So I'm deep into writing this book and keep getting mired in it. One is that I'm interrupted a lot and I really have to be directed to get through it. Another is that it has a lot of tangents and reasons I can't stay on that singular path to where it's going.
Where it's going is about where I am: proving that what we say is not controlled by a mysterious genetic template determining what is grammatically possible and what is not, but rather controlled by systematically keeping track of the normal or usual ways of saying things, and using those ways whenever one is determined to be understood.
The next chapters are really about internal and external controls. Chomsky believed in internal controls - that certain ways of saying things were "restricted" or we didn't "have access to them." I believe that there are no internal restrictions, and that we have access to every way of saying things. We even have access to unusual ways of saying things, like other languages or pig latin. But we don't use them because most of the time we just want to be understood and we want to make sure that people understand exactly what we mean and nothing more. That last part is actually quite important.
Then one chapter is about comparison to traffic and specifically about how control of traffic is somewhat like attempted coontrol of language. We can make rules, we can put police out on the road, and it influences behavior, but it doesn't control behavior. People will still drive too fast if their wife is in the passenger seat having a baby. No genetic control makes us drive on the right or even on the left, or anywhere, we just decide it's easier to follow the law than make everyone honk and swerve as they come toward us.
In other words, it's our decision every step of the way.
I write this book often late at night. That's when I can count on maybe a half hour of uninterrupted time when i'm awake and aware. People know I don't answer my phone after ten. I like to walk then too but this has become slightly more important. i'm 72 and have to write what I was put here to write. More later.
Wednesday, October 21, 2026
Monday, August 31, 2026
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.
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.
Thursday, March 26, 2026
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...
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...
Sunday, September 15, 2024
the self-organizing community
I've kept my computer on the linguist list all these years, dumping maybe seven or eight messages a day, trying to keep general tabs on the field and find out when the topic of language as a self-organizing system comes up. Now that I am writing my book (finally) this has become more urgent.
There is no movement of linguists working to show that language is a self-organizing system. There were a few people in years gone by who said it, and a few more who did something about it, but they never really made a movement out of it, or built a groundswell of support for the idea.
There are two possible reasons for this, maybe more. The first is that linguistics is an incredibly complex field, and people go off in these little corners of it, like computational linguistics, and what good is language theory to them? They look at work on natural approaches as, what will this do to me? And since Universal Linguistics didn't run them into the ground, they figure that there's no trashing it out, even if they feel it's wrong. Why bother? Let the Universalists run a cover, write the introductory chapter of the textbook, and they'll keep working their little corner of the field. Don't slam Chomsky, at least not until he dies.
Linguists always had another reason not to slam Chomsky: the left, who partly agreed with him and totally agreed with him on the Vietnam War, relied on his academic authority to give him political authority, i.e. good crisp leftist analysis of government forces doing the wrong thing. To undermine his linguistics would be to undermine his politics, and nobody wanted to do that, even me. I agreed with him on the war, just not on genetic underpinnings of language.
So the self-organizing people came along, and people who paid attention wanted to know how this might change things. Well, it might not at all. The basic building blocks of language are still there, and we haven't decided whether they have genetic origin or just got there by random arbitrary chance. That's what my book is about. But what I'm saying is that the evidence I can find points to a self-organizing system, one in which the smallest actors, human perceptual models, interact with each other. I will lay this out in the book. I don't expect the field to change overnight.
I'm somewhat surprised nobody's done this. In fact maybe they have, and I just haven't found it. But no matter, even if they have, I'm going my own way anyway.
There is no movement of linguists working to show that language is a self-organizing system. There were a few people in years gone by who said it, and a few more who did something about it, but they never really made a movement out of it, or built a groundswell of support for the idea.
There are two possible reasons for this, maybe more. The first is that linguistics is an incredibly complex field, and people go off in these little corners of it, like computational linguistics, and what good is language theory to them? They look at work on natural approaches as, what will this do to me? And since Universal Linguistics didn't run them into the ground, they figure that there's no trashing it out, even if they feel it's wrong. Why bother? Let the Universalists run a cover, write the introductory chapter of the textbook, and they'll keep working their little corner of the field. Don't slam Chomsky, at least not until he dies.
Linguists always had another reason not to slam Chomsky: the left, who partly agreed with him and totally agreed with him on the Vietnam War, relied on his academic authority to give him political authority, i.e. good crisp leftist analysis of government forces doing the wrong thing. To undermine his linguistics would be to undermine his politics, and nobody wanted to do that, even me. I agreed with him on the war, just not on genetic underpinnings of language.
So the self-organizing people came along, and people who paid attention wanted to know how this might change things. Well, it might not at all. The basic building blocks of language are still there, and we haven't decided whether they have genetic origin or just got there by random arbitrary chance. That's what my book is about. But what I'm saying is that the evidence I can find points to a self-organizing system, one in which the smallest actors, human perceptual models, interact with each other. I will lay this out in the book. I don't expect the field to change overnight.
I'm somewhat surprised nobody's done this. In fact maybe they have, and I just haven't found it. But no matter, even if they have, I'm going my own way anyway.
Friday, September 13, 2024
book on the horizon
I just ran my book through the printer - 130 pages - and it wore out the printer, which stopped at about 62, only having printed the last 68 pages or so. I don't know why it would start at the end and work forward, but that's what happened, and the ink was a little spare, and the print too small.
But my book, as it is, is now right here in my hands. I will start using this blog again to talk about its development and my progress on it. I have a critical situation which I will explain briefly.
The book is my life work. If there's nothing else I do in life, what I want to do is explain how language should be viewed as a self-organizing system. Many of my thoughts and resources are on this blog somewhere and you can find them by perusing the template and seeing what I dug up. In my better days I was much more careful about resources and documenting what I found. I also have a paper file in front of me that I'm using.
Here's my problem: now that I'm seventy, I'm less inclined to stretch those academic muscles to do the thinking required to lay this all out carefully, though I know I can still do it with what time I have left. I'm impatient with things that remind me of work and of the rigorous discipline of academia that I inhabited for many years. On the other hand, since this is my life work, I have to get going on it and produce something. And, the urgency is increased by the fact that I'm getting cochlear implants, having health issues, etc., so with each blow to my general well-being I find myself saying, "you have to finish this now!"
I got stuck on the literature review section. Briefly, how do I put all this stuff into the book such that people who want to dig more into various aspects of what I'm saying, have resources to pursue it? In many cases I haven't read the books. I know they are there but I am running out of time. I say to myself, I really need to read up on perception, or on Cooley, but at the same time I'm not doing it. I'm door-dashing. I'm taking care of a 19-year-old dependent and a 16-year-old very-dependent. I'm struggling to keep body and soul together. I'm recovering from cochlear implant surgery.
Two big problems have been a stumbling block. First, language is incredibly complex. I feel the urge to explain how writing is related to the whole thing, and at the same time explain how traditional linguistics has always considered it an offshoot of the "real thing," which would be oral language. My theory puts them all on equal footing. Humans use whatever symbols they deem easiest to use, and most of the time this is the sounds we can make in our mouth. In the case of the deaf it is the hands. In the case of people who don't have access to either hand or mouth communication it could be writing. All symbols are arbitrary. All are equal. Humans use the ones that are easiest to establish a communication system with. And that could be writing or chat.
Second, perceptual theory is an entire field of psychology. The moving parts in our system, which we will watch change in a regular, scientifically beautiful pattern which looks so fine and mathematical that it must be magic or exceedingly good design, are actually human perceptions. You perceive the vowels of our language to be like this. Therefore you make them like this, or as close to it as you can. Your production is based on your perception. Your perception is based on your observation of what you have actually heard or seen. To get at that last part, we have to break perception down into two parts: what you actually heard, and what you interpreted it as. A third part is how you created your average. For example, you heard a thousand /a/'s. One of them was an outlier, created by your uncle who came from the old country. You decided not to average him in because you decided he was an outlier. You decided that you wanted to speak like the people you go to school with rather than like your uncle, because there would be a price connected to speaking like your uncle and you didn't want to pay it. Uncle can pay the price; he's from the old country anyway. You want to be seen as coming from here. So you calculate the average out of the other 999 /a/'s that you heard and try to replicate the norm that you perceive. You may in fact calculate wrongly or be influenced unduly by something you saw on television or something else. Your perception may not be the same as what we might calculate as the actual norm if we were to simply measure every /a/ in the world and do the math for the entire system. What I'm saying is that the norm "English /a/ sounds like this" may not be exactly the same as your perceived norm "I believe English /a/ sounds like this" but the perceived norm is what you are using to create your own language. And the norms cover not only the sounds, the vowels and consonants, but also ways of creating sentences, ways of interpreting words, choice of words to use in situations, formal/informal distinctions, etc.
