Every time I take a class, I semi-consciously pick up its jargon and use it for all kinds of unrelated things. I'm aware that this is very common among nerds/hackers -- after all, I hang out with lots of them. I, too, speak of "pinging" people in real life, and of the "failure modes" of couches and suchlike. But because I'm a biologist hanging out with mostly non-biologists, it stands out a lot more because everyone else isn't using jargon from their biochemistry classes. I don't know many other people who use words like "inhibit" and "saturation" and "depletion" and "steady state" and "modularity" on a daily-to-hourly basis. (OK, maybe the last two are more widespread than I think, and I just need to hang out with more MechE or EE people.)
The most recent one is "timescale", or "on the timescale of". I picked this one up from my biomechanics class, which analyzes bio-materials of all different sizes from single molecules to whole organs. In order to keep ourselves sane, we have to take into account the size of the object in question when choosing an analysis method. Should we speak of the stresses and strains in a rod made of continuous material, or of the entropy-driven behavior of a randomly meandering chain? Can we ignore thermal motion of molecules, or the transient behavior when you begin applying force? It all depends on the length scale.
I find the word "timescale" very useful in my daily life. It's much easier to say exactly what I mean if I say "on the timescale of weeks" rather than "in the medium-term". I would love to say that it helps other people understand, as well, but unfortunately no one else seems to have picked up on it yet, so I will have to wait and see.
Strangely enough, the jargon-adapting habit seems to be largely involuntary. However, the success or failure of a given word is definitely related to its usefulness, to the usefulness of the metaphor. There's not that much difference between a feedback system in a cafeteria and a piece of complex software, so it makes sense to speak of both of them as having "failure modes". I guess this is what the "seeing-as" theory of intelligence is all about. (Something I read in one of Hofstadter's books... I don't remember which it was, and I don't know what this is all about.)
Addendum: jargon-adapting is also not particularly widespread among people who aren't part of hacker or twinkie social circles. Or, at least, I don't encounter it very much, and I often get laughed at (in a kind way) when I'm hanging out with my friends from Bioengineering and I speak of rainwater "saturating" a drain, thus forming a puddle.
Showing posts with label linguistics. Show all posts
Showing posts with label linguistics. Show all posts
Monday, April 26, 2010
Wednesday, February 6, 2008
But is conlangery useful?? [Linguists and Conlangers, part 2]
Yes, it's been quite a while since the first installment of this series. I wrote a whole big long draft of this post and then realized it was mostly wrong, and it took a while to get back on track.
First off, I am not saying that conlangers are oppressed or shunned or anything by academic linguists. Far from it. It's often said that conlangers have a "persecution complex" in this arena -- i.e. we're whiny little geeks. If anything, conlangers get more friendship from linguists than from the general public. That said, most linguists don't exactly brim over with warmth and welcome for practitioners of the secret vice. Conlanging is typically regarded as a kind of silly little hobby or diversion: nobody cares that much as long as you don't let it interfere with your work.
I will admit that there is one anti-conlanging argument that stings me and makes me feel guilty: "Why aren't you out in the field, saving dying languages? You're squandering your talent, skills, interest, and time!"
This argument seems a lot more valid than its generalized counterpart, "Why aren't you working against Great World Evil #42373?" Linguistics interest and expertise are relatively thin on the ground, so it's harder for the cause of saving dying languages to get enough resources/people behind it. Conlangers are often so interested in linguistics that they pursue their interest even when it harms other aspects of their life. Not for nothing do people call it addictive.
But seriously? Firstly, most conlangers just don't have as much spare time as people seem to imagine. Secondly, and more important, most conlangers don't have the expertise to do linguistic fieldwork. A goodly number pursue linguistics in college, but you need a lot more than a bachelor's to do fieldwork. I only know of two conlangers who are linguistics grad students (undoubtedly there are more, but not many more). Most of us have day jobs. We're hobbyists. Would you want model-airplane hobbyists fixing fighter jets?
The other main arguments against conlanging are that it's frivolous, pointless, a waste of time, etc. And for this I can't do better than to point you to The Conlanger's Manifesto, by David Peterson, which eloquently defends conlangery as an art form:
Amen, brother. Conlangery is the art of linguistics, and it should need no more defense than that.
