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Kindle Notes & Highlights
by
Lane Greene
Read between
October 4 - October 7, 2021
irascibility,
John McWhorter of Columbia University calls “fingered speech”.2
This book is a love-letter to language:
All of us have once experienced those neverending discussions in which a dame, using lots of interjections and incoherences, swears to you that the word “luna” is more (or less) expressive than the word “moon”.
Sapir, a linguist, and Benjamin Lee Whorf, who had studied with him, developed “linguistic relativity”: the idea that the world looks different depending on the native language of the speaker.
If this full-strength statement of Whorf’s hypothesis were true, building a better language – repairing the defects inherent in natural language itself – would be something like a key to unlocking the full logical powers of the mind. Brown’s
“mondegreens”,
The creators of Lojban have put into their language everything which we know to matter for human communication; if the language fails, natural languages may have other crucial properties that we have not yet noticed. “If people can speak logically transparent languages, why don’t they?” It’s a good question, and Lojban hasn’t answered it yet, with its small user numbers and their difficulty speaking the language fluently. If the strong Whorfian proposition were true, and speaking Lojban made you think more logically, it should have spread considerably since 1960. Who wouldn’t want to think
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Should the BBC switch to Lojban? Unlike English, it is exactly the kind of language that sticklers (including many journalists) think people should speak. It makes you communicate information precisely, after working out exactly what you want to say in your own mind. Many sticklers assume a lay version of the Sapir–Whorf hypothesis themselves: that thought itself depends on language. They worry that lack of careful attention to grammar threatens the entire enterprise of clear communication and even clear thinking.
Gwynne lays out an extravagant, pseudo-logical “proof”. Step one. For genuine thinking we need words. By ‘genuine thinking’ I mean: as opposed to merely being – as animals are capable of being – conscious of feeling hungry, tired, angry, and so on, and wanting to do something about it. Thinking cannot be done without words. Step two. If we do not use words rightly, we shall not think rightly. Step three. If we do not think rightly, we cannot reliably decide rightly, because good decisions depend on accurate thinking. Step four. If we do not decide rightly, we shall make a mess of our lives,
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[T]he use of “he” to embrace either “he” or “she” now being held by some people to be offensive to women. The result of this has been unfortunate, to say the least. Because saying “he or she”, “him or her” and “his or hers”, when speaking about people generally, is often disagreeably clumsy, a way of avoiding doing so has arisen which is offensive to logic and common sense and shockingly illiterate when in writing. In place of “he or she”, and the rest, the words “they”, “them” and “their” are now often used, even when referring to only one person, as in “Anyone who considers this modern
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“Someone left [possessive pronoun] umbrella!” If you are like the vast majority of English-speakers, you’ll naturally say “someone left their umbrella.” Don’t worry. You are not illiterate, nor out of your mind, and you haven’t offended logic.
Modern English doesn’t have a good “epicene” pronoun, meaning one common to both genders, when you want to refer to “someone”, or a generic
socially gendered subjects. Try “someone has left his lipstick.”
Everyone is grammatically singular (it takes is, not are). But it is semantically plural (referring to all people, or all the people relevant to a discourse).
Plenty of languages have pronouns that can be both singular and plural: French vous, German sie/Sie, and so on.
that epicene they is even older, and you can look that up in the dictionary too. The Oxford English Dictionary’s first citation for sex-neutral, singular they is not “modern”, as Gwynne says. It is from 1375, in a poem called The Romance of William of Palerne.
[E]very body was pleased to think how much they had always disliked Mr. Darcy before they had known any thing of the matter. (Pride and Prejudice)
Gwynne has seen these arguments. But he is adamant, nonetheless, that an infinitive should never be split, with a bold justification: “Shakespeare never needed to split an infinitive, and scarcely a single instance of a split infinitive is to be found in the classical authors of the last two centuries.”
John Wycliffe, an early translator of the Bible into English, used it frequently.
though Shakespeare uses one (“thy pity may deserve to pitied be,” from a sonnet). But it returned in force in the 18th
epicene they.
Many kinds of thought, from artistic to mathematical, and from simple to complex, are possible without language. “Genie” – a girl famous to linguists for having been raised until age 13 without language by her abusive parents – was able to learn a number of words, but never to speak properly with English grammar. But her ungrammatical narratives certainly showed that she had vivid memories of her horrible father (“Father hit big stick. Father angry. Father hit Genie big stick. Father take piece wood hit. Cry. Me cry.”) And she could tell far more intricate stories with pictures. In other
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European languages constantly borrow English terms of science, technology or business.
Physicists invented the word “hadron” because they needed it; they did not find the particle because they had the word in their vocabularies.
Gwynne and prescriptivists like him would have you think that grammar, not primarily vocabulary, is the key to thinking. His theory entails that people who use non-standard (what he would call “incorrect”) grammar can’t think straight.
Similarly, in Latin, when a pronoun in a predicate refers back to the subject of the sentence, they should both be in the same case, the nominative. By this logic, English should do the same. This is the reason many people have been taught to say things like “it is I” and “that is he” instead of “it’s me” and “that’s him”.
English, like other languages, has “modal verbs”, which express the relationship between a speaker and an action like obligation, desire, ability and so forth. They include can, should, must, dare and the like. These verbs take an infinitive after them: can go, should work, must sleep, dare try. If you’ve heard that an infinitive must have to before it, you will wonder if these are really infinitives, but they certainly are – a “bare infinitive” is one that has no to before it. Modals take bare infinitives.
To this inglorious list belongs the third item in the list above: the idea that you can’t use which in a “restrictive” relative clause, one that crucially defines the word it refers back to. (A “non-restrictive” relative clause simply adds an extra bit of information.) Many people think that which can’t be used in sentences like the first one below; they think which can only be used in sentences of the second type. Restrictive: The car that I sold cost me $8,000. Non-restrictive: The car, which I sold, cost me $8,000.
extemporised,
the fear that people ignore news that doesn’t fit their pre-existing views has only grown.
Voters self-segregate, “liking” and sharing news stories in their social media feeds that comport with what they always believed. Psychologists have long recognised the larger phenomenon of “confirmation bias”: it pleases people to read what they already know (or at least believe) to be true, a fact that can even be shown in scans of the brain, where
Most people really don’t like paying taxes, and it has little to do with metaphor. Money’s tight; like time, it’s a scarce resource, exactly one of those deep-seated concepts Lakoff identified in Metaphors We Live By. Nobody likes parting with a scarce resource, no matter what the framing.
non-sequiturs,
