“How you must detest dining in this bear garden,” she said, making use, as she did when she was distracted, of her social
manner. So, when there is a strife of tongues, at some meeting, the chairman, to obtain unity, suggests that every one shall
speak in French. Perhaps it is bad French; French may not contain the words that express the speaker’s thoughts;
nevertheless speaking French imposes some order, some uniformity.
--To the Lighthouse
Showing posts with label Linguistics (amateur ramblings about words and dialects). Show all posts
Showing posts with label Linguistics (amateur ramblings about words and dialects). Show all posts
07 January, 2012
29 January, 2011
Speech and Silence in Decalogue One
In class the other day we watched the first of a series of ten one-hour films by Polish director Krzysztof Kieślowski. Called the "Decalogue," the series deals, unsurprisingly, with the Ten Commandments. Which could be a set-up for disaster of the most stupendous "Christian moralizing" sort. But Kieślowski doesn't approach his subject from a moralizing perspective at all. The first Decalogue is profoundly elegiac, sensitively negotiating questions of love, the nature of belief, and death in its recounting of the apparently senseless death of an eleven-year-old boy. So it comes as something of a tonal non sequitur when about halfway through the film the private world of the father, son, and aunt is interrupted by a lecture on linguistics at the public university. We have not left behind the central characters: the father is simply appearing in his public role as a university professor, his son, Pawel, accompanying him. But this temporary shift away from personal interaction gives Kieslowski a chance to simultaneously articulate one of the central concerns of the film in theoretical terms inappropriate to ordinary conversation and to increase the tragic irony of the father's preoccupation with science.
The film is attentive to questions of communication, both verbal and non-verbal, and this lecture takes up the same topic. Yet the father restricts the lecture’s focus to linguistic communication. Building an argument for the possibility of intelligent volition in computers, he reconfirms his fascination with technology through his choice of subject matter. But a certain tension—parallel to that existing between his non-reductive love for his family and his obsession with scientific logic—exists between the beginning and ending of his analysis of language here.
He begins affirming a holistic view of language, seeing it as an organic entity, specific to a culture and expressive of that culture’s individuality. Transmitting the “metasemantics”—that is, the controlling vocabulary—of one culture to another is almost impossible, he says, even in the best of translations: language is too deeply rooted, too tied to a distinct locality and common cultural experience. His approach hints at elements of transcendence contained in language when he suggests that this metasemantic is in essence that culture's metaphysic, the meaning hidden behind the delimiting effects of words. Yet somehow, though he argues so seriously for the value of “what is hidden behind the words,” he concludes by questioning Eliot's idea that “poetry is untranslatable.” Poetry is untranslatable in some respects, according to his initial observations: it is an expression of beauty and love that must by its nature be particularized within a culture that can comprehend its premises and value what it values. But he does not seem to follow these implications through to their logical conclusion. Rather than be satisfied with the existence of the inexpressible, he prefers (at least according to his own words), to essentially deny its existence. Translation is difficult, he suddenly begins to claim, not impossible. And it is difficult only because human linguists are finite, incapable of comprehending a sufficient number of variations of culture and temporality: surely a computer, with its potential for a near-infinite permutations of 0 and 1 can do what the limited human cannot. It is, after all, a translator “capable of accumulating all knowledge of words and language.”
Throughout the lecture, however, images of Pawel, smiling, watching his father, and experimenting with perspectives from which he can see him, contrast with this theoretical conclusion. Pawel hardly seems attentive to the words being said, but he is highly attentive to his father. This attention to the whole person, rather than to what is only verbally expressed, reminds the viewer of the aunt’s earlier conversation with the boy. As the he talks to her about his father and the existence of God, she is able to anticipate and respond to the unspoken questions behind his words. She eventually realizes that the best response is one that is not essentially verbal, hugging him to explain that God is love; we see that real human communication in this case is an expression of love as well.