Occasionally, you'll run across linguists actually using conlangs. If you're teaching a linguistics course, occasionally you may want to illustrate some particular concept by using a conlang. That way, you can design the conlang to show off the feature to its best advantage, and avoid all the irrelevant noise/irregularities that you'd get if you used a natlang. It's the same principle as medical illustration: realistic, but with all the fat trimmed away. Just try and find an illustration that shows the pancreas without trimming away a whole load of other viscera! It's damn near impossible. Conlang examples serve the same purpose in a linguistics class. The goal is transmission of key information, not pinpoint-accurate naturalism.
Another, less-used, possibility is to have students create a miniature conlang that exemplifies a particular feature. I've seen a worksheet that taught the basics of ergativity very effectively this way. Unfortunately, it wasn't from an actual linguistics class. It was from a presentation at the 2nd Language Creation Conference. Er, I mean, a presentation that never took place (it was sacrificed in favor of another panel discussion due to time constraints): "Applications of Conlanging in Pedagogy". You can see the worksheet on page 13 of the PDF of the program. I can't genuinely speak from the perspective of a student, because I already knew what ergativity was at the time, but I really think it would have been very effective as a homework assignment, because it gets you actually working with an ergative system.
But the most interesting intersection of conlangs and linguistics, in my opinion, is in the domain of research. A lot of studies have come out recently, where people are exposed to a small conlang and then their learning success is tested and studied. This is a really exciting paradigm, because you can engineer your language to have certain traits in the area you're interested in, and to be `normal' or `easy' in all other areas. If you're testing acquisition of (say) verb-subject-object word order (English is subject-verb-object), you can make your language have perfect consistent VSO order and be completely unremarkable in everything else. Good luck finding a natlang that fits that bill. It's the same cutting-out-the-noise principle we saw earlier.
Or, if you want to put in noise and study how people will deal with it, you can manipulate the type and amount of noise to a very high resolution. Likewise with (say) syllable-transition probabilities in a word-segmentation study (if ba is always followed by ka, but ka is followed by a whole lot of different things, you can deduce that fooBAKAbar is the words fooBAKA and bar, not fooBA and KAbar.)
I'm currently involved in a research project using this paradigm, and I think it's an incredible tool. Look out for a lit review in the near future!
There are some conlangers who would like to see descriptive research done on fully-fleshed-out conlangs. And I hate to say this, especially because I'm good friends with this crowd, but I disagree. I don't think that investigating and describing conlangs can tell you much about the range and properties of human natural language. (Most academic linguists, I think, would agree with me.) To find out anything about human natural language, you ought to study human languages that have evolved naturally, instead of ones that were consciously invented. You can make a conlang with any conceivable twisted logical structure; the structure may be possible, but that doesn't mean it would ever evolve naturally, or that it's reflective of anything in natural language.
But since conlangery is the art form associated with linguistics, you could do the same sort of humanistic or aesthetic studies that you do on paintings (the art form associated with vision science). What do people find elegant or appealing? What conlang properties elicit what subjective reactions? What bizarre structures have what bizarre effects on people trying to use the language (the linguistic analogue of optical illusions)? And this could have implications in the study of natlangs.
Next up: the learn-a-conlang paradigm in language acquisition research.
First off, I am not saying that conlangers are oppressed or shunned or anything by academic linguists. Far from it. It's often said that conlangers have a "persecution complex" in this arena -- i.e. we're whiny little geeks. If anything, conlangers get more friendship from linguists than from the general public. That said, most linguists don't exactly brim over with warmth and welcome for practitioners of the secret vice. Conlanging is typically regarded as a kind of silly little hobby or diversion: nobody cares that much as long as you don't let it interfere with your work.
I will admit that there is one anti-conlanging argument that stings me and makes me feel guilty: "Why aren't you out in the field, saving dying languages? You're squandering your talent, skills, interest, and time!"
This argument seems a lot more valid than its generalized counterpart, "Why aren't you working against Great World Evil #42373?" Linguistics interest and expertise are relatively thin on the ground, so it's harder for the cause of saving dying languages to get enough resources/people behind it. Conlangers are often so interested in linguistics that they pursue their interest even when it harms other aspects of their life. Not for nothing do people call it addictive.
But seriously? Firstly, most conlangers just don't have as much spare time as people seem to imagine. Secondly, and more important, most conlangers don't have the expertise to do linguistic fieldwork. A goodly number pursue linguistics in college, but you need a lot more than a bachelor's to do fieldwork. I only know of two conlangers who are linguistics grad students (undoubtedly there are more, but not many more). Most of us have day jobs. We're hobbyists. Would you want model-airplane hobbyists fixing fighter jets?
