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-- A conversation about languages and writing systems

A conversation about languages and writing systems, ffs!

Well, this thread is the revival of a serious discussion deleted in a couple of previous threads...

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Originally posted by Omega_M who deleted it ? there was some interesting conversation in there between me and Lira. Not to mention all those pictars and drunk nachos posts.

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Originally posted by Lira quote: Originally posted by Omega_M Interesting...although I'd be inclined to believe that a language with a lot more alphabets has a wider range of words, and words for many more expressions/experiences than a language with less number of alphabets. quote: Originally posted by Lira hhmm... there's no necessary correlation between these two facts, I think. English has an enormous vocabulary - as it's spoken in all continents and every community lives a different reality, thus resorting to different words - whereas Mongolian could be written with 3 different alphabets (the native Mongolian cursive alphabet, the Cyrillic Alphabet borrowed from Russia, and the Latin Alphabet). However, it's used by less than 6 million people, most of them living in the same area. Sure, Mongolian is probably a rich language with a vast vocabulary, but I find it hard to believe that it's unexpectedly vaster than that of any other neighbouring language. We should rename this thread to "A conversation about languages and writing systems" or something of that sort

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Originally posted by Omega_M oh shit, that was good. As for your reply, I'm still quite skeptical. But I totally suck at analyzing languages (since I've never formally studied Linguistics), idk how to correlate # of alphabets directly with the richness of language. Some how, it appears to be common sense to me. There must be a reason why a language has more alphabets. it must give the language more flexibility to create words for many more experiences than a language with less alphabets.

... there we go, I'm adding a proper reply as soon as I arrive at my lovely "office"

.....

so is this the thread to look in for future updates in this conversation?

If its not deleted again.

yea I dont think it has to do with alphabet size, more ummm, I dunno usage....[cites the common example of the eskimos having 9000000 words for snow while we only have 1...snow]

I would imagine the real key is the number of users of a given language combined with the amount of time those individuals have available to devote to pursuits other then survival, and the amount of time the language has been in use. It only makes sense that if more people have been using a language for a longer period of time and have had time to devote to art or other means of developing the language it will be more versitile and complex.

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Originally posted by Moral Hazard I would imagine the real key is the number of users of a given language combined with the amount of time those individuals have available to devote to pursuits other then survival, and the amount of time the language has been in use. It only makes sense that if more people have been using a language for a longer period of time and have had time to devote to art or other means of developing the language it will be more versitile and complex.

thats part of it but a HUGE part of it is the way in which the people are or arent isolated. isolation has created languages such as ukrainian, swiss german, mexican spanish, portuguese, and the likes. also depending on the influences of tourism, economics, and social structure, the language can change dramatically in ways you wouldnt expect.

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Originally posted by gehzumteufel thats part of it but a HUGE part of it is the way in which the people are or arent isolated. isolation has created languages such as ukrainian, swiss german, mexican spanish, portuguese, and the likes. also depending on the influences of tourism, economics, and social structure, the language can change dramatically in ways you wouldnt expect.

With regard to isolation... I agree that it has created unique languages or unique dialects, however, the uniqueness is not what we're looking at here... we're talking about variety of words or methods of combining words/sounds/etc. In this regard, isolation would really work against the development of a language into a more complex form. Isolation cuts down on the number of users and likely on the need for using the language et al. This would result in a less, rather then more complex language. Part of the reason English is so complex is because it has had applications all over the world for hundreds of years now... each place where it is used has some unique attributes and interactions with other cultures... these interactions and unique requirements help to develope new words, styles of use, rhetoric devices, phrases, etc.

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Originally posted by Moral Hazard Part of the reason English is so complex is because it has had applications all over the world for hundreds of years now... each place where it is used has some unique attributes and interactions with other cultures... these interactions and unique requirements help to develope new words, styles of use, rhetoric devices, phrases, etc.

Its complexity can also be attributed to the various kings that held power during the rise of English. Having Norman kings resulted in an enormous expansion of the language as the Old French and English speaking peoples' languages inevitably became enmeshed. This intermingling of languages including, importantly, Latin allows it to be incredibly flexible when it comes to adding words to its vocabulary.

edit: it's = its

There's got to be a basis for comparison of languages. Further, the evolution must depend on the number of years the language has been in existence and as moral said, how much time the civilization has invested in Arts and Culture, rather than simply fighting for survival. Larger number of alphabets may not necessarily point to the richness of a language. But I'm inclined to think that the variety of word (maybe even the grammar and structure ) that can be created out of the pool must be larger than other languages with lesser number of alphabets. More words should => better expression. I was reading about the use of Sanskrit language for machine level computer usage. (Link) . From what I understand, the language is known for its disambiguity of expression. Now, would this quality make it a better language than others ?

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In the past twenty years, much time, effort, and money has been expended on designing an unambiguous representation of natural languages to make them accessible to computer processing. These efforts have centered around creating schemata designed to parallel logical relations with relations expressed by the syntax and semantics of natural languages, which are clearly cumbersome and ambiguous in their function as vehicles for the transmission of logical data. Understandably, there is a widespread belief that natural languages are unsuitable for the transmission of many ideas that artificial languages can render with great precision and mathematical rigor. But this dichotomy, which has served as a premise underlying much work in the areas of linguistics and artificial intelligence, is a false one. There is at least one language, Sanskrit, which for the duration of almost 1000 years was a living spoken language with a considerable literature of its own. Besides works of literary value, there was a long philosophical and grammatical tradition that has continued to exist with undiminished vigor until the present century. Among the accomplishments of the grammarians can be reckoned a method for paraphrasing Sanskrit in a manner that is identical not only in essence but in form with current work in Artificial Intelligence. This article demonstrates that a natural language can serve as an artificial language also, and that much work in AI has been reinventing a wheel millenia old.

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Originally posted by Omega_M Further, the evolution must depend on the number of years the language has been in existence and as moral said, how much time the civilization has invested in Arts and Culture, rather than simply fighting for survival.

I would add to that the culture's economic influence. The expansion of the British Empire spread English all over the world and the rise of America after World War II accelerated this immersion of English into the world's cultures.

Art and Culture are quite important to the spread of a language but they do not place a strain on other nations to adopt the language as failing to adopt, "The Language of Business" does.

the ability for absorption is important. You can romanize just about everything but not being able to say L causes issues.

Having multiple styles doesnt help like hiragana V katakana plus chinese in its multiple forms means when something uniquely english happens and you need a word for it...

well you get engrish.com

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Originally posted by gehzumteufel thats part of it but a HUGE part of it is the way in which the people are or arent isolated. isolation has created languages such as ukrainian, swiss german, mexican spanish, portuguese, and the likes. also depending on the influences of tourism, economics, and social structure, the language can change dramatically in ways you wouldnt expect.

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Originally posted by Moral Hazard With regard to isolation... I agree that it has created unique languages or unique dialects, however, the uniqueness is not what we're looking at here... we're talking about variety of words or methods of combining words/sounds/etc. In this regard, isolation would really work against the development of a language into a more complex form. Isolation cuts down on the number of users and likely on the need for using the language et al. This would result in a less, rather then more complex language. Part of the reason English is so complex is because it has had applications all over the world for hundreds of years now... each place where it is used has some unique attributes and interactions with other cultures... these interactions and unique requirements help to develope new words, styles of use, rhetoric devices, phrases, etc.

reread the bolded part.

edit// isolation plays a big part but also the way in which trade influences languages is enormous. look at the english language for example. has a good amount of its roots in german because the angles and the saxons invading england. this has had a profound effect on the way that english is today.

Jacques Lacan ftw!

Hover your mouse over the words with this kind of underline in order to understand its meaning, in case it's a new word to you

Alphabet vs Language

Well, back to the main question: Can the number of alphabets enrich a language? Not really, and the reason why I say there's no link between the two is inspired on a minor detail: the alphabet is simply a way of codifying a language. Just as a telegram is not the news it contains, a writing system is not the language itself, but the medium used to convey a message.

Usually, when there's an alphabet shift, that is, some group decides to use another alphabet to write their language, it's political decision that doesn't necessarily lead to a lexical borrowing of any sort. The Japanese, for example, have borrowed an insane amount of words from European languages, without necessarily using the Latin Alphabet. Mongolian, as I said, doesn't seem to have gone through any major change in its vocabulary in spite of all the different alphabets used to write it in the last century.

Basis for comparison among languages

If you want to compare the structure of a language (i.e. whether it prefers to place the verb at the end of sentences, or whether it tends to bond words together), yes, there is some basis for comparison - that's called Linguistic Tipology. However, if you want to compare whether a language is more developed then another... well, you simply can't.

Different languages engage in different strategies, and they all evolve according to the needs of its speakers. Sanskrit, Greek and Latin had their heyday during the golden days of philology. They were seen as "the best of all languages", because of how they declined nouns and whatnot. In fact, Ferdinand de Saussure, the father of modern linguistics, was a specialist in Sanskrit. However, there's a reason why most Latin languages lost these features - you could achieve the same result by just having a more fixed order (reason why you could scramble words in Latin as much as you wanted, although you can't do that in Portuguese, Spanish or Italian, without changing the meaning of the sentence). It's more economic. These Latin languages, on the other hand, usually have a more complex set of verb tenses. I, for example, speak Portuguese which has 21 different time tenses... and I don't miss any of these tenses when I'm speaking English, which has a far less complicated verbal paradigm. In a way or another, I can convey a similar meaning in spite of these meanings.

The "perfect" language

Amount of words and "usefulness" of a language aren't necessarily related either. First of all, words only make sense within a context, and this context only makes sense within a language - and, finally, this language only makes sense to a particular group of speakers. It's utterly useless for a Christian to learn the word "आत्म" without its philosophical background. It's like showing a car to a caveman - sure, the caveman knows its a metallic structure with wheels, but he's not in the necessary social context, so he won't ever learn what a "car" is (unless you take him to civilisation).

Secondly, the whole analytic tradition in philosophy started out with Frege's assumption that words and things don't necessarily have a one-to-one relationship. Several words could mean the same thing, and several things could be described with the same word. It's a mess, really, and no language could fix that because of how human cognition words - every speaker of this perfect language would have to know that Clark Kent is Superman, that George Orwell is Eric Arthur Blair and so on. And, the problem with having way too many words is that some of them might even refer to nothing at all, so you could end up with loads of "useless" distinctions.

Finally, there's a reason why I'm a bit sceptic about computers learning a language as we would expect them to: computers can't access meaning. All they can learn is the morphosyntax... which is quite different from how we think. Unless, of course, you find a way to plug the computer into the world and a particular social life, so it could recognise people, how the concept of atman works and what cars are for

hmmm...interesting. I will post my thoughts on this later. Don't have that much time right now.

Here's a little something you might enjoy: http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio4/history..._20031218.shtml

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