Given his rejection of the unspoken for the language of the computer, one may, out of context, suspect that this father fills the role of the unimaginative counter to the aunt’s unquestioning love; that between the two exists a divide between reductive rationality and non-reductive love. But for Kieslowski to have moved in this direction would have been for him to make the characters into symbols rather than human beings. The father’s love for his son contradicts his argument for the computer’s ability to assume any crucial human function. The pleasure with which he announces that “in [his] opinion” a computer may have its own aesthetic preferences, personality, individuality, is particularly ironic in the context of the film’s conclusion. He has intellectually (though I emphasize again, not emotionally) set up the computer as a god of sorts, or at least as an entity capable of comprehending and surpassing all human capacities. But if this god even has a personality and volition, what are we to make of the fact that it fails him at the end? When the boy dies, is this a proof that technology does not have the power the father attributes to it in this scene? Or will unpredicted breaking of the ice appear the act of a malevolent deity, à la Hardy's “Hap, to this university professor and father whose theory is haunted by the possibility of such volition and whose practice is nonetheless in constant contrast to his ideas? The movie answers these questions neither in absolute terms, nor with respect to the father himself, forcing the viewer, like the central family here, to remain content with the “meaning behind the words” or images. We can understand the film’s “message” only by empathizing with the father and making his unanswered questions imaginatively our own.
The film is attentive to questions of communication, both verbal and non-verbal, and this lecture takes up the same topic. Yet the father restricts the lecture’s focus to linguistic communication. Building an argument for the possibility of intelligent volition in computers, he reconfirms his fascination with technology through his choice of subject matter. But a certain tension—parallel to that existing between his non-reductive love for his family and his obsession with scientific logic—exists between the beginning and ending of his analysis of language here.
He begins affirming a holistic view of language, seeing it as an organic entity, specific to a culture and expressive of that culture’s individuality. Transmitting the “metasemantics”—that is, the controlling vocabulary—of one culture to another is almost impossible, he says, even in the best of translations: language is too deeply rooted, too tied to a distinct locality and common cultural experience. His approach hints at elements of transcendence contained in language when he suggests that this metasemantic is in essence that culture's metaphysic, the meaning hidden behind the delimiting effects of words. Yet somehow, though he argues so seriously for the value of “what is hidden behind the words,” he concludes by questioning Eliot's idea that “poetry is untranslatable.” Poetry is untranslatable in some respects, according to his initial observations: it is an expression of beauty and love that must by its nature be particularized within a culture that can comprehend its premises and value what it values. But he does not seem to follow these implications through to their logical conclusion. Rather than be satisfied with the existence of the inexpressible, he prefers (at least according to his own words), to essentially deny its existence. Translation is difficult, he suddenly begins to claim, not impossible. And it is difficult only because human linguists are finite, incapable of comprehending a sufficient number of variations of culture and temporality: surely a computer, with its potential for a near-infinite permutations of 0 and 1 can do what the limited human cannot. It is, after all, a translator “capable of accumulating all knowledge of words and language.”
Throughout the lecture, however, images of Pawel, smiling, watching his father, and experimenting with perspectives from which he can see him, contrast with this theoretical conclusion. Pawel hardly seems attentive to the words being said, but he is highly attentive to his father. This attention to the whole person, rather than to what is only verbally expressed, reminds the viewer of the aunt’s earlier conversation with the boy. As the he talks to her about his father and the existence of God, she is able to anticipate and respond to the unspoken questions behind his words. She eventually realizes that the best response is one that is not essentially verbal, hugging him to explain that God is love; we see that real human communication in this case is an expression of love as well.
Given his rejection of the unspoken for the language of the computer, one may, out of context, suspect that this father fills the role of the unimaginative counter to the aunt’s unquestioning love; that between the two exists a divide between reductive rationality and non-reductive love. But for Kieslowski to have moved in this direction would have been for him to make the characters into symbols rather than human beings. The father’s love for his son contradicts his argument for the computer’s ability to assume any crucial human function. The pleasure with which he announces that “in [his] opinion” a computer may have its own aesthetic preferences, personality, individuality, is particularly ironic in the context of the film’s conclusion. He has intellectually (though I emphasize again, not emotionally) set up the computer as a god of sorts, or at least as an entity capable of comprehending and surpassing all human capacities. But if this god even has a personality and volition, what are we to make of the fact that it fails him at the end? When the boy dies, is this a proof that technology does not have the power the father attributes to it in this scene? Or will unpredicted breaking of the ice appear the act of a malevolent deity, à la Hardy's “Hap, to this university professor and father whose theory is haunted by the possibility of such volition and whose practice is nonetheless in constant contrast to his ideas? The movie answers these questions neither in absolute terms, nor with respect to the father himself, forcing the viewer, like the central family here, to remain content with the “meaning behind the words” or images. We can understand the film’s “message” only by empathizing with the father and making his unanswered questions imaginatively our own.
