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Language Wants To Be Free

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Regrettable Juvenilia

15:17 / 06.02.02

quote:Language is a virus from outer space.

- William S. Burroughs

Spinning off from the 'defining anarchism' thread, because as someone pointed out it was kind of thread-rot... What do people make of the idea that attempts to standardise language inevitably involve a political agenda, and that this agenda will be the further extension of centralised state control?

How about this: dialects are about localised communities communicating based on informal rules and mutual understandings that have presumably developed in a much more organic, decentralised - one might almost say democratic - fashion. Dictionaries and ideas such as Received Pronounciation or 'The Queen's English' (a telling name) are tools that can be used to actively oppress language - keep it locked up and catalogued in a state-sanctioned box. Then there are contemporary examples of dialect or slang which seem to be a deliberate attempt to create language which cannot be interpreted using official apparatus, which escape/elude definition by the state. Ebonics, or hip-hop slang, is perhaps the best recent example of this. (I have no idea whether this is confined to the recent times, btw - it may well not be.)

Maybe this is a bit hokey, but I'm thinking of ideas like those of Ram Ell Zee (which I need to re-familiarise myself with again, actually, cuz I'm a bit rusty on the specifics) about letters or words that fight wars with other letters or words, or even PRML SCRM's "vowels are evil" schtick. I'm sure there were lots of bald or balding perverted French people who wrote about this stuff as well, but I know fook all about that.

This post has been brought to you by the words 'cuz', 'schtick', and 'fook'.

Thoughts?

16:16 / 06.02.02

Very cool.

I would just like to start by sticking up for dictionaries everywhere and saying that a dictionary is a fair servant but a poor master.

[ 06-02-2002: Message edited by: Persephone ]

16:31 / 06.02.02

Each language or dialect, contains aspects of the identity of the social group that uses it. the perception of the world, the things that matter, the religious conceptions, it's all in there.

17:23 / 06.02.02

First, a caveat - Ebonics, or "Black English" is not the same thing as Hip Hop Slang. Rather, I think the best way to understand it is an "alternate" grammar for English, with its own rules of transformation that nevertheless conform to a Chomskyian "deep structure."

Hip Hop Slang is more usefully thought of as a "Code", which I would be happy to describe in Baudrillardian terms if (a) he wasn't so unhip right now (b) I had the appropriate references at work (c) I was sure I could make it work.

That said-

If we want to put your idea in simple theory-speak, what you are postulating is that dictionaries, grammars, etc. are attempts to freeze the play of signifiers in order to gain a specific political goal.

This is not the same thing as saying, however, that certain concepts are untranslatable across languages/codes, which is what I gather you're trying to get at from "words that can not be interpreted using official apparatus." This is dicier territory, for if you believe the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, there exist words in any language that are untranslatable across any other languages, meaning that this essential quality of your "non-official" languages is an essential quality of all languages. However, someone like Steven Pinker would say that that's bullshit, and that there must exist an ur-language (he unimaginitively calls "thought-ese") that is purely immanent and common among all human brains.

Anyway, who is ram ell zee and what's his deal?

The Knowledge +1

17:28 / 06.02.02

Language needs to be abolished don't ya know?

Sex and dancing is where it's at, on a purely 'communication' level - Being your feeling, etc...

Matthew Fluxington

17:34 / 06.02.02

I'm no linguist, but wouldn't Ebonics most easily be explained as something like a dialect?

Just to back Todd up: Ebonics is not in any way the same thing as hip hop slang.

18:35 / 06.02.02

Nah, the whole point behind Ebonics was that it had its own specific grammar and vocabulary, imported from Africa and adapted to English. Then again, maybe that *is* the definition of "dialect" after all. It's certainly more than slang.

At it's best, Ebonics was a contentious idea, and so far removed from today's mainstream society as to not even be the butt of jokes any longer.

Attempts to standardize language = attempts to standardize thought.

18:42 / 06.02.02

Language = attempt to standardize thought, for that matter.

20:24 / 06.02.02

quote: If we want to put your idea in simple theory-speak, what you are postulating is that dictionaries, grammars, etc. are attempts to freeze the play of signifiers in order to gain a specific political goal.

I don't think this is necessarily true - Flyboy's argument doesn't depend on any particular theory of semiotics (i.e. 'the play of signifiers'). Anyway this is wanky as hell but I'm going to quote myself from an old essay:

quote: In 1755, Samuel Johnson published the first English dictionary, beginning a trend for the codification of 'proper' - that is, middle class - English. The dictionary didn't just record word use, it was an authoritarian tool for setting the limits on language, to the extent that 'a Bill was thrown out of Parliament in 1880 simply because one of its words had not been recorded by Dr Johnson.' Thus, middle-class English - in fact, merely one segment in a continuum of dialects - began to steamroll other dialects by presenting itself as the only correct form of the language.

Another example is Osmanlica, the elite Turkish language at the start of the twentieth century. It had so many Arabic and Persian elements it was difficult for native speakers to communicate (i.e., trade) with other Europeans, so they needed to change it. But they were faced with the groundswell of nationalism following wwi and the 1908 revolution, which made changing the language tricky. So the 'sun language theory' - the idea that Turkish was the original language, so they were entitled to 're-appropriate' bits from any other language since they were ultimately derived from Turkish.

