Patterns and language

When you read "blue" do you think of the sky, or ocean, or copper sulfate, or maybe a little of all at once? The word's just a word, a few letters, a sound, but you use that abstraction to bring to mind all these things, from colored chalk to the spectrum to the rainbow to the refringence in a bubble.

Anecdotal Evidence introduced Nemerov and his Figures of Thought (also see this and I like The Spy ). In that "Figures of Thought" he describes discovery of patterns in disparate things as a "dry delight."

"Dry"? Those spirals he wrote of, like blue hues, inhabit much in the world that we sense. Like "blue", the word "spiral" evokes something from our senses. But it also evokes something from our minds, like "care" or "depth" do.

If you do not know the name, the language, you can still see the commonality when looking at something as obvious as the color blue or a spiral, but you'll miss things less obvious things like the commonality between a pendulum and a wave in the water.

Heinlein exaggerated, but just as you can't fully appreciate Chinese poetry without knowing the Chinese language, or fully understand some paintings without knowing the symbols the artist used, you won't fully appreciate the poems of the world without knowing the language of the world.

Life is short, and I don't have time for all I find to do. I'll never learn Chinese. I'll just have to worry along with translations.

Out of touch

We bought a replacement car, which came with a trial of Sirius. I am getting fliers and emails urging me to sign up for the low (or "current") price and suggesting channels to entice me. What does? Talk radio--hardly. Sports--no. "Every music genre" that didn't list the only channel I'd be interested in. "Nonstop news" sounds like Babel torture. "So much comedy"--not a diet of it, thank you, and most of the modern comedian shorts youtube offers up are more bitter than funny.

My wife was on the phone with someone talking about a child interested in manga. I looked it up. I'd heard of Isekai--I'd written something that might be classed as "portal fiction" (though not Isekai)--but most of the classifications were new to me. I'd have to spend quite a while at the library reading through stuff to get up to speed, and even then I don't know if the library carries some of the more "adult" stuff. It might--libraries have been getting a little odd lately.

Maybe a movie a year at the theaters, no broadcast TV, no cable TV... The HBO/Netflix/etc produced content I haven't seen at all. Young adult conversations are replete with references to catch phrases from shows I've barely heard of. I'm told the caliber of the work is better than the old 60's/70's TV shows (which I'm not interested in rewatching). OK.

The book of Daniel says the Babylonians trained their most promising captives in the language and literature of the Babylonians--presumably because the way the language is used references the literature for additional meanings. How far out of touch can I be before communication becomes difficult?

Some words have already changed meanings.

"Different"

I get it. They want to make sure that someone with a birth defect is not considered of lesser worth. They want to be kind and fair, so they coin labels like "limb different."

I think it rises from the denial that there's a human nature – physical, mental, spiritual. The way they define things, and people, is by their actions. If it walks like a duck and quacks like a duck, it's a duck – nevermind if it needs batteries.

If you define humanity by the things a person does rather than some essence or nature, inequalities of ability are a problem for you. The world's economies define human worth by economic value added, but there's no reason for us to give assent to that. We know better (I hope).

There are normal differences in people, e.g. skin color. There are also abnormal differences, e.g. skin color (albinism). It's normal to have 5 digits on each limb, and rare indeed for more than 5 not to be a defect.

The Salisbury Organist goes to old country churches to play their organs. Not infrequently a note will be bad or the machine slightly out of tune – and you wouldn't be able to tell because he picks the music to fit the organ.

If you don't have a right foot, walking is more of an accomplishment than it is for a healthy youngster. If we flatten everything to "difference" you lose that extra accomplishment.

Plenty of things are legitimately just "difference": including a lot of the skills. Just because it isn't always easy to agree on the names of things that are human essence doesn't mean they aren't real.

We seem to have a hunger to oversimplify. A "definition by action" is very useful (especially in mathematics), while a "definition by essence" is also important in determining purposes – like what a government is actually for. If we don't know what the essence of human-ness is, how do we know what human flourishing is? Keep both approaches, but in tension with each other.

Sapir-Whorf and groups

AVI's recent post on Sapir-Whorf brought a few things to mind.

I took a course in linguistics as an undergrad. Our teacher assured us that there were no primitive languages. You could talk philosophy in any language. If you had to make up and define new words, that was always possible. I gather he didn't care for Sapir-Whorf, weak or strong.

I didn't attempt to prove him wrong – that's too many languages to learn. It seemed plausible, people being people everywhere. You can't talk about nuclear physics without words for nucleus, but you can explain what those are, just as you can teach the relevant math. To an adult, anyway.