01 September, 2010
Grammatical...Existentialism?
Ok, I am busy. But this is far too marvelous to remain unexpressed for long. A bit of background: I am taking Elementary Latin here at UD because I always did fight my mother tooth and nail about taking it in middle school...and here I am having gone to Rome, regretting all the time not having followed her sage advice. Well, as you can imagine, much of the "civilized" world is not up to snuff with their grammar. So the first assignment for this class was to parse several sentences from Genesis and the famously long and tortured opening sentence of Paradise Lost (the exercise decreased my already poor opinion of Milton, I'm afraid). My roommate and I went vastly overboard in completing the exercise, of course. No need to get way down into details like relative clauses and subclauses; the teacher was looking more for "this is a verb, transitive, past tense". One place in particular that had confused us to no end, however, was a line from Genesis that runs: "And God said, 'Let there be light'" , etc. Well, imperatives are always a bit tricky. And the usual rule of implicit subjects that I usually hazily follow when I am compelled to have anything to do with them is kind of hard to apply in this case. Who on earth would God be commanding other than Himself? Which, of course, is an option that works syntactically but not grammatically.
But then there was all this "let be" nonsense (which reminds me unavoidably of that gorgeous conclusion of Hamlet's existential drama)--let being an intransitive helping verb, we later found. And the mysterious "there". What part of speech would "there", used clearly not as an adverb, but to signify the state of something's being in existence be? This is what I've been working up to all along. Wait for it...wait...this particular part of speech is known as the "Existential there". Really! This is no joke. They call it the existential there.
That's all I wanted to say, in point of fact. But it's kind of awesome, don't you think? Perhaps not quite as delightful to some, but there's nothing better (I just used it!) than all of the sudden finding a previously hidden potential for puns of epic proportion in, of all things, technical grammatical vocabulary.
But then there was all this "let be" nonsense (which reminds me unavoidably of that gorgeous conclusion of Hamlet's existential drama)--let being an intransitive helping verb, we later found. And the mysterious "there". What part of speech would "there", used clearly not as an adverb, but to signify the state of something's being in existence be? This is what I've been working up to all along. Wait for it...wait...this particular part of speech is known as the "Existential there". Really! This is no joke. They call it the existential there.
That's all I wanted to say, in point of fact. But it's kind of awesome, don't you think? Perhaps not quite as delightful to some, but there's nothing better (I just used it!) than all of the sudden finding a previously hidden potential for puns of epic proportion in, of all things, technical grammatical vocabulary.
22 July, 2010
A note
If I were to expand the post below, I'd add a rant about how capitalism is a completely artificial term as well as being impossibly hard to use. It's just a description of how things work, very naturally, in a free society, and could be seen in the ancient and medieval worlds too (except where feudalism was quite absolute); it's not a system. Unless of course you use it to mean our particular situation in which we're so lamentably removed from the concrete products of our work, in which case the confusion is multiplied.
"Capitalism" was first used, according to the OED, in the 1850s by Thackeray. Then the Marxists took it and ran with it.
"Capitalism" was first used, according to the OED, in the 1850s by Thackeray. Then the Marxists took it and ran with it.
30 November, 2009
Fillers
I happened across this rather fascinating article regarding linguisitic fillers on Wikipedia the other day. It's actually less of an article than a listing of common fillers in different languages, but what would you say about fillers?
"Uh, it's sort of like, you know, um, when you use a thingymajig to, um, talk, er, about, like, things." A sentence almost entirely composed of fillers.
Essentially fillers are just generic sounds which can be interspersed with intelligible dialogue to denote that you haven't yet relinquished control of the conversation and are pausing merely to order your thoughts.
Some people hate them unneccessarily, assuming, it seems, that because overuse of fillers sounds rotten and uneducated, any use of them makes you automatically sound like an idiot. This is an exaggeration, of course. Fillers have certainly existed for at least several generations more than any of us have been around, reaching well back into an era when the educated populace was generally much better educated than the average American today. Probably even Shakespeare used fillers. I seem to remember a couple appearing more than once in dialogues of his plays.