My section on perception will sound much like what you have just read. My time is running out and I can't do even a chapter on the entire story. I no longer believe I can support all this with the appropriate research and make it sound like I read everything there was to be read on the topic. Therefore I can't make a standard lit review as such and shouldn't even try. In brief, the same thing goes for Cooley (looking-glass self) and the field of self-organization physics. I have gotten a little removed from that and will have to fly over it in the book. No matter. Let people look into it in their own time and framework. I will do what I can do.
Stay tuned and I will keep you posted. The book, Vowels in an Elevator, will be out hopefully before the end of the year.
But my book, as it is, is now right here in my hands. I will start using this blog again to talk about its development and my progress on it. I have a critical situation which I will explain briefly.
The book is my life work. If there's nothing else I do in life, what I want to do is explain how language should be viewed as a self-organizing system. Many of my thoughts and resources are on this blog somewhere and you can find them by perusing the template and seeing what I dug up. In my better days I was much more careful about resources and documenting what I found. I also have a paper file in front of me that I'm using.
Here's my problem: now that I'm seventy, I'm less inclined to stretch those academic muscles to do the thinking required to lay this all out carefully, though I know I can still do it with what time I have left. I'm impatient with things that remind me of work and of the rigorous discipline of academia that I inhabited for many years. On the other hand, since this is my life work, I have to get going on it and produce something. And, the urgency is increased by the fact that I'm getting cochlear implants, having health issues, etc., so with each blow to my general well-being I find myself saying, "you have to finish this now!"
I got stuck on the literature review section. Briefly, how do I put all this stuff into the book such that people who want to dig more into various aspects of what I'm saying, have resources to pursue it? In many cases I haven't read the books. I know they are there but I am running out of time. I say to myself, I really need to read up on perception, or on Cooley, but at the same time I'm not doing it. I'm door-dashing. I'm taking care of a 19-year-old dependent and a 16-year-old very-dependent. I'm struggling to keep body and soul together. I'm recovering from cochlear implant surgery.
Two big problems have been a stumbling block. First, language is incredibly complex. I feel the urge to explain how writing is related to the whole thing, and at the same time explain how traditional linguistics has always considered it an offshoot of the "real thing," which would be oral language. My theory puts them all on equal footing. Humans use whatever symbols they deem easiest to use, and most of the time this is the sounds we can make in our mouth. In the case of the deaf it is the hands. In the case of people who don't have access to either hand or mouth communication it could be writing. All symbols are arbitrary. All are equal. Humans use the ones that are easiest to establish a communication system with. And that could be writing or chat.
Second, perceptual theory is an entire field of psychology. The moving parts in our system, which we will watch change in a regular, scientifically beautiful pattern which looks so fine and mathematical that it must be magic or exceedingly good design, are actually human perceptions. You perceive the vowels of our language to be like this. Therefore you make them like this, or as close to it as you can. Your production is based on your perception. Your perception is based on your observation of what you have actually heard or seen. To get at that last part, we have to break perception down into two parts: what you actually heard, and what you interpreted it as. A third part is how you created your average. For example, you heard a thousand /a/'s. One of them was an outlier, created by your uncle who came from the old country. You decided not to average him in because you decided he was an outlier. You decided that you wanted to speak like the people you go to school with rather than like your uncle, because there would be a price connected to speaking like your uncle and you didn't want to pay it. Uncle can pay the price; he's from the old country anyway. You want to be seen as coming from here. So you calculate the average out of the other 999 /a/'s that you heard and try to replicate the norm that you perceive. You may in fact calculate wrongly or be influenced unduly by something you saw on television or something else. Your perception may not be the same as what we might calculate as the actual norm if we were to simply measure every /a/ in the world and do the math for the entire system. What I'm saying is that the norm "English /a/ sounds like this" may not be exactly the same as your perceived norm "I believe English /a/ sounds like this" but the perceived norm is what you are using to create your own language. And the norms cover not only the sounds, the vowels and consonants, but also ways of creating sentences, ways of interpreting words, choice of words to use in situations, formal/informal distinctions, etc.
My section on perception will sound much like what you have just read. My time is running out and I can't do even a chapter on the entire story. I no longer believe I can support all this with the appropriate research and make it sound like I read everything there was to be read on the topic. Therefore I can't make a standard lit review as such and shouldn't even try. In brief, the same thing goes for Cooley (looking-glass self) and the field of self-organization physics. I have gotten a little removed from that and will have to fly over it in the book. No matter. Let people look into it in their own time and framework. I will do what I can do.
Stay tuned and I will keep you posted. The book, Vowels in an Elevator, will be out hopefully before the end of the year.
Wednesday, November 22, 2023
Vowels in an Elevator
Thank God I've finally got to the point where I can finish this work. I've held it out, psychologically, as the only book on my bucket list, a culmination of working teaching language for thirty years and raising ten children, watching some or most of them learn language themselves. It is my work's answer to my training and what I feel was wrong with it. It is my theoretical explanation of language.
As I look at the manuscript that I'd started (I'd written about fifty pages), I feel like it's crap. I have to start over again. No problem, though, what's fifty pages once you get going? And I can already tell, I'll probably start several more times before I get the one I need. But it's written in my head; that's the most important part.
The title can be explained very simply; in fact if you are a follower of this blog you have already read it. This blog is a collection of sources related to the idea that language is a self-organizing system. A self-organizing system is one that can be described as similar to an elevator where a number of people shift around to make themselves more comfortable, and end up in a perfect pattern whereby there is maximum distance between each of them. The fact that vowels do this in a language - preserve maximum distance between them - makes a lot of sense, yet is hard to explain. That is my goal. A self organizing system, in brief, is one in which the players all make an organization by doing what their own little job is; they may be unaware of the grand organization, and they certainly aren't being told to organize in a pattern. Looked at from above, one might conclude that the whole organization is perfect, like a mandala. But it is simply a product of individual small actors doing their part.
So right now I'm practicing so I can make a better blurb, when the time comes. It will be self-published. I'll show some pictures soon.
As I look at the manuscript that I'd started (I'd written about fifty pages), I feel like it's crap. I have to start over again. No problem, though, what's fifty pages once you get going? And I can already tell, I'll probably start several more times before I get the one I need. But it's written in my head; that's the most important part.
The title can be explained very simply; in fact if you are a follower of this blog you have already read it. This blog is a collection of sources related to the idea that language is a self-organizing system. A self-organizing system is one that can be described as similar to an elevator where a number of people shift around to make themselves more comfortable, and end up in a perfect pattern whereby there is maximum distance between each of them. The fact that vowels do this in a language - preserve maximum distance between them - makes a lot of sense, yet is hard to explain. That is my goal. A self organizing system, in brief, is one in which the players all make an organization by doing what their own little job is; they may be unaware of the grand organization, and they certainly aren't being told to organize in a pattern. Looked at from above, one might conclude that the whole organization is perfect, like a mandala. But it is simply a product of individual small actors doing their part.
So right now I'm practicing so I can make a better blurb, when the time comes. It will be self-published. I'll show some pictures soon.
