Discussing language, it is interesting how cultural forces shape the evolution of different tongues. German, for instance, contains many very long words that are particularly difficult for native English speakers to get a grasp on.

While I risk getting far out of my depth, the reason for the length is the method of creating new German words. Compound words are very common, and the method of creating them is simply to pile a bunch of words that contain parts of the concept on top of one another - sort of a linguistic orgy. Thus, you get words like "Selbstbedienungsladen", which means a self-service outlet or store; "selbst"=self, "bedienenungs"=to use or to serve, and "laden"=store.

[ March 13, 2002: Message edited by: ronb ]

[ March 14, 2002: Message edited by: Trespasser ]

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Yes, I am never contested in anything I say, you got that right.

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And, I should add, "erudite."

[ March 14, 2002: Message edited by: Mandos ]

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A propos of very little, I have found that my French accent improves greatly if I speak through gritted teeth. I don't know why that should be so, but it is. Speaking French certainly does require me to do unaccustomed things with my face, and while that perhaps needn't affect my mind, it happens to.

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Speaking French certainly does require me to do unaccustomed things with my face, and while that perhaps needn't affect my mind, it happens to.

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You got me thinking about my acting school days, skdadl....

One of the most amazing and powerful discoveries for me as an actor was that language and physicality are closely connected. I studied a discipline of movement called Choreology, developed by a choreographer named Rudolph Laban, who later adapted the theory for actors, and was later used by a group of psychologists in Britain as a diagnostic tool. It was also used to determine strengths of individual workers in WWII to increase factory efficiency. More about Laban, if interested:

http://www.medialab.chalmers.se/projects/motion_space/history.html

Anyway, different languages require different motions of face and body, consequently this affects emotional/psychological state of the speaker. Within any language you also have variations on how the language is spoken -- dialects based on location, class... Your accent can actually affect your physicality.

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..."language itself"

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...Which is a philosophical question, and not the question that should be asked of researchers of computational linguistics. Look, to turn things a bit more civil here, the thing is, Mandos, you always translate philosophical or questions of political theory or theoretical psychoanalysis, into your own field of study and methodological preferences, which is the move that I refuse to follow. That Kristeva thing that you wanted justification for through your own favourite validity-reaching means, was a philosophical proposition.

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Yes, and thinking happens somewhat differently in different languages. Some writers (like Kristeva) even argue that a new language is a "new sex, new skin": if your entire body is a resonating box for the sounds you produce, and the sounds radically change when you cross the border...

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I have a question for you, Tres -- Having two languages, do you find that your accent changes somewhat with your mood?

I know my accent in French improves markedly depending on my psychological state.... So I was just curious...

[ March 14, 2002: Message edited by: Zoot Capri ]

[ March 14, 2002: Message edited by: Zoot Capri ]

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..Which is a philosophical question, and not the question that should be asked of researchers of computational linguistics. Look, to turn things a bit more civil here, the thing is, Mandos, you always translate philosophical or questions of political theory or theoretical psychoanalysis, into your own field of study and methodological preferences, which is the move that I refuse to follow. That Kristeva thing that you wanted justification for through your own favourite validity-reaching means, was a philosophical proposition.

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If the sorts of things you wish to study as a social and philosophical proposition are also the sorts of things that I wish to study as a cognitive and computational proposition, then we have a conflict. An interesting one, but a conflict nonetheless. We have a conflict about the philosophy of language, an area in which I do have an amateur's interest in. If we blur the distinction between mind and body, then I must object--I claim that there must be such a distinction and that it is unblurrable except in what we don't know.

So we have two conflicts here: the democratic nature of the search for validity of propositions, and the philosophy of language. Both of us can't be right. You may be way more qualified than me in certain areas of social philosophy but that doesn't mean that I should plan to exclude myself from discussing it with reference to language.

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And you just don't translate philosophy and free thinking that way, you know, especially not with people who hold a vocabulary alien to yours. Doing that means not listening, or having a conversation with yourself. So when someone refuses to converse with you on your own terms, don't be surprised.

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And don't get bitter or sarcastic.

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I have always had a rather loosely-derived idea about how closely language controls the pattern of thought. Of course I got thumped for this on ane earlier thread, but I will simply rest my case by pointing out that the word "privatization" or the verb derived from it did not exist in any dictionary prior to 1980. This indicates that such a concept didn't exist in the consciousness of the western world generally, and thus, there was no word to describe in a compact manner the concept (ideologically rooted) that governments should always sell off corporations they own.