On the other hand, it's rather tragic that our public officials, of all people, can't seem to string together a single sentence (without the back up of their speech writers) that doesn't include enough fillers to garble the meaning of the sentence almost beyond recognition. Ever heard Barack Obama speak without a teleprompter?
"Uh, it's sort of like, you know, um, when you use a thingymajig to, um, talk, er, about, like, things." A sentence almost entirely composed of fillers.
Essentially fillers are just generic sounds which can be interspersed with intelligible dialogue to denote that you haven't yet relinquished control of the conversation and are pausing merely to order your thoughts.
Some people hate them unneccessarily, assuming, it seems, that because overuse of fillers sounds rotten and uneducated, any use of them makes you automatically sound like an idiot. This is an exaggeration, of course. Fillers have certainly existed for at least several generations more than any of us have been around, reaching well back into an era when the educated populace was generally much better educated than the average American today. Probably even Shakespeare used fillers. I seem to remember a couple appearing more than once in dialogues of his plays.
On the other hand, it's rather tragic that our public officials, of all people, can't seem to string together a single sentence (without the back up of their speech writers) that doesn't include enough fillers to garble the meaning of the sentence almost beyond recognition. Ever heard Barack Obama speak without a teleprompter?
29 October, 2007
Shall and Will
Who uses "shall" anymore? Does anyone really? If pressed, I can think of a few instances in which more grammatically astute people use the word - first person offers sometimes feature this word: "Shall I throw your laptop down the garbage chute?"
I had no idea, however, just how grammatically complex the issue of when to use the word can become. It's all the fault of Old English, as far as I understand. I'm far too hazy on the subject of the two words' origins myself to feel confident offering any explanation, but it has something to do with the fact that Old English did not really have a future tense, and these words were originally used in the preterite-present tense.
The two are distinguished primarily by their original connotations of command (shall) and wish (will). You can see this distinction more clearly in the way we use their conditional tense counterparts, should and would: "You should eat every one of those delicious lima beans" versus "I would equip myself for battle by learning how to use a lightsaber". The English grammarian, H.W. Fowler, gives some examples of using the two words in the "pure" system which derives more directly from Old English:
* Thou shalt not steal.
* Shall I open the door?
* You should not say such things.
* And shall Trelawney die?
* Whom should he meet but Jones? (...was it his fate...)
* Why should you suspect me?
* It should seem so. (It would apparently be incumbent on us to believe)
* I will have my way.
* I (he) asked him (me) to do it, but he (I) would not.
* I would not have done it for the world.
* I would be told to wait a while (Habitual).
* Will you come with me?
* I would I were dead.
* He will bite his nails, whatever I say.
* He will often stand on his head.
Now, of course, both shall and will function primarily as "auxiliary verbs" - words used to give additional grammatical information about another verb in the sentence - to approximate the future tense (which doesn't have specific independent verb forms in English), and this is where the issue becomes much more confusing. In the pure sense that I discussed above, you usually don't use "should" in the first person, because you don't usually give commands to yourself, and you don't usually use "would" in the second or third person, because it is used to connote a wish. However, these rules are reversed when expressing the "simple future".
When expressing simple future (i.e. making spontaneous decisions, making predictions, etc), shall and should are applied to the first person, whereas will and would are used in the second and third persons. From what I understand, this switch exists simply to distinguish this tense from the above pure sense in which the words can be used.
It switches back yet again, however, when expressing the modal future. This is a modification of the simple future, and is used to express the speaker's wish, intention, threat, promise, offer, refusal, and so on. Shall is used for second and third persons in this case, and will for first person. So if we had a conversation between the cyclops and Odysseus, for instance, using this tense, it might proceed like this:
Cyclops: I will eat you in a few minutes. (Cyclops' intention)
Odysseus: You shall regret it if you do. (Odysseus' threat)
Cyclops: You should have my lands and sheep if you let me eat you. (Cyclops' conditional offer)
Odysseus: I would poke your single eye out with a burning brand if I could. (Odysseus' conditional threat)
You get the idea.
