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| 45852 |
Something to think about.
Have you ever wondered how you know that what your reading really says what you think it says. How do you know that a is a and b is b. Or how do we know that C-A-T spells cat. Don't think about this too long, because it will mess you up.
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Language pair: English; German
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| 46063 |
Re:Something to think about.
These things can be decided by a simple
agreement. If we cannot tell for sure that
the letters C, A, and T stand for the
sound of "cat", we can always declare
that from now on they will stand for "cat".
Most of the time ortography develops
all by itself, without anybody paying
too much attention to its details, but
if the correspondence between written
and spoken words becomes too complicated,
quite soon there will be a committee who
creates a better ortography and declares
that "this is how we will write from
now on".
Korean language got a completely new
alphabet a few centuries ago. Irish
ortography has been renewed, and a few
years ago there was some fine-tuning
done with German, too. There has been
some discussion about renewing English,
too, but English is so widespread that
changing it globally would be a very
difficult task.
My mother tongue is Finnish, in which
each letter can be read in only one way.
Therefore it has never really occurred
to me that I could be unsure about the
words I read. The reasons why a certain
letter is read the way it is, can in
most cases be traced to the history of
the surrounding languages, all the way back
to the dawn of writing.
Puti
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Language pair: English; German
This is a reply to message # 45852
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| 46115 |
Re:Re:Something to think about.
Interesting. Thanks for the insight!
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Language pair: English; German
This is a reply to message # 46063
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| 46130 |
Re:Something to think about.
Message 1 of 2
Dwyn, I really love your question, because as a student of language and literature, this is something I’ve learned some interesting things about. As you say, it really can mess you up, and it’s been messing people up for centuries.
Part of the problem is, so few of us were around when they decided to call those silly creatures C-A-Ts, and we’ve never been able to figure out what they were thinking of at the time. It’s very interesting, too, that so many words for cat in so many different languages are very similar: Cat, chat, katze, gato kedi, just to name a few. It almost looks like the same word, only just spelled differently, and it’s easy to think that there is something inherently “cat”ish about cats, that makes the word “cat” the only meaningful word we could call these things by. There’s a great line from Mel Brooks, “The 2000 Year Old Man,” when Karl Reiner asks, “why do we call a nose a nose?” and the 2000 year old man answers, “Well, what are you gonna blow, your eyes?” There is something about the words we use that makes them seem like there’s something inherently “right” about them, like no other word would effectively express what they express. On the other hand, look at the word “Tree.” In Spanish, it’s “árbol,” and “baum” in German. There is nothing to connect these words. Often we name things using some sense of onomatopoea, such as the Romans who came up with the word, “barbarian” to describe hoards of “uncivilized” soldiers whose language sounded like they were saying “Barbarbarbar.” But ultimately, words are completely arbitrary. They work, as Puti wisely points out, for no other reason than that we have all agreed to use them in the ways we do.
Dwyn asked about letters like, “Why is a a and b b?” As with the words, they are purely arbitrary. Compare the alphabet we use, for example, with that used by languages such as Russian, using cyrillic alphabets, or Greek. And then try comparing all of these alphabets to written languages such as ancient Egyptian or Chinese where there aren’t letters at all; they write down idiograms that represent ideas, whole words, and nothing there tells you how to pronounce the word. You have to know how to say it.
(Continued)
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Language pair: English; All
This is a reply to message # 45852
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| 46132 |
Re:Something to think about.
Message 2 of 3
There have been some interesting theories about language and its relationship to the reality it describes. Ferdinand de Saussere developed this theory called structuralism—it’s the study of how meaning is connected to symbols. DeSaussure created this new idea which he called a sign – it’s a little different from what we mean by a sign normally. For de Saussure, a sign was a very particular thing that consisted of two parts. The signifier is any symbol representing an idea. This could be a picture of a cat, or the word “cat” or a paw print which informs us that a cat has been present. The other part of the sign is the signified, and it represents the idea in our mind of what we’re trying to describe. It is not a physical thing in the world. Actually, things in the world are classified as signifiers, because they reflect ideas in our minds, and in fact, we create them or describe them based on our ideas of them, more than on the things themselves. Saussure was the one who made a point to mention that the relatinoships between the signifiers and signifieds are completely arbitrary, but he hoped to nail down a way to perfect language so that we could express anything we ever wanted to complete accuracy.
Now de Saussure’s discovery that language has a purely arbitrary connection to meaning has a very interesting connection to the first question you asked, about multilingualism. Remember how easy it was for us to fall into thinking that there was something special about this word “cat” that made it’s relationship to the animal look like some we could think of as “right” or “wrong”? Then we looked at the tree and saw that there were a whole bunch of things we could call it. By looking at other languages we were able to see that our words for things had arbitrary connections, the words only felt right because they were the words we’ve been using all our lives, not because there is anything magic about them. This is an example of what I was saying before about how knowing about different languages helps us to get unstuck for limited ways of thinking.