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Then what about the reverse? It has long been my position that even though language is the medium through which these things pass, is it really language that is being affected? Or aren't our other modules of cognition that really are ideologically oriented being affected, and in turn driving the linguistic system to make other choices.

(Without presuming to tell people what to write) The concept I was trying to get at with my first post was the way cultural and societal influences affect language. As opposed to how language affects society.

I was reading an interesting study I found on the web that was done a few years ago on Swiss German attitudes towards English words and phrases. I'll quote a bit here.

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Age-group 1 (61 years old and above)

This was a group of ten retired people. Nine members of this group had very limited knowledge of English and the same nine people were extremely critical of the widespread use of English vocabulary in German texts.

Associations for the English words were frequently negative or simply not expressed.

Age-group 2 (41-60 years old)

The 20-40 year-old age-group was a heterogeneous group from the point of view of professions. It was observed during the collation of data that informants' attitudes depended more upon educational background than age for both Age-group 2 and 3.

Age-group 3 (21-40 years old)

In most respects the results recorded for this group closely matched those for Age-group 2. Age-group 3 consisted of informants from a variety of professions, with a slightly higher proportion of members of the B-category professions than Age-group 2.

Age-group 4 (15-20 years old)

This was the most homogeneous of the age-groups and also the largest, consisting of students in full-time education and apprentices taking day-release courses in English. Ten members of this group read only youth magazines and comics, 28 read a selection of newspapers including their local weekly newspaper and occasionally the NZZ. Approximately 80% of this group watched television for over twenty hours per week.

Many younger people preferred English slogans to possible German translations. For instance in the case of Fun 4 You it was felt that the word fun encapsulated emotions that could not be adequately captured by German Plausch, Spass, or Vergnügen, and that the use of you saved one from having to decide between du and Sie.

This group expressed the fewest negative associations in relation to the 25 items of English vocabulary. New loanwords and unassimilated slogans were particularly popular.

Over half of the informants, including nearly all of Age-group 4, claimed to like English. It was associated with American fashions and music, and with a free, relaxed life-style. A number of young people claimed that all new things come from America, and with the object comes the terminology. Members of Age-groups 3 and 4 admitted to paying more attention to advertising than the older informants: in particular they felt that if an American product is advertised, like Voyager, the use of an American English slogan such as Built to Set You Free is perfectly acceptable.

A small number of young people explained that peer group pressures play a significant role: English expressions are fashionable (in, cool, up-to-date, elegant). Young people claimed to use English words because everyone else does, because they thought them phonetically more desirable than German words (`English tönt besser'), and because they thought that other people liked to hear them (`es spricht die Leute mehr an'). Amongst older people slightly different social pressures apply: `man muss up-to-date sein' (? ironic). A number of informants from Age-groups 2 and 3 who admitted to using English vocabulary regularly wished to appear up-to-date and sophisticated (`weltoffen', `weltmännisch').

Overuse of foreign vocabulary was seen as elitist by many informants from Age-groups 1-3, and particularly the members of Age-group 1, 9 of whom had learnt no foreign languages: each of these 9 people criticised the media and contemporary advertising techniques, which they regarded as obscuring the advertising message.

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[ March 14, 2002: Message edited by: MJ ]

Failure to understand compounding in English is, I notice, very, very, common, and often leads to mischaracterizations like Fowler's stupid little articles on the "noun adjective" (O irony!) or "headline language" (O double irony!), which disparage very old (6000 years or more!), natural, and entrenched features of the language that immensely add to its suppleness, richness, and character. It also leads to stupid overcorrections like the British practice, which can only be a 19th century innovation, of not putting the first member of a compound in its stem form if its sense is plural, e.g. "drugs problem" or "incomes policy" instead of "income policy". I'm actually going on a hunch here, I haven't studied the history of it, but as it goes against Indo-European usage, and, more narrowly, Germanic usage, including N. American English usage, I am assuming it is a relatively recent innovation; at any rate, by all those measures, it is wrong and misinformed, and comes from the idea that Fowler potted, that the first word is a noun-adjective (which all adjectives are!).

The only popular source I have seen that has a real grip on compounding in English is Thomas McArthur's The Oxford Companion to the English Language under "compound word". The large grammar of the English language by Randolph Quirk et al., as well as its abridgement for college students, are also good.

Let's look at the compound word "employment policy". How do we know it's a compound? Well, first off, there are two nouns in a row! But also, if you want to unpack these two words, you have to paraphrase, usually by adding prepositions: "a policy on employment". At the phonological level, the compound is marked by a shift in intonation, so that the first member is stressed, and higher-pitched, and both stress and pitch fall off rapidly as you get to the second member. See with examples:

job training
message board
chocolate factory
book review

And, to punch a hole in Fowler's stupid notion once and for all, the first member of a compound can also be an adjective. Compare, "I live in a white house" with "President Bush lives in the White House". "white house" vs. "White House", intonation is totally different because the latter is a compound word whose first member is an adjective.

