Kinross

bable fish says: You entice me to take to you rather hard on the arm.

????

Gurdur

Babel fish, not bable fish.

And it's idiomatic German, and properly translated would be:

You tempt me to severely tease the hell out of you (or to severely take the piss out of you).

_________

NOW PLEASE LEAVE ME ALONE, FOLKS, OTHERWISE I WILL NEVER GET THE PROMISED POSTS DONE.

Kinross

Thank you for the translation.

Tease me for what? Its a valid claim. Feel free but I will wait fro you to finish your posts.

RufusAtticus

And all that shows is that out of all known languages, no ones are better than any others. However, that still doesn't address my point about ancient languages that are distinctly different than modern ones, such as simple languages developed by our ancestors before the development of grammar or modern cognition.

Umm it's your purpose to support your statements. Surely if all known langauges are equal, you can find a comparative linguistic reference for it.

Go back and read my post because I'm not talking about "full languages," i.e. modern ones. When discussing the evolution of language, "modern language" refers to not just current languages, but human languages that fit the "modern" pattern. Similar to how "modern humans" refers to human remains that fit the modern pattern. The references I posted are studies which demonstrate that a compositional/structural language is more effecient at communicating and more stable than a holistic one, especially when there is poverty of input.

But without references to support your arguments, they're not much better than non-substantive rhetoric. Just because I don't necessarily disagree with you on a point, does not mean I still don't want you to support it.

BTW: Shouln't this thread be moved to E/C?

Farren

On Aphasia:

If two athletes, trained by two different methods both broke thier legs, and were equally afflicted, one would expect that both would suffer equally.

Similarly, if we're talking about damage to Broca's area, the disability would be equal across many populations, regardless of the language spoken.

In fact Broca's area is always active in the production of language, and is certainly critical, but so are many other areas of the brain, depending on the nature of what is being said (whether it is reflexive or considered speech, whether it requires sensory memory or abstract thought...).

There is little or no indication that Broca's area is the part that learns English, French or Zulu. It is a critical part, but so is a fan on the CPU of a computer. The fan, however, does not process machine code. The CPU does.

In the case of the brain its a little more complex because the learning and processing of a particular language is widely distributed and partially redundant. In some remarkable experiments done with split brain patients who have had complete lobotomies and have the halves of thier brain connected only by the older limbic system, cases have cropped up of the right side learning language and expressing different preferences (via written language) from the left side.

So the provided statistical argument for evaluating the "goodness" of a language is hopelessly flawed. In fact I don't think any such argument can be made until we've acquired a far more detailed understanding of the workings of the brain.

I think there's far more utility in examining language from a cultural and individual behavioural perspective, since language is essentially bound at the hip to culture. Sankskrit, for instance, had an excess of 120 for soul, varieties of Zulu no distinction between "blue" and "green". Koi-san no word for "enemy".

In a discussion of the Whorfian hypothesis, I read that Athenian greeks of ancient times basically could not phrase an argument comfortably without saying "On the one hand... on the other hand", so the culture shaped a language that shaped the culture in a kind of dialectic wave function that constantly collapsed extreme views into rational compromises, resulting in the sense of balance Greeks were famous for in architecture, and the evenhanded examination of nature required for good philosophy.

So ancient greek could be said to have more utility than the languages of thier "barbarian" neighbours.

Similarly the judgement by beauty is another way in which distinction between languages can be made. I don't think anyones got a complete explanation for why music appeals to us, whatever form your preferance might take, however, certain linguistic traditions stress the musicality of tone for good elocution, while others encourage conformity to a norm, regardless of how this mangles rythm and fluidity.

I read an interesting interview with Selma Hayek once where she said when she came to Hollywood, she took up acting classes because although she had been acting for years, no one took Mexican's seriously.

She said she found Shakespearean acting easier than modern because her culture encouraged "singing" your words, changing the pronunciation and rhythm of you spanish to achieve the greatest musicality, while most English people seems to be encouraged to speak individual words to a norm, without regard for context. Her point was that Spanish (in Mexico today) is spoken like the English of Shakespeare's day, while modern English sounds robotic.

And then there are those nations who's tongue so many people seem to find pretty, like the french and the italians. I read a Beeb correspendent's book the other day (several years old, admittedly), in which he claimed that said japanese advertisers seemed to have a mania for chattering itialians, even placing them incongruously in the background in uptown Tokyo scenes, sipping saki.

While I can't make a case closed logical argument for greater or lesser beauty of tongues, I think that some appeal to more primitive human emotional responses more than others, without the intervention of reason or cultural bias.

emphryio

Interesting Farren.

I'd just like to predict that Gurdur will find all languages equal in all the ways he decides to compare them because any other finding might contradict his thoughts on racism. I hope I'm wrong on thinking that of Gurdur.

99Percent

What about written languages? There are certainly distinct advantages between different written languages. For example spanish text is generally much longer than english text. Chinese text is much harder to learn and in fact it was designed that way on purpose so that only the nobility or those who had excess time could learn it.

Of course for computers, machine language is best, but which human language ports easiest on machine language? My guess is English.

Farren

I almost feel guilty shooting Gurdur down, because he's quite a charming chap with whom I share many left leaning views.

Sorry Gurdur.

But, I think in order for all languages to be equal along the axis of beauty, utility, precision etc, they would have to have an equal number of terms, be topologically equivalent (in terms of semantic networks), have the same sentence structure and be oriented towards the same cultural norms.

Also, Gurdur won't hug me, and suggested I hug a man with an exothermic pet instead.

Gurdur

Then stop feeling guilty, because you haven't shot me down.

Quite seriously, all you came out with were numerous unsubstantiated assertions, some of which are quite easily provably wrong.

And -- to put it bluntly --- as a professional in linguistics, I must really say that your *cough* *cough* criticisms leave me much unmoved, since you are obviously *cough* not terribly well-trained in this field; I'm far more worried about certain interesting aspects Rufus Atticus brought up, and I await with interest whether or not Copernicus, ksagnostic, Luiseach, Lisearea, Phaedrus, Tyler Durdane�and Hugo Holbling also join in ---- on this subject those are the people I fear, not the peanut gallery.
No offence intended.

All compliments are accepted.

No need to be.

You've got the question all wrong.

The basic premise that prompted me into starting with this thread here was the claim elsewhere by Jat that English was "better" than French; and I'll be showing not only that simply isn't so, I'll be going through a fair bit of sociolinguistics and structural linguistics as well, to look at other interesting questions.

Mind you, I more or less promised myself not to answer irrelevancies till I got my promised long posts done, and also I wanted to keep this thread free of irrelevant *cough* static; but I might as well change my mind, and look at all the fallacies inherent in your assertions.
I can always start a new thread for the real stuff.

I wasn't aware Sullster had an exothermic pet.


Are you sure you haven't gotten things are mixed up and wrong yet again ?

But never mind; feel free to think you've shot me down.

Luiseach

I would think that it would be a rather straightforward task to go about disproving a claim for either the superiority or the inferiority of anything at all.

Judgements of value presuppose criteria with which one would judge relative worth.

Shouldn't we be asking what the criteria for judging the value of languages are, and why these criteria themselves are being considered as indicators of relative value?

[Edited to add]

My hunch is that value judgements, and the criteria involved in making them, are politically motivated, not objective indicators of worth.