a preference not only for speaking in complete sentences, but also for argumentative and expository speech – such as I’m engaging in now. Narrative becomes a mode retained mostly for entertainment and art.
     The collection has no selections by Marshall McLuhan and George Steiner (except in memic quotes inserted at random in the text). It is I think somewhat less than complete.
     OK, you can see where my biases lie. I’ve come to realise that we communicate both consciously and unconsciously via more means than language. “Body language” (a term that betrays a bias) is as powerful as spoken language, and sometimes more so. Observation shows that gesture is an unavoidable concomitant of speech. Cultures differ in how much gesturing they accept and expect, but all human beings gesture when they speak, and not only with their hands. Some gestures are learned, hence of arbitrary significance, which causes problems when people from different cultures use gestures deliberately as an alternative to speech.
     The bias towards literacy has also caused a scant selection of pieces that attempt to understand how media have changed what we communicate. Print was the first mass medium, expanding the audience of any given book ten- and a hundredfold compared to manuscripts, but also splintering that audience into mutually uncomprehending groups. It also created a sharp division between literal and symbolic understanding of sacred texts, a division hardly ever recognised in orality. The problem of idolatry differs for people who have no written record of their ancestor’s thoughts about their gods, and so have no need to figure out exactly what they meant. A hymn is a performance, not a text to be analysed.
     Newspapers, cheap enough to throw away after reading, completed the transition from selective to mass media. Radio enabled large-scale exploitation of the audience. TV did the same, while shifting from the explicit politics of the radio personality to the implicit politics of the huckster. Now the internet has created both the largest audience for remote communication ever, but has also shattered that audience into more and smaller enclaves than any other. Control has shifted from the creator and broadcaster to the consumer: we choose the terms of engagement on the web. Every post has a potential audience of billions, but almost none reach more than a few hundred, with a select few reaching more, often amplified by the legacy media. A moderately successful influencer commands the attention of several thousand followers, the size of a small town. Some have followers in the hundreds of thousands, a handful in the millions. There are now many famous people that almost no one has heard of.
     I’d have liked to read seem comments on fashion. Clothes communicate everything from social status to mood, therefore clothing is regulated both by custom and law, and by personal preferences within what limits custom and law prescribe. Fashion now goes well beyond clothes. When goods become cheap enough to discard, they become expressions of passing fancies and tastes.
     Overall, the collection tells us more about what people thought worth communicating than how they did it. But within these limits, it is as good as any Lapham and his team have produced. I enjoyed reading it, especially the ancient, pre-electronic excerpts. ****

How Writing Changed Us: Orality and Literacy by Walter Ong (1982)

Walter Ong. Orality and Literacy (1982) A careful survey of the state of orality studies, or better, the study of spoken language. Since the 80s, the field has proliferated, with increasing emphasis on how we generate speech in different contexts. That spoken and written language were different was obvious. What was less obvious was that the written language was not the superior mode. In fact, spoken language, exhibiting as it does the vagaries of regional and class dialects, was often deprecated as a primitive and even degraded form of the proper language as recorded in writing.
      Ong does not attack this attitude directly, but shows that an oral culture uses language differently than a literate one. He’s concerned that literate readers of the earliest writings aren’t aware enough that these are records of oral compositions, and hence of oral modes. He does a wonderful job of describing and explaining how people without writing construct(ed) their songs, stories and orations using standard tropes and repetitive patterns as scaffolds for building the performance in real time, and certainly each time adapted to whatever audience listened to them. What Homer memorised was not an unbroken stream of thousands of lines of verse, but pieces of the story, which (he) would select, adapt, and reconstruct. Ong’s evidence is both field work by anthropologists who recorded the myths and histories of non-literate peoples, and also the bits of speech embedded in the epics as recorded.
     Ong (and his fellow scholars) go a step or two further. They claim that literacy changes the way we understand the world. What’s written is read, not heard. The text takes precedence over the writer, and eventually become detached from the writer. When we read old books, we read them as independent and objective witnesses to the past, often not realising how much we reconstruct a text, any text, as we read it. Hence the mistaken belief that we can understand the “literal meaning” of a text.  In an oral culture, speech and speaker are one: the story exists only while it is being spoken, and the relation between the audience and the speaker’s utterance is personal, immediate, and fleeting. A written text preserves what was though and understood generations before us. A speech exists only while it’s spoken, and memory of what the now dead ancestors thought and understood is reinterpreted every time it’s spoken. Written law can be consulted. Spoken law depends on trust in the speaker. Grasping the difference between the oral and the written may help us understand why so many of our present day conflicts are about what words signify. We tend to believe that if we understand the text we understand reality, and if we understand reality, we know the truth.
     I found the book heavy going at times, and have already begun to re-read it. Ong’s style is clear, and he has nice dry wit. His observations cast a new light on the effects of electronic media. The Wiki article on him adds a great deal to my comments.
     Recommended. ****

Lynn Truss on courtesy in speech and writing.

