Julian

I watch home improvement shows on Saturday morning and the Redskins whenever they play. That's it. You'd be surprised (probably not) at the linguistically interesting observations one might make watching weathered contractors building or reparing stuff.
Not sure what you are getting at here. "De mortuis nil nisi bonum" is short for "De mortuis nil nisi bonum dicendum est" taken apparently from the Greek work on Chilon by Diogenes Laertius. I scanned through it quickly and I guess it is translated from this bit here: τὸν τεθνηκότα μὴ κακολογεῖν. Did I spot the correct sentence in the Greek here? I didn't read the whole thing even though it is short, my vocabulary leaves some things to be desired.

What am I missing with your 'bene' example...?

Julian

The Evil One

Appreciate the backup, Julian, but I'm afraid I'm going to have to take issue with some of your other points...

From a descriptive viewpoint we shouldn't describe it as "unfortunate". It's a tendency, definitely (though not just a modern one - most non-standard dialects have been getting along quite happily without the -ly ending for donkey's years) ... but if we describe it as "unfortunate" then we have to explain either (a) why there is something inherently better about having morphologically-marked manner adverbs (which the Germans might not be too happy about); or else (b) why the grammar of English at point-in-time X is inherently better than the grammar of English at subsequent point-in-time Y.




Again, not so; "it is me" is the more native form, "it is I" was artificially enforced by a century or two of schoolmasters who used Latin as the measure of correctness.


Part of the problem with issues like the dog smelling is that people try to solve them by relying on rough rules-of-thumb. This doesn't work. (I did it myself, and this hampered my argument until I thought it through properly in terms of subcategorisation frames).

Clivedurdle

And to confuse things even more, American English and British English are very different, as is the Queen's and Jay Goody's!

http://books.guardian.co.uk/reviews/...085519,00.html

Julian

It is most certainly 'unfortunate,' and I will happily explain why. Sure, from a diachronic perspective it would hardly seem to matter, however, since English already lacks most of the morphology of agglutinative languages it would be easy to argue that any further loss will either weaken the expressive quality of the language (by being forced to adopt a stronger and stronger word order dependency) or render meaning so vague as to require additional constructions for dependency indications, thus defeating the purpose of discarding a morphological indicator.

I spend most of my free time these days doing syntactical analysis of Greek sentences (to derive a set of grammtical rules, not because I love pain) and the only way that one can make sense of them is, of course, through morphology and proper understanding of syntactical relationships. Without this, one ends up with something like English where word order is almost everything.

It seems obvious to me that some grammars are clearer, i.e. the relationships of the words are defined better, and the form therefore more free. This, in turn, leads to greater expressive potential which is, of course, what language is all about: The ability to clearly express one's thoughts and ideas in a manner that most closely resembles the intentions of the speaker.
I have no idea what you mean by 'native form.' However, there are real grammar rules. They are quite simple, actually. It is their ability to be subsumed in constituencies (phrases which in turn take on the characteristics of the head component) in a recursive manner that complicates the issue, but the rules remain fairly consistent. I am not sure what your definition of a predicate nominal is and why you think that there are two forms.

Julian

The Evil One

How do you quantify expressive quality?


Oh I see. The freer the word order, the greater the expressive quality. So that would mean that, on the scale of expressive quality, English would be above Chinese but below Latin ? Well you're entitled to define your own terminology however you like but the resutl seems a bit culturally-biased to me.


I have yet to see any evidence that people who do not use a class of morphologically marked manner adverbs (including, as I say, all speakers of Dutch and German) have any difficulty in conveying their meaning appropriately.



Who said it had a purpose? It's just something that happens. It's part of the process. Languages abandon their old morphology and generate new morphology over time from the increasing fixity of syntactic structures.


It may seem obvious to you but it's utterly contrary to the underlying principle of modern linguistics, which is that no grammar is better or worse than any other grammar.


Perhaps you could indicate what evidence leads you to think that Chinese does not allow one to express one's thoughts and idea as closely to one's intentions as English does, because your "expressive quality" argument implies that you must hold that position.


I mean, the form found in English before it was articficially engineered to be more like Latin, a foreign language. Native vs. foreign.


There most certainly are, but they are the sort of rules we discover via observation (like the laws of physics) and not the sort of rules that we lay down as what "should" be conformed to (like the laws of a country).



I haven't used the term.


Two forms of what?