The other main arguments against conlanging are that it's frivolous, pointless, a waste of time, etc. And for this I can't do better than to point you to The Conlanger's Manifesto, by David Peterson, which eloquently defends conlangery as an art form:
...Looking only at the utilitarian end of it, if the creator isn't going to use his/her language for communication, and since language can be viewed only as a means of communication, language creation is pretty useless.
But is this all language is: A method of communication? If so, what is poetry? what is literature? What possible use could James Joyce's Ulysses have? I suppose if you were on a desert island and needed to smash crabs, it would do the trick—it's pretty thick, after all. But beyond that? According to them, it would have no use. And why stop there? What good do paintings do anyone?...Pretty soon what you're left with is a world without art.
At this point, the argument should come to an end. The rigor and usefulness of art is an argument that has been argued many times by many people much more articulate than I, and by now (I certainly hope), the whole world should have figured out that art really does pull its weight on Earth.
Amen, brother. Conlangery is the art of linguistics, and it should need no more defense than that.
Occasionally, you'll run across linguists actually using conlangs. If you're teaching a linguistics course, occasionally you may want to illustrate some particular concept by using a conlang. That way, you can design the conlang to show off the feature to its best advantage, and avoid all the irrelevant noise/irregularities that you'd get if you used a natlang. It's the same principle as medical illustration: realistic, but with all the fat trimmed away. Just try and find an illustration that shows the pancreas without trimming away a whole load of other viscera! It's damn near impossible. Conlang examples serve the same purpose in a linguistics class. The goal is transmission of key information, not pinpoint-accurate naturalism.
Another, less-used, possibility is to have students create a miniature conlang that exemplifies a particular feature. I've seen a worksheet that taught the basics of ergativity very effectively this way. Unfortunately, it wasn't from an actual linguistics class. It was from a presentation at the 2nd Language Creation Conference. Er, I mean, a presentation that never took place (it was sacrificed in favor of another panel discussion due to time constraints): "Applications of Conlanging in Pedagogy". You can see the worksheet on page 13 of the PDF of the program. I can't genuinely speak from the perspective of a student, because I already knew what ergativity was at the time, but I really think it would have been very effective as a homework assignment, because it gets you actually working with an ergative system.
But the most interesting intersection of conlangs and linguistics, in my opinion, is in the domain of research. A lot of studies have come out recently, where people are exposed to a small conlang and then their learning success is tested and studied. This is a really exciting paradigm, because you can engineer your language to have certain traits in the area you're interested in, and to be `normal' or `easy' in all other areas. If you're testing acquisition of (say) verb-subject-object word order (English is subject-verb-object), you can make your language have perfect consistent VSO order and be completely unremarkable in everything else. Good luck finding a natlang that fits that bill. It's the same cutting-out-the-noise principle we saw earlier.
Or, if you want to put in noise and study how people will deal with it, you can manipulate the type and amount of noise to a very high resolution. Likewise with (say) syllable-transition probabilities in a word-segmentation study (if ba is always followed by ka, but ka is followed by a whole lot of different things, you can deduce that fooBAKAbar is the words fooBAKA and bar, not fooBA and KAbar.)
I'm currently involved in a research project using this paradigm, and I think it's an incredible tool. Look out for a lit review in the near future!
There are some conlangers who would like to see descriptive research done on fully-fleshed-out conlangs. And I hate to say this, especially because I'm good friends with this crowd, but I disagree. I don't think that investigating and describing conlangs can tell you much about the range and properties of human natural language. (Most academic linguists, I think, would agree with me.) To find out anything about human natural language, you ought to study human languages that have evolved naturally, instead of ones that were consciously invented. You can make a conlang with any conceivable twisted logical structure; the structure may be possible, but that doesn't mean it would ever evolve naturally, or that it's reflective of anything in natural language.
But since conlangery is the art form associated with linguistics, you could do the same sort of humanistic or aesthetic studies that you do on paintings (the art form associated with vision science). What do people find elegant or appealing? What conlang properties elicit what subjective reactions? What bizarre structures have what bizarre effects on people trying to use the language (the linguistic analogue of optical illusions)? And this could have implications in the study of natlangs.
Next up: the learn-a-conlang paradigm in language acquisition research.
Thursday, January 31, 2008
My Erdős number is 5
Back in high school, when we got around to it (about once a year) the Neighborhood would publish an issue of the Menlo Math Magazine. It was sort of a random collection of real-world-relatedness, whimsy, and interesting problems. Not an academic publication by any standard. But that didn't stop us all from facetiously claiming an Erdős number of 6, when we heard that Mr. T's was 5.
I just found out that mine is actually 5, and this time it's damn near official, not tenuously based on a high school pamphlet. Over the summer of 2005 I worked on the Stanford ALL project. Mostly as unpaid labor, admittedly, but I did sit in on the meetings and I did point us to a couple of valuable data sources. This meant I got to interact with some big names, however briefly.
According to Language Log, the lowest Erdős number known for a linguist is 2, and Geoff Pullum's is 3. A quick Google Scholaring shows that Arnold Zwicky and Thomas Wasow, therefore, have Erdős numbers not greater than 4. And they were both involved in the ALL project, as was I, which makes my Erdős number not greater than 5.
...All right, none of us are actually authors of the paper in question. I appear in the acknowledgement footer on the first page, along with the other students involved in the project. But Zwicky and Wasow appear in the same footer, as does John Rickford (who doesn't have any papers coauthored with Pullum, at least on Google Scholar). (Well, OK, all those big names appear in the references, which I don't.) Their contributions to the project were certainly substantive enough to qualify criteria for what counts as `collaboration'. My contributions were far less substantive, but I still think they counted for something, and if I appear in the same acknowledgements (the same parenthesis in the acknowledgements, even), that's got to be worth something.
(Naturally, this all comes with the caveat that we've been counting non-strictly-mathematical publications, but that has plenty of precedent.)
I just found out that mine is actually 5, and this time it's damn near official, not tenuously based on a high school pamphlet. Over the summer of 2005 I worked on the Stanford ALL project. Mostly as unpaid labor, admittedly, but I did sit in on the meetings and I did point us to a couple of valuable data sources. This meant I got to interact with some big names, however briefly.
According to Language Log, the lowest Erdős number known for a linguist is 2, and Geoff Pullum's is 3. A quick Google Scholaring shows that Arnold Zwicky and Thomas Wasow, therefore, have Erdős numbers not greater than 4. And they were both involved in the ALL project, as was I, which makes my Erdős number not greater than 5.
...All right, none of us are actually authors of the paper in question. I appear in the acknowledgement footer on the first page, along with the other students involved in the project. But Zwicky and Wasow appear in the same footer, as does John Rickford (who doesn't have any papers coauthored with Pullum, at least on Google Scholar). (Well, OK, all those big names appear in the references, which I don't.) Their contributions to the project were certainly substantive enough to qualify criteria for what counts as `collaboration'. My contributions were far less substantive, but I still think they counted for something, and if I appear in the same acknowledgements (the same parenthesis in the acknowledgements, even), that's got to be worth something.
(Naturally, this all comes with the caveat that we've been counting non-strictly-mathematical publications, but that has plenty of precedent.)
Friday, January 18, 2008
Feeling a teacher's love
In high school, we had a teacher, Mr. T, who taught computer science and some of the advanced math courses. And he was wonderful. Everybody loved him. I've never encountered so much infectious enthusiasm, even at the ungodly hour of 8am on a Monday morning. He could light us on fire by drawing box-and-pointer diagrams. We had a party the day we learned the Fundamental Theorem of Calculus. Mr. T was a mentor, a friend, a father, a rock; his room was a haven for geeklings. Everybody loved him, and he loved us too.
I understood his love in a rather abstract sense back then, and up until this morning. But this afternoon, I understood it from the inside.
The research I'm doing at the moment involves teaching pairs of people a constructed language by immersion, and then having them take a test. (More details on this (very interesting) paradigm in an upcoming post!) Today was only the second time this experiment has ever been run, so I'm also happy just because it worked. We ran two pairs of people.
I had an awfully hard time teaching the first pair. They just seemed to fundamentally not get a lot of the grammar. It was very difficult to keep myself from grabbing one guy and telling him, loudly and in English, that "the way to turn a sentence into a question is NOT just to say the sentence with a rising intonation at the end!!!". And so on, and so on. Teaching them was frustrating, occasionally painful.
And then the second pair came in, a pair of undergrads, and they more than made up for the first pair. It only took them twenty minutes to get to more than adequate proficiency, where it had taken the first pair almost an hour to get to less than adequate proficiency. They seemed to pick everything up right away. It was like watching a rose bloom in time-lapse. My favorite moment was when I taught the question form, using only one verb in my examples. When I prompted one of the participants, she immediately came up with several correct question-form sentences, and she generalized to all the verbs we'd learned, not just the one I demonstrated with. If we hadn't been in an experiment, I might have proposed to her on the spot.