Monday, November 20, 2023
sources
G. K. Zipf, Human Behavior and the Principle of Least Effort: An Introduction to Human Ecology, Addison-Wesley, Boston, Mass, USA, 1949
P. Bak, How Nature Works: The Science of Self-Organized Criticality, Copernicus Publications, Göttingen, Germany, 1996. View at: Publisher Site | MathSciNet
G. Pruessner, Self-Organized Criticality, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, UK, 2012. View at: Publisher Site
Vasilii A. Gromov, Anastasia M. Migrina, "A Language as a Self-Organized Critical System", Complexity, vol. 2017, Article ID 9212538, 7 pages, 2017. https://doi.org/10.1155/2017/9212538
Jensen, Henrik. J. (2012, Sept. Foreword to Self-Organized Critcality. Cambridge Univ. Press.
When Self-Organised Criticality (SOC) was first introduced in 1987 by Bak, Tang, and Wiesenfeld, it was suggested to be the explanation of the fractal structures surrounding us everywhere in space and time. The very poetic intuitive appeal of the combination of terms self-organisation and criticality, meant that the field gained immediate attention. The excitement was not lowered much by the fact that the claimed 1/f and fractal behaviour were soon realised in reality not to be present in the sandpile model used by the authors to introduce their research agenda. Nor did the lack of power laws in experiments on real piles of sand deter investigators from interpreting pieces of power laws observed in various theoretical models and physical systems as evidence of SOC being essentially everywhere. This led rapidly to a strong polarisation between two camps. On the one side there was the group of researchers who did not worry about the lack of a reasonably precise exclusive definition of the SOC concept and therefore tended to use SOC as synonymous with snippets of power laws, rendering the term fairly meaningless. The other camp maintained that SOC was not to be taken seriously. They arrived at this conclusion through a mixture of factors including the observation that SOC was ill defined, not demonstrated convincingly in models, and absent from experiments on sandpiles. The debate sometimes reflected a reaction in response to bruises received during fierce exchanges at meetings as much as a reaction to scientific evidence.
Thursday, April 13, 2023
General report
There is not much new to report, actually. I am about to write my book, Vowels in an Elevator, which I will explain in a minute. I will give a brief overview of the book. I have written about a third of it and just have to fill out the details, or rather, the meat of it. It is not simple. It will take a lot of concentration on my part and time to myself is not something I've had in recent years. Even now, I am finishing a book about Puritan New England and have had trouble getting hours to click together to work on it.
So here is the gist of the book: Chomsky has been wrong. From the beginning we linguists have been looking for the science that is the foundation of language, and Chomsky claimed to have found "universals," and his universalist doctrine has prevailed in the field of linguistics for as long as I have been studying it. But what he has come up with after all these years is that human language has recursion, while animal language does not. Well, this may be true, but it doesn't give us the scientific underpinning we need to make generalizations about all languages. My book will begin by showing how Chomsky's theories have not panned out nor allowed us to have a satisfactory explanation of what languages have in common.
The science of self-organizing systems, however, does give us that explanation, so the book will ultimately go into the relationship between symbols and language, and the science behind understanding the behavior of human perception of symbols. The problem with language is that it is so bound up in perception that one must be able to scientifically explain perception in order to scientifically explain language. But it can be done.
This site has within it most of the links I need to finish the work. I have not done much searching in recent years but I know from what limited contact I have with the linguistics world that there is very little meaningful work being done on language as a self-organizing system. What work has been done is back in my notes somewhere and will have to be pulled out, aired out, investigated, etc. Work on behavior of self-organizing systems is mostly scattered in other fields. But a well-written work will connect language with other scientific systems in such a way that there will be no doubt that linguistics can be a science of language production.
I am sorry to let this site die away a little as I've been preoccupied with other things. I have ten children, the last three adopted (three others step), but the last ones have somewhat filled my plate, and made my retirement a little busier than I had planned. At the same time I have twenty-seven other books on the market, and every time I try to do something esl/linguistics oriented I get a slight back-to-work headache whereas in the process of marketing my books (haiku/short stories/novel/historical biography) I get rushes of egomaniacal self-satisfaction. So I've put a stall on Vowels in an Elevator for way too long.
Finally, let me explain the title. If you were to have a seat at the top of an elevator which had a glass ceiling, and watched as a number of people got in the elevator, you would notice a perfect kind of pattern-making where every person makes as much space as possible between himself/herself and every other person, thus making the entire elevator take on the image of a perfect mandala or a perfect pattern. You would conjure up a rule of mandala-creation that said that there is a rule that people must create a perfect mandala pattern. The same thing happens with vowels in our mouths. Is there a rule that says vowels have to make as much space between them as possible? Well, you would think so, because they do. And they do because that is easier for people's perceptions. People do it naturally, because they are acting in their own best interest.
Case closed. Stay in touch.
So here is the gist of the book: Chomsky has been wrong. From the beginning we linguists have been looking for the science that is the foundation of language, and Chomsky claimed to have found "universals," and his universalist doctrine has prevailed in the field of linguistics for as long as I have been studying it. But what he has come up with after all these years is that human language has recursion, while animal language does not. Well, this may be true, but it doesn't give us the scientific underpinning we need to make generalizations about all languages. My book will begin by showing how Chomsky's theories have not panned out nor allowed us to have a satisfactory explanation of what languages have in common.
The science of self-organizing systems, however, does give us that explanation, so the book will ultimately go into the relationship between symbols and language, and the science behind understanding the behavior of human perception of symbols. The problem with language is that it is so bound up in perception that one must be able to scientifically explain perception in order to scientifically explain language. But it can be done.
This site has within it most of the links I need to finish the work. I have not done much searching in recent years but I know from what limited contact I have with the linguistics world that there is very little meaningful work being done on language as a self-organizing system. What work has been done is back in my notes somewhere and will have to be pulled out, aired out, investigated, etc. Work on behavior of self-organizing systems is mostly scattered in other fields. But a well-written work will connect language with other scientific systems in such a way that there will be no doubt that linguistics can be a science of language production.
I am sorry to let this site die away a little as I've been preoccupied with other things. I have ten children, the last three adopted (three others step), but the last ones have somewhat filled my plate, and made my retirement a little busier than I had planned. At the same time I have twenty-seven other books on the market, and every time I try to do something esl/linguistics oriented I get a slight back-to-work headache whereas in the process of marketing my books (haiku/short stories/novel/historical biography) I get rushes of egomaniacal self-satisfaction. So I've put a stall on Vowels in an Elevator for way too long.
Finally, let me explain the title. If you were to have a seat at the top of an elevator which had a glass ceiling, and watched as a number of people got in the elevator, you would notice a perfect kind of pattern-making where every person makes as much space as possible between himself/herself and every other person, thus making the entire elevator take on the image of a perfect mandala or a perfect pattern. You would conjure up a rule of mandala-creation that said that there is a rule that people must create a perfect mandala pattern. The same thing happens with vowels in our mouths. Is there a rule that says vowels have to make as much space between them as possible? Well, you would think so, because they do. And they do because that is easier for people's perceptions. People do it naturally, because they are acting in their own best interest.
Case closed. Stay in touch.
Sunday, December 5, 2021
Another update - more than a year later
What has given some urgency to this situation is that, coming around the corner from sixty seven to sixty eight, I am beginning to realize that my time is running out. I have a solid idea of what I want to write. I even have it largely finished, although it needs quite a bit of work. I just have to get it out there.
The book, Vowels in an Elevator, is about finding the science in language and language change, in a situation where Chomsky has largely been defeated but nobody has risen to take his place.
By defeated I mean that though his theories still reign in the world of teaching linguistics, his sixty-year search for language universals has been reduced to the idea that human language has "recursion" while many or most animal languages don't have it. As I do with most of his ideas, I question such things immediately and wonder several things. First, who says animals can't do recursion? Who can prove it? If we don't know what dolphins are saying, how can we know they don't have recursion?
Second, if recursion is a language's being able to refer to itself, a layering of symbolism as it were, then what we are saying is that humans at least as we know them now have enough braind power, or gave themselves enough brain power, to keep track of such things (such as, My friends Peter and Paul married Joan and Mary, respectively), thus having a characteristic of reference and keeping track that supposedly animals can't do. But there is nothing special grammatically about this. It negates all his previous ideas about how grammar was some kind of magical characteristic that we were genetically programmed to be able to figure out, and this genetic magical characteristic (the Language Acquisition Device) was programmed with all these restrictions or laws that somehow just appeared in our genetic programming. All that turns out to be hogwash, which is what I suspected from the minute i heard it. It sounded good, and Chomsky sold it worldwide, and people are still spouting it, but it's hogwash.
So what's the truth? Stay tuned and I'll put it forward, as soon as I can.
The book, Vowels in an Elevator, is about finding the science in language and language change, in a situation where Chomsky has largely been defeated but nobody has risen to take his place.
By defeated I mean that though his theories still reign in the world of teaching linguistics, his sixty-year search for language universals has been reduced to the idea that human language has "recursion" while many or most animal languages don't have it. As I do with most of his ideas, I question such things immediately and wonder several things. First, who says animals can't do recursion? Who can prove it? If we don't know what dolphins are saying, how can we know they don't have recursion?
Second, if recursion is a language's being able to refer to itself, a layering of symbolism as it were, then what we are saying is that humans at least as we know them now have enough braind power, or gave themselves enough brain power, to keep track of such things (such as, My friends Peter and Paul married Joan and Mary, respectively), thus having a characteristic of reference and keeping track that supposedly animals can't do. But there is nothing special grammatically about this. It negates all his previous ideas about how grammar was some kind of magical characteristic that we were genetically programmed to be able to figure out, and this genetic magical characteristic (the Language Acquisition Device) was programmed with all these restrictions or laws that somehow just appeared in our genetic programming. All that turns out to be hogwash, which is what I suspected from the minute i heard it. It sounded good, and Chomsky sold it worldwide, and people are still spouting it, but it's hogwash.
So what's the truth? Stay tuned and I'll put it forward, as soon as I can.
Wednesday, July 1, 2020
2020 Update
There is no news on the language-as-a-self-organizing-system front. I have not finished my book, and have not even worked on it. Nobody I know is doing work on language-as-a-self-organizing-system.
Ah, but here's the rub. Language is a self-organizing system. I know it. I will write a book about it. That book will explain everything.
Feel free to comment if you agree, or know someone who can help me with this. During the lockdown, I've been writing 1) lots of family history; 2) short stories; 3) haiku; 4) a novel about the Actualists. I still hope to do my memoirs and this.
This, Language as a Self-Organizing System, is most important, because it represents a lifetime of observing and noticing the structure of language as people grapple with it and try to learn it. I wasn't wasting my time; I have a lot to contribute; I want to do it before I'm senile and it's too late.
If you are interested in anything I have just said, most of my work on the subject is linked off of this blog. It's no secret. It just has to be compiled into a reasonable theory book. And it will get done, sooner rather than later, because this lockdown deal isn't going anywhere. I'm finally retired, and could do it if I put my mind to it.
Ah, but here's the rub. Language is a self-organizing system. I know it. I will write a book about it. That book will explain everything.
Feel free to comment if you agree, or know someone who can help me with this. During the lockdown, I've been writing 1) lots of family history; 2) short stories; 3) haiku; 4) a novel about the Actualists. I still hope to do my memoirs and this.
This, Language as a Self-Organizing System, is most important, because it represents a lifetime of observing and noticing the structure of language as people grapple with it and try to learn it. I wasn't wasting my time; I have a lot to contribute; I want to do it before I'm senile and it's too late.
If you are interested in anything I have just said, most of my work on the subject is linked off of this blog. It's no secret. It just has to be compiled into a reasonable theory book. And it will get done, sooner rather than later, because this lockdown deal isn't going anywhere. I'm finally retired, and could do it if I put my mind to it.
Tuesday, August 27, 2019
Update
Recently I've taken what I'd written about language as a self-organizing system, and compiled it into a book of about sixty pages. It has about a page of sources, and it runs through much of my thinking as I've tried to put it into order. Though I know it's not done, it's reached a certain point where I have to reach out and find other sources, to help me say what I want to say. When I returned to this blog, I was stunned to find what I found.
Not that this blog will be enough. What is connected off this blog are several things: links to dozens of documents that I wrote myself, in the last decade; links to other books that I reviewed or read; ideas of other sources that could be used in laying out my vision. All of these are useful and will take some time to slog through. But it's still not enough.
One thing I've found is that language as a self-organizing system has pretty much fallen off the radar. I have stayed in touch with the linguist list over the years, and have found nothing. Nobody has bothered to put together a cohesive explanation of how a language could seek order, simplify itself, and change over time. In some ways that's good: I have the field to myself. In some ways it's scary: if it's so clear to me, why has nobody jumped on it before?
The idea for my book, Vowels in an Elevator: Principles of language as a self-organizing system, is pretty much contained in Google docs that are linked off of this blog. The one that shares its name is not available, as are a couple more; I'm not sure why. In fact I'm surprised that google docs, and the weblog itself, could manage to survive as long as it did; I've ignored the whole thing for what, about seven years. I make no excuses; I have ten kids, and things happening that cause instability in my own family situation, so I get to it when I can. But I am what, sixty five, and I'm beginning to think that if I don't get it down on paper coherently, it will be lost. Now is the time to compile it and present it. And don't worry if the rest of the world is ignoring it as a coherent theory of language change.
So in the spirit of gathering resources I'm going to ask a few questions. I know that nobody really reads these blogs all that much, but there's a chance they'll stumble on this one, so, if you don't mind, and if you know the answers to these questions, would you kindly just put those answers in the comments. What I'm saying is that, to some degree, I'm talking to myself, but, I really do welcome input of all kinds and would love to hear anything you have to contribute.
Is there any cohesive attempt anywhere to explain language as a self-organizing system?
How do I go about even looking for such things, given that my attempts so far have been so fruitless?
Should I leave these google docs where they are, or compile them into a separate volume of writing on language acquisition?
Do people actually read google docs, or blogs? Good night.
Not that this blog will be enough. What is connected off this blog are several things: links to dozens of documents that I wrote myself, in the last decade; links to other books that I reviewed or read; ideas of other sources that could be used in laying out my vision. All of these are useful and will take some time to slog through. But it's still not enough.
One thing I've found is that language as a self-organizing system has pretty much fallen off the radar. I have stayed in touch with the linguist list over the years, and have found nothing. Nobody has bothered to put together a cohesive explanation of how a language could seek order, simplify itself, and change over time. In some ways that's good: I have the field to myself. In some ways it's scary: if it's so clear to me, why has nobody jumped on it before?
The idea for my book, Vowels in an Elevator: Principles of language as a self-organizing system, is pretty much contained in Google docs that are linked off of this blog. The one that shares its name is not available, as are a couple more; I'm not sure why. In fact I'm surprised that google docs, and the weblog itself, could manage to survive as long as it did; I've ignored the whole thing for what, about seven years. I make no excuses; I have ten kids, and things happening that cause instability in my own family situation, so I get to it when I can. But I am what, sixty five, and I'm beginning to think that if I don't get it down on paper coherently, it will be lost. Now is the time to compile it and present it. And don't worry if the rest of the world is ignoring it as a coherent theory of language change.
So in the spirit of gathering resources I'm going to ask a few questions. I know that nobody really reads these blogs all that much, but there's a chance they'll stumble on this one, so, if you don't mind, and if you know the answers to these questions, would you kindly just put those answers in the comments. What I'm saying is that, to some degree, I'm talking to myself, but, I really do welcome input of all kinds and would love to hear anything you have to contribute.
Is there any cohesive attempt anywhere to explain language as a self-organizing system?
How do I go about even looking for such things, given that my attempts so far have been so fruitless?
Should I leave these google docs where they are, or compile them into a separate volume of writing on language acquisition?
Do people actually read google docs, or blogs? Good night.
Tuesday, May 21, 2013
The Self-Organizing Economy
Krugman, Paul. (1996). The Self-Organizing Economy. Cambridge, MA: Blackwell.