I am with Flyboy on this to some extent, although I wouldn't go so far as to say grammars and standard languages are devised to specific political ends. They do, however, have their own politics which are tied up with ruling classes, nationalism, etc. I also agree that some codes/dialects are developed to sidestep centralised language controls - most obviously graffiti styles, many of which are incomprehensible to people who haven't hung out with writers. I am always amused to see newspaper columnists complain both that graffiti is meaningless, and that they can't understand what it says.

05:29 / 07.02.02

quote:Originally posted by Flyboy:
What do people make of the idea that attempts to standardise language inevitably involve a political agenda, and that this agenda will be the further extension of centralised state control?

The realist in me figures that if it did happen, then a political (or perhaps corporate, but maybe that's only my cyberpunk fear for the future) agenda will create the means, and state (or corporate) control will be the end. Sad really.

The dreamer in me likes what some of the alchemists were after in their attempts to universalize language. Can't think of the one guy's name (I'll dig it up later) but his system worked off a base symbol which was the symbol of the divine, and all other words stemmed from this symbol. A reminder in our very words that all things come forth from divinity and the divine is within all things.

21 + 42 = 3 (mod 5)

13:32 / 07.02.02

quote:Originally posted by Persephone:
Language = attempt to standardize thought, for that matter.

Not neccisarily. Or may be, but only kinda. I've gotten into all kinds of arguements with friends over my tendancy to tweek definitions. Accepting the part of definitions that I like, and tossing off what I don't like.

In my opinion, thought is only standardized, when language is. When you lock yourself into the bit where x can only equal y. When you allow x to equal anything in the general area of y though, you open up a variable that allows thought to be much more fluid.

Personally, I'm all for burning the dictionaries. Toss out standardized language, and force people to focus more on the context of what's being said. People get way to caught up in the individual words.

The Planet of Sound

13:32 / 07.02.02

The most beautiful aspect of the English Language is its ability to morph, mutate, absorb, and flexaparacombobulate in an expansive, pro-active and psychoparascendatory fashion. Damn the word and grammar fascists...

Tuna Ghost: Pratt knot hero

15:17 / 07.02.02

There's a poem out there that involves gimbles wabing and other words that don't technically have any meaning. If someone can find a copy, I'd much appreciate it, because it helps a topic I'd like to address in this thread. There's also an e.e. cummings poem that really helps, so I'm off to track that down.

15:29 / 07.02.02

There may be no such thing as a dead American bobsledder, but there is Jabberwocky.

Tuna Ghost: Pratt knot hero

17:12 / 08.02.02

There we go. The topic was on how despite us not knowing what the words mean we still know what's going on. I had a neat example set up, but I can't find the damn poem by cummings on this very subject. It seems every site has the same twenty poems, none of which are even in the same book as the one I'm looking for. Unfortunately, I don't know the name of it, so I'm going to have to look through his seven or so books to find it.

19:17 / 08.02.02

Kind of a perfect example of how it's sometimes handy to know the names of things, eh?

<gales of laughter>

[Not laughing at you, this is pure joyful Wattsian laughter that you must understand being a zen bastard.]

[ 08-02-2002: Message edited by: Persephone ]

22:17 / 08.02.02

it's a common intuition, i guess, that there is a pure form of "English" that exists somewhere, of which everyone speaks some variant degraded from the original. this misconception, preached by high school english teachers and prescriptive grammarians everywhere, is undoubtedly oppressive. but at least in my opinion, it's also doomed.

the instinct to think of my dialect and your dialect and his dialect as belonging to this vague entity "English"--the instinct to draw out similarities and name them-- is in itself indicative of the innate, preverbal processes that allow each of us to create and use language, suggesting chomsky's universal grammar and pinker's mentalese.

sign languages develop between deaf children who have never been taught to sign. creole languages with systematically perfect rules of compositionality emerge from the children of people who speak pidgins--slaves, for example, who've been forced to learn english. imposed changes in linguistic prestige, however, like some forgotten english aristocrat up and deciding we should no longer end sentences with prepositions, catch on very slowly, if at all. what i mean is, people who seek to restrict the use of language are up against a huge opponent.

language standards can be incredibly useful--shit, i'd hate to live without my dictionary--insofar as they are descriptive, not legislative.

04:10 / 09.02.02

I've noticed recently that English is very poorly adapted to dealing with spiritual concerns. There are a lot of unhelpfully dualistic principles that one wants to approach from a both/and rather than either/or perspective. One has to learn highly specialised language, which still doesn't always feel suffient. Of course, there's massive precedent for the creation of a language barrier between the lay person and the supernatural, because the idea of "filthy commoners" having access to empowering influences that could cause them to disagree with the state is one that many governments have sought to supress.