I graded the four tests just now. The first pair had decidedly mediocre scores, no surprise there. But the second pair did extremely well, and they both did just about perfectly on the part we're most interested in. I was overjoyed to see them using linguistic terminology correctly to explain their answers (even though their knowledge of terms had nothing to do with how well they acquired the language). When I was done grading, I spontaneously picked up the last test and kissed it.
Tonight, I think I experienced a little of what made Mr. T such a good teacher, what made him love his students and his work. It's not an easy feeling to articulate. Pride and joy in students, enthusiasm for the subject, and a little bit of self-satisfaction that, yeah, I taught them that. The feeling was very powerful, even though the teaching I did today wasn't very real. What if I were teaching material that was beautiful and meaningful, instead of an arbitrary constructed language? What if I could teach for an entire semester and witness long-term progress and synthesis, instead of bidding goodbye after an hour? What if I were teaching students who learned for love of the material, not because they were paid to be subjects in a study?
For the record, this is not the first time I've taught, nor the first time I've found it satisfying. For a couple of years I tutored 6th graders in math and Japanese, and it was always great when they'd get a flash of insight after a long hard slog. (They were remedial students, so it wasn't often.) And in the Karate club, it's traditional that you help teach the people who rank below you. I was co- leading brown belt my senior year, so that meant I taught just about everybody. I always enjoyed seeing some yellow-belts perform a technique really well, and thinking "Yay, they remembered X subtle point I taught them about!". But I've never felt a teacher's love as strongly as I did today; certainly not strongly enough to merit using the word `love'.
If I follow the track I'm planning to follow, I'll end up a professor. I understand that teaching is mostly tedious, frustrating, and difficult, not full of brilliant-student-love. But it's the possibility, the hope that springs eternal, and when it's fulfilled it makes up for everything else.
I understood his love in a rather abstract sense back then, and up until this morning. But this afternoon, I understood it from the inside.
The research I'm doing at the moment involves teaching pairs of people a constructed language by immersion, and then having them take a test. (More details on this (very interesting) paradigm in an upcoming post!) Today was only the second time this experiment has ever been run, so I'm also happy just because it worked. We ran two pairs of people.
I had an awfully hard time teaching the first pair. They just seemed to fundamentally not get a lot of the grammar. It was very difficult to keep myself from grabbing one guy and telling him, loudly and in English, that "the way to turn a sentence into a question is NOT just to say the sentence with a rising intonation at the end!!!". And so on, and so on. Teaching them was frustrating, occasionally painful.
And then the second pair came in, a pair of undergrads, and they more than made up for the first pair. It only took them twenty minutes to get to more than adequate proficiency, where it had taken the first pair almost an hour to get to less than adequate proficiency. They seemed to pick everything up right away. It was like watching a rose bloom in time-lapse. My favorite moment was when I taught the question form, using only one verb in my examples. When I prompted one of the participants, she immediately came up with several correct question-form sentences, and she generalized to all the verbs we'd learned, not just the one I demonstrated with. If we hadn't been in an experiment, I might have proposed to her on the spot.
I graded the four tests just now. The first pair had decidedly mediocre scores, no surprise there. But the second pair did extremely well, and they both did just about perfectly on the part we're most interested in. I was overjoyed to see them using linguistic terminology correctly to explain their answers (even though their knowledge of terms had nothing to do with how well they acquired the language). When I was done grading, I spontaneously picked up the last test and kissed it.
Tonight, I think I experienced a little of what made Mr. T such a good teacher, what made him love his students and his work. It's not an easy feeling to articulate. Pride and joy in students, enthusiasm for the subject, and a little bit of self-satisfaction that, yeah, I taught them that. The feeling was very powerful, even though the teaching I did today wasn't very real. What if I were teaching material that was beautiful and meaningful, instead of an arbitrary constructed language? What if I could teach for an entire semester and witness long-term progress and synthesis, instead of bidding goodbye after an hour? What if I were teaching students who learned for love of the material, not because they were paid to be subjects in a study?
For the record, this is not the first time I've taught, nor the first time I've found it satisfying. For a couple of years I tutored 6th graders in math and Japanese, and it was always great when they'd get a flash of insight after a long hard slog. (They were remedial students, so it wasn't often.) And in the Karate club, it's traditional that you help teach the people who rank below you. I was co- leading brown belt my senior year, so that meant I taught just about everybody. I always enjoyed seeing some yellow-belts perform a technique really well, and thinking "Yay, they remembered X subtle point I taught them about!". But I've never felt a teacher's love as strongly as I did today; certainly not strongly enough to merit using the word `love'.
