The "Strange Doctrines" Undercroft

The Awful German Sense of Humor

Gillian Russell posts on German language mavens.

She closes by recounting the classroom results of her didadactic experiment with Mark Twain's wonderful essay, "The Awful German Language":

What is this passage about?

The man is being very rude about our language. I think it is stupid.

That's interesting. What do the rest of you think? Is Mark Twain trying to insult German?

(silence)

[Another student] I agree with Inga. He is stupid. He writes stupid things.

So, er...no-one thinks it meant to be humourous then?

No, because it is not funny.

45 minutes to go.

Reminds me of two early encounters I had with the German sense of humor (such as it is). The first was a television interview (in English) with a German yuppie who was discussing (what else?) the German sense of humor:

Well, many people say that we do not have a sense of humor. And, you know, maybe that is not such a bad thing.

The second incident involved a dear Bavarian friend of mine who related the following ethnic "joke":

What is the difference between a white cow and a black cow? The white cow says, "Moo," and the black cow says, "Moo man."

Which pretty well backs up the German yuppie's statement, above.

Kaas and chi-zu

You might not know those two words. But you should. Even rats can tell the difference.

Language Reform You Can Really Get Behind¡

Josh Greenman proposes a new innovation at Slate.

What's Sapir-Whorf Got to do with it?

The Economist describes an interesting experiment conducted with members of the Pirahã, a Brazilian tribe that uses a system of counting (dubbed "one-two-many") in which

the word for “one” translates to “roughly one” (similar to “one or two” in English), the word for “two” means “a slightly larger amount than one” (similar to “a few” in English), and the word for “many” means “a much larger amount...”

Apparently, their language has no other numbering terms. As you might imagine, this system makes elementary mathematical operations somewhat difficult for them:

Using objects with which the participants were familiar (sticks, nuts and—perhaps surprisingly—small batteries), [Columbia University's Peter Gordon] asked his subjects to perform a variety of tasks designed to measure their ability to count. Most of these tests involved the participant matching the number and layout of a group of objects that Dr Gordon had arranged on a table. [] In the tests that involved matching the number and layout of objects they could see, participants were pretty good when faced with two or three items, but found it harder to cope as the number of items rose. Once it was beyond eight, they were getting it right only three-quarters of the time. The only exception was in those tests that used unevenly spaced objects—an arrangement that can be perceived as a group of clusters. Here, performance fell off when the number of objects was six, but shot up again when it was between seven and ten. Dr Gordon suggests that the participants used a “chunking” strategy, counting the clusters and the numbers of objects within each cluster separately. Things were worse when the participants had to remember the number of objects in a layout and replicate it “blind”, rather than matching a layout they could see. In this case the success rate dropped to zero when the number of items became, in terms of their language, “many.”

The article ends by saying that the results suggest the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis is correct, at least in the domain of mathematics. The problem is that the article casts Sapir-Whorf as a hypothesis primarily about the role of language in determining thought, whereas both Sapir and Whorf wanted to make claims about the role of language in determining perception. Here's Sapir:

We see and hear and otherwise experience very largely as we do because the language habits of our community predispose certain choices of interpretation.

And here's Whorf:

[T]he world is presented in a kaleidoscopic flux of impressions which has to be organized by our minds - and this means largely by the linguistic systems in our minds.

Yet by and large we don't "perceive" quantities like we perceive, say, color. We count quantities. And since it's clear that the Pirahã don't count, it would be expected--to the point of being trivial--that given various counting tasks, they would do poorly. Thus, the role of language in all of this (again) might be symptom rather than cause. (Side thought: To control for the possibility language reflects rather than determines thought or perception, the relevant question that has to be answered in any test like Gordon's has to be whether the measured competence in completing the test procedure can be improved without introducing new terms into the test group's lexicon. It is not difficult to imagine how such improvements could be obtained in the case of Gordon's Pirahã study--say, by a numeric mapping procedure using fingers and toes.) UPDATE: Crooked Timber posts on the topic.

NOCAPS in Web Nomenclature

What took so long?

Sapir-Whorf and Linguistic Relativity

This review notes that Wendy Lesser's new collection of essays, The Genius of Language, trades (in some parts) on the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis. Although somewhat skeptical, reviewer Philip Marchand doesn't do enough to dispatch the idea in readers' minds.