The concept of self-organization is difficult (for me) to get a grasp on, so I turned to this well-known writer who tackled economics. What I like about him is that he's always conversational in tone, and I have to be the same way, because I'm explaining language to people who already know quite a bit, but don't know self-organization. But second, he actually went as far as to work out the math; this I admire him for, and don't know if I can do the same for language.
Now it's time to return the book to the library (though I could just renew it); I've had it for months, and I need to mine it for quotes and get it out of here. I'm sure somebody else could use it!
He points out that scientists of complexity theory have not had much luck with economics and economists, because:
The concept of self-organization is difficult (for me) to get a grasp on, so I turned to this well-known writer who tackled economics. What I like about him is that he's always conversational in tone, and I have to be the same way, because I'm explaining language to people who already know quite a bit, but don't know self-organization. But second, he actually went as far as to work out the math; this I admire him for, and don't know if I can do the same for language.
Now it's time to return the book to the library (though I could just renew it); I've had it for months, and I need to mine it for quotes and get it out of here. I'm sure somebody else could use it!
He points out that scientists of complexity theory have not had much luck with economics and economists, because:
the authors of articles and books on complexity almost never talk to serious economists or read what serious economists write; as a result, claims about the applicability of the new ideas to economics are usually coupled with statements about how economies work (and what economists know) that are so ill-informed as to make any economist who happens to encounter them dismiss the whole enterprise. (p. 2)His definition of a self-organizing system is the following:
...what links the study of embryos and hurricanes, of magnetic materials and collections of neurons,is that they are all self-organizing systems: systems that, even when they start from an almost homogeneous or almost random state, spontaneously form large-scale patterns. (p. 3)Self-organization is not always good:
...self-organization is not necessarily, or even presumptively, a good thing. I think it is fair to accuse many of the writers on complexity, especially but not only the more popular ones, of falling into this fallacy...Self organization is something we observe and try to understand, not necessarily something we want. (p. 6)This part is about Schelling and his model of how neighborhoods become segregated:
Thus Schelling derived, without any fanfare, a theme of many writers on complexity: local, short-range interactions can create large-scale structure. (p. 17)About the field of complexity in general:
...the whole rationale of the field is the idea that common principles may apply to subjects with very different details....(p. 29)His main thesis is that economics is a self-organizing system in two senses that are shown by complexity theorists to be properties of self-organizing systems. First is that:
starting from disordered initial conditions they tend to move to highly ordered behavior, and at least in a statistical sense this behavior exhibits surprisingly simple regularities...(p. 36)The second sense is that they create order from random growth. (p. 37). Of this he tells a story:
Take a ceramic object, say a Grecian urn, and throw it hard against a stone wall, so that it shatters randomly into innumerable pieces. Surely such an act can do nothing but create disorder! And yet (so The Economist tells us) a strange hidden order emerges. Carefully gather up the pieces larger than 0.1 grams, the number larger than 0.01 grams, and so on, and you will find something remarkable: the pieces will obey a power law. And not just any power law: if it really was a Grecian urn, the exponent will take on a particular value; if it was a ceramic sphere it will take on another value; and so on. That is, a seemingly disorderly and complex process of fragmentation (which is random growth with a minus sign) produces the simple order of a power law, and the exponent of that power law contains important information - in this case, incredibly, it turns out to reveal the shape of the original object. (p. 49)Here is a complexity theory bibliography:
Bak, P. (1991). Self-organizing criticality, Scientific American (January).
Kauffman, S. (1993). The Origins of Order. New York: Oxford Univ. Press.
Lewin, R. (1992). Complexity: Life at the Edge of Chaos. New York: Macmillan.
Nicolis, G. and Prigogine, I. (1989). Exploring Complexity. New York: W.H. Freeman.
Schelling, T. (1978). Micromotives and Macrobehavior. New York: W.W. Norton.
Waldrop, W. M. (1993). Complexity. New York: Basic Books.
Friday, May 10, 2013
Harrison, K. D. (2007). When Languages Die: The extinction of the world's languages and the erosion of human knowledge. New York: Oxford.
I was impressed by this book, which I taught in the last part of the spring, maybe April to now. The author is a professor at Swarthmore and took almost twelve years crossing the globe, talking to people in remote places about their endangered languages. In the course of finding out why their languages are endangered, and what they are doing about it, he also was able to make generalizations about indigenous languages in general, about world trends, etc.
These languages have a wide variety of ways to talk about numbers, from the Melanesians, who invented abstract math independently, to the Piraha, who have no use for numbers at all, really. Languages have different ways of orienting their people in space; they have ways of talking about where they are and how to get where they want to go.
So what do they have in common? Very little, according to Dr. Harrison. Greenberg's universals, which intend to find commonalities among the ways they talk about numbers, can all be disproven, one at a time. Dr. Harrison does not pretend to hold up Chomsky's ideas; in fact, he calls Chomsky narrow, unnecessarily focused on the world's "major" languages, and unnecessarily focused on grammar, at the expense of the other building blocks of language. Some of what he concluded, I will copy below:
I was impressed by this book, which I taught in the last part of the spring, maybe April to now. The author is a professor at Swarthmore and took almost twelve years crossing the globe, talking to people in remote places about their endangered languages. In the course of finding out why their languages are endangered, and what they are doing about it, he also was able to make generalizations about indigenous languages in general, about world trends, etc.
These languages have a wide variety of ways to talk about numbers, from the Melanesians, who invented abstract math independently, to the Piraha, who have no use for numbers at all, really. Languages have different ways of orienting their people in space; they have ways of talking about where they are and how to get where they want to go.
So what do they have in common? Very little, according to Dr. Harrison. Greenberg's universals, which intend to find commonalities among the ways they talk about numbers, can all be disproven, one at a time. Dr. Harrison does not pretend to hold up Chomsky's ideas; in fact, he calls Chomsky narrow, unnecessarily focused on the world's "major" languages, and unnecessarily focused on grammar, at the expense of the other building blocks of language. Some of what he concluded, I will copy below:
The lack of meaning does not hinder linguists in our investigation of mental structures: we have come to focus mainly on the structures themselves, not their cultural meanings. This has been the conventional wisdom in linguistics for at least four decades. But although languages certainly contain abstract structures, they evolve and exist to convey information within a specific cultural matrix, and that function permeates and influences every level of language. To its critics, including me, the Chomskyan program has been unduly narrow, overly focused on large, globally dominant languages, and preoccupied with structure at the expense of content. (pp. 205-206)It was also inspirational to me that, essentially, he said that language was a self-organizing system.
...when we sum up all these discoveries, both across many languages and within a single one, we achieve a clearer insight into the grand realm of human cognition. Language may by its very structure force speakers to attend to certain qualities of the world (shape, size, gender, countability). Languages are self-organizing systems that evolve complex nested structures and rules for how to put the parts of words or sentences together. No two languages do this in the same way. (p. 236)
Thursday, May 9, 2013
Leverett, T. (2013, May). 13th floor, please: Vowels on an elevator. Google docs. https://docs.google.com/document/d/1l5E7PuK16JS1xsmpR9SlTCRn8sfXNEeBrZAfFjbR4f0/edit?usp=sharing.
Saturday, February 2, 2013
gender revisited
In class the other day I told my students of what they told me in graduate school. Gender was a language characteristic, a grammatical thing, whereas sex was a biological thing, and they weren't to be confused. That's because some languages marked gender, male or female, on things that weren't alive; some marked them with neuter in some cases, etc. A gender marker was a separate idea from sex or gender as we knew it in the physical sense.
Now in the time since then both words, "sex" and "gender" have changed somewhat in people's interpretation, but the truth behind it is the same. A language's marking is separate from the physical characteristics of the thing marked. Just for example, I said, is there any good reason "book" is male in Spanish?
One student brought up the possibility that there was a good reason in the past, or at least a reason, in this case perhaps that men ruled the world of books at the time it was decided. Yes, but men also ruled the world of ships, and made ships feminine, one woman pointed out.
