Languages and Thought

rufio wrote:

Setanta, I really have no interest in becoming an expert on the Romans. If you read that in my post, I'm sorry I wasn't blunt enough to hammer through your skull. I don't know much about the Romans. I really don't give a **** about them except as far as their language was concerned. But even I can think of a few things that don't fit with your "Roman personality". You don't even have to be very educated to empirically disprove generalizations, because all you need is ONE example? Funny how that works, isn't it?

As for German, it's a well-known fact that German is related rather closely to English, perhaps you should educate yourself. Look, I'm not even going to go make you read book after book and tax your reading comprehension skills further. Here's a VERY breif history of the English language - online, too, no less:

http://www.wordorigins.org/histeng.htm

Hey clown, get a grip. Don't you make the sweeping generalizations from the profundity of your all too evident ignorance, and you won't get called for the stupid **** you spew. Since you place so much value on majors and minors in university, i majored in English and History. So i can tell you don't know squat about the Romans--and that doesn't stop you from saying horseshit things about them. I can also tell you don't know squat about the origins of English, or at least you don't display any sophisticated knowledge of the subject when you come here and make the ludicrous contention that English derives from German.

Frankly, when i read your posts, in which you attempt to teach others who in fact know more of the subjects under discussion than do you, i get a picture of a great braying jackass . . .

0 Replies

I've just finished reading Steven Pinker's book, The Language Instinct, which covers most of the areas discussed in this thread. Pinker discusses among other things: Chomsky's Universal Grammar theory, the origins of early language, similarities between ASL and verbal languages, language centres of the brain, and lots more.

I'll also mention that the 200 words the eskimos have for snow is an Urban Legend, it's somewhere closer to twelve.

I'm afraid to disappoint some of you, but it's widely accepted that English is a Germanic Language. Please feel free to read:
http://www.wordorigins.org/histeng.htm

Also, English was influenced by Latin because, up to a few centuries ago Latin was considered the language of the educated. If you wanted to be someone, you'd end up speaking Latin, Greek, and English. It might have been unclear before, but the first English speakers were descended from Angles and Saxons (both Germanic tribes), French speaking Normans, or Norsemen, and Vikings. Original English speakers weren't descended from the Romans.

Iain

0 Replies

Iain, i don't for a moment dispute the Germanic origins of English. Rufio here has a habit of pontificating, and i objected to the thoroughly unsupportable statement that English derives from German. Had the joker stated that English and German have common origins, it would have drawn no comment from me. I don't believe that Rufio was stating, nor certainly was I, that English speakers descended from the Romans.

Welcome to the discussion. We can always use well-informed input.

0 Replies

That lets me out then.

hehehe

0 Replies

Feeling a bit more sober today, Boss?

0 Replies

I never said anything about the Romans in any manner in order to teach people anything. Somone mentioned ASL, so I added to the discussion what I knew about ASL. Sorry if this offended you in some way.

As you can see from the link, English and German DO come from the same origin. Dispute that if you will.

If everyone on this board knows so much already, than why do they ask questions? Why do they ask questions at all if this is how the answers are greeted?

Dduck, I read Pinker's book too, and I thought it was pretty interesting - however, the people on this board seem to get so defensive about anything I say that it's probably pointless to point this out.

0 Replies

God, what a putz . . . Rufio i disputed your contention that English derives from German. It does not, English and German are modern languages. Not only do i not dispute that they have a common origin (read my response to Dduck), but that was not what you originally wrote. You wrote that English derives from German, a patently false statement.

We start topics here to discuss them, not to have revealed truth thrust at us by smug pups, especially when said pups make egreggiously false statments.

0 Replies

This is the LSA on the subject of the origins of English

"English remains, a Germanic language: The bulk of the basic vocabulary and the bulk of the grammar are as Germanic as they ever were. The English population never did switch to French, the language of the conquerors; instead, the Norman French eventually switched to English. Other Germanic languages include Dutch, German, Icelandic, Swedish, and more. All of them arose from a single language, called Proto-Germanic by linguists, which was spoken over 2500 years ago. Proto-Germanic was never written down, but its existence and much of its vocabulary and structure can be confidently inferred from the many systematic correspondences in words and grammatical structures shared by its descendants."

Language Variation and Change By Sarah G, Thompson Linguistic Society of America

http://www.lsadc.org/

0 Replies

Damn, it's like Parliament in here...

Quote:

As far as I know, children who grow up without ever learning a language never learn any, if they grow past about 10 or 12 without verbal human contact. I don't know much more than that about their developement, though. Kind of makes you wonder how the first languages came about, I guess. I do know that children who grow up around pidgins, which are not fully developed conglomorations of words from different languages, develope a creole, which is like the pidgin in vocabulary, but unlike the pidgin, has rules and grammar and syntax. Eventually, the creole becomes a dialect.

I was thinking more in terms of how a lack of language would affect other mental capacities -- which, would, I suppose, be practically untestable, ethics aside. For instance, does the development of language help with the development of abstract spatial thought, or are these separate entities? Could Greystoke have made a machine without first learning to speak? That's more what I had in mind.

And for me it steers thinking away from vocabulary (which may be something of a red herring as it pertains to this subject) and back toward structure and syntax. After all, the syntax of mathematics -- and here I use the word "syntax" loosely (not having any firm grasp of its precise linguistic meaning), taking it to mean something akin to how logical relationships are encoded in language -- is not that different from language. Now, language is virtually assured to have evolved before mathematics (unless you count the sort of calculus a dog can do to catch a ball), but is it a necessary prerequisite to mathematics?

Just blabbing here...