 

Lynn Truss Talk to the Hand (2005) Truss is seriously annoyed by rudeness. Not the rudeness of ignoring merely fashionable etiquette, but the rudeness of ignoring other people’s rights, especially the right to be treated with respect. Her reaction is to stay inside and bolt the door. Maybe escaping rudeness can make for a more peaceful life, but it will be lonely one.
Truss’s six reasons for staying inside are:
* Was That So Hard To Say? (about Please and Thank you)
* Why Am I The One Doing This? (about downloading customer service onto the customer, etc)
* My Bubble, My Rules (about being a good guest, among other things)
* The Universal Eff-Off Reflex
* Booing The Judges (about fake egalitarianism)
* Someone Else Will Clean It Up
Of course her remarks go beyond my simplistic summary phrases. She’s well worth reading, more than once, which I intend to do. ****

Lynn Truss. Eats, Shoots and Leaves (2003) Truss’s first book. Her defence of good punctuation has, I hope, done some good. But she doesn’t go far enough: Punctuation is the (inevitably inadequate) method for signalling syntactic structure. The title demonstrates this admirably. But Truss doesn’t follow through. She discusses the conventions very well, and provides wonderful examples of what happens when writers ignore them. But her explanations of the rationales are too often misleading. For example, her differentiation between ; : . These marks correspond to the subtle signals in speech that there’s more to come, with some hint as to how it’s related to what’s just been said. The apostrophe is not a punctuation mark, but a spelling mark, as are the diacritic and the hyphen.

      I guess I want more conceptual rigour. But that’s nit-picking. Truss has done us all a service, and she’s done it with grace, humour, and nuanced awareness of how we differ in our pointing preferences. Buy this book, follow its advice, and read it at least once a year. ****

How to spell ʃ (and brief a note on English spelling)

     

     English spelling is notoriously problematic. It's a mashup of several different spelling conventions, made worse by a number of inconsistencies. Teaching spelling is also problematic. English-speaking countries focus on letters instead of sounds, so much so, that some English speakers refer to "alphabetic languages". Another result of this focus is the insistence on correct spelling for words that are never confused when speaking. That's just two (too, to) effects of confusing letters and sounds.

     Every language uses a specific set of sounds, called phonemes. Most languages use around three dozen phonemes. An "accent" consists of variations of the phonemes, and may have more or fewer phonemes than the standard version. The English alphabet is borrowed from the ancient Romans, with a few additions. We have 26 letters for about 40 sounds. Q and X each spell two sounds, which could be spelled KW and KS. C duplicates the sounds of S and K. In effect we have only 23 letters. So we use letter combinations (which include  "silent letters"), and spelling conventions that signal different sound values. But for many common words, one must memorise the spelling.

     And there's a twist: English speakers are more willing to adopt foreign words than just about anybody else. Along with the words we usually adopt the foreign spellings. So we end up with multiple spellings for the same sound.

     One of these sounds is the one that begins "she". It has more spellings than any other sound. Here are the most familiar ones:

How to spell ʃ

Common words:
oCEan
groCery *
CHef
caCHE
suspiCIon
Sugar
nauSEous
faSCist
conSCIence
SHine
aSSure
seSSIon
naTIon

From other languages:
FuCHSia
GauTHier **
SCHnapps

* Regional dialect
** Pronunciation varies

Footnote 1: Linguists have identified about 400 distinct sounds used by the known languages. Another linguistics concept is the "morpheme": think of it as a unit of meaning. For example combine the base "dog" (which refers to an animal) with "s" (which means "more than one), and you get "dogs".  Some linguists refer to the spelling unit as a "grapheme": a letter or combination of letters that spells a single phoneme, or some conventional combination of phonemes.

Footnote 2: Phonemes and sounds are not the same. The essence of a phoneme is that it signals a difference in meaning. Thus in "sing" and "sang", the sounds spelled by "a" and "i"  are phonemes  because  the two words have different meanings. On the other hand, the  sounds spelled by "ng" in "singer" and "finger" are different in most English dialects, but the difference is ignored. If they were phonemes, then "singer" rhymed with "finger" would be a different word than its usual pronunciation. (And in "ginger", "ng" spells a combination of three phonemes.)

Footnote 3: Homonyms come in two varieties: two words with the same spelling but different sounds (and meanings), called homographs. And two (or more) words with the same sound but different spellings (and meanings), called homophones. The study of homonyms helps one to understand the difference between a sound and a phoneme.

Footnote 4: Almost every phoneme in English is spelled two or more ways. Every letter and most letter combinations stand for two or more phonemes.
 

Difficult Essays by George Steiner.

George Steiner. On Difficulty and Other Essays (1972-78) Steiner is one of my heroes: his insights into how we use language have I think not been surpassed. They have certainly helped stimulate modern linguistics, which has widened its focus from the comparison of available texts to include the study of actual speech. Herewith some stray thoughts responding to and prompted by these essays.
     The study of spoken pre-literate languages has produced some unexpected results, such as that not only the lexicon but the grammar of a dialect can change radically within a speaker’s lifetime. (McWhorter, The Power of Babel). Writing slows down the rate of language change. It also, eventually, spawns two forms of the language, written and spoken, each with its own conventions and usages missing from the other.
     Steiner’s critiques of Whorf’s and Chomsky’s stances on the nature of language (Whorf, Chomsky, and the Student of Literature) feed into experiments by Pinker and others that have shown that grammatical gender, for example, affects how people feel about the world around them. That supports Whorf’s hypothesis that language shapes our experience. But Bickerton’s researches into pidgins and creoles suggest that pidgins reveal the essential features of all human languages, and the creoles show how languages acquire first the regularities that we label “grammar”, and then the idiosyncrasies that differentiate them, and eventually make them new languages. Those findings support Chomsky’s hypothesis that language is innate.

     Steiner’s stance is that neither Whorfian nor Chomskyian hypotheses can account for actual language. This reminds me of the surprising success of computerised translation, which depends not only on dictionaries, but also on statistical features such as the most likely adjective-noun combinations. “Style” also can be statistically defined, and so can some genres. Combine these ideas with AI pattern-matching systems, and an AI algorithm can write a credible sports news report when given a handful of facts about the game.
     Steiner wrote these essays before ubiquitous personal computers, which limited his speculations and predictions about the future of reading and books (After the Book?). He correctly predicted that audio-books (cassettes) would gain market share, and that hard-cover books would lose out to other formats. What would he make of e-books and texts preserved in the electronic web? I think his judgement would stand. What he calls “deep reading” would continue to decline. The kind of awareness of other texts, past and present, which characterises serious literature, would become the preserve of a literate elite. The rest of us would be semi-literate: able to decode text, but unable (and increasingly unwilling) to take the time to relate texts to each other and to the present moment. Which is exactly what has happened. Since serious literature is historical in its very essence, the awareness of history, especially of its messiness, its ethical ambiguities and contradictions, has also declined. I haven’t read more recent essays by him, so I don’t know whether my speculations about his opinions are accurate.
     I think semi-literacy tends to simplistic literalness, a resistance to and intolerance of ambiguity, an inability to recognise irony or handle metaphor, and a suspicion of any text that assumes familiarity with allusions to the past. The digital world is an eternal present, with yesterday already receding into the mist-obscured ancient past.
     I read several of these essays twice. A book that’s difficult in Steiner’s sense, but well worth the effort. His language is ornate, laced with Latinisms, but so appositely that even unfamiliar words yield their meaning(s) transparently, and enrich the reader's understanding. ****

George Steiner 1929-2020

[British Council]

A Brief History of English

Beginning of Canterbury Tales

The history of English has two main themes: first, the words (lexicon) come from many sources, and second, the grammar is fundamentally a simplified Germanic one, marked by an almost complete absence of grammatical gender. English is essentially a multi-layered creole.

The prehistoric peoples (who settled the islands 5,000 years ago or earlier) as far as we know left no traces in the English language. Then there were the Britons, a motley crew of miscellaneous Celtic tribes. These were conquered by the Romans, whose language had some influence on the Celtic dialects, mostly in place names. They built forts and roads, and romanised the indigenous people. Many place names date back to the Roman occupation, for example London (from londinium), and names ending in -chester, -cester, or -caster (from L. castellum).

From about 450 AD, several northwest European peoples invaded the Island. First came the Angles and Saxons, followed by the Danes and the Norwegians. The Anglo-Saxons brought their languages with them, and adopted or adapted some words and place names from the Celts they displaced or enslaved. For example car (originally from Latin), the Avon, Salisbury (Salis- from Celtic Sorvio, a personal name, plus Anglo-Saxon burh, a fortified settlement), and many other place names in southwestern England. The Danish and Norwegian invasions affected the northern and eastern Anglo-Saxon dialects, which are still distinct from the southern and midland dialects that became the language of the court. Anglo-Saxon as written is a jumble of dialects that are mutually intelligible enough that they form a language.

In 1066, William the Bastard of Normandy conquered England and brought Norman French with him as the language of government and trade. Over the next couple of centuries, the existing Anglo-Saxon dialects and Norman French blended into what we now think of as Middle English. By 1400, it was not only a practical language but a literary one: Geoffrey Chaucer wrote his Canterbury Tales (1387-1400) in his Middle English, London-centric dialect. It became the source of modern English, which in vocabulary is basically Anglo-Saxon with an overlay of French, and a grammar regularised and simplified as Anglo-Saxon and French speakers mashed up their languages into a mutually intelligible creole. Hence cow, bull, cattle for the animals, beef for their meat. Anglo-Saxon houses and fields made up French real property. French and English shared a plural ending -s, which became the near-universal way of making plural nouns, and gender survived only in the third person pronouns and some feminine suffixes.

During the Roman era and throughout the Middle Ages, Latin and Greek words were adopted into the vernacular all over Europe. In English, that produced “church”, “bishop” and “bible”, for example. During the Renaissance, English speakers, like other Europeans, adopted many more Latin and Greek words. By the later Middle Ages, scholars had developed the habit of using Latin and Greek terms when writing in their local languages, and still do so today.

In 1473, Caxton brought printing to England. During the 1400s and 1500s, Middle English was evolving into Early Modern English (the language of Shakespeare). Printers wanted standard spelling (and to some extent also standard vocabulary) to widen the market for their books. Thus, English spelling became standardised at a time when its pronunciation changed rapidly. The result is the most inconsistent spelling system in the world: each of the main streams of language that make up the Modern English lexicon has its own spelling system.

Here's the Lord's Prayer in Anglo-Saxon:

Fæder ure þu þe eart on heofonum; Si þin nama gehalgod to becume þin rice gewurþe ðin willa on eorðan swa swa on heofonum. urne gedæghwamlican hlaf syle us todæg and forgyf us ure gyltas swa swa we forgyfað urum gyltendum and ne gelæd þu us on costnunge ac alys us of yfele soþlice (note: the old english "þ" is pronounced "th")

Read more at: https://www.lords-prayer-words.com/lord_old_english_medieval.html

Fæder ure þu þe eart on heofonum;
Si þin nama gehalgod
to becume þin rice
gewurþe ðin willa on eorðan swa swa on heofonum
urne gedæghwamlican hlaf syle us todæg
and forgyf us ure gylta
swa swa we forgyfað urum gyltendum
and ne gelæd þu us on costnunge
ac alys us of yfele soþlice 

Note on pronunciation:
There are no "silent letters".
Anglo-Saxon "þ" is pronounced "th" as in "thin";
Anglo-Saxon "ð" is pronounced "th" as in "this";
The vowels are pronounced as in "pat, pet, pit, pot, put";
"y" like "ee" in  "beet".
"æ" is a vowel about halfway between "pat" and "pet";
both vowels in double vowels are pronounced;
"c" before e and i is pronounced like "ch"  in "chin",
otherwise like "k"

Fæder ure þu þe eart on heofonum; Si þin nama gehalgod to becume þin rice gewurþe ðin willa on eorðan swa swa on heofonum. urne gedæghwamlican hlaf syle us todæg and forgyf us ure gyltas swa swa we forgyfað urum gyltendum and ne gelæd þu us on costnunge ac alys us of yfele soþlice (note: the old english "þ" is pronounced "th")

Read more at: https://www.lords-prayer-words.com/lord_old_english_medieval.html

Fæder ure þu þe eart on heofonum; Si þin nama gehalgod to becume þin rice gewurþe ðin willa on eorðan swa swa on heofonum. urne gedæghwamlican hlaf syle us todæg and forgyf us ure gyltas swa swa we forgyfað urum gyltendum and ne gelæd þu us on costnunge ac alys us of yfele soþlice (note: the old english "þ" is pronounced "th")

Read more at: https://www.lords-prayer-words.com/lord_old_english_medieval.html

 

Hitchens essays: And Yet (2015)

     And Yet... (2015) Posthumous collection of essays, mostly from periodicals such as Slate, The Atlantic, The New York Review of Books, etc. His book reviews are thorough and sometimes occasions for polemics. His polemics are always interesting. He was a libertarian who detested totalitarianism, including religion. He became an American citizen late in life, and immediately began digging into the history that is glossed over by the myths. He tried to be honest and rational; one of his heroes was Orwell, because Orwell tried to be as truthful as humanly possible.
     Picking any one essay as an example won’t do Hitchens justice, but here goes: Bah, Humbug attacks Christmas, not because it’s religious but because the relentless urging to buy gifts promotes hypocrisy. The holiday instills guilt: if you don’t lavish gifts upon your nearest and dearest, you obviously don’t love them. Along the way Hitchens reminds us that, as soon as Cromwell’s victories gave them the power, the Puritans banned Christmas in England. It was a pagan feast, not a Christian one. Thus those who wish to “keep the Christ in Christmas” betray both their historical and theological ignorance. In any case, what we now think of as time-honoured Christmas traditions were invented wholesale by the Victorians. Prince Albert and Dickens have a lot to answer for.
     Beware: if you start reading, you will want to read the next essay and the next and the next, and before you know it, you’ve spent a hour or so immersed in this book. ***

Language How She Is Spoke

     The Power of Babel (2001) McWhorter (at U of C Berkeley) surveys a slew of languages. He establishes what should be a common-sense conclusion: Languages change without ceasing. The book explores some implications of this fundamental fact.

     Standard languages are recently standardised dialects spoken by the politically and economically most powerful groups. When the King’s power unified disparate regions into a country, the dialect of his region spread beyond its borders. The dialect of the powerful became the language of law and business. Hence, standard languages. Printing accelerated this process, and had the secondary effect of recording language changes. Before printing, people spelled as they spoke. Standardised spelling prompted the wide-spread misconception that language is unchanging, and that dialects are bastardised, defective versions of the “real” language.
     And that I think, is why language mavens make a living. They claim that they know what the language should be, and never tire of correcting other people’s mistakes. They do, eventually, accept change, but they do so reluctantly. I’ve never read a language column that welcomed some change.
     McWhorter’s central thesis is that a language is a collection of related (but not always mutually intelligible) dialects whose speakers see themselves as all using some version the common language. He shows that in pre-literate societies, languages change within a person’s lifetime, and that sometimes these changes are major reconstructions of grammar and vocabulary. Some changes are so drastic that we need a written record to recognise them.
     These drastic changes illustrate an important fact: languages change in illogical ways. There is no logical reason why English speakers should distinguish between the apple they’ve just spoken about, and an apple they haven’t referred to. Yet that’s what we do. Around the world, “articles” are unusual. Sino-Tibetan languages, even Indo-European Russian, don’t have them. In most contexts we know what we are talking about, and if we aren’t sure, we make sure with words like "this" and “that”. Thus, articles (aka “determiners”) aren’t necessary. So why do we have them?
     Look at similar oddities in every language, and there’s a clue. McWhorter focusses on gender. We think of gender as being about sex: male, female, or neither. That’s why we find German genders odd: why is a woman female, but a girl not? But in many languages, gender goes well beyond these concepts, into animate/inanimate, for example. How and why?
     McWhorter argues that “drift” accounts for these unnecessary and often illogical elaborations of language. He uses the analogy of water-cooler talk. The group develops in-jokes and allusions to their common history. Their conversation may be utterly opaque to the outsider. Linguistic drift, McWhorter claims, is like this. Speakers add information to their speech by extending word meanings, or adding in bits and pieces. I also think of tag-lines and buzzwords, and slang as sources of language drift. A deliberate in-joke mistake may become standard if it spreads fashionably enough.
     The book is rich in examples. It amounts to a survey of language as she is spoke, with a side-glance at how she is wrote. It consolidated my understanding, and gave me lots of new data and insights. McWhorter is a bit wobbly on semantic change, I think. For example, in his discussion of the English article, he fails to note that the absence of the article changes the reference of a noun from object to class. Abstract nouns normally don’t take articles in English. When someone uses the article, they signal that they see varieties of the abstract entity (eg, C S Lewis’s The Four Loves).
     McWhorter believes that pidgins and creoles show us the most basic aspects of reality that we want or need to express. I think he makes the case. Pidgins and creoles are stripped down. As such, they are a clue to the ur-language, the one that our remote ancestors must have used before they migrated out of Africa. McWhorter notes that as a creole develops and changes over time, its speakers add those wonderful curlicues and frills. We believe those add-ons are essential, simply because we use them in our own language. We’re flummoxed when we discover other languages don’t have them. And we’re even more flummoxed when we find that they have different ones. These are often so different that it’s almost impossible for us to grasp their intended meanings. I think that’s why we feel that every language expresses a different way of experiencing the world.
     An excellent introduction to linguistics in general, and especially the wonderful variety of languages. One thing this book confirms: languages differ mostly in what must be said in each of them, even if it doesn’t matter. Pinker has some interesting discussions of experiments teasing out how these differences affect the way we feel about reality. ****
     20190527: Another factor that standardises language, and also fossilises them, is religion. Sacred texts tend to be preserved verbatim by memorisation or precise copying. Thus "dead" languages like Latin and Sanskrit. Hebrew is an instructive exception: Israel made it the official language, and it has become a living language again.
     20190812: The Guardian reviews a book with the same stance. See Don’t Believe a Word by David Shariatmadari review – the truth about language.
     Thanks to CMKG for this link. 

    Update 2022-03-06: McWhorter writes a column for the New York Times. His latest discusses the effect of capitalisation on our perception of meanings. There may be a paywall, however.

Words, words, words Wanted Words, Jane Farrow 2000)

 

   Jane Farrow, ed. Wanted Words (2000) The CBC ran a delightful short program about words for those things, events, and (usually) annoyances that we labour to describe. It was almost entirely listener-driven. Listeners supplied the wants and the words, and many anecdotes, some even about the event that caused the coinages.This eponymous book collects some of the best, along with short lists of alternative suggestions. None of the listed words has entered the general lexicon.
     For example, Motorola-mouth for those annoying people who not only answer their cellphones in public, but ensure that we hear their side of the conversation. An alternative suggestion: Cell-droids, which would do very well for people incapable of surviving more than a couple of minutes without checking their screens. Now that texting has superseded voice, we may be entertained by demonstrations of the perils of texting while walking, and terrified of becoming a participant in a demonstration of the perils of texting while driving.
     Aneurythm was proposed for “a song that sticks in your head”, but earworm appeared later and became the fairly common term for this annoying brain-glitch.
     A pleasant read. **½

Computer languages aren't languages

I posted this on a newsgroup:

A computer language isn't a language. Formatting code to make it easier for humans to use doesn't make it a language. Computer code at root describes switching sequences. That's all. Recall that the very first machines were coded by rerouting cables between switches.

Human languages don't code, they present what (for want of a better phrase) I call "intersecting ambiguities". That's why you can understand sentences that include words you've never encountered before (it's how we learned our native language in the first place). It's why we can shift word-usage, and be fairly confident that our hearers and readers will get at least enough of what we intend that they can ask good questions about what we mean.

The ambiguities etc of human language are paradoxically also the reason that statistical and pattern analysis of samples has produced successful translation AIs, and AIs that write boilerplate news reports (eg, for sports and business). The most recent language-writing AI can imitate your personal style well enough that it's impossible for the casual reader to detect a forgery. That will not end well.

So you want to show off your Latin

     Eugene Ehrlich. Amo, Amas, Amat and More (1985) A dictionary of Latin words and phrases in more or less common use. By the 1980s, Latin was removed from almost all high school curricula, even as an elective, but many people still used Latin tags and phrases. This book will help anyone who reads works from the 1980s and earlier.
     Ehrlich divagates often, adding wry and not so wry comments to his explanations. Such as this one:
     sit non doctissima coniunx
     A Roman formula for a happy marriage.
     One of Martial’s epigrams, Literally “may my wife not be very learned”, revealing more than we would like to know about one Roman’s attitude towards women.
    To which I would add, many men would agree with Martial. I don’t: I prefer sit doctissima coniunx.
      Ehrlich uses the English/American convention of Latin pronunciation. I learned a different one in Austria, but (as he points out) we don’t really know how Latin was pronounced. Nor, I think, do we know how the dialects varied. Pleasant introduction by William F. Buckley, Jr.  A well done reference book. ****

A Grammar checker.

I’ve just tried Grammatik, a grammar checker built into WordPerfect. To say it’s bad is an understatement. The only actual error it flagged was a typo. All the other errors showed that Grammatik could not parse sentences correctly, and so mistook verbs for nouns and nouns for verbs; demanded modifiers where none were needed; confused proper names with common nouns; didn’t recognise objects; and on and on and on.

One example: “A voice from on high spoke:...” Grammatik said it should read “A voice from a high spoke...”

I don’t know if the other wordprocessors have equally bad grammar checkers. I suspect so. Avoid them, they will thoroughly mislead you.

BTW, Grammatik flagged eight errors in this short screed.

If you want ot be a writer: Stephen King On Writing

     Stephen King. On Writing (2000). Subtitled “A Memoir of the Craft”. I’m not a fan of Stephen King, not because he’s a bad writer, but because horror fantasy doesn’t move me. I read some of his short stories way back when, and thought they were well done.
     King writes both about the nuts’n’bolts (grammar and style, narrative pace, character, etc) and his own experience as a writer. The book is worth reading for both. If you need some guidance to improve your writing and work habits, read this book. If you need some inspiration and emotional support because you’re not sure you can hack the writing life, read this book. You will improve your mastery of the craft, and you may discover your writing groove. Or you may discover that you’re not a writer after all. Either way, the book is worth reading.
     More take-aways: Writing is a compulsion, it’s what you have to do to maintain your sense of self.
     Reading a lot is essential to your development as a writer.
     A story is out there, like a fossil to be discovered. Writing it is uncovering the fossil.
     Interesting for any Stephen King fan, and for anyone who's curious about the writing life. ****

APOSTROPHE RULES

The following is a summary of the apostrophe rules I taught. They are really quite simple.

The apostrophe is a spelling mark, not a punctuation mark. As such, it distinguishes between words that might be confused. (Aside: it’s not really needed, since we never confuse these words when speaking.) In spelling, the confusions arise because the apostrophe is used for two purposes, as set out below.

A) The apostrophe of possession:

1) Singular nouns and proper names: add ’s at the end.  Dog – Dog’s. Jim – Jim’s
    Problem: Words/names ending in -s. Usage for these cases varies. See section C below.

2) Plural nouns and names: Add the apostrophe after the plural. If the plural has no -s, add s’.No exceptions. Parents – Parents’. Children – Childrens’

3) Never make a plural by adding ’s to a word.
    Problem: Some newpaper style books specify an apostrophe to make plural out of a number used as a name: the 1970's, not the 1970s. I think this is wrong.

4) Possessive pronouns ending in -s contain no apostrophe. No exceptions. Your - yours. Her- hers. He - his. It – its. Our – ours. Their - theirs.

B) The apostrophe of omission:

5) An apostrophe is used to indicate a syllable lost or compressed through elision (combining two words that otherwise would be pronounced separately). No exceptions. He had – He’d. It is – It’s. They would – They’d. The garden is lovely  – The garden’s lovely.

C) Nouns/names ending in -s:

1) Preferred usage is to add ’s: “James’s book.” This rule expresses preferred pronunciation.

2) However, usage omitting the possessive -s in both sound and spelling is acceptable: “James’ book.”

Rule: When different usages are acceptable, choose one and stick to it.

Figures of Speech (Espy's Garden of Eloquence)

     Willard R. Espy. The Garden of Eloquence (1983) Espy made a name for himself as a language guru. Inspired by a copy of Henry Peacham’s Garden of Eloquence (1577), Espy decided to update and emulate that work, and contrived a fanciful Garden ruled by a Queen who handed out Awards to the various Figures of Speech that appeared before her. The book ends with excerpts from Peacham’s book covering the more strained and exhaustive/ing terms.
     The book’s a nicely produced object, printed on good paper, with witty illustrations by Teresa Peekema Allen. Espy includes asides in boxes, making for a patchwork text, an early version of what HTML was intended to facilitate. His illustrative quotations are apt, the narrative is just whimsical enough not to annoy, and the whole is a worthwhile reference book, if you need to look up and understand some obscure terminology.

     Espy, like Henry Peacham, was a collector, not a classifier, nor an analyst. The Figures are presented in alpha order, with no attempt to group them by function or purpose. Espy’s understanding of grammar is typical of the glossophile, an uncritical acceptance of the muddled terms and concepts learned in middle school. He wrote columns and books about the oddities and felicities of English, delighted in etymology, and collected slang and cliches. He provided many harmless hours of instruction and pleasure for those who look at language as birdwatchers look at birds: those wonderful creatures that make the world a more beautiful place.
     So while I occasionally cringed at Espy’s linguistic errors, I enjoyed the book. It will go on our reference shell. ***

Alien language, alien mind (Arrival, 2016)

     Arrival (2016) [D: Denis Villeneuve. Amy Adams, Jeremy Renner, Forest Whitaker. Based on a story by Ted Chiang.]

