Loosely Assembled » linguistics

Thinking Outside the Bounding Box

fekaylius — Wed, 03 Nov 2010 19:56:44 +0000

In his refreshingly multi-faceted project about the gradual evolution of what we now describe as “the public”, David Cayley dives into one pair of contributing factors that really caught my attention: the institutionalization, canonicalization and therefore social elevation of common vernacular tongues (like French and English) alongside the proliferation of popular cartography. The gist of the argument is that this combination of talking about talking and conceptualizing oneself as a member of a group defined by geography and language helped bring about the idea of self conscious human agency, belonging, and citizenship, providing a new affiliation infrastructure in place of the officially defunct system of monastic and parish based guilds.

I see the shadow of a similar change happening within the current world of Geography related to the contentious neologism “Neogeography” and all the agnostic advances and changes taking place under this monicker of ill repute. In the above mentioned episode there is a story about Joachim De Bellay and his poetry gang’s manifesto on renovating the shabby provincial French language into something capable of expressing grand poetic vision. In this manifesto (Défense et illustration de la langue française) a relatively new term “patrie” (fatherland) is heavily used and advocated but the entrenched defenders of the status quo retaliated with the sentiment, “Those of us with a country (pays) have no need for your fatherland (patrie).” Perhaps the recent deletion of Wikipedia’s page on Neogeography should be taken as a similar expression of defensive self preservation by a status quo uninterested in the elevation and expansion of location based practice? “Those of us with Geography have no need for your Neogeography.”

Part of the idea behind this French linguistic renovation was that a dualistic relationship to the language needed to be in place for it to be more fully understood, analyzed, and exploitable. The language had to be spoken and dissected, internalized and externalized. This could only be achieved if the language was made foreign again, self alienated, reread. I suspect the new organic world of the Neogeographic vernacular will likewise play a role in the rebirth of spatial expression into a form more capable of elegantly handling the increasing complexity of interaction between people, places, things, ideas, and time.

Viva la Neogeography! Shoutouts to @schuyler for getting that page back up, @ajturner and @dianneisnor for their prolific and glamorous use of the term and all the others involved in thinking outside the bounding box!

Linguistics of Loyalty

fekaylius — Fri, 25 Jun 2010 18:19:24 +0000

Does your product or service have users, members, consumers, customers, patrons, or players? Do you and your team refer to them in a consistent way? Do the people who interact with your app even know what they are to you and what you are to them? Is the relationship clearly defined? Does it matter?

Could vernacularly empowering and agency imbuing terms be a viable loyalty boosting tactic?

Frienemy vs Enemigo

fekaylius — Wed, 28 Apr 2010 17:23:28 +0000

Welcome to another installment of the Outsider Linguistics series, where I propose new and unfounded causation models for societal paradigms via casually perceived linguistic quirks. This installment looks at relationships and word appendages between friends and enemies, and attempts to propose a model that connects the way we speak to the way we see the world.

Plausibly originating in the arts, the word frienemy attempts to perform a balancing act between the boolean concepts of friend and enemy, most commonly indicating that the term ‘enemy’ is the root concept, thinly veiled by the suffixation of the nearly complete “frien”. A frienemy is someone who appears to be, or starts out being, your friend, but reveals himself to be your enemy, although possibly without disrupting the friendship. Regardless of the etymology, our common English understanding of friend and enemy posits them as polar opposites, concepts that have no relationship to each other besides their opposition. Friends and enemies don’t come from the same places, don’t share a common root, don’t have the ability to change sides, cannot transform or migrate. They are purely distinct and repel each other. This is where the power of the term frienemy comes from, it’s the dangerous and tenuous balance between these naturally opposed forces.

Many years ago, I found it amusing and quaint that in Spanish, the words for friend and enemy were closely related, amigo and enemigo. Amusing because the linguistic pattern matching part of my brian is ticklish, and quaint because it was clear to me at the time that a less distinct cut between the expression of these concepts represented less experience in, or a lack of honest evaluation of, the harsh realities of the world (i was in high school ok?). If spanish speakers see their enemies as simply ‘un-friends’ does this mean there could be potential migration back and forth between these two states? Are these relationship states simply different sides of the same coin, endpoints on a slider, or are they more akin to oil and water, fundamentally different? Could these specific questions be related to the nature of all conceptual opposites?

Several years later, as part of an art based propaganda war between rival meme gangs (CitAC and N.I.N.E.), one widely distributed sticker dared it’s readers to “stop pretending you have no enemies”. It could have also read, “stop pretending opposites don’t exist.”

Frienemy is still a rarely printed word, but it recently showed up in a headline of an article about the future relationship between the governments and economies of China and the United States. I wanted to know if more languages follow the English model or the Spanish model, and if anything could be learned from this about our cultural connections to the ideas of opposition.