If I follow the track I'm planning to follow, I'll end up a professor. I understand that teaching is mostly tedious, frustrating, and difficult, not full of brilliant-student-love. But it's the possibility, the hope that springs eternal, and when it's fulfilled it makes up for everything else.
Sunday, December 9, 2007
What's This `Conlangery' Business? [Linguists and Conlangers, part 1]
[This will be part of a series of posts about conlanging and its interaction with academic linguistics.]
So, what is conlangery? It's not a popularly known art, so here's a primer for y'all who haven't ever heard of it.
The word conlang is short for "constructed language". Well-known conlangers include Ludwig Zamenhof (Esperanto), Marc Okrand (Klingon), and the revered JRR Tolkien (who once wrote that he invented Middle-Earth largely in order to give his beloved Elvish languages a place to live). We invent languages: spoken languages, signed languages, artificial siblings and alternative scripts for natural languages, artistic languages, logical languages, international auxiliary languages, mind-extending languages, you name it.
(I should warn you that conlangers, being naturally fond of playing with words, habitually `overgeneralize' and apply all kinds of grammatical forms to the word `conlang'. Just for starters, it's both a noun and a verb. A conlanger is someone who conlangs, what they create is a conlang, and the art in general is conlanging or conlangery. On top of that, the con- prefix has become productive, meaning it can apply to all kinds of invented/imagined things: conlangs, conworlds, conscripts (meaning writing systems, not military draftees), conreligions, consolarsystems, conbiology...the list goes on.)
The earliest known conlanger is Hildegard von Bingen, a 12th century German abbess. She's best known for her gorgeous music, but she also invented a language called Lingua Ignota ("unknown language"), which supposedly came to her by divine inspiration.
The best known conlanger...well, it depends who you talk to, but most people will name either Zamenhof or Tolkien, and here we come to a major split in the world of conlangery: that between auxlangers and everybody else. Auxlang is short for "international auxiliary language", and not to make any sweeping generalizations here, but the sort of people who make auxlangs are also the sort of people who have fiery and/or highly unconventional political agendas, and a lot of them are also shamelessly self-promoting. Unfortunately, if you're auxlanging in earnest, this isn't really fixable. You have to want the entire world unified, in some sense, by your language. And you have to think your language is not only `good' enough for everyone in the world to speak, it's `better' than the dozens and dozens of old failed auxlangs. A certain amount of crankery is inherent to the practice of serious auxlanging.
(Quite apart from the above, the vast majority of linguists and conlangers have a horrible visceral reaction to the thought of losing most -- if not all -- of the world's linguistic diversity. Who wants to replace all that culture, knowledge, and sheer beauty with something necessarily bland?)
(Yeah, and, in case you couldn't tell, I'm totally biased, and I freely admit it. Auxlangs are not all bad; any conlangery effort bears some useful fruit.)
So what about the `rest' of the conlangers? People conlang for all sorts of reasons, but the one that really unites us is, trite as it sounds, is love: love of language, its beauties, its intricacies, its elegances; and love of playing around with that in systems of our own creation.
This is not to say that there aren't divisions within the body of non-auxlangers. Probably the biggest group is the artlangers, like Tolkien, who conlang for aesthetics and elegance. (This is not to say that all artlangs end up looking like Tolkien's Elvish languages, all full of L and R and vowels everywhere with nary a `guttural' consonant. Conlangers have as much variation in taste as the general population. Plus, for example, there's a lot to be said for a language in which you can swear effectively. Imagine trying to shit-talk someone in Quenya or Sindarin.) At the very least, many hundreds of artlangs have been made, or at least started. My own language Tlharithad is a young artlang, though I sadly haven't had time to work on it since the beginning of the semester. You can find quite a few well-developed artlangs, associated with the fantastic conworld of Verduria, at Virtual Verduria, made by Zompist. I have to apologize to the many, many, very worthy artlangers that I haven't linked to, but for non-conlangers, Zompist's work makes a good place to start.
On the flip side of the same coin, you have the engelangers -- engelang is short for "engineered language" -- who design their languages to achieve a particular goal. There are logical languages, like Lojban, which are designed to eliminate ambiguity. And there are other engelangs, whose design goals don't really fall naturally into groups. A seminal example is Ithkuil, which has about five times the information content per syllable of natural languages. In the words of its creator, John Quijada, Ithkuil is "systematically designed to blend a high degree of communication of cognitive intent and meaning with a high degree of efficiency, i.e., to allow speakers to say a lot in as few syllables as possible." While I'm not intimately familiar with the language, I know the making of Ithkuil involved a lot of mindbending reorganization of cognitive concepts. For example, if you're indoors, the spatial axes around which you organize your speech are placed with respect to the long axis of the room! (Of course, JohnQ freely admits that Ithkuil is extraordinarily difficult to learn, and has in fact created a somewhat simplified version, called Ilaksh, for those of us without superhuman vocal tracts.)