     The aliens finally arrive, in 12 ships scattered round the globe. They clearly attempt to communicate, so linguist Louise Banks (Adams) is recruited to learn the language. The heptapods (one less tentacle than octopuses) use both whale-like sounds and a written language. Louise, with some help from physicist Ian Donnelly (Renner), deciphers the written symbols, each of which is a complex circular string of squiggles that represents a complete utterance.
     The movie, like the story it’s based on, asks and plausibly answers a number of questions. Could one  communicate with a non-human mind? Yes, if there are some common concepts to start from, in this case the difference between “human” and “Louise”. Does learning a language rewire the brain? Yes, in fact it does. Does that rewiring change the way you perceive the world? Maybe. As a bilingual, I would say yes, but not as drastically as is posited here. For the heptapods time isn’t linear: They have an all-at-once perception of past, present, and future. Their circular "sentences" can be read starting from any point and in either direction. Louise’s daughter has died of leukemia. As she masters the heptapod language, Louise's latent second sight develops so that her daughter’s life becomes present to her, as does her future with Ian, and the child she will have with him.
     The mcguffin is that the 12 ships each provide part of the answer about the heptapods’ purpose in arriving on Earth: They will need human help in the future, but can get it only if humans co-operate and become one world. Which happens, but only because Louise is able to talk to the Chinese ruler in his own language over an NSA cellphone.
     As you can see, this is a complicated movie, on many levels. Villeneuve knows how to make us engage in what for many of us would be an esoteric irrelevance or a boring exercise in abstruse academic theorising. The acting and editing occasionally confuse, that’s why I want to see it again. Is it a fault that the movie demands more than one viewing? I don’t think so. ****

Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue (1811)

     [A Member of the Whip Club] Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue (1811) Foreword by R. Cromie, 1971. This version is based on an earlier one, with additions and corrections. Obviously hastily printed, with numerous typos, and bleeding ink on many pages. This is a photolithographed copy of the original.
     Anyone who likes to know how the language develops will find this a useful source. Besides, it’s entertaining, which I think was the intention of the compilers. Like any specialised dictionary, it’s also a snapshot of the culture. To judge from this list, the 18th and early 19th century was a brutal time. There are multiple words for hanging, for theft (a trade with many specialties); begging; prostitution and prostitutes; copulation; drink; jokes and japes, many of them cruel; and frauds. There are many more words for women’s than for men’s private parts, which either reflects the fact that a man compiled the book, or that women aren’t as interested in talking about men’s parts as men are in talking about women’s.
     The picture of daily life and its dangers and pleasures is a good antidote to the romanticised one that most readers of Austen take from her books. But it also helps us grasp the subtext of 18/19th century literature better. Many words and phrases have improved or worsened in meaning; some have become innocuous colloquialisms in one of their senses. “Rum” has become a negative. “Quip” has become to mean a one-line joke. “Plump” was slang or cant back then, and is now ordinary usage. And so on. We still fear burglary, theft, and robbery, but it was much more of a daily (and nightly) threat then than it is now.
     Many of the terms are “jeering appellations” of people suffering from some physical flaw or disability, or merely the effects of age. “Hopping Giles” referred to as man with a limp, as St Giles was the patron of lepers, etc. I don’t know if we are kinder now, but we don’t have near the number of such terms as are listed here.
     There are a few surprises. “Yorkshire Dolly” refers to a contrivance for washing, by means of a wheel fixed in a tub, which being turned about, agitates and cleanses the linen put into it, with soap and water. A washing machine, which is not as modern an invention as we may think.
     The net effect of reading through this list of words is the feeling that life is a lot safer and more pleasant now. ***

William Strunk Jr & E B White. The Elements of Style, 2nd edition (1972)

     William Strunk Jr & E B White. The Elements of Style, 2nd edition (1972) I first read this marvellous book several decades ago. I can’t recall who recommended it, but I owe them thanks. Strunk‘s course and his little book were legendary at Harvard.  His advice, allowing for changes in usage, is still sound. Know and understand grammar. Know and respect the rules of usage. Revise and rewrite. That’s it. There isn’t any more.
   The Rules give examples that exemplify this advice. Most of the rules still stand. E B White revised the examples of bad usage, and added a chapter of general advice on the craft of writing. Some of the bad examples have either disappeared or become accepted, but that should not dissuade a writer from ignoring current usage. Good usage in any era consists of writing for the reader.
     When I taught composition, I stressed that writing should be clear, concise, and correct. In that order. Rereading Strunk’s book and E B White’s addition to it, I see that these three words sum up their counsel. ****