But. Poverty of language makes it harder to communicate some things. If you have leisure, that doesn't matter, but when you don't have time to define nuances that aren't part of a common language heritage, you've got problems.

That matters a lot for slogans, which we often use as a shorthand for thought.

Step back from individual words and think of phrases, or words that have changed meanings. If a culture has succeeded in framing a dispute in terms that admit only a handful of options, you can theoretically describe an alternative, but in practice it's not easy.

Though some people make it look easy. Maybe the most famous framing situation is the one when Pharisees and Saducees tried to get Jesus to take a side in a political quarrel about the legitimacy of Roman oppression – should they pay taxes to the Romans or not? Answer "Yes," and the average folks give up on Jesus, "No" and the Romans will kill him. Jesus was able to rephrase the problem in two sentences (and change the course of Western Civilization). You or I would have been struggling to be nuanced and wind up looking spineless, and disgusting everybody.

The language includes things taken for granted (denotation or connation), most of which most of us never think through. Who has the time to think through what we mean by "liberty" when the the kids need supper? We quote "life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness" but those invisible assumptions mean that John Adams would be startled at how we interpret the phrase. (Liberty: is it intrinsic, something granted, or something achieved? An addict is effectively a slave no matter what the law says. "Slave to one's appetites" is a real condition.)

Orwell went with a strong version of Sapir-Whorf: without appropriate words there are no concepts. But if you expand what you mean by language to include the cultural associations of words and phrases, and think in terms of average behavior, a weaker version seems to be true for populations – subject to the caveats that languages and associations(*) can be made to change, and one on one dialog can go anywhere the participants have the endurance for.

Insofar as slogans rule us, weak Sapir-Whorf seems true.

(*) E.g. Uncle Tom's Cabin changed the image and mental associations of "slave owner."

Natural

English infamously overloads the word "love" with a riot of different meanings.

We overload "nature" too. There's the physical universe, and also the local ecosystem; alternatively, it means the rules they operate by.

And there's "human nature", which can mean the ways we were designed to function (human nature to love your children), or the brokenness we suffer from (human nature to be selfish). For the Christian there's a new nature given as well.

And there's the "nature" of the expression of individual gifts and traits (a "natural-born storyteller") or expressions of training ("a natural-born killer").

So is a writer using "nature" to describe something common to all humans, or specific to this individual? Is it something built in, or thanks to training (marching towards the gunfire)? It makes a difference in what is changeable, or even what's good--and I see a lot of disagreement on that.

Until we learn to disaggregate these meanings, and quit playing motte and bailey with them, I guess we're stuck making sure we parse out how the writer is trying to use them.

FWIW, about 400 years ago a "natural" was an idiot.

When do you stop using a writing system?

A question implicit in a post from almost five years ago: when did people quit using cuneiform? If Augustine didn't know the histories of the "Assyrians," maybe the use had been lost by then. I tried a prediction: Alexander the Great would have introduced the alphabet in a great way, and the complicated cuneiform system would have dried up--maybe quickly if the new Greek masters wanted official records translated.

So, what says wikipedia? Oh. Which cuneiform? There seem to have been a lot of them, from about 2900BC to the most recent object known made in 75AD; with a major change when Old Persian became dominant (e.g. Darius I, about 525BC)--which made it into a simplified syllabary. I wonder what future archaeologists would make of our computer texts -- alphabet plus pictographs. Would they try to detect the derivation of our alphabet from the emojis?

Yes, people have been trying to use AI to do more rapid translations, though "Predictably, the AI had a higher level of accuracy for formulaic texts, such as royal decrees or divinations, which follow a certain pattern. More literary and poetic texts, such as letters from priests or treaties, had a higher incidence of “hallucinations,”"

If an empire begins to crumble and its cities are overrun, will the conqueror care about the old history? Probably not much. The old literature? Eh. Maybe, but not obviously enough to make an effort to preserve it. That burden would lie on the entertainers. How about the old religious ritual records? Not so much; that burden rests on the clergy of the defeated gods, to make the case for honoring the gods of the land. How about old title records? William the Conqueror said the land all belonged to him now, and he'd fief it out--that probably wasn't a novelty. Still, it might be handy to keep the local administration running, working for you, so that would keep the old systems going awhile.

So maybe there was no great reason for the records to survive. Things like astrological texts, math, etc, would be translated by the practitioners for the use of their new students.

The Seleucids and early Parthians were still using cuneiform in the hellenistic period up to April 69 BC, though it wasn't the same as the very oldest cuneiforms.

