/lang/ - Language General

[Thricegreat]

This thread is for anything about language. Linguistics, Language Learning, Translation, &c. are all welcome.

[Thricegreat]

Since I'm not that professional about languages, I would start the thread with this question:

"Is the usage of language predetermined by the human biology?"

[drummyfish]

"Is the usage of language predetermined by the human biology?"

I'm not a linguist or anthropologist or anything close either, but the capacity for the USE of language seems pretty much given by our genetics? AFAIK it's the details that are more controversial, like the universal grammar. I have recently heard some ornithologist say that some species of birds have the melody they sing genetically given while others have to learn it, so it looks like there's some benefit to both strategies.

[Thricegreat]

"Is the usage of language predetermined by the human biology?"

I'm not a linguist or anthropologist or anything close either, but the capacity for the USE of language seems pretty much given by our genetics? AFAIK it's the details that are more controversial, like the universal grammar. I have recently heard some ornithologist say that some species of birds have the melody they sing genetically given while others have to learn it, so it looks like there's some benefit to both strategies.

Well maybe it is just a matter of whether function follows form.

[Lopadsa]

I’m currently learning two languages but it’s probably counterintuitive to learn both at the same time. I’ve also read that language acquisition gets more difficult as you get older but hasn’t this proven to be incorrect over time? I don’t use any apps mainly just pimsleur and textbooks for grammar. Long story but Spanish was spoken in my household but I was too stubborn to learn it when I was a child, plus where I was living there wasn’t anyone who I could speak the language to besides my mother who herself mostly spoke English. Hungarian is the other language I want to learn because I find it to be a very beautiful. It is hard af in comparison to Spanish but I still practice every day and it’s getting better for introductory statements. It’s been enjoyable even though I’ve just started not too long ago.

[drummyfish]

I’m currently learning two languages but it’s probably counterintuitive to learn both at the same time. I’ve also read that language acquisition gets more difficult as you get older but hasn’t this proven to be incorrect over time? I don’t use any apps mainly just pimsleur and textbooks for grammar. Long story but Spanish was spoken in my household but I was too stubborn to learn it when I was a child, plus where I was living there wasn’t anyone who I could speak the language to besides my mother who herself mostly spoke English. Hungarian is the other language I want to learn because I find it to be a very beautiful. It is hard af in comparison to Spanish but I still practice every day and it’s getting better for introductory statements. It’s been enjoyable even though I’ve just started not too long ago.

I'm learning Spanish too. I started it quite late, in my last year of university. Got two semesters and learned practically just bare minimum, then a few years later I decided to hop on it again and started to watch a 10 minute Spanish video every single day. No studying grammar or anything, literally just watch 10 minutes with full focus and that's it (well, I'd also try to listen to Spanish music and things like that, but not systematically). That's been like 3 years now and I'm feeling quite comfortable, can read books and understand normal speech pretty well, even started to think in the language on occasion now. Apps and memorization don't work -- you literally learn what you do, so if you're playing a language game, you'll get good at playing that specific language game but not at actual communication in the language. If you want to understand, you have to listen, if you want to be able to speak, you have to speak etc.

I'm pretty convinced that learning anything at older age is more difficult, even if just from experience, but my impression is that the capacity doesn't drop as drastically as it was generally believed in the past. I don't even remember how I learned English (my native language is Czech), I literally just absorbed it from games and shit, whereas with Spanish now it takes considerable effort and a lot more time, but with dedication it's entirely possible to learn a language at any age IMO.

[λiber]

Since I'm not that professional about languages, I would start the thread with this question:

"Is the usage of language predetermined by the human biology?"

I think the entire field of linguistics is united on the answer to this being "yes", they only differ on what native capacities exist towards that end. On one radical end, you have Chomsky's LAD and conceptualist view of an innate grammar and on another you have the usage-based cognitivist bunch like the more radical Construction Grammar people that believe that language is a fundamentally emergent system from domain-general human skills, pattern-matching, sequential learning, etc.

I'm closer to the former end. Unlike a good bit of the Chomskyans I don't think all can be explained through the innate faculty of linguistic competence, but I think the most radical usage-based folks may often reject the idea of linguistic universals altogether which I find to be insane (e.g. William Croft's Radical Construction Grammar).

My sympathies mostly lie with scholars such as Joan Bresnan, Ronald Kaplan and Ivan Sag in my belief that there is such a thing as a universal linguistic capability, but that it must be beholden to performance data. My interest in linguistic typology as well as my finding that language is fundamentally generative lead me to Lexical-Functional Grammar as the framework I generally like most, though it's not to say others are wrong, there's great difference and similarity between linguistic frameworks.

It should be said that the generativists have in the past had team-ups with the usage-based folks; Ivan Sag actually developed his own generative framework, Head-driven Phrase Structure Grammar, and integrated it with Construction Grammar to create Sign-Based Construction Grammar, and LFG proves that you can take data seriously without throwing out linguistic universals altogether.

[kshmr]

A spiritual friend of mine posed an idea something like that Birds, Cats, Dogs
&c. don't have suffering like human beings and we can classify these creatures
closer to nature than humankind because they are still considering survival as
something they can't ignore while on the other hand, like we have to worry about
exams, taxes, economy, society &c. while the miseries we can observe in animals
are directly or indirectly closer to survival, things like food, shelter, their
offsprings and physical damage done by other animals or by external factors.

This idea directly propose that most of the problems with mankind are about
abstract concepts and societal constructs instead of immediate biological needs.