Julian

I will answer both of these the same way. In Greek you can use a noun and an adjective in any order with or without an article on either word. Do you think there is a difference in emphasis between those various constructions or are they all the same? That was a rhetorical question, of course. A language that has the ability to change the structure in that way will be able to emphasize certain words more so than others in a way that is not available to languages without that ability. Hence the expressive quality (or expressive range if you will, like the dynamics of a good piano) is higher, there are more ways to express things. Other factors play a role, to be sure, some more so. Vocabulary would have more impact, for example.

I am not culturally biased, merely efficiency biased. More below.
Again, since I speak quite a few languages I know first-hand that some things are easier to say in some languages rather than others. Sure, you can say anything you want in any language, but how nuanced is it? How easy is it to express? Imagine if you were a poet, would there be a language more suited to poetry than some other language? It is an issue of degrees.
Diachronically or synchronically, natural language has no purpose, obviously, in the sense of an intellectually conceived goal. Your post said that one would have to explain two points which you listed. That's what I was doing, explaining why one was better than another, in this case more efficient. Language in real life obviously cares nothing for what I, or anyone else, thinks it ought to do. It is still driven by impulses determined by statistically significant factors. Koine Greek gradually came into being because many Greek dialects were thrown together by Alexander. Thus, one might say that the 'purpose' of the shift was to make everyone understand each other better, even if that purpose came about through a natural impetus and not anyone's design.
Not true. No grammar is better or worse in any kind of qualitative sense, i.e. morally superior or whatever. However, some grammars are far more effective at getting their job done than others. Effectiveness of a grammar can be easily measured. An effective grammar is not necessarily a better one, just more effective.

I have never heard of any underlying principle of modern linguistics. I do know about syntactical parser design and implementation in the field of computational linguistics and can categorically state that some languages parse far more easily than others. Some have never been succesfully parsed at all. Some have been parsed almost perfectly.
To be sure. My Chinese is almost non-existing. I started learning it once but abondoned it, at least for the time being. As an example, Chinese has no plural or singular and no verbal tenses which means that you would have to qualify your meaning when such details are necessary by using additional words. In Greek or English we can use plural (and aspect and so on) or we can use the same words a chinese would use to indicate plurality and its degree. Thus we have more options and, while the meaning comes across in both cases, one grammar clearly has greater expressive range than the other.
I have no idea what you mean here. When did this happen? Where? How? Looking back at English, I see some major shifts. From Old English, a German-Norse dialect nearly incomprehensible, through Middle English, Chaucer et al. also very hard to understand but not nearly as bad as the Old English, and then finally modern English as seen in Shakespeare and onwards.

I do not know what engineering you are talking about, especially since you earlier said that language had no purpose and just changed naturally (which I agree with).
Well, the laws of physics are immutable, not so those of language. We do not discover them nor design them, merely describe them, making a map of the diachronic flow of expressions down through the ages.
You didn't use the term but that is what you were talking about. Native form and some engineered form. Anyways, I asked about this earlier in this post.

Julian

Clivedurdle

The Singing Neanderthals: The Origins of Music, Language, Mind, and Body (or via: amazon.co.uk)

The Evil One

Of course. There is no such thing as perfect synonymy, at the lexical or grammatical level.



It goes without saying that different languages mark emphasis in different ways.


If we are talking about the range of grammatical options (which I would be happier with than a pseudo-aesthetic term like "expressive quality", TBH) then your point would only hold if there was some way of quantifying the total sum of grammatical options in a alnguage. There isn't. Oh sure, we can look at a particular option and say "this language has it, this other language doesn't", but that doesn't speak to the sum total of grammatical options. It only speaks to that particular option.

So I am dubious that this approach allows you to actually quantify the expressive range of a language.



How are you determining and quantifying "easy"? In terms of cognitive effort? (if so, whose - the hearer or the speaker?) In terms of articulatory effort?


I wasn't talking about the purpose of language. I was referring to your mention of "defeating the purpose of discarding a morphological indicator". You apparently thought that "-ly" was discarded for some purpose. I was merely inquiring what it was.

Although in any case, talking about the disappearance of "ly" as "discarding" may be misleading, as far as I am aware the zero and "ly" variants have co-existed for a long long time (having separate derivations from OE).


And yet, you are not doing a terribly good job at explaining this easy method of measuring the effectiveness of a grammar. Earlier in your post you were calling on such numinous and unquantifiable notions as "nuance", "ease of expression", "suitability for poetry". For instance, you said:

How exactly would you gauge these things objectively?