This rabbit hole looks deep.

Euphemism

I read decades ago that the use of the term "anti-semitism" spread as a euphemism for "hatred of Jews." It was a less "in your face" term; abstract and verging on respectable. I haven't tracked down a source for that claim yet, but it seems plausible. Hatred is personal, while being "anti-"X could mean you've a scholar's thorough understanding of why X is bad.

NJOP says the term was coined by Moritz Steinschneider, writing against Ernest Renan's "jews are an inferior race" claims. (Renan seems to have changed his mind, or nuanced things considerably. The NJOP article's claim about Wilhelm Marr's repentence is disputed.)

At any rate, when you read a news story about demonstrations on campus or the state house, mentally replace the euphemism with the phrase it replaced, and see if the result describes the actions and attitudes more clearly.

Studies in Words

I referenced this book by C.S. Lewis in the previous post. He meant it as a textbook for literature students. It has moments of his trademark insights and wit. Examples of his broad and detailed reading appear in almost every paragraph.

The book is about the development of the meanings of several words, some of which were used radically differently in other eras, e.g. nature, sad, wit, free. He ends with a chapter on criticism that's worth reading by itself.

I had just enough curiosity about the words and the examples to make it through. I wasn't cut out to be a linguist. If you are, read it. Otherwise just read the last chapter.

Ebonics

The youtube video "The Origin of Black American Culture and Ebonics" by Thomas Sowell asserts that the foundations for much of modern "ghetto black" language and culture are traceable to the ScotsIrish culture of the American South (also see Albion's Seed), and thence to their aboriginal cultures in the British Isles.

My first thoughts were that I'd already noticed some cultural similarities (and important differences--modern "black ghetto culture" is orders of magnitude wealthier than the old backwoods white South and Central USA), but that the language seemed only sort-of related. But I know little about dialects.

My second thoughts were wishing he'd given some numbers for the achievement statements he'd made, but realizing that they probably aren't there.

I don't have the years needed to answer the question: At the time of the Civil War, what was the African ethnic background of blacks in the various parts of the country (and territories)? Fischer's African Founders notes that some people wanted Igbo slaves and others wouldn't have them. That sort of preference would make for initial regional differences in ethnicity. If there was a founders' effect in slave culture, or if the descendents of those slaves stayed in the same region, you'd expect some differences from region to region.

Sanskrit

"The discovery makes it possible to translate any word written in Sanskrit."

That's a provocative headline. What does it really mean? "Rishi Rajpopat decoded a rule taught by Pāṇini, an Indian grammarian" of the 5th century BC.

Rajpopat decoded a 2,500-year-old algorithm that can accurately use Pāṇini’s “language machine” for the first time. Pāṇini’s system consists of 4,000 rules and is detailed in the Aṣṭādhyāyī. Considered his greatest work, Aṣṭādhyāyī is believed to have been written around 500 BCE. It is meant to work like a machine, where the base and suffix of a word are fed in and a step-by-step process should turn them into grammatically correct words and sentences.

"Pāṇini had a metarule to help the user decide which rule should be applied if a rule conflict occurred, but it has been misinterpreted by scholars for the last 2,500 years. ... Rajpopat argues that Pāṇini meant that between rules applicable to the left and right sides of a word respectively, Pāṇini wanted us to choose the rule applicable to the right side."

Rajpopat found the ancient scholar’s language machine produced grammatically correct words consistently and with almost no exceptions.

The headline was clickbait--people had been reading and writing Sanskrit already; this just had to do with being machine-like systematic about it.

But I'd bet that the ancient system was at least partly aspirational rather than descriptive, and that the ancient Sanskrit wasn't as systematic as the "language machine" describing it. (4000 rules?!)

Grimm's Law

Is there an analog to Grimm's Law in Chinese language families?

Ask and you shall receive: kind of. " The application of a Grimm's-like law comes later and differently in different languages, e.g. where the -p -t -k endings became -ʔ in Wu and -ø in Mandarin, or the /g/ initial was palatalised in certain situations so what in Korean is /ga/ is likely /tɕiɑ/ in Mandarin."

Don't ask me what those sounds are, but people seem to have noticed sound shifts in the languages in question. "But there's no single rule to explain all of them. They each developed in different ways."

It is fascinating what sorts of answers to random questions are easily available to us these days. Of course the answer has nothing to do with my life, and too much 'satiable curtiosity can get your nose pulled...

High-context language

"Cultivation fiction"/xianxia is a popular genre that I haven't dipped into. Writer Benjamin Cheah is fed up with sloppy pastiches of it. He tries to connect Sapir-Whorf, high-context languages, and Daoism/Buddhism, along the lines that a high-context language tends to demand a more integrated/embedded understanding, with more indirect communication--and that this makes internal-oriented religions easier, and forms the framework for real "cultivation" and "cultivation fiction."

Strictly speaking, Buddhism was devised in Sanskrit and not Chinese, and from the fact that the oldest grammar is of Sanskrit I suspect it is a "low-context" (more explicit) language.

And poetic and mystical forms are, as far as I can tell, found in all languages, so I'd say that "high-context" forms can be used to describe the numinous in any language.

Still, it's an interesting take on languages.

"Dog my cats"

An afternoon conversation's question: Who said that?

I remembered it from some cartoon, but couldn't remember which one either. (Pogo) And what did it mean? Obviously a dramatic interjection, maybe a "minced oath". If it's the latter it doesn't mean anything exactly, but maybe the first does?

Searching the infalible internet turns up the claims that the earliest known reference is in Huck Finn (or by O Henry decades later, through some amazing time warp).

Suppose the phrase is literal and the key word is the verb "dog". "Follow my cats around" isn't a compelling image. "Latch down my cats" has an arrestingly chaotic feel to it; I could almost believe that one. A random internet-er held that "my great-grandfather said" it was a sarcastic "Sic your dogs on my cats" to someone being too aggressive--um, maybe, but again it doesn't seem compelling.

I suspect the majority is right, and it was a euphemism for "damn my something-or-other". But I like my little folk-etymology.

Things not good to say

I'd looked up one Godspell song, so youtube offered me "Turn back, O man." The lyrics sounded a little off, but my ear for lyrics has always trended mondegreenish, so I looked it up. It turns out to be a hymn from 1916, though with decidedly different music and choreography. And the "off" bit is in the original: "Yet thou ... Still will not hear thine inner God proclaim".

When I hear "inner god" or "god within" I don't think of "indwelling Holy Spirit" but either Hinduism or the semi-gnostic do-it-yourself denial of "organized religion" that's been so popular in our culture. As far as I can tell, that's what most other people think of too, so as AVI points out, that's what the phrase means now--unless you preface it with an explanation.

So if we want to use the old hymn and keep the intended sense (at least I hope the intent was orthodox), we should probably revise it, because the words, though strictly accurate, are no longer good to say.

I wrote before that: A husband may say of his wife: "She is mine." That is true enough, but it is much safer to say "I am hers." Likewise "Mother of God" is a true title for Mary, but a dangerous one to try to use. And a Christian, given God's Holy Spirit, with a changed and increasingly sanctified life, may truthfully stand to pray "God, I thank thee that I am not like other men"--but I wouldn't recommend it.

I've recommended Charles Williams' works before--but I probably should do that with care, since he frequently uses occult environments, and I know of at least one person who became interested in tarot after reading Williams. (The underlying themes of his novels are Christian, but an on-ramp can become an off-ramp.) I'm not sure I ought to say "Read him" to all and sundry.

The slogan "Blue Lives Matter" seems banal enough, but that's not the way it's taken--I'd use the phrase with caution. It isn't always a good thing to say.

By the same token, "Black Lives Matter" isn't always a good thing to say either, without some explanation. Does it refer to the banal plain meaning, or the political slogan that stands for a lot of claims--some true and some lies, or does it refer to the corrupt organization whose main interest, if their children's education material is any guide, is unusual sexual claims?

But

Am I God to tell you what you shouldn't say? Quite a few Catholics will assure me that honoring Mary in no way diminishes from their worship of God--and I know that's true for some friends.

Will people die because you pulled an Andrew May?

Are you God to tell me there are kinds of knowledge too dangerous to be learned?

Granted, I think we can agree that if you discovered how to make a 25kT nuke from a speakerphone and a box of Oreos we should suppress that information. But I decline to believe that closing your eyes and pretending will have much effect on already active realities. (Grim is more hopeful than I about that writer.)

Yes, I self-censor. I tried to teach the kids to too. But I object to you trying to do it for me. I won't do it to you.

"Ideally"

I've read several times that having renewable energy sources charge up automobile batteries is the ideal future for automobiles. But if we're talking about "ideal", how about using renewable energy to synthesize octane or nonane? These have a high energy density; we understand the safety issues very well; we have mature technologies for delivery and for engines.

The only thing we don't have is the synthesis technology. But the phrase was "ideal", not "feasible anytime soon."