(Continued)
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Language pair: English; All
This is a reply to message # 45852
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| 46133 |
Re:Something to think about.
Message 3 of 3
Anyway, when Saussure was trying to perfect language, we learned instead that not only do have no ultimate connection between the words and the ideas we tie them to, but that there will never be any way to solidify those connections. They are always unstable, and if you pick at the words just a little bit, they’ll all always come apart on you. That was discovered by Jacque Derrida, who just died a few montsh ago. His theory is called deconstruction. I’m sure he sat up in his grave and beamed when you posted your wonderful question, because that was excactly the kind of stuff Derrida spend his life wrestling with. There is nothing about a that makes it a, and nothing about b that makes it b. In fact, in Russia, b isn’t b at all, but v. C is S, and P is R. In Greek, X is Ch and H is e. In Arabic, b is t and T is h.
Anyway, Puti’s answer to your question was perfect; I hope having a little more of the background on it was interesting. Words mean what they mean because we all agree that they do, and we all reserve the right to renegotiate what the words mean at any time. You think I’m wrong? Go to your library, and find the Oxford English Dictionary. Look up the word “smart” and see how the meaning of the word has changed over time. Try it with the word, “dumb.” That which we call “sky” today was the whelkin in another age. Language, written or oral, is nothing but a rough social contract by which we enable ourselves to share ideas.
Mark Springer
Sacramento, CA USA
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Language pair: English; All
This is a reply to message # 45852
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| 46219 |
Re:Something to think about.
As far as I know, the Roman letters,
together with all other scripts of same
origin, are descendants of images or
hieroglyphs. The letter A was originally
a head of an ox, and B was a house; even
its Hebrew name "beth" can be taken
to mean "house". The letters went through
many transformations before they ended up
into the shape in which we use them now.
Therefore also the strange-looking Greek,
Hebrew, or other letters are actually the
same A's and B's we use, they have just
gone through a slightly different changes
in their shape.
A similar process exists in Chinese, too.
A Chinese character corresponds one
monosyllabic word, and the character is
more or less the image of the object
the word describes. However, when
a Chinese writer writes foreign words
whose meaning he does not understand,
he must use the characters phonetically,
regardless of what objects they depict.
This is why the name "Finland", pronounced
in Chinese as "Fenlan", is written with
two characters meaning "the fragrance of
an orchid", even though orchids have
no real relationship with our northern,
snowy country. However, many Chinese have
become interested in Finland, because
"it has so beautiful name".
Korean script is a conscious and sudden
invention, and therefore the shape of the
letters has also been decided in
a definite manner: at least the consonants
are supposed to describe the shape of lips
or tongue when the consonant is
pronounced.
Puti
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Language pair: English; German
This is a reply to message # 45852
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| 46900 |
Re:Re:Something to think about.
Wow. So, if I read that right, this: Gweb h movw swa could easily be: Have a nice day. So letters aren't solid/permanent, they can change any time?
Only no one will change them because everyone has known them all there lives and if we were to suddenly change our letters many people would never learn. It would be a big hassle, and a major detriment to our education. We would have to re-learn how to read and write. I never thought of it that way.
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Language pair: English; German
This is a reply to message # 46133
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| 46969 |
The Art of language
Yes. But even more so than that. “Zhu4 ni3 hao3” could mean have a nice day (and does in Chinese). “Stop picking your nose, you ugly bobo” could mean have a nice day.
Yes, letters change over time, and they change quite a bit. Compare Modern English to Middle English. There was a letter in the alphabet that we don’t use anymore, what we call a “thorn” which used to represent the th sound, and looked like this þing (thing). There was another one for the voiced th sound we use in the word ðis (this). You know all of those silent letters that plague us through grammar school? Guess what? They weren’t always silent. The e’s at the ends of words, the k’s preceding n’s at the beginning? We used to pronounce them all. There were no such things as silent gh’s, because gh was always pronounced like the German “ch”.
But words change, too, and in remarkable ways. “He” used to mean “she.” And it would be really interesting if it were more widely known that “man” used to mean “human being”, and that the individual genders were called “wereman” (yes, just like “werewolf” which comes form the same word and really means “male person wolf”.) and wifeman (which later changed to woman).
And although we do resist change quite a bit, it happens anyway in spite of our best efforts. It used to be really important to know when to use “who” and when to use “whom” for example. Nowadays, we’d kind of rather everyone just use “who” in any case.
The word, “different” used to require the preposition “from” when you wanted to distinguish one thing from another: “Snow is different from sleet.” “Different than” used to work only in a comparison of differences. “Compared to water, snow is more different than sleet is” But now, people seem to prefer different than in both cases.
And there are problems when changes happen. Old farts like me get uncomfortable when you whippersnappers run around saying, “different than”s and “who should I give this to?” And we may argue about it sometimes— at least those more ornery than I who think there is such a thing as “the right way” to speak. The rest of us just feel uncomfortable, and we either get used to it or we don’t, but either way, the world spins on, and there ain’t a damn thing we can do about it.