It can be argued that artlangers are just engelangers whose design goal is that of beauty, rather that something more conventionally associated with the words "design goal". It's a little like the distinction between architects and sculptors: you have people who are clearly one or the other, people who are mostly one with a little of the other, and people like Michelangelo or Maya Lin who straddle the boundary so well that no one ever finishes arguing about which category they fall into. (And, as good linguists, we have no problem with this, knowing that strict definitions are artificial constructions, and everything is better described in terms of generalizations from prototypes.)
Next up: the enmity, such as it is, between conlangs/conlangers and professional linguists / linguistics research.
So, what is conlangery? It's not a popularly known art, so here's a primer for y'all who haven't ever heard of it.
The word conlang is short for "constructed language". Well-known conlangers include Ludwig Zamenhof (Esperanto), Marc Okrand (Klingon), and the revered JRR Tolkien (who once wrote that he invented Middle-Earth largely in order to give his beloved Elvish languages a place to live). We invent languages: spoken languages, signed languages, artificial siblings and alternative scripts for natural languages, artistic languages, logical languages, international auxiliary languages, mind-extending languages, you name it.
(I should warn you that conlangers, being naturally fond of playing with words, habitually `overgeneralize' and apply all kinds of grammatical forms to the word `conlang'. Just for starters, it's both a noun and a verb. A conlanger is someone who conlangs, what they create is a conlang, and the art in general is conlanging or conlangery. On top of that, the con- prefix has become productive, meaning it can apply to all kinds of invented/imagined things: conlangs, conworlds, conscripts (meaning writing systems, not military draftees), conreligions, consolarsystems, conbiology...the list goes on.)
The earliest known conlanger is Hildegard von Bingen, a 12th century German abbess. She's best known for her gorgeous music, but she also invented a language called Lingua Ignota ("unknown language"), which supposedly came to her by divine inspiration.
The best known conlanger...well, it depends who you talk to, but most people will name either Zamenhof or Tolkien, and here we come to a major split in the world of conlangery: that between auxlangers and everybody else. Auxlang is short for "international auxiliary language", and not to make any sweeping generalizations here, but the sort of people who make auxlangs are also the sort of people who have fiery and/or highly unconventional political agendas, and a lot of them are also shamelessly self-promoting. Unfortunately, if you're auxlanging in earnest, this isn't really fixable. You have to want the entire world unified, in some sense, by your language. And you have to think your language is not only `good' enough for everyone in the world to speak, it's `better' than the dozens and dozens of old failed auxlangs. A certain amount of crankery is inherent to the practice of serious auxlanging.
(Quite apart from the above, the vast majority of linguists and conlangers have a horrible visceral reaction to the thought of losing most -- if not all -- of the world's linguistic diversity. Who wants to replace all that culture, knowledge, and sheer beauty with something necessarily bland?)
(Yeah, and, in case you couldn't tell, I'm totally biased, and I freely admit it. Auxlangs are not all bad; any conlangery effort bears some useful fruit.)
So what about the `rest' of the conlangers? People conlang for all sorts of reasons, but the one that really unites us is, trite as it sounds, is love: love of language, its beauties, its intricacies, its elegances; and love of playing around with that in systems of our own creation.
This is not to say that there aren't divisions within the body of non-auxlangers. Probably the biggest group is the artlangers, like Tolkien, who conlang for aesthetics and elegance. (This is not to say that all artlangs end up looking like Tolkien's Elvish languages, all full of L and R and vowels everywhere with nary a `guttural' consonant. Conlangers have as much variation in taste as the general population. Plus, for example, there's a lot to be said for a language in which you can swear effectively. Imagine trying to shit-talk someone in Quenya or Sindarin.) At the very least, many hundreds of artlangs have been made, or at least started. My own language Tlharithad is a young artlang, though I sadly haven't had time to work on it since the beginning of the semester. You can find quite a few well-developed artlangs, associated with the fantastic conworld of Verduria, at Virtual Verduria, made by Zompist. I have to apologize to the many, many, very worthy artlangers that I haven't linked to, but for non-conlangers, Zompist's work makes a good place to start.
