jerry@oliveb.UUCP (Jerry Aguirre) (10/17/84)
>> J. Morgan uicsl!morgan >> ...................................... There do not seem to be any >> languages with any kind of expressive deficit. ...................... This struck a choard. I remember a PBS TV show about the Australian aborigines and the difficulties studying them. There is apparently no way to phrase "what if" types of questions. The anthropologists had to tell them a thing was so, get their response, and then tell them it was not so. This would seem to me to be a serious "expressive deficit". Any aborigines on the net care to verify this? Jerry Aguirre {hplabs|fortune|idi|ihnp4|ios|tolerant|allegra|tymix}!oliveb!jerry
steiny@scc.UUCP (Don Steiny) (10/20/84)
> >> ...................................... There do not seem to be any > >> languages with any kind of expressive deficit. ...................... > > This struck a choard. I remember a PBS TV show about the Australian > aborigines and the difficulties studying them. There is apparently no > way to phrase "what if" types of questions. > This would seem to me to be a serious "expressive deficit". When I was a linguistics student I took a class in "field methods" where our professor (Dr. William Shipely) pretended he was a Maidu Indian and we pretended we were linguists trying to preserve the language. Bill is probably the only person alive who speaks this particular branch of Maidu. We would ask "how do you say X" and from the questions we tried to write a grammar of Maidu. Doing this is a fascinating experience that caused me to bump against some assumptions that I did not even know I had. When we asked very indian questions, like "he runs like the wind". We were shocked to find that you could not say anthing like that. Bill claimed that the Maidu could not grammaticaly make a metaphor or a syllogism. On the other hand, the Maidu could make many distinctions that we could not make. For instance, they have a quotative mood. This means that if you are reporting something someone else told you, you have to use a special verb inflection. When anthropologists (linguists were a type of anthropologist at this time) first started studying the Native American languages, they were shocked to find that did not have the same grammatical categories that Indo-European languages had. For instance, several months ago I posted part of an essay by Benjamin Whorf where he pointed out that the Hopi have no tense and that they do not conceive of time in sequence the way we do. From one point of view, these langauges lack expressive power. They cannot express things we find extremely important. From still another point of view, our language lacks expressive power because we have to kludge to say some things and there are other things we cannot express at all. The point is not that every language can express all the things that any other language can express, because this is not true. The point is that every language can express everything the speakers of that language wish to express. To say that some group or another is lacking because they cannot express the same things we can is politics. The Madiu had a pleasant existance and they lived in harmony with their enviornment. Since the native Americans lost their status as the dominate social groups on this contenent, we tend to devalue their world-view. If you think about it, without syllogisms and metaphor there is no basis for logic. They could not have developed a technology like ours. In Proto-Indo European, "weaver of words" was a metaphor for "poet". This shows that metaphor has existed for a long time in Indo-European. They way our societies developed might have been preordained by the language we use to view the world. What would the society of the Maidu be like in 100 years, 1000 years? We have no way of knowing, but it is mind candy to speculate. Remember, the rules are: "no deduction, no induction." The statement that "all languages have equal expressive power," is make to be neutral. If we define the set of things that we believe that are necessary for a language to have more or less expressive power we are forced to make value judgements. If we accept that people in every language express everything the could ever want to, we are led to trying to understand the different worldviews of different people without making a value judgement. -- scc!steiny Don Steiny - Personetics @ (408) 425-0382 109 Torrey Pine Terr. Santa Cruz, Calif. 95060 ihnp4!pesnta -\ fortune!idsvax -> scc!steiny ucbvax!twg -/
robison@eosp1.UUCP (Tobias D. Robison) (11/06/84)
NOTE: This memo contains a SPOILER regarding one of Peter Dickenson's novels!!!!!!! I think it's silly to talk of deficiencies, but to those who worry about a language that is "deficient": what happens when the native speakers of that language are asked to deal with the inability of their language to express something? Many languages easily adapt and fill in the deficiency. Most European languages easily borrow words as needed from each other, and even grammatical constructions. I'm going to use "gezellig" at the next genuine opportunity, now that I have some idea of what it means. Peter Dickenson has a fascinating novel (sorry, as usual I can't give the name) in which a linguist is dealing with an Aboriginal tribe that, as a feature of their language, cannot express things that are contrary to fact. He is eventually taken prisoner by them, and his method of escape is to attack their system of witchcraft. He utters the statement: "there is no witching", which is comprehensible by the aborigines, but forces them to consider the possibity that although they can discuss witchcraft, it may not actually exist. He does this with great regret, KNOWING THAT IT WILL CHANGE THE LANGUAGE AND THE CULTURE. I'm mentioning all this here to support a simple point -- languages can adapt. If a language is incapable of expressing something, perhaps it never really needed to. When it has to, perhaps it will. - Toby Robison (not Robinson!) allegra!eosp1!robison or: decvax!ittvax!eosp1!robison or (emergency): princeton!eosp1!robison