The classic statement of the hypothesis is due to Sapir:

We dissect nature along lines laid down by our native languages. The categories and types that we isolate from the world of phenomena we do not find there because they stare every observer in the face; on the contrary, the world is presented in a kaleidoscopic flux of impressions which has to be organised by our minds - and this means largely by the linguistic systems in our minds. We cut nature up, organise it into concepts, and ascribe significances as we do, largely because we are parties to an agreement that holds throughout our speech community and is codified in the patterns of our language. [W]e cannot talk at all except by subscribing to the organisation and classification of data which the agreement decrees.

But this statement of course is thoroughly refuted by the phenomenon of language itself.

For at one time there was no language. And then there was. But if language delimits perception, then perception could not have given birth to language.

Of course language does reflect the perceptual habits or tendencies of a society, and such forces of habit will constrain thought. But, again, that still concedes that the perception came first--before there was a language for it. (And how could it be otherwise?)

Comparative Swearing 101

Consider the following three cases:

(1) Secret Service Agent knocks over John Kerry on the ski slope while snowboarding. JK relates to Third Party that "that sonofabitch" knocked him over.* (2) After repeated questioning by News Reporter based on a characterization of remarks that she denies several times, Teresa Heinz tells News Reporter to "shove it."* (3) In the Senate hall during recess, and having had his character "called into question" by Patrick Leahy, Dick Cheney tells Leahy to "go fuck yourself."*

Some in the political muddle middle suggest that the episodes described above are sufficiently similar to warrant like disapprobation in each case, and that a failure to treat them as such amounts to partisan hypocrisy. Forgive me for saying so, but I just don't think the distinctions are too subtle even for the commonest clay to draw. Set aside the institutional starch that thickens the stew in the third example, and just consider the language. Would, say, the FCC view these three phrases all as equally subject to sanction? How often do you hear the word sonofabitch on cable television? Okay, now how about the word fuck? Then there's the obvious family-values angle. If you are (or were) a parent, which of the following phrases would you most want to keep out of your child's lexicon: (1) sonofabitch; (2) shove it; or (3) go fuck yourself? In sum, if you want to claim that it is your considered view that telling someone to "shove it" is epithetically identical to telling someone to "go fuck yourself," well, then you can shove it. And, which (by hypothesis, anyway) is the same, go fuck yourself.

All's Well That Ends Well

A blog post by Stuart Buck about his daughter's declination of subject rather than verb reminded me of a generatively unrelated if phonologically similar construction I've been hearing a lot, viz., 'Alls I know is, ...' (or is it 'All's I know is, ...'?). I'm not sure quite what to make of this. Looks like a job for Language Log. UPDATE: Language Log is on the case. Just to add a set of curious quantitative data to the discussion, Google queries on 'alls I know is' and 'all's I know' yield 956 and 527 hits respectively. This seems to favor the theory that the /allz/ in this context is a derivation from the German alles. On the other hand, Google queries on 'alls I know is' and 'all's I know is' yield 836 and 1,150. Besides the fact that the balance here favors the contractive theory, we have the (seemingly) illogical result that the more restrictive search yielded a greater number of hits. The upshot would seem to be that the data here have more to do with Google's algorithm than any linguistic facts. Still, I thought it was interesting.

It Depends on the Meaning of "Is, Is"

I've heard the following sort of locution three times today: "The problem is, is that..." (The last instance was on this evening's Daily Show.) This formula has been gaining currency in the lexicon and I thought a cool explanation was that the formulation is a variation of utterences like: "What this is is a..." But, sonofa-, I did a search to see if I could harvest examples and I find that Language Log already has a line of posts on the topic. Mark Liberman's discusses things along the line I was going to address, and does a much better job of it than I would have, so if you are interested enough to finish this sentence, you might want to go here.

Autophagous* Arguments from a Language Prescriptivist

The Boston Globe's John Powers lodges the standard prescriptivist complaints about the "imprecise" use of words:

We say "transpire" when we mean "happen." We say "momentarily" when we mean "soon." We say "livid" when we mean "angry." This growing imprecision of usage may not be what fictional professor Henry Higgins declared "the cold-blooded murder of the English tongue." But it does matter if you don't know what you're saying. If you don't, how will I?

Well, if Powers asserts that when people say "transpire" they mean "happen," then he must know what they mean, mustn't he? * Strictly, of course, 'autophagous' refers to the self-digestion by a cell through the action of enzymes originating within the same cell. But you know what I mean. UPDATE: Eugene Volokh thinks Powers should spare us the kibitz and take a look at his dictionary.