A very quick survey of some languages available through google’s translation tool (limited to roman based characters) reveals the following pairings.

friend as the root:
ami ou ennemi (french)
amigo o enemigo (spanish)
mik apo armik (albanian)
amic o enemic (catalan)
prijatelj ili neprijatelj (croatian)
přítel nebo nepřítel (czech)
priateľ alebo nepriateľ (slovak)
vinur eða óvinur (icelandic)
amico o nemico (italian)

enemy as the root:

related but not using modification through appendage:
vriend of vyand (afrikaans)
vriend of vijand (dutch)
Freund oder Feind (german)
zanmi oswa lènmi (haitian creole)

seemingly not related:
cara nó namhaid (irish)
teman atau musuh (malay)
rafiki au adui (swahili)
arkadaş ya da düşman (turkish)
ffrind neu gelyn (welsh)
ħabib jew ghadu (maltese)
friend or enemy (english)

Has a mashed up term like frienemy also evolved in Irish, Malay, Swahili, Turkish, Welsh and Maltese? Is the concept of a backstabbing friend, or a wolf in sheep’s clothing, as culturally powerful in these places as it is in our own?

The larger group, that does use friend as the common root, would presumably have a tough time inventing words that sit between their already intimate terms. Is there no need for further disambiguation between ami and ennemi? Are these cultures more tolerant of differences in general? less prone to violence? more cooperative? How do their political structures relate to their languages? Do these languages have more examples of appending suffixes to denote opposites? Is there a difference in how a language sorts verbal polarity internally? Does it matter if we are talking about polarity in nature or culture? between objects or people?

English makes at least one notable use of the suffixed polarity model with male and female. If we had completely unrelated representations of these concepts, would we understand each other more or less fluently? Would we feel more or less antagonism? Would we have more of less equality in the work place?

Can the structural relationships of our words predispose our cultural emotions and priorities?

The Constraints of Counting, and Other Segmentation Constructs

fekaylius — Fri, 27 Mar 2009 02:29:16 +0000

I just heard Daniel Everett talking about the unique language and culture of this small Amazonian tribe, and it’s been churning my mind around and around. For me there are a few interesting threads to follow, and as always, I’m interested in your thoughts on where to go with this knowledge.

The Pirahã language has no numbers or concept of counting (only terms for “relatively small” and “relatively large”); no kinship terms beyond immediate children and parents; no “left” and “right” (only “upriver” and “downriver”); no named distinction of past and future (only near time and far time); no creation stories or myths; and—most important for linguists—no recursion.

Numbers, Universal Segmentation, and Individuality
The lack of numbers and counting, while being at first utterly unimaginable, does strike some familiar conceptual chords once accepted as a potential reality. Numbers, and counting of objects, essentially rely on a conceptual framework where boundaries exist. This fish is separate from that fish. A culture, a worldview, liberated from the numeric grid, can simply see EVERYTHING as a substance, a continuous, flowing, merged, unified mass of stuff. Fish are like water, there is no need to count water, you just take what you need, and you know how much is enough. Perhaps abundance, or at least non-scarcity are prerequisites for this?

Does a lack of numbers indicate a world view with a low level of universal segmentation? If an individual fish is seen as part of a massive entity, of a substance, of a part of nature which doesn’t have naturally differentiated units, then humans might also fit right into that framework as well.

A World Without Before
Creation myths are irrelevant within a purely stable world. Asking what the world was like before the current state of things only makes sense in a world of change. Western modernism, and urbanization in general, seem to be building or offering stability (at least saturating itself with materials and references that connote this) but it might be this same (encroaching) stability that puts an end to a way of life, a culture, and a language born of the real thing.

Systemic Attribution (or Empirical Gradients) and the 4th Dimension
Apparently their verb formations include a built in way to trace back the source of the information being relayed. For example, if you said, “He went fishing”, this utterance would contain embedded information as to how you know this, if you heard it from someone else, if you saw it yourself, if you inferred it from evidence, etc.

Does this integrated (attribution oriented, and seemingly gradient) empiricism also represent a more sophisticated notion of interconnection? Is this a social reputation system?

Is there a way to consider this invisible chain of perpetual attribution as an alternative to our own 4th dimension (time)?

Delineation vs Happiness
Combine low universal segmentation with highly integrated empiricism and consider if these realities are causal contributors to their standing as one of the planet’s happiest people. In other words, do time and numbers prevent us from being happy?

This tribe is truly rejecting binary dualism!

So many more nuggets of ideas tightly woven into this talk, it’ll have to be revisited again.
Listen to the MP3.

(Via longnow.org.)

The role of linguistics in the rise of individualism

fekaylius — Tue, 01 Jul 2008 06:29:43 +0000

What does it mean that English, and other subject-verb-object languages, might have veered off-course from the dominant (hard wired? or simply ancient?) subject-object-verb model? A recent study shows that despite one’s native linguistic model, non-verbal communication will follow the subject-object-verb format, both gesturally, and diagrammatically. Basically, when people try to communicate with just their hands, they will create “sentences” following the “mice cheese eat” model even if their spoken language would follow a “mice eat cheese” format. The study seems to indicate that the English model is a variant of something more automatic. Why would this kind of change happen?

Could this “promotion” of the verb (and the subsequent “demotion” of the subject) be tied to a cultural deficiency in empathy, our imperialist tendencies or even the rise of individualism? The latter being specifically an effect of object/subject polarization. This same polarization can also be tied to differences between Eastern and Western perceptions of “subject in context” images. The Western description being along the lines of, “a fish in a pond”, while the Eastern version would be more like, “a pond with a fish”.

I guess this still leaves us short when it comes to unravelling Master Yoda’s verb-object-subject format, or whatever he does.