The good thing, though, is that the language doesn’t change too fast, not like that great Mark Twain citation in message 20053. Pretty much, we can keep up with the changes if it’s important to us to do that.
But I think it’s pretty fascinating watching them happen.
Nice to see you again Dwyn! Talk to you soon.
Mark Springer
Sacramento, CA USA
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Language pair: English; German
This is a reply to message # 46900
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| 47180 |
Re:The Art of language
> “Zhu4 ni3 hao3” could mean have a nice
> day (and does in Chinese). “Stop picking
> your nose, you ugly bobo” could mean have
> a nice day.
>
Onomatopoetic words are a special case
that do not yield as easily to arbitrary
choices as the other words. Most people
agree that "boom" is a good word for
describing an explosion, while "splosh"
and "tweet" are not. These words may get
new meanings besides the previously
existing ones, but the sounds cannot
easily get new such words to describe
them, as the words are defined by the
properties of our ears and brains.
These descriptive words are not limited
to sounds, but they can also be used
for visual and other types of impressions.
Japanese language has a wealth of such
words describing not only how a thing
sounds, but also how it looks or feels,
or what kind of general impression it
gives. Some nouns and adjectives in
western languages may actually have
similar background, too.
Puti
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Language pair: English; German
This is a reply to message # 46969
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| 47234 |
Peking pork
Hi Puti, Dwyn!
This is true, but only up to a point. Animal sounds are the classic examples of onomatopoeia, and yet it is amazing how divergent the different words are to describe these sounds. In English, the pig says "oink, oink," which doesn’t sound like a pig's grunting sound. In Croatian, it's "Rok-rok," which does. In French, "groin groin", and in Japanese, "buubuu." In German, they don't even try to pronounce it, rendering it as "Schweine grunzen," or "pig grunts." The differences are largely caused by phonological differences between the different languages. But each case, the problem is how to render in a particular language, a sound that does not exist in that language. This requires approximations and substitutions, all of which will be chosen by largely random rationale.
An excellent example arbitrary approximation is in the different ways we have pronounced Beijing in English. Pre-World War II, we called it Peking. These are two equally rational efforts to pronounce a word that does not exist in the English language. Neither is more correct than the other. In fact, neither is correct at all. The Chinese sounds that we render as P or B, as K or J do not exist in English, and they are about equally close to the two different approximations we've used--the P and the K or the B and the J. So we made arbitrary choices and pronounced it one way at first, and we use another way now. But even those translations are missing critical information that contains important meaning in Chinese. Chinese is a tonal language, and without tones, meaning is highly ambiguous. But the English language has no tones. Therefore, tones necessarily get stripped from words coming to us from the Chinese, and a huge chunk of the meaning bearing information is arbitrarily eliminated from the words.
Coming back to the onomatopoeia, words of this nature seem to be somehow less arbitrary than other words, and they are somewhat. However, the decision to invoke onomatopoeia in forming a word is arbitrary--many words that could be onomatopoeic are not. Look at the German for "oink oink." And since onomatopoeia can only be approximated in language, arbitrary decisions must often be made in order to render the sound pronounceable to the speakers of the given language. Since the phonology of any language is arbitrary (there's no reason why Chinese should have the ability to pronounce Beijing properly and not English speakers; that's just how it worked out), the limitations that influence the production of an onomatopoeic expression are ultimately arbitrary as well.
Mark Springer
Sacramento, CA USA
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Language pair: English; All
This is a reply to message # 47180
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| 47354 |
Re:Peking pork
> In English, the pig says "oink, oink,"
> which doesn’t sound like a pig's grunting
> sound. In Croatian, it's "Rok-rok," which
> does. In French, "groin groin", and in
> Japanese, "buubuu."
>
I think that here English, Croatian and
French have captured similar features
of pig's sound, namely gruff start (spelled
with 'r' or 'gr') and rising formants
(spelled with 'oi'). While the words are
different, they have quite much in common.
English "oink" has smooth start -- could
this be because English has no suitable
trills or gutturals to use here?
Japanese "buu" is quite different from
the others; it seems to me that Japanese
phonology compels the speakers to
underline different parts of pig's
sound, as the above-mentioned gutturals
and consonant clusters are not available.
However, like the other languages, also
Japanese catches the plosive-like initial
and the dominating low formant ('u') in
the beginning.
All the sounds are, of course, mere
approximations, as pig's vocal tract
cannot produce exact human phonemes and
vice versa.
Puti
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Language pair: English; All
This is a reply to message # 47234
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| 47355 |
Re:Peking pork
> But each case, the problem is how to
> render in a particular language, a sound
> that does not exist in that language.
> This requires approximations and
> substitutions, all of which will be
> chosen by largely random rationale.
>
I agree. It often gives me goose bumps
to see the valiant struggle of Asian
people spelling their languages with
insufficient Roman alphabet. The Chinese
must have been especially hard pressed
when they mapped their ten sibilants on
the Roman letters.
Puti
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Language pair: English; All
This is a reply to message # 47234
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