Etc.

In longer compounds the intonation pattern usually mirrors the syntactic relationship. E.g.
"income policy briefing paper" which is a four-membered compound that logically divides into two compounds of two members each; still the primary stress is on the first member of the larger compound, but there is a duplication of the basic pattern in the second pair, with a secondary stress on "briefing".

And on and on. I happen to have a little expertise on this topic.

[ March 14, 2002: Message edited by: rasmus_raven ]

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the first word is a noun-adjective (which all adjectives are!).

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"income policy briefing paper"

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I beg your pardon?

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The primary definition of the headword "adjective," used as a noun substantive, given in the OED, is:

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B. sb. The adj. used absol.
1.
a. A `Noun Adjective' (see A. 1.); one of the Parts of Speech.

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income-policy briefing paper

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...including under the appellation of a noun-adjective, a noun substantive employed in that
character in the mode which is so happily in use in the English language, and which gives it, in comparison with every language in
which this mode is not in use, a most eminently and incontestably useful advantage.

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Here, on the other hand, is a fragment from Sir Hornbook; or, Childe Launcelot'S Expedition: A Grammatico-allegorical Ballad by THOMAS LOVE PEACOCK:

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And now a wider space they gained,
A steeper, harder ground,
Where by one ample wall contained,
All earthly things they found: [12]

All beings, rich, poor, weak, or wise,
Were there, full strange to see,
And attributes and qualities
Of high and low degree.

Before the circle stood a knight,
Sir Substantive his name, [13]
With Adjective, his lady bright,
Who seemed a portly dame;

Yet only seemed; for whenso'er
She strove to stand alone, [14]
She proved no more than smoke and air,
Who looked like flesh and bone.

And therefore to her husband's arm
She clung for evermore,
And lent him many a grace and charm
He had not known before;

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Which the footnotes explain thus:

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13 Nouns are of two kinds, substantives and adjectives. A noun substantive declares its own meaning, and requires not another word to be joined with it to show its signification; as, man, book, apple.

14 A noun adjective cannot stand alone, but always requires to be joined with a substantive, of which it shows the nature or quality, as, "a good girl," -- "a naughty boy."

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[ March 14, 2002: Message edited by: MJ ]

Kristeva is too hard for me, so I can't contribute there, but I do know that language can change the content of my conversation, at least slightly.

For example, when speaking Spanish, if I am looking for a word for "messy disorder", I am likely to choose "quilombo", which comes from Argentine Spanish. But it refers to a kind of bacchanalian celebration of the once-local native people, and is consequently used for a range of things which "messy disorder" isn't.

So, the imagery of a comment changes drastically, and consequently so do the associations. That means I am understood SLIGHTLY differently, even though the general idea gets through all the same.

To tell you the truth, I don't enjoy everything that Kristeva writes either. (And she can be quite conservative with regards to gender roles and parent-child separation, for instance.) But this book (Strangers to Ourselves) I read, like, seven times. I'm paraphrasing some propositions here:

Exile always involves shattering of the former body.
Foreigner is deprived of one's mother (as Camus knew well), upon adoption of a non-mother-tongue.
But then being deprived of one's parents, isn't that where feedom begins?
Your first language remains in nocturnal memories of your own body as a handicapped child, cherished and useless.
Being alienated from myself, no matter how painful it may be, opens up a distance from myself that may be perversely pleasurable.
And so on.

A couple of observations.

In Inuktitut, the word for social worker became something like... "person who comes in airplane to work with the people" The whole language is just an accumulation of aquired experiences .

My employer was trying to do a survey among the client of my particular team to assess among other things, client satisfaction. This was aimed at recipients of mental health services. Questions included such things as whether the clients felt free to refuse meds, felt free to decline service, and felt that they were full participants in establishing their treatment goals.

Most of our clients have Tamil or Somali as first or only languages. My Tamil and Somali team mates found themselves unable to do relevant translations of the questions as they applied to the wishes of the questionaire. This had to do with fundamental differences regarding authority structures between western and eastern cultures. Both the Somali and Tamil languages posed different problems, but they both required a substantial reframing of the original concept.

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In Inuktitut, the word for social worker became something like... "person who comes in airplane to work with the people" The whole language is just an accumulation of aquired experiences .

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