Well now you've heard of one. come now, the notion that no grammar is better than any other is foundational to descriptive linguistics.


well, if we're flashing credentials, I have a PhD in linguistics and earn my living teaching this stuff. Not that I'd have raised the issue...

Since there's no evidence that computers are using the same techniques as the mental parser does, the differential ease of parsing of particular languages doesn't tell us anything about the "expressive quality" of those grammars.


What exactly is the qualitative (or indeed quantitative) difference between indicating plurality with an affix versus indicating it with an extra word? It's still a unit which has to be processed.


Disagree. One could argue precisely the opposite, that Chinese gives you MORE options. Let me explain. In Chinese you can use a noun on its own, or you can add an extra word or two to show it's singular, or you can add an extra word or two to show it's plural. But in languages with an inflected plural, that plural is NOT OPTIONAL. So we have only two options (singular - plural) whereas Chinese has three (singular - plural - unspecified).

That's before even touching on the huge range of "options" that Chinese has access to via its classifier system, against which the gender systems of Greek is crude indeed.

ETA: I'm not attempting to argue that Chinese is in fact superior. What I'm attempting to do is show you that your standard of evaluation is parochial -- you will feel the absence of features of Greek and English to be noticeable deficits in Chinese, but you won't even notice the features of Chinese that are missing in Greek and English. The next step is to observe that in the absence of an objective method of evaluation, any such standard will be parochial - though the locale in question may vary.


Well, it's clear to you. I venture that it would be rather less clear to a native speaker of Chinese. Which is why descriptive linguistics has learned to avoid any attempt to evaluate grammars in any way, because it always gets mired in subjectivity.



In the education system. For centuries educators were universally fluent in Latin, to which they attached a much higher prestige than they did to English. So a number of prescriptive rules were enforced on English which were based on the principle that "it's right if it's like Latin, it's wrong if it's not". The rule against the split infinitive was one of these. So is the rule against preposition stranding. The rule against using an accusative pronoun in the subj. comp. position is another. All these things are impossible in Latin, but were perfectly normal in English. The education system did not succeed in wiping them out, because it is very difficult to engineer that kind of language change. However, they did succeed in attaching a stigma to the language forms they had decided were to be ruled against.



Exactly. It wasn't intentional engineering, as those responsible hadn't actually thought through what they were doing. And of course, as I say, it didn't succeed: prescriptive attempts to change the langauge almost never succeed, at best they just make people feel self-conscious and guilty but they don't stop them doing it.

How exactly can we describe something we haven't previously discovered.

Oh right, I follow.

"It is me" = the form that is natural and native to English.
"It is I" = the form that was modelled on Latin and imposed on English as an (unsuccessful) attempt to engineer the language.

gstafleu

We may have a difference between the Continental European and English traditions here. My classical language teachers all insisted, quite emphatically, that the correct version is "De mortuis nil nisi bene [dicendum est]." Of course in "real" Ciceronian Latin nobody would be caught dead adding something as redundant as "dicendum est." The point is that "bene" is an adverb, so the admonition is to only speak of the dead in a just manner, because they cannot defend themselves anymore. The idea is not to say only nice things, that is a later moralistic weenieism (which looks almost Hawaian in its multivowelism). Now μὴ κακολογεῖν means literally "not uglyspeak," I think. If that means something like "slander" the "bene" version would be correct. If it just means saying bad things in general you have the "bonum" version.

We can see an example of the continental version on this page:
Translation: De mortuis nil nisi bene, a loose translation of words of the Greek Cheilon, which has been handed down by Diogenes Laertios (Cheilon I, 3, 70). The meaning is not, like it is mostly translated, "you should only say good things about the dead," as then it would say bona in the Latin rather than bene; rather: "about the dead one should only speak in a good manner," friendly, not smarmy; as the dead cannot defend themselves.

Gerard Stafleu

gstafleu

I don't think the expressive power of English would be weakened by this. Rather I think it would be strengthened in a Post Modern sense, where everything can mean nothing and hence means everything, where all theses are both inherently indefensible and universally meaningful. As a result we can all retreat into a meaningful (or meaningless) cave and meaningfully (or voidly) stare at our navel, which is the center of everything and nothing. This makes writing grant proposals real easy.

Gerard Stafleu