15:11 / 09.02.02

...what I'm kind of curious about is how large de-centralized systems of communication (eg. the internet) work with current languages, concepts and notions. Since all peoples (generally speaking) have access to this resource, it hasn't (or won't) marginalized languages into a common form per se. In fact, I think it in many ways has come out with its own unique and widely used structures (acronyms, (lol, IMHO, etc.) "net" jargon, (revector, netizen, etc.) <meta-tags>, etc.).

Plus, it should also be brought up (somewhat by lolita nation with signing, etc.) that language so far has been addressed in its audible and written forms but there's still the whole realm of communication through images, etc. This too plays a big part in the ideas that are communicated (esp. on the web). I think the ramifications a system like the internet has on language, etc. is very exciting...

16:13 / 09.02.02

i like to think about burrough's phrase literally and a little paranoically <--is that a word?]: language is a virus from outer space. we have developed as a species in order to be better carriers of language. we are beings controlled by language, rather than vice versa.... it's all a plot.

(bwahaha, anyone?)

16:47 / 09.02.02

Dammit alas, that blew my mind & I'm out of spare parts.

I have to lie down now...

16:55 / 09.02.02

quote:we have developed as a species in order to be better carriers of language. we are beings controlled by language, rather than vice versa.... it's all a plot.

...isn't that the idea behind memes? We're all just vessels of information...the randomness is what makes each individual's message unique...

17:24 / 09.02.02

where does the idea of memes come from? i'd seen references here on the 'lith but i'm frightfully ignorant in many ways. reference?
thanks---

19:16 / 09.02.02

Here's a list of some resources that I came up with:

Richard Dawkins - evolutionary biologist accreditted with the discovery / idea of memes.

Memecentral - peruse the site for links / info

09:29 / 10.02.02

Oh how weird, I was going to say earlier that alas's idea about people being language-carriers reminded me about this thing I had read about people being gene-carriers... and that turns out to be from the mind of this same Richard Dawkins guy who thought up memes. Or I guess it's not so weird.

09:29 / 10.02.02

quote: creole languages with systematically perfect rules of compositionality emerge from the children of people who speak pidgins

I'm not sure what 'systematically perfect rules of compositionality' means, exactly - is it a technical term? - but I just don't think this is true. Surely you can't derive the formal rules of English grammar from spoken English (a mass of redundancy, ums and ahs, fragments, etc.), and claiming any spoken language - major, standard, pidgin, creole, whatever - emerges in a perfectly systematic form seems pretty unlikely.

I think my point is that far from assuming any preverbal structure reflected in existing languages, 'languages' are just the accumulation of pretty random assortments of more or less successful attempts to communicate. Language as an emergent structure then mistaken for generative principle... does this make sense to anyone? I am too tired to express myself properly.

13:31 / 10.02.02

I don't know that I can say with assurance that it's "true," but I have heard and read in linguistic circles this thing about the grammar of creole and other languages. And I don't suppose there is any language that is systematically "perfect," as anyone who learns French, for one, knows well.

Your thought, below, is very intriguing...

quote:Originally posted by Dread Pirate Crunchy:
'languages' are just the accumulation of pretty random assortments of more or less successful attempts to communicate. Language as an emergent structure then mistaken for generative principle... does this make sense to anyone?

...to a person, me, who believes that randomness generates its own structure. What do you think about that?

On a different note, I was thinking in the shower about Flyboy's original thesis

quote:the idea that attempts to standardise language inevitably involve a political agenda

and also what expressionless said about how

quote:there's massive precedent for the creation of a language barrier between the lay person and the supernatural

and of course these things do happen, but it is not a one-sided battle... it's The Empire Strikes Back and The Return of the Jedi, if you know what I mean.

14:22 / 10.02.02

perfect insofar as it conforms to its own rules, and is just as efficient as any other language. that's all i meant. compositionality is basically the way words are put together.

20:13 / 10.02.02

agree with all above that language shapes thought patterns, but then what shapes language and its change/stasis over time? interactions with people of a different language, hence thought pattern? thus culture as a dynamic force over time?

relative to expressionless's original statement. could it be said that terminology in English related to the spiritual were
a) derived from greek, celtic, and latin languages families terms, which themselves had religious cultures featuring many binary distinctions?
b) were developed largely in the medium of Christianity?
hence their poverty at describing ambiguities...?

attempts have been made, and probably in the future will be, to reify language. i'm thinking in particular of the colonial projects to alter language...particularly in Russia, the formation of French/France, the European-held Caribbean, Australian seizure of Aborigine children and the same with the US and the Natives. i'm not sure how to assess the "success" or failure of these...
France was probably the most successful at stamping out dialects within its own borders...but are these events necessarily comparable with the more general flux of convergence/divergence of language. or are they seperate beasts?

also, just a general question: language wants to be free, but doesn't it also want to communicate to an audience? hence there is a sort of counter-force to the complete breakdown of language structure [word meaning and grammatical arrangement]?
consider in terms of the orignal Burroughs statement. a virus exists to perpetuate itself. but for it to travel from one subject to another it has to have a point of reception [in the most biochemical sense]...hence "viral language" must have an aspect of communicability...its DNA [meaning] can be processed by the encodