Gurdur

Reading lots of posts back:
Where you most certainly seemed to be denying essentiality --- or at least that's my charitable interpretation, since no-one asserted that the language module consists only of Broca's.
Well, yes ?

see you soon.

Dr Rick

Cool it. everyone, and keep it civil, please; Either that, or the thread will be locked.

Thanks

emphryio

Gurdur said:
Apparently I forgot about some thread with Gurdur somewhere. My apologies.

Now let's leave Gurdur alone so he can finish, it would be ridiculous if the thread was locked before he was allowed to do that.

Vorkosigan

I'm constructing my argument to show why (IMHO) a full natural language cannot be inherently better than another one, on general principles,

An interesting thread. Hope it stays on course.

Gurdur, perhaps before you show that all natural languages comply with some value, wouldn't it be better to clearly state what you mean by "better?" I mean, that is relative to some goal or use, right?

I think I can see where you are going, and it sounds potentially right. But some fleshing out of the background is necessary, unless I missed it somewhere. For which I apologize.

Vorkosigan

Gurdur

Well, I kinda doubt it myself.
But what I'll eventually do is boil out the most important points and objections and responses to objections, and put them in a new thread.
The difficulty here is the vagueness of the original claim that prompted me to start all this.
To quote myself:
Jat was claiming that English was superseding French in Canada simply because English was more "flexible", "developmental" etc. than French; all very vague claims, but a common viewpoint nonetheless.
Many people do in fact think English can incorporate foreign words better than other languages can; that English is better than other languages for knowledge transmission; etc. etc. etc.

I'm tackling these claims by going to the heart of the matter, and dealing with all aspects. It takes time.
Given that there is indeed some initial confusion, as well as valid objections to the scope of the enquiry, I'm considering how best to set the parameters in steel concrete.

I've already dealt with some of the claims (especially regarding "flexibility" or "ability to incorporate/import foreign words" elsewhere, and for the original people for whom I dedicated this thread, then the context is probably clear.
However, as you point out, that might not be clear for people coming into this only on this thread.

Luiseach

My husband and I will both enjoy reading this new hard-boiled thread you're planning. He is an analytic philosopher, unlike myself (who is just a lowly literary-critic-in-the-making) , and the idea about moving towards a step-by-step analysis is definitely the way to go. We shall await the thread with interest.

I still maintain, however, that political motivation (politics in a general sense) is behind the formulation of value systems that judge anything as 'better' or 'less' better than something else...that's my position in the discussion, FWIW.

I might not be able to contribute much to the conversation, because I'm moving later this week to join my sweety, and will be wrapped up in the more immediate concerns of hearth and home, but I'll try to follow it all nonetheless.

I love the subject of language and politics! Makes for great reading. Best of luck to you with the thread(s) you're planning!

Gurdur

Well, since you're one of the four people to whom this thread is dedicated, and for whom this thread is intended, all to the good !

Absolutely correct......
but
the claims of more "flexibility" or "incorporational ability" are natural-world factual claims, and therefore come under scientific review.

So I'll be proving them wrong.

While values are arbitrary, the claims as to whether certain values actually apply or pertain to natural phenomena is not an arbitrarily-choosable position... and subject to logical and empirical judgment.
Pity.
Yo, so do I.

Many thanks indeed !

phaedrus

Gurdur

DOES ONE REQUIRE LANGUAGE TO 'THINK'?

G: Give me a break .....
Next one up is "Is language inherently politically biased ?"

?? Does one need "english" to think? What about people who know 3/4 languages? When they are speaking in a particular language are they "thinking" in that particular language ? Or translating it from their mother tongue to that particular language? This paper makes some interesting observations....The mapping between the mental and the public lexicon


uh ?
Since when are existing human languages unnatural ?

Or what do you mean ?

Ok, let me rephrase, Am basically going back to the language of thought thesis and fodor's innate non-natural language, mentalese and the subsymbolic processes of connectionism ... and whether mentalese is sufficient enough to explain our mind and language. If mentalese is used for cognitive activities....is the same used for "unconscious" cognition? We will again land up at the so-called homunculus.

The Language of Thought Hypothesis (LOTH) postulates that thought and thinking take place in a mental language. This language consists of a system of representations that is physically realized in the brain of thinkers and has a combinatorial syntax (and semantics) such that operations on representations are causally sensitive only to the syntactic properties of representations. According to LOTH, thought is, roughly, the tokening of a representation that has a syntactic (constituent) structure with an appropriate semantics. Thinking thus consists in syntactic operations defined over such representations.

One could look at LOTH as an attempt to "naturalize" this whole thing ...take a look at Hearing Yourself Think

Because I got fed up with one poster in this forum making completely wrong statements about language and the politics of sociolinguistics.

The poster in question (Jat) kept on blathering about how one language was "better" than another, and kept on making Social Darwinist arguments about languages dying because somehow they magically weren't "fit" enough

Do some languages vanish since the "users" find a better way to communicate or are forced to adopt or that particular culture is overwhelmed by others and the language of the old culture vanished because it was used only the so-called elite...case in point being latin/sanskrit...etc.

Will wait for your views on SAUSSURE'S NOTION OF SYNTAGMA ...

jp

echidna

Gurdur, an interesting topic. I'm not sure if this is the correct time to post that anecdotally I have come accross bilingual Germans who on occasion will break into English to talk to each other, simply because they say that they can communicate more succinctly in English.

It's difficult to be objective on this, but (naturally to me I suppose), it seems inherently difficult to place the verb at the end of the sentence (especially where lists or complex structures may be involved). There are several amusing anecdotes of translators being faced with these frustrations. Not of course, that German is the only language placing the verb at the end of course.

Gurdur

Hiya Phaedrus,

I think you may have misunderstood my "Give me a break".......


What I meant with that is that this topic --- the politics of language --- already covers a huge amount of territory, and if I tried seriously tackling the additional questions you raise, then my head and the heads of all readers would explode......


Nvertheless, I shall do my humble best to keep your concerns in mind as I slowly develop the theme.