Even if it was feasible, right now it is so cheap to distill octanes from oil that I can't see anybody trying to synthesize n-octane for anything other than curiosity's sake. And of course there's the "what's the raw material?" question--we'll run low on coal one of these days too. CO2 or plant waste would be "ideal" raw materials.

Different "ideals" send you in different research directions. Batteries or synthesis?

Pronouns

Althouse has a post about someone I heard about first on the Bee who is adjusting her pronouns. I learned that Finnish lacks them, which about now sounds refreshing.

In some of Andre Norton's science fiction, she introduced the term "gentle-sap" as a generic honorific that applied to any sapient species or sex. One might drop the "gentle" and repurpose the remainder as a generic pronoun--pronounced with a long or short "a" depending on your mood.

If we insist on multiplying pronouns, why not use some that add some distinguishing information--marital status, youth or elder, grandparent ... ?

Hosanna in the Highest

What does Hosanna mean? In the Old Testament 'it is used only in verses such as "help" or "save, I pray"', but in the Gospels 'it is used as a shout of jubilation.' Wikipedia links a blurry scan as an example of the complicated effort at reconciliation of meanings. A Jewish site is easier to read. That it did shift meaning is clear enough from the rituals associated with Hoshana Rabbah (the seven hoshanot in honor of patriarch or prophet).

It isn't hard for words to shift meaning: hussy changed from housewife to "improper woman" in a little over a century. You'd think that liturgical words would be more stable, but "Thou" is widely believed to be a holy and respectful way to address God, and its original intimate familiar meaning got lost. If a phrase becomes less popular in everyday language, it would be easy to pick up new connotations, and have those eventually become the denotation.

If no one can see God and live, and if the angels Ezekiel saw had to hide their faces, perhaps the closer you get to God's glory the more you need His protection: joy and fear together; praise and please save. That's almost certainly not how the phrase's meaning developed, but it's interesting that it still connects.

It probably shows a character defect, but I don't like roller coasters.

Blue Letter Bible is a nice resource, but be careful teasing meanings out of word roots.

Othering

"view or treat a person (or group) as intrinsically different from and alien to oneself"

Abortion involves an extreme form of "othering" a family member.

Big screen lyrics

Providing slides with the lyrics to hymns is good for getting people to sing with their heads up, and you needn't haul hymnals in and out when you rearrange the seats. But sometimes it would help to have the music to go with the lyrics, especially when introducing a new song. I've tried to figure a readable way to add that as an option, but it needs more time and tinkering that I've devoted to the problem.

Managing the number of lines on the screen is a minor but pesky nuisance--sometimes the ratio of characters to syllables in a line is large enough to demand wrap-around. You want to break at at a vocal pause so it looks natural. Not a big problem--in English. I'd hate to try that in German.

Do German singers ever have to pause for breath in the middle of a word? Messiah seems to demand that in some places--or at any rate I don't have the lung capacity to hold out long enough. And there's the extended gloria in Angels We Have Heard On High. But it doesn't happen often. We generally don't overfeed English words.

Song tangles

I'm not terribly fond of songs where the drumset drowns your own voice, and somewhat monotonous repetition. If you take a random song from the hymnbook that I've never heard before and sing a line, I can generally predict the arc of the rest of the song (generally). It's probably my lack of familiarity with the genres that makes it harder for me to do this with praise choruses, though sometimes it seems as though melodic line is an optional feature.

Some praise song theology is a bit on the incomplete side, but that's true of the old hymns as well. It was quite a few years before I realized that a large fraction of the songs are aspirational rather than descriptive. And the ancient fad for trying to make English verse behave like Latin had repercussions that lasted a long time: Yoda's hymn from 1739, for example. The song has noble ideas, but it's not trivial to parse. (I try to make sure that the slides have appropriate punctuation and quotation marks--I remember being utterly confused as a child by lines like "my sin oh the bliss of this glorious thought")

When I try to look at hymns (old or new) as if I were an outsider, unfamiliar with Christianity or not very experienced in the language, they sometimes look very odd--topsy-turvy and misleading.

Topsy-turvy: I like some of Browning's work, but he had the same unhappy habit of practicing complicated knots with his sentences (at least he didn't put them in a blender). A little involution is forgiveable, and can sometimes add a tang to the verse, but too much doesn't seem respectful--to the language or the reader. Kipling generally wrote a clean strong line--it's possible to do.

The psalmist wrote of God putting a new song in his mouth--maybe he wasn't satisfied with the old ones either.

I grouse, but I love them.