Crystal Clear ...

Thanks to cko (who lent/loaned/leaned me her copy of Crystal's Language Death) I was finally able to read Chapter 2 Why Should We Care and Chapter 3 Why Do Languages Die. I have to say, I found the general writing style disappointing. It’s a lightweight volume that reads like it was pasted together from notes and speeches (which it may very well have been). He tends to make the same points over and over, in no systematic order.

I read nothing in the first three chapters of this book which caused me to re-evaluate my gut feeling that there may be some favorable outcomes to language death (and we linguists ought to study that possibility more closely).

Only 3 main points relate to why language death is bad:

I. Languages are like an ecosystem = ecosystems have mutually reinforcing relationships between members/elements (i.e., hurt one, hurt the system)

II. Languages are repositories of data (i.e., we can learn stuff from them: history, culture, linguistic feature space)

III. Language = identity

There’s no proof of (I) and Crystal is quick to caution against taking the analogy too far (he claims that humans are in complete control of language death factors; I suspect he is wrong about that, but ...); nonetheless, I suspect that it’s somewhat analogous. However, by the same ecosystem analogy, it may be the case that some language death may have favorable outcomes (which has been my guess all along). As I noted on cko’s blog recently, “I suspect that recent work in language learning and evolution by Partha Niyogi and folks like him will bear greatly on this topic in the coming decade.”

Argument (III) is garbled at best. Crystal claims that “Identity makes members of a community recognizably the same” (p39). Hmmmmmm. I thought it was the opposite -- identity makes members of a community recognizably different. In any case, this argument is vague at best, and does not relate directly to language death. There are various cultural factors that go in to “identity”, whatever that is.

It is argument (II) which I find most compelling, and the one I agree with most readily and without debate. Yes, I agree that all languages have unique linguistic properties that are well worth studying in themselves. But just because we find valuable data in every language does NOT mean we should stop language death per se. we need a broader understanding of the system of language interaction and language evolution, otherwise zealously stopping language death may be as irresponsible as zealously causing language death. Like a protected species over-grazing or over-hunting a locale, language over-population may serve some ecosystem harm. We just don't know.

Reduntant Blogging. Redundant Blogging.

Eugene Volokh over at The Volokh Conspiracy complained yesterday that some interpretations of Bushisms are not particularly fair because the interpretations are not taking into account the genuine ambiguity of the comments (okay, that's my version). In my zeal to put in my 2 cents, I posted a comment to that affect, only to realize now that I was basically repeating what Volokh himself had said in his original post.

Since Eugene Volokh was some kind of genius wunderkind or something, I'm not all that ashamed that we basically think alike. Maybe HE'S ashamed of thinking like The Lousy Linguist. But I'm not ashamed. Oh no, not me.

Chicken pecks revisited...

Cool, Eric Bakovic over at Language Log posted about "Langage SMS". This was the topic of my very first substantiative post.

I may have misstated Chatham’s belief’s below. It’s not clear that he agrees with the claim I complained about. But, his blog makes it clear that he believes this:

experience can be coded in a non-linguistic form, and that recoding into language is possible, at least over short delays

First, I didn’t realize it was at all controversial that experience can be coded in non-linguistic form. Of course it can. Does anyone doubt this?

Second, I have no clue what Chatham means by recoding into language. Certainly thoughts and memories can be expressed by language, that should go without saying; but, Chatham seems to believe that at least some thoughts and memories are STORED in language form. This sounds like the old “we think in language” argument.

I am not convinced that we think in language. In fact, I seriously doubt we think in language. I think language is always a post-thought process.

Language and Memory ...

Yesterday, Andrew Sullivan linked to this Chris Chatham blog Memory Before Language: Preverbal Experiences Recoded Into Newly-Learned Words. In it, Chatham says

adults tend to use language in encoding and retrieving memories...

I’ve read this sentence multiple times and I still don’t know what it means.

Chatham is a grad student in Cognitive Neuroscience at the University of Colorado, Boulder. From his web page, it’s clear that he’s a smart guy. But he’s going to have to explain his point about adult language and memory more clearly. Right now, it sounds like bullshit.

The Storm Gathers Force ...

cko and The Language Guy have a nice discussion of language death going over at knittertating. The Language Guy has been around this biz longer than most and he always has thoughtful comments. I take cko's comments quite seriously because she is both a smart linguist and an experienced field linguist. I'm neither. But I'm tall, so, ya know, that's something.

The Innateness Hypothesis

Juan Uriagereka is a very good linguist, no doubt. He writes here that

"Language is an innate faculty, rather than a learned behavior...Language may indeed be unique to humans, but the processes that underlie it are not."

Yes, most linguist agree that some sort of cognitive endowment is unique to humans which helps us learn and use language, but the nature of that endowment is far from well understood. Uriagereka has a particularly apropos background for the topic of language evolution, I respect that. Nonetheless, I suspect he is a tad biased towards the Chomskyan view. Therefore, I will try to list the arguments AGAINST the innateness hypothesis for y'all this weekend (I guess this makes #4 on my list of blog promises).