On the flip side of the same coin, you have the engelangers -- engelang is short for "engineered language" -- who design their languages to achieve a particular goal. There are logical languages, like Lojban, which are designed to eliminate ambiguity. And there are other engelangs, whose design goals don't really fall naturally into groups. A seminal example is Ithkuil, which has about five times the information content per syllable of natural languages. In the words of its creator, John Quijada, Ithkuil is "systematically designed to blend a high degree of communication of cognitive intent and meaning with a high degree of efficiency, i.e., to allow speakers to say a lot in as few syllables as possible." While I'm not intimately familiar with the language, I know the making of Ithkuil involved a lot of mindbending reorganization of cognitive concepts. For example, if you're indoors, the spatial axes around which you organize your speech are placed with respect to the long axis of the room! (Of course, JohnQ freely admits that Ithkuil is extraordinarily difficult to learn, and has in fact created a somewhat simplified version, called Ilaksh, for those of us without superhuman vocal tracts.)
It can be argued that artlangers are just engelangers whose design goal is that of beauty, rather that something more conventionally associated with the words "design goal". It's a little like the distinction between architects and sculptors: you have people who are clearly one or the other, people who are mostly one with a little of the other, and people like Michelangelo or Maya Lin who straddle the boundary so well that no one ever finishes arguing about which category they fall into. (And, as good linguists, we have no problem with this, knowing that strict definitions are artificial constructions, and everything is better described in terms of generalizations from prototypes.)
Next up: the enmity, such as it is, between conlangs/conlangers and professional linguists / linguistics research.
Thursday, December 6, 2007
Stir-fried wikipedia, anyone?
The highly estimable Language Log points out yet another instance of Chinese menu translator ingenuity. Wikipedia: now with even more uses!
For more on this phenomenon, see Engrish.com (marginally NSFW), which is devoted to collecting this sort of unintentionally hilarious bad English, mostly from Japan. Aside from just giggling at the bad translations, it's interesting to occasionally catch a nugget of linguistic insight. Well, I mean, the fine folks at Language Log can catch them all the time, but I'm an amateur, so I have to take what I can get.
A while ago, Engrish.com featured a shirt (which I unfortunately can't seem to find now), bearing the sentence "We are dumb and haven't intelligence apes." And I jumped out of my seat, because it made perfect sense to me. In English, that sentence means "we are dumb and do not possess apes of intelligence." Presumably the shirt-writers meant "we are apes who are dumb and do not possess intelligence." (Perhaps dumb here means mute rather than unintelligent -- a relatively subtle distinction, but I've seen Japanese<==>English dictionaries that do very well at this. Or, y'know, maybe it's just redundant.)
What English handles as a relative clause, "apes who do not possess intelligence", Japanese handles by effectively turning the verb "not possess intelligence" into an adjective. To say "we are apes who are dumb and do not possess intelligence" in Japanese, you say something along the lines of "we are dumb and non-intelligence-possessing apes", which is clearly the origin of the T-shirt.
Of course, there's also the complete nonsense, e.g. "I smell the smelly smell of something that smells smell", and the grammatically-correct-but-thematically-inappropriate text, a la this classic example.
For more on this phenomenon, see Engrish.com (marginally NSFW), which is devoted to collecting this sort of unintentionally hilarious bad English, mostly from Japan. Aside from just giggling at the bad translations, it's interesting to occasionally catch a nugget of linguistic insight. Well, I mean, the fine folks at Language Log can catch them all the time, but I'm an amateur, so I have to take what I can get.
A while ago, Engrish.com featured a shirt (which I unfortunately can't seem to find now), bearing the sentence "We are dumb and haven't intelligence apes." And I jumped out of my seat, because it made perfect sense to me. In English, that sentence means "we are dumb and do not possess apes of intelligence." Presumably the shirt-writers meant "we are apes who are dumb and do not possess intelligence." (Perhaps dumb here means mute rather than unintelligent -- a relatively subtle distinction, but I've seen Japanese<==>English dictionaries that do very well at this. Or, y'know, maybe it's just redundant.)
What English handles as a relative clause, "apes who do not possess intelligence", Japanese handles by effectively turning the verb "not possess intelligence" into an adjective. To say "we are apes who are dumb and do not possess intelligence" in Japanese, you say something along the lines of "we are dumb and non-intelligence-possessing apes", which is clearly the origin of the T-shirt.
Of course, there's also the complete nonsense, e.g. "I smell the smelly smell of something that smells smell", and the grammatically-correct-but-thematically-inappropriate text, a la this classic example.
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