And these things couldn't have existed if our language wasn't this advanced and
we basically wouldn't be able to suffer from these things

Other might propose that even if the language plays a huge role in a man's
suffering, it is the foundation of the whole development of mankind like we
couldn't have achieved this much technology and information about nature if we
didn't had the ability to think. But honestly, I can't find myself being able
to consider this so-called 'development' an inherently good or bad thing because
these things potentially threat mankind's own existence by exploiting natural
resources and basically this is very non-survival instict to keep on doing
things which can lead to your own extinction while knowing it. Knowing the
effect of what mankind is causing and still doing it for abstract concepts like
money, fame &c. isn't what survival instinct is. And this leads to a very
weird point, I mean I'm not able to go any further than this

I myself am not an expert in terms of language so I can't claim a lot of things
about these animals' communications and their abilities to think about abstract concepts
but as a casual observation, I find that the languages these street animals
possess are very survival oriented and I don't think they think like "Bark!
BArk! Bark!" and next day they are departing for the moon.

I'm still not able to conclude anything, I just thought about this could
contribute to someone else's ideas so I posted this anyway and I'm looking
forward for other's perspectives on this topic. And their are much more
intellectual people in this forum who might be able to investigate this idea
further.

Thank You

[drummyfish]

A spiritual friend of mine posed an idea something like that Birds, Cats, Dogs
&c. don't have suffering like human beings and we can classify these creatures
closer to nature than humankind because they are still considering survival as
something they can't ignore while on the other hand, like we have to worry about
exams, taxes, economy, society &c. while the miseries we can observe in animals
are directly or indirectly closer to survival, things like food, shelter, their
offsprings and physical damage done by other animals or by external factors.

This idea directly propose that most of the problems with mankind are about
abstract concepts and societal constructs instead of immediate biological needs.

And these things couldn't have existed if our language wasn't this advanced and
we basically wouldn't be able to suffer from these things

Other might propose that even if the language plays a huge role in a man's
suffering, it is the foundation of the whole development of mankind like we
couldn't have achieved this much technology and information about nature if we
didn't had the ability to think. But honestly, I can't find myself being able
to consider this so-called 'development' an inherently good or bad thing because
these things potentially threat mankind's own existence by exploiting natural
resources and basically this is very non-survival instict to keep on doing
things which can lead to your own extinction while knowing it. Knowing the
effect of what mankind is causing and still doing it for abstract concepts like
money, fame &c. isn't what survival instinct is. And this leads to a very
weird point, I mean I'm not able to go any further than this

I myself am not an expert in terms of language so I can't claim a lot of things
about these animals' communications and their abilities to think about abstract concepts
but as a casual observation, I find that the languages these street animals
possess are very survival oriented and I don't think they think like "Bark!
BArk! Bark!" and next day they are departing for the moon.

I'm still not able to conclude anything, I just thought about this could
contribute to someone else's ideas so I posted this anyway and I'm looking
forward for other's perspectives on this topic. And their are much more
intellectual people in this forum who might be able to investigate this idea
further.

Thank You

Thanks for an idea I'd say we humans are preoccupied with survival as any other organisms (those who aren't simply go extinct), but we're playing a big brain game with shitload of abstraction and indirection because this is the niche of high intelligence we invested in. Language is perhaps a side effect of it. You're anxious about passing school exams because you know it means getting a job, earning money and ultimately buying food. It's like chess, checkmate is the goal for all players, it's just that dumb beginners think one move ahead whereas masters see much further, think of complex structures, what kind of endgame the moves lead to and so on.

Anyway, I believe the question this all suggests is whether language is a prerequisite for complex thinking. I remember being very surprised when I found that there are people who don't have an "inner monologue". For me 99% of my whole waking life consists of talking to myself, even when thinking about spatial problems for example at which, if I may say so, I'm relatively good -- but still when thinking "visually" I keep talking to myself like "Hmm, what if I do this? No, that's stupid. Let's try this." There was a reddit AMA with someone who "suffers" from the lack of inner monologue and he said that where others think something like "Hmm, I'm hungry, let's go grab a hotdog", he'd just sort of get up and go get the food. This was shocking to me, I assumed someone like this couldn't function, but apparently the guy did pretty normal in life. But then at some tasks you automate very well, obviously, you just do them instantaneously and instinctively without any language, like improvising a guitar solo or playing bullet chess or something like that, so I believe it's possible to optimize tasks through training by hard wiring certain parts of your brain so as to gain a good intuition that gets rid of the need for "language thinking", although I can't see how you can solve new types of problems without thinking about them with language. In short then my belief is that language is a universal tool for solving any type of problem, but it's also not the most effective, which is why you need a lot of training to learn to think about something effortlessly and without the need for words. However this conflicts with the reddit guy's case, so really I am just confused.

Do you guys have inner monologue? Also could the linguists around here perhaps say something about this "language and thinking" issue? Is there some sort of consensus answer about it?

[Amlux]

Do you guys have inner monologue? Also could the linguists around here perhaps say something about this "language and thinking" issue? Is there some sort of consensus answer about it?

I also have an inner monologue which is very strong and an ability to visualize things in my head, both of which apparently vary and sometimes go with each other. Though I never "sub-vocalize" while reading (i.e. have a voice in my head that "says" the words as I read them). Apparently this is necessary to overcome in order to read with any kind of efficiency, so maybe it explains while I've always been a quick reader. I do sub-vocalize when reading Japanese though, but maybe when it's not your first language it just can't be helped.

There's a book called The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind which is a sort of classic out-there theory: It states that humans only had the ability to be "conscious" (self-aware of their own thinking and actions, i.e. having an internal monologue) sometime in the 2nd millennium BC, whereas before humans had a "bicameral" mind which experienced "commands" via auditory hallucinations and obeyed them without introspection. This system was anthropomorphized into the idea of "gods" commanding our actions (or providing us with spiritual insight, creative inspiration, etc.). Kind of a wild theory, but one of those which is interesting to think about. I haven't read the book yet but really should.