Of course, no one really cares about such obscure grammar rules any more, especially not in the USA, where "will" is almost universally replacing "shall". I'd expect about the same is happening in most of the English-speaking world. This is probably a good thing, in some ways. If people can manage to mix up "has" and "have" the moment they are faced with a slightly complicated syntax in a sentence, it would be rather painful to hear what could happen if these rules were carefully followed.
And besides, insisting on such a manner of speech... would't be almost sadistic to all the people who have to learn our ridiculously complicated language? As if our spelling rules (or lack thereof) aren't bad enough....
I had no idea, however, just how grammatically complex the issue of when to use the word can become. It's all the fault of Old English, as far as I understand. I'm far too hazy on the subject of the two words' origins myself to feel confident offering any explanation, but it has something to do with the fact that Old English did not really have a future tense, and these words were originally used in the preterite-present tense.
The two are distinguished primarily by their original connotations of command (shall) and wish (will). You can see this distinction more clearly in the way we use their conditional tense counterparts, should and would: "You should eat every one of those delicious lima beans" versus "I would equip myself for battle by learning how to use a lightsaber". The English grammarian, H.W. Fowler, gives some examples of using the two words in the "pure" system which derives more directly from Old English:
* Thou shalt not steal.
* Shall I open the door?
* You should not say such things.
* And shall Trelawney die?
* Whom should he meet but Jones? (...was it his fate...)
* Why should you suspect me?
* It should seem so. (It would apparently be incumbent on us to believe)
* I will have my way.
* I (he) asked him (me) to do it, but he (I) would not.
* I would not have done it for the world.
* I would be told to wait a while (Habitual).
* Will you come with me?
* I would I were dead.
* He will bite his nails, whatever I say.
* He will often stand on his head.
Now, of course, both shall and will function primarily as "auxiliary verbs" - words used to give additional grammatical information about another verb in the sentence - to approximate the future tense (which doesn't have specific independent verb forms in English), and this is where the issue becomes much more confusing. In the pure sense that I discussed above, you usually don't use "should" in the first person, because you don't usually give commands to yourself, and you don't usually use "would" in the second or third person, because it is used to connote a wish. However, these rules are reversed when expressing the "simple future".
When expressing simple future (i.e. making spontaneous decisions, making predictions, etc), shall and should are applied to the first person, whereas will and would are used in the second and third persons. From what I understand, this switch exists simply to distinguish this tense from the above pure sense in which the words can be used.
It switches back yet again, however, when expressing the modal future. This is a modification of the simple future, and is used to express the speaker's wish, intention, threat, promise, offer, refusal, and so on. Shall is used for second and third persons in this case, and will for first person. So if we had a conversation between the cyclops and Odysseus, for instance, using this tense, it might proceed like this:
Cyclops: I will eat you in a few minutes. (Cyclops' intention)
Odysseus: You shall regret it if you do. (Odysseus' threat)
Cyclops: You should have my lands and sheep if you let me eat you. (Cyclops' conditional offer)
Odysseus: I would poke your single eye out with a burning brand if I could. (Odysseus' conditional threat)
You get the idea.
Of course, no one really cares about such obscure grammar rules any more, especially not in the USA, where "will" is almost universally replacing "shall". I'd expect about the same is happening in most of the English-speaking world. This is probably a good thing, in some ways. If people can manage to mix up "has" and "have" the moment they are faced with a slightly complicated syntax in a sentence, it would be rather painful to hear what could happen if these rules were carefully followed.
And besides, insisting on such a manner of speech... would't be almost sadistic to all the people who have to learn our ridiculously complicated language? As if our spelling rules (or lack thereof) aren't bad enough....
17 October, 2007
Falling madly in love with a word
Is something I tend to do a lot. Right now, the word in question is "clever." Isn't it great? Say it a million times to yourself, turn it into a mantra or a chant. Liking it yet? Maybe you could try writing a paper on a certain Greek hero's cleverness.
Since I am so excessively fond of the word (cleverness, clever, cleverly, cleverosity - ok, that last one isn't a genuine word), I decided post its etymology. Just in case reading my random ravings about the word (cleverness, clever; I'm almost singing it now)haven't bored you enough, you can take a look at this. If you're rabidly interested in linguistics, however, I'm afraid that won't work, because it is a very interesting etymology.
