In 1988 I came back to the USA from Korea, eager to start on an ESL teaching career but at the same time still considering some of the things I'd seen in Korea. For example, once in the monsoon season, I'd seen three girls and three violins, all under one umprella, all staying dry. How can they work together so closely? I thought - American girls or boys could never do that... I was amazed by a country where people walked on the left side of the sidewalk, but drove on the right side of the road. Was there some kind of reason for this? Or for what we do?

Similarly, the language amazed me. It wasn't that they had no subjects or verbs, they did. It was more that they didn't matter much of the time, they were thrown in as an afterthought or left out altogether. All that stuff in graduate school about SVO or SOV languages was based on the apparently Eurocentric idea that subjects, verbs objects were the basic building blocks of sentences in languages the world around, when in Korea, apparently, you made sentences by ecpressing a topic (In my case...), some other words (interesting experience...) that may or may not be object, verb or anything else, and finally (it is) thrown in accidentally as if almost an afterthought. That last part being da, you'd hear it at the end of so many sentences that Americans learning Korean would use mixed phrases like No Biggie-da kind of making fun of it, yet my point is, if it was the basic building block of sentences as subject and verb are here, you'd never know it from the way they made sentences.

So back to 1988. I was driving on Lakeshore Drive in Chicago, coming in from Evanston; the morning sun came up behind the buildings on my right, the light shimmering off the lake on the left. Seven lanes of Lakeshore Drive are all going seventy, bumper to bumper, fifteen mph over the speed limit. At the same time I'm terrified of using the brake and causing an accident for miles back, or going too fast, having cars accordion up in front of me. It's a delicate dance - staying seventy, staying reasonably close to another car going seventy, taking occasional glances at the Gold Coast or the Lake.

This is literally how I got my inspiration for "language is a self-organized system." These drivers were operating in tandem with the others, attention on the others, acting as a coordinated system for their own benefit.

Two minor problems: This probably actually happened in 1994, six years later, after I'd already. taught in Kansas for six years. I'll reconcile it. Perhaps it won't matter as I write the book.

Second, I probably shouldn't get into sentence analysis in the first page. I mean, what reader actually wants to go back and analyse. them? None. Space out the introduction of Korean sentneces.

Thank you foor listening. My new book Vowels in an Elevator, will be out shortly I hope.

shifts in language use

We are undergoing profound shifts in language use and I am using this post to get my thoughts clear before going back to writing my book, Vowels in an Elevator.

It doesn't work to write the book comparing outdated theories of language with mine, when mine will soon be outdated by the rapid changes we are in the middle of. I do feel, however, that I can integrate some of the changes and even make them work for me, if I am able to describe them carefully and review the implications.

The first is the biggest, most profound, and hardest to imagine, in terms of its consequences. In brief, a huge percentage of communication is being done by AI now; it has no real person behind it until you get to the person who designed the program. When you do business with a company over a phone or computer, you have motives and the AI bot has motives, and its motives are probably more easily tracked than yours. Much of what it does is based on what a person would have done in a similar situation. But it's not entirely the same. It's a different kind of communication. I'm not quite sure what to make of it.

The single biggest consequence is that new slang is no longer likely to spring up. These bots don't just make up new words; they can't. If you use new words with them, they might pick them up or might not. Might turn them around and use them, might not. But most likely their patterns will be based on what they've heard or read by volume. It could affect the rate of change of a language: slowing it down considerably.

Second, the relationship between writing and talking has changed dramatically. We now say things that started in the writing realm (in my household such things as OMG, LOL etc. are routinely spoken); all assumptions that writing is inherently based on speaking are just patently false now. Informal writing in the form of texting is more and more common; writing used to be considered the formalized variant of the language, but is much more than that these days.

There are several generalizations I'd like to free the world of linguistics of, as they don't hold up under the scrutiny of a modern view of language and communication. One is that humans are uniquely equipped to make language, given a working mouth and the brain power to manage complex symbols and grammatical systems. That therefore, animals can never have languages as complex or well-made as ours, because they are missing the mechanisms required to parse them. That humans are therefore superior to animals, being better equipped to. manage these things. That cultures who put their languages into writing systems are inherently more and better evolved than those who didn't, who kept their languages oral, for whatever reason, or simply didn't use whatever alphabet was developed to express them.

To open up this picture would be to say that systems of symbols and commuunication can be used or developed by any animal or any people; that brain power may cause a limit to the complexity or size of a language but that brain power is changeable, evolvable, not restricted to humans; and finally, that there are no inherent restrictions, grammatical or otherwise, that are just programmed into the users of a language such that you must use a language a certain way. Why would nature create restrictions? If it builds a fence, or a place you can't walk, it does it entirely by accident, but if you see a barbed-wire fence in a field, it is undoubtedly made by people and therefore can be removed by people. Nature doesn't make restrictions; it has better things to do.

more later...