I said that in our culture we have an ongoing discussion about gendered things, words like "mankind" being applied to everyone, grammatical issues like "everyone brought his/her/their umbrella today" and that the essence of the discussion is that people are being more literal about pronouns and gender-marked things, thus rejecting the idea of using male words for everyone, etc. My question was whether this was happening in other cultures as well.
Two women mentioned that in Spanish, it was an issue how one addresses a group of mixed men and women; the standard rule was that if a group included even one male, it was considered male. One man who speaks German pointed out that in German, new words and borrowed words such as "computer" were all neuter these days.
I found these observations interesting and vowed to do research on the topic. My questions remain; I suspect that it's always an issue and has always been one. I remember noticing these problems immediately upon learning languages like Spanish and French (What do you call a dog that you don't know? or a group of them? Why are books male and windows female? What if you have books and windows together? etc.) or German (How do you decide which 'things' are neuter? Does male + female = neuter, and if not why not?). A glorious can of worms.
I remember the relative randomness of the answers drawing me into the study of language as I suspected that the 'reasons' for such things were actually subtle but powerful forces in our lives. Things happen, languages change, and it can happen fairly quickly over time. My questions (above) remain. I'll do research and get back to you.
Now in the time since then both words, "sex" and "gender" have changed somewhat in people's interpretation, but the truth behind it is the same. A language's marking is separate from the physical characteristics of the thing marked. Just for example, I said, is there any good reason "book" is male in Spanish?
One student brought up the possibility that there was a good reason in the past, or at least a reason, in this case perhaps that men ruled the world of books at the time it was decided. Yes, but men also ruled the world of ships, and made ships feminine, one woman pointed out.
I said that in our culture we have an ongoing discussion about gendered things, words like "mankind" being applied to everyone, grammatical issues like "everyone brought his/her/their umbrella today" and that the essence of the discussion is that people are being more literal about pronouns and gender-marked things, thus rejecting the idea of using male words for everyone, etc. My question was whether this was happening in other cultures as well.
Two women mentioned that in Spanish, it was an issue how one addresses a group of mixed men and women; the standard rule was that if a group included even one male, it was considered male. One man who speaks German pointed out that in German, new words and borrowed words such as "computer" were all neuter these days.
I found these observations interesting and vowed to do research on the topic. My questions remain; I suspect that it's always an issue and has always been one. I remember noticing these problems immediately upon learning languages like Spanish and French (What do you call a dog that you don't know? or a group of them? Why are books male and windows female? What if you have books and windows together? etc.) or German (How do you decide which 'things' are neuter? Does male + female = neuter, and if not why not?). A glorious can of worms.
I remember the relative randomness of the answers drawing me into the study of language as I suspected that the 'reasons' for such things were actually subtle but powerful forces in our lives. Things happen, languages change, and it can happen fairly quickly over time. My questions (above) remain. I'll do research and get back to you.
Sunday, December 30, 2012
The SVO myth
There's a benefit to the world getting smaller, and our being able to know more information, have it at our fingertips, be more worldly, etc. And that is, people no longer pawn off assumptions based on parochial thinking, that don't stand up to the facts. At least they do this less, because they're more likely to be proven wrong, and they're more careful about their assertions, because it's so easy to check the great database and prove someone wrong. This is why I never make assertions.
Ah, but here's one I can't resist. It's all very tentative, because what do I know? That's why I put it in a blog, and not, say, in a published academic journal. But I've been around the block a few times, and I'm sharing the best of my observations here. Take them or leave them.
When I was in graduate school (80's), the concept of SVO languages came into my field of perception. English, they said, was an SVO language, and so was Chinese, but Korean was SOV, verb last. S=subject, V=verb, 0=object.
Now the assumptions behind this observation were not stated directly, but it could be inferred that S, V and O were the main building blocks of a language, and that all languages would have them. Sure, they'd also have genitive, and instrumental, and locative and all that other fine stuff. But at their base, they were the actor, the action, and the victim. He kicked the desk. In English, you could say, sometimes there was no object. But generally there was always a subject, except when it was understood, as in Kick the desk.
So I remember wondering: why would you separate the object from the verb? So I asked: is there any such thing as an OSV language? Or VSO? I was assured that there were such things but the proof wasn't immediately forthcoming. Someone at some point allowed that they weren't distributed evenly among the what, six possibilities?
But as it turns out, this view, that there are six different kinds, whether languages distribute evenly or not, is not very useful. I have found languages that don't really have subjects; instead, they have topics and they omit those whenever possible. So where we'd like to think of subject and predicate as the two basic placeholders, like Mom and Dad, of a sentence, the fact is, there are a lot of languages where even SOV, or (S)(O)V is a fairly inaccurate way of describing them, even though it may be true to the order. You end up saying that, for the vast majority of this language's sentences, they have a subject, but it's understood, they just give you the topic, and you figure out who did it. A sentence that can be translated literally as, "As for me, the desk-victim kick-past" forces you to interpret an actor, which is not really a problem if you get used to it, but makes it hard really to maintain that the actor is the big honcho of a sentence, one of two main characters. And a LOT of languages are like this.
So what to make of it? I've noticed that people use terms like "SOV" and "SVO" a lot less these days, and maybe it's just as well, rather than beat a dog that's down already, I'll just let it die a natural death and start talking about languages another way. But somehow, I've been unable to let it die peacefully in my mind. That's because I think it is representative of another problem: that we in the west are so quick to assume that the construction of every language we've ever learned (English, Spanish, maybe a tad of French or German) makes it necessary that all languages share these properties, that S V & O are building blocks of our language because they must be natural inherent big honchos in every sentence that's ever been made in any language. It's just one more case of a kind of western ethnocentrism, and ultimately isn't very helpful in classifying the worlds's languages.
So how should we classify them? I have no idea. Linguists use words like "agglutinative" vs. "non-agglutinative" but I fancy myself a linguist, and couldn't even explain what that is, let alone assure you that there is such a thing as that second one. One thing about S V O, is that at least we could explain what it meant...and that's why it stuck around linguistics books for so long. Not because evidence provided any support for classifying languages in that way.
One final irony: you'd think that, sharing an SVO structure would make a language essentially easier to learn. Thus, Chinese would be easier (for us) to learn than, say, Korean. I'm not sure that's true. The Chinese have that SVO order, all right, but everything else is so different, including the function of grammar within the language, that Chinese I think is one of the hardest languages for us to learn. It's one thing to say, I don't think a language is going to change its basic order very easily; in other words, if our languages are SVO today, they'll probably be SVO tomorrow. An order, or a way of constructing sentences, does in some kind of way seem to be a fundamental characteristic of a language. But, though we and the Chinese both construct our sentences with subject first (and they presumably have subjects, unlike Korean), Chinese learners are famously stumped by English grammar. It brings up the question of whether patterns that are similar to yours, but way different in some ways, are actually harder to learn, than patterns that are just way different from the very start. There's an argument to be had, in there, somewhere.
Ah, but here's one I can't resist. It's all very tentative, because what do I know? That's why I put it in a blog, and not, say, in a published academic journal. But I've been around the block a few times, and I'm sharing the best of my observations here. Take them or leave them.
When I was in graduate school (80's), the concept of SVO languages came into my field of perception. English, they said, was an SVO language, and so was Chinese, but Korean was SOV, verb last. S=subject, V=verb, 0=object.
Now the assumptions behind this observation were not stated directly, but it could be inferred that S, V and O were the main building blocks of a language, and that all languages would have them. Sure, they'd also have genitive, and instrumental, and locative and all that other fine stuff. But at their base, they were the actor, the action, and the victim. He kicked the desk. In English, you could say, sometimes there was no object. But generally there was always a subject, except when it was understood, as in Kick the desk.
So I remember wondering: why would you separate the object from the verb? So I asked: is there any such thing as an OSV language? Or VSO? I was assured that there were such things but the proof wasn't immediately forthcoming. Someone at some point allowed that they weren't distributed evenly among the what, six possibilities?