0 Replies

rufio wrote:

the people on this board seem to get so defensive about anything I say that it's probably pointless to point this out.

rufio,

This only happens when you make a false or absurd statement and then tout it as 'the answer' or the truth. Simply put, people frequently reject your 'answers' because of their false nature.

Bemoaning that your deviance from factual basis is challenged will not help. Nobody has anything personal against you, but sometimes what you say is false or absurd, and you obdurately insist that everyone is wrong and 'defensive' in the face of your only-to-self-evident 'answers'.

0 Replies

My bad, setanta, I mistyped. I figured people would be smart enough to figure out what I meant. Whoops. I thought that was fairly common knowledge.

Roger, I just noticed you chose not to respond to my post, so let me ask more plainly - how much do you actually know of navajo, and does it have any general terms?

Patio, I think it's been shown that people who are linguistically incompetant, either because they were never exposed to language or because they damaged a very specific part of their brain, are no more or less mentally incompetant otherwise. Simlarly, people who are quite eloquent can also be idiots. Pinker gives a few examples, as I recall. Computers that "speak", or chatterbots, or other things of that sort don't think in any way like a human does, and on top of that, often make heinous mistakes in ordinary conversation. It's very testable, and in the book that dduck mentioned, there are examples of people who damaged the language areas of their brains and are still mentally capable in other ways.

0 Replies

Ah the emperor's new clothes. "When I'm wrong people better realize that it's just a typo and think that I had actually been right or they are simply not smart. Why are you all so defensive? When I'm wrong it's just a typo, accept it as being right! If you know so much why do you challenge my answers when they are wrong (due to typos, as any smart person knows of course). Doesn't anyone care that I study linguistics??!!!"

You have illustrated why they shouldn't, study != learn.

0 Replies

Easy on rufio, now.

0 Replies

Ok, so what was I talking about... ??? Oh yeh, language and thought...

If we assume that language has some effect on thought (weak determinism), and visa versa, then language becomes part of the environment in which homo sapiens evolved. And yet the language evolves with us at the same time.

I'm not sure what point I'm making with that observation. It's just interesting to me how much feedback there is in the environments that can effect the evolutionary process at many levels.

For example, I wonder if similar thought characteristics might be compelled by communication systems used by animals as well? Octopus color changes, versus bird song or wolf howls for example. An animal's physiology might well be a determining factor in the direction its mind takes while it evolves based on how it communicates.

Hmmmm.... Have fun Smile

0 Replies

ros,

I still don't want to go hog wild but here is a thought.

I believe satts brought up that all languages can express any logic but some are just more awkward than others.

I contend that when something is more difficult to express in one language than another it might be expressed less often in one language than another.

The structure of some languages are better suited to logic than others. Logical operators are more heavily used in some languages than others.

Weak determinism is almost a given. The chicken/egg of it all is a tougher nut to crack.

0 Replies

I appreciated Roger's remarks about the Navajo. As well, i heard a comment on NPR today that the Inuit have a dozen words for snow (not the several hundred or even several thousands which is often wrongly claimed to exist in Inuit dialects). For most of us, snow is snow, and perhaps slush. We require more words to describe different experiences of snow. It seems to me in those examples that language is molded to provide a means of communicating the environment in which it either developed, or into which it was brought.

I would also revert to the issue of sign language. A woman for whom i once worked, whose field was language pedagogy, was making studies of communicative competence. Her research included a great body of contentions that those who use sign language are able very quickly to learn to communicate with others using a "foreign" sign language--much more quickly than those required to learn a new vocubulary, grammar, syntax, etc. As well, she studied the facility with which people learn language in relation to their age, and their position in society.

I believe that all of these questions are worthy of further consideration.

0 Replies

I'm sorry, Craven. I'm typing fast and trying to get out the main points of the argument, and glossing over the bits that are strictly necessary to what I'm saying. I've developed ways of speaking about things that I don't really stop and think about much when I'm in a hurry. Why would I think that English evolved directly from German? Trust me, if I didn't know how it really was, I wouldn't have claimed to.

What I am pissed about here is not the German thing. I typed one sentence about ASL, which was as basic as I think I could get on the subject, in response to someone's question, and I get this nasty retort about how I shouldn't try to teach people what they obviously know better than I do.

Craven, logical languages are the only languages that will be able to express logic unambiguously. In that regard, natural languages are all quite equal.

Setanta, I believe I read in Pinker's book that there are only like 4 unique words for snow in the Inuits' language. That's probably less than we have. (Snow, slush, sleet, flurry, I'm sure there's more.)

0 Replies

Almost any time you hear someone name how many words for something that exist in a language that person is wrong.

0 Replies

Well, he listed them, Craven. I think the list was replicated from something Chomsky wrote. I guess it's still slightly desputable, though.

0 Replies

Sleet is kind of shakey as a word for snow--flurry is a description of an atmospheric condition, not what results from the condition. Whether or not there are twelve such words (i'd have to go check NPR's site to try to retreive the fragment i recall, and i don't consider it worth the effort), my point is that environment appears (to me) to have an effect on language, more than one might posit the reverse to be true. Until the 16th and 17th century "philosophers" began to investigate and hierarchically categorize the plants and animals of the natural world, there were, perhaps, a few hundreds of words to describe wild species, but thousands of words to describe domestic species--in English at any event. But in the languages of our forebears in the era before the domestication of plants and animals, one might reasonably expect that a hunting and gathering culture would have very precise terms for those species which they hoped to exploit. All of which is a more detailed description of what i think is worthy of investigation in terms of the relationship of language and environment.

0 Replies

Languages and Thought

Related Topics

Quick Links

My Account

able2know