Clever
c.1590, from E.Anglian dial. cliver "expert at seizing," probably from E.Fris. klufer or Norwegian dialectic klover "ready, skillful," perhaps infl. by O.E. clifer "claw, hand" (early usages seem to refer to dexterity); extension to intellect is first recorded 1704.
I like the part about its descent from the word "hand". Even today, this word has a definite connotation of dexterity, though now obviously referring to mental dexterity. Speaking of which, dexterity is a jolly cool word as well, is it not? The two sound rather similar, in fact. Clever. Dexterous. I won't write a compare and contrast essay, but my opinion remains that they sound as though they were designed to go together.
Since I am so excessively fond of the word (cleverness, clever, cleverly, cleverosity - ok, that last one isn't a genuine word), I decided post its etymology. Just in case reading my random ravings about the word (cleverness, clever; I'm almost singing it now)haven't bored you enough, you can take a look at this. If you're rabidly interested in linguistics, however, I'm afraid that won't work, because it is a very interesting etymology.
Clever
c.1590, from E.Anglian dial. cliver "expert at seizing," probably from E.Fris. klufer or Norwegian dialectic klover "ready, skillful," perhaps infl. by O.E. clifer "claw, hand" (early usages seem to refer to dexterity); extension to intellect is first recorded 1704.
I like the part about its descent from the word "hand". Even today, this word has a definite connotation of dexterity, though now obviously referring to mental dexterity. Speaking of which, dexterity is a jolly cool word as well, is it not? The two sound rather similar, in fact. Clever. Dexterous. I won't write a compare and contrast essay, but my opinion remains that they sound as though they were designed to go together.
28 September, 2007
Accent of a Mainuh
Inspired both by the realization that while I don't have a Maine accent, my speech features much idiosyncratic "Maine vocabulary", as well as by my ever-present fascination with linguistics, I've been reading up on the Maine accent a lot lately.
Among other things, I've found that one of my private theories about the origins of the accent is actually generally held in linguistic circles. This theory is one that I've expounded on at length to many people, but I'll summarize it again here: the dialectic traits of the Maine accent seem to draw more directly from features of colloquial British English. The primary similarity lies in the common predominance of "R-drop phonetics", although the ways the vowels surrounding these dropped "r"s are pronounced vary considerably between the two types of dialect.
Here's a neat article I found. Not the most scholarly article(in the sense that it doesn't talk a lot about rhotic tendencies in dialects, or nasal vowels, etc) but a good analysis and fun to read.
The Maine accent is nothing short of fascinating, if you ask me. It would also probably be a field day for someone studying linguistic origins in America, since every town seems to have very slight variations on the accent. In some of the more isolated areas, people came over from England back in the 1700s and have been fairly insulated against population ingress over the last 3 centuries, so their accent is almost closer to the proletarian British accents than to standard American.
This, of course, is mostly limited to very rural areas, and even in such places the accent is disappearing faster now than ever before, as more rural areas fall victim to sprawl and artists and such from away (another very Maine expression) take up residence and "dilute" the accent, if you will. The more standard "New England accent" or "Boston accent" is observable both in the city of Portland and in points south towards New Hampshire and Boston, though the majority of people, even those who grew up in this area like myself, speak basically the same as the news anchors on CNN.
Obviously, I can't really explain the mechanics of an accent via the internet. A good way to get in the frame of reference for trying imitate this accent, however, is to pronounce the word "mash" as most Americans would pronounce it, but imagine that you are actually referring to a marsh, that is, a piece of wet, swampy land, when you say it. Now, while you're in this mode, imagine your lobster boat has been grounded on the dock for repairs, and your 400 hp Evinrude outboard motor has just toppled out of the engine well and into the brine beneath. Now, contort your face ever so slightly and say "Well, hadn' counted on that now..." Some accents are easy to recreate (like the Brooklyn accent), but this one is near impossible to pin down.
There's also a store in Portland (where, of course, this accent is virtually nonexistent) called "Queen of Hats". The store sells hats. Do you get the joke yet? Well, I think saying downeast Mainers would pronounce "heart" the way more Americans would pronounce "hat" is a bit of a stretch. They would probably hit the "r", especially in places where the accent is bit more rhotic.
-From Everything2.com
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