But as it turns out, this view, that there are six different kinds, whether languages distribute evenly or not, is not very useful. I have found languages that don't really have subjects; instead, they have topics and they omit those whenever possible. So where we'd like to think of subject and predicate as the two basic placeholders, like Mom and Dad, of a sentence, the fact is, there are a lot of languages where even SOV, or (S)(O)V is a fairly inaccurate way of describing them, even though it may be true to the order. You end up saying that, for the vast majority of this language's sentences, they have a subject, but it's understood, they just give you the topic, and you figure out who did it. A sentence that can be translated literally as, "As for me, the desk-victim kick-past" forces you to interpret an actor, which is not really a problem if you get used to it, but makes it hard really to maintain that the actor is the big honcho of a sentence, one of two main characters. And a LOT of languages are like this.
So what to make of it? I've noticed that people use terms like "SOV" and "SVO" a lot less these days, and maybe it's just as well, rather than beat a dog that's down already, I'll just let it die a natural death and start talking about languages another way. But somehow, I've been unable to let it die peacefully in my mind. That's because I think it is representative of another problem: that we in the west are so quick to assume that the construction of every language we've ever learned (English, Spanish, maybe a tad of French or German) makes it necessary that all languages share these properties, that S V & O are building blocks of our language because they must be natural inherent big honchos in every sentence that's ever been made in any language. It's just one more case of a kind of western ethnocentrism, and ultimately isn't very helpful in classifying the worlds's languages.
So how should we classify them? I have no idea. Linguists use words like "agglutinative" vs. "non-agglutinative" but I fancy myself a linguist, and couldn't even explain what that is, let alone assure you that there is such a thing as that second one. One thing about S V O, is that at least we could explain what it meant...and that's why it stuck around linguistics books for so long. Not because evidence provided any support for classifying languages in that way.
One final irony: you'd think that, sharing an SVO structure would make a language essentially easier to learn. Thus, Chinese would be easier (for us) to learn than, say, Korean. I'm not sure that's true. The Chinese have that SVO order, all right, but everything else is so different, including the function of grammar within the language, that Chinese I think is one of the hardest languages for us to learn. It's one thing to say, I don't think a language is going to change its basic order very easily; in other words, if our languages are SVO today, they'll probably be SVO tomorrow. An order, or a way of constructing sentences, does in some kind of way seem to be a fundamental characteristic of a language. But, though we and the Chinese both construct our sentences with subject first (and they presumably have subjects, unlike Korean), Chinese learners are famously stumped by English grammar. It brings up the question of whether patterns that are similar to yours, but way different in some ways, are actually harder to learn, than patterns that are just way different from the very start. There's an argument to be had, in there, somewhere.
spanglish: two sources
Just before the term was out I got some information about so-called Spanglish, but things were busy and I was unable to write much of it down. Now, in the heart of break, I am remembering some of it and hoping to write down what I know so that it's not lost altogether. Sometimes ruminating about what I know helps me at least come up with the right questions. There will be more sources, I'm sure, but if I don't know how to approach the subject, I won't get much information.
One problem was that my students were very naive about grammatical rules and linguistics in general. I phrased the problem as this: We know that there is a lot of language-mixing going on. We know that people make sentences that use both languages (English and Spanish) freely. The question is this: Is this widespread enough, with a large enough community, that this language begins to have its own rules? And if it has its own rules, what are they? Would they be the same where Spanglish is spoken in California and New York? Can we prove that it's a language of its own? I invited them, in a prompt for a research paper, to enter the discussion and try to prove it one way or the other.
When I brought it up in class, I got very little argument, because they really had little concept of what I meant by "rules." They even now have little concept of rules, as we know them, in English, and corresponding but different rules in Spanish. My interest really is in the interaction of these rules. I wanted to know what happens.
One of the most helpful people to me was I.D., who identified herself as being from Lubbock, but seemed to have relatives elsewhere in Texas and roots in Mexico. She said that Spanglish was a way of life when she was growing up, but she called it Tex-Mex. "Isn't Tex-Mex a kind of food?" I asked her, but she was more comfortable using the term "Tex-Mex" for what she spoke. It's definitely not Pachuco, she said, though I was unfamiliar with that term. She explained that there was a Californian side of this picture, where it's glorified in movies and such, and made to sound fancy, or glorified. She felt that what happened on a day-to-day basis in Texas was quite removed from this and wasn't described adequately by what one could experience in the media.
She gave examples which all seemed to be English words or expressions that had been worked into a Spanish system. By Spanish system I mean they sounded Spanish and had Spanish endings, gender, Spanish grammar. Tex-Mex would simply take an English word, say "truck", and make it "troca", and "park" became "parquear" or some such; clearly borrowed words that were integrated into Spanish pronunciation and grammar. She admitted to mixing Spanish and English within a single sentence; it happened all the time.
One thing she made clear which was verified by the second source. It really depended on context, how much you used, and what you did. She had one grandmother who wouldn't tolerate it, either that, or didn't know the English words, so she in effect had to use Spanish 100% of the time at that grandmother's house. Another grandmother had very limited tolerance of it. It wasn't that she couldn't understand, but because she wouldn't use it and they respected her, they wouldn't use it around her. She said, the young used it all the time; they lived in a bilingual world, and switched freely. To the older generation, it had different meaning.
One thing that has become clear to me since I got here, independent of the sources, is that the Spanish-speaking Texan community feels a little isolated from Mexico itself. A whole swath of northern Mexico has been overrun by drug lords to such a degree that people don't feel as comfortable visiting, or traveling through, as they used to. They still call family in Mexico as often as possible, and visit whenever they can. They have problems at the border as there is a heightened sense of watchfulness of people coming and going. It is just not as easy as it used to be; Mexican-Americans have in effect stepped out of that problem but in the process have isolated themselves from their community back home, which in many cases is going through the political turmoil of adjusting to the terror of very wealthy drug gangs.
A second source, C.L., identified himself as from Austin, and also claimed that Spanglish was a way of life for him as he grew up. If there are no rules, he wrote, let's make some, because this is definitely a language. He also maintained that it was different for his generation and that of his parents. The parents, he said, would use it for a different reason, to show that they were trying to fit in to the new world. We kids, he said, would use a lot more of it, and would use it sometimes to aggravate the elders.
He gave a number of examples, but I was unable, overall, to answer my own questions. If it had rules, what were they? Also, I misplaced the paper; it does not seem to be where I left it, though I'm sure it's around and will bring up more questions when I find it and reread it. The impression I got, that stuck with me, was the emotional nature of its use. These were kids who lived in two worlds; they grew up in two worlds. They spoke two languages interchangeably with each other, as something they shared, but, being bilingual, could slip immediately into either all-English (school) or all-Spanish (grandmother's house). Their concept of rules for either language was somewhat limited, so they had no examples of times when one language's rules would interact with another's. I don't get a sense of an organized community developing something and going in its own direction, or having rules such as, "when we make noun phrase constructions in this mixed language, we generally do it this way". It happens spontaneously, but it happens a lot, because you are talking about millions of people now, in Texas alone.
One problem was that my students were very naive about grammatical rules and linguistics in general. I phrased the problem as this: We know that there is a lot of language-mixing going on. We know that people make sentences that use both languages (English and Spanish) freely. The question is this: Is this widespread enough, with a large enough community, that this language begins to have its own rules? And if it has its own rules, what are they? Would they be the same where Spanglish is spoken in California and New York? Can we prove that it's a language of its own? I invited them, in a prompt for a research paper, to enter the discussion and try to prove it one way or the other.
When I brought it up in class, I got very little argument, because they really had little concept of what I meant by "rules." They even now have little concept of rules, as we know them, in English, and corresponding but different rules in Spanish. My interest really is in the interaction of these rules. I wanted to know what happens.
One of the most helpful people to me was I.D., who identified herself as being from Lubbock, but seemed to have relatives elsewhere in Texas and roots in Mexico. She said that Spanglish was a way of life when she was growing up, but she called it Tex-Mex. "Isn't Tex-Mex a kind of food?" I asked her, but she was more comfortable using the term "Tex-Mex" for what she spoke. It's definitely not Pachuco, she said, though I was unfamiliar with that term. She explained that there was a Californian side of this picture, where it's glorified in movies and such, and made to sound fancy, or glorified. She felt that what happened on a day-to-day basis in Texas was quite removed from this and wasn't described adequately by what one could experience in the media.
She gave examples which all seemed to be English words or expressions that had been worked into a Spanish system. By Spanish system I mean they sounded Spanish and had Spanish endings, gender, Spanish grammar. Tex-Mex would simply take an English word, say "truck", and make it "troca", and "park" became "parquear" or some such; clearly borrowed words that were integrated into Spanish pronunciation and grammar. She admitted to mixing Spanish and English within a single sentence; it happened all the time.
One thing she made clear which was verified by the second source. It really depended on context, how much you used, and what you did. She had one grandmother who wouldn't tolerate it, either that, or didn't know the English words, so she in effect had to use Spanish 100% of the time at that grandmother's house. Another grandmother had very limited tolerance of it. It wasn't that she couldn't understand, but because she wouldn't use it and they respected her, they wouldn't use it around her. She said, the young used it all the time; they lived in a bilingual world, and switched freely. To the older generation, it had different meaning.
One thing that has become clear to me since I got here, independent of the sources, is that the Spanish-speaking Texan community feels a little isolated from Mexico itself. A whole swath of northern Mexico has been overrun by drug lords to such a degree that people don't feel as comfortable visiting, or traveling through, as they used to. They still call family in Mexico as often as possible, and visit whenever they can. They have problems at the border as there is a heightened sense of watchfulness of people coming and going. It is just not as easy as it used to be; Mexican-Americans have in effect stepped out of that problem but in the process have isolated themselves from their community back home, which in many cases is going through the political turmoil of adjusting to the terror of very wealthy drug gangs.
A second source, C.L., identified himself as from Austin, and also claimed that Spanglish was a way of life for him as he grew up. If there are no rules, he wrote, let's make some, because this is definitely a language. He also maintained that it was different for his generation and that of his parents. The parents, he said, would use it for a different reason, to show that they were trying to fit in to the new world. We kids, he said, would use a lot more of it, and would use it sometimes to aggravate the elders.
He gave a number of examples, but I was unable, overall, to answer my own questions. If it had rules, what were they? Also, I misplaced the paper; it does not seem to be where I left it, though I'm sure it's around and will bring up more questions when I find it and reread it. The impression I got, that stuck with me, was the emotional nature of its use. These were kids who lived in two worlds; they grew up in two worlds. They spoke two languages interchangeably with each other, as something they shared, but, being bilingual, could slip immediately into either all-English (school) or all-Spanish (grandmother's house). Their concept of rules for either language was somewhat limited, so they had no examples of times when one language's rules would interact with another's. I don't get a sense of an organized community developing something and going in its own direction, or having rules such as, "when we make noun phrase constructions in this mixed language, we generally do it this way". It happens spontaneously, but it happens a lot, because you are talking about millions of people now, in Texas alone.
Saturday, December 29, 2012
so far
1. Leverett, T. (2012, Jan.) Right metaphor, wrong conclusion. Google docs. https://docs.google.com/document/d/1j2SLvs6HF7CPQ6CYcHikZzHkOS2EV5W1z2IV4doiO1k/edit.
2. ___. (2012, Dec.) Principles of language construction and change. https://docs.google.com/document/d/19eU6DYbuMIoobGpDEa99SamegqRf0ZifvjClV_u5_pg/edit.
3. ___. (2012, Dec.) The centrality of perception. Google docs. https://docs.google.com/document/d/18_DQ6FDAf6CjujJ1SFW1iNoOUgPjJuREIcrIuuN1p-k/edit.
4. ___. (2012, Dec. Differences in Self-organizing systems. Google docs. https://docs.google.com/document/d/1ioiPeeanVq_ZFL6y_i0p7EnNO_S3kiMNMLeF-iyGZYM/edit.
a. ___. (2012, July). Symbols and the language learner. Google docs. https://docs.google.com/document/d/13rmxVLpnx3-6A7Kz4FqY9ylX7yxHTL7p_ReWJluso5M/edit.
b. ___. 2012, July). Koutsoudas' first principle. Google docs. https://docs.google.com/document/d/1xnyTaAIqY5necN8WeXL5nnebYEc3h4ihL-sFP-yuxtg/edit.
c. ___. 2012, May). Saussure and the Oral-writing relationship. Google docs. https://docs.google.com/document/d/1b7ibffTbB-gDGmJJnCUtclUZrjFE71T1lqL9XmQysLw/edit.
d. ___. 2012, Dec. The role of intonation. Google docs. https://docs.google.com/a/siu.edu/document/d/1oCtw1VUeKAMZ83zr7w9qyPPdTjHu4V_QrA4ebOJJI18/edit.
OK, so here's what I've got, besides what I wrote back eight or nine years ago. I wrote #1 as the introduction, a year ago, and then, in my opinion, #a-c were diversions. It was necessary to say them, I think, but as I read them, I notice that they are disorganized, and often say more than they imply, but not quite in good order, etc. I have now gone back and written #2 and will continue. #1 and #2 and the numbered ones are the book as it's developed. I want to save #a-c, as records of my thinking, but I will not use them or include them as chapters of the book.
I have a question about these Google docs. I put things here, because I can look at them, and revise them, and get comments on them, have my friends read them, etc. Yet I always feel that the computer is treating me differently, as an editor etc., than my friends who are coming in from some outside computer. How do I see them as they see them? How do I know they are seeing anything at all? And why, if they are "publicly available", do they not show up on searches, when I search for them?
Mysteries for another day.
In addition, by the way, here is more writing.
2. ___. (2012, Dec.) Principles of language construction and change. https://docs.google.com/document/d/19eU6DYbuMIoobGpDEa99SamegqRf0ZifvjClV_u5_pg/edit.
3. ___. (2012, Dec.) The centrality of perception. Google docs. https://docs.google.com/document/d/18_DQ6FDAf6CjujJ1SFW1iNoOUgPjJuREIcrIuuN1p-k/edit.
4. ___. (2012, Dec. Differences in Self-organizing systems. Google docs. https://docs.google.com/document/d/1ioiPeeanVq_ZFL6y_i0p7EnNO_S3kiMNMLeF-iyGZYM/edit.
a. ___. (2012, July). Symbols and the language learner. Google docs. https://docs.google.com/document/d/13rmxVLpnx3-6A7Kz4FqY9ylX7yxHTL7p_ReWJluso5M/edit.
b. ___. 2012, July). Koutsoudas' first principle. Google docs. https://docs.google.com/document/d/1xnyTaAIqY5necN8WeXL5nnebYEc3h4ihL-sFP-yuxtg/edit.
c. ___. 2012, May). Saussure and the Oral-writing relationship. Google docs. https://docs.google.com/document/d/1b7ibffTbB-gDGmJJnCUtclUZrjFE71T1lqL9XmQysLw/edit.
d. ___. 2012, Dec. The role of intonation. Google docs. https://docs.google.com/a/siu.edu/document/d/1oCtw1VUeKAMZ83zr7w9qyPPdTjHu4V_QrA4ebOJJI18/edit.
OK, so here's what I've got, besides what I wrote back eight or nine years ago. I wrote #1 as the introduction, a year ago, and then, in my opinion, #a-c were diversions. It was necessary to say them, I think, but as I read them, I notice that they are disorganized, and often say more than they imply, but not quite in good order, etc. I have now gone back and written #2 and will continue. #1 and #2 and the numbered ones are the book as it's developed. I want to save #a-c, as records of my thinking, but I will not use them or include them as chapters of the book.
I have a question about these Google docs. I put things here, because I can look at them, and revise them, and get comments on them, have my friends read them, etc. Yet I always feel that the computer is treating me differently, as an editor etc., than my friends who are coming in from some outside computer. How do I see them as they see them? How do I know they are seeing anything at all? And why, if they are "publicly available", do they not show up on searches, when I search for them?
Mysteries for another day.
In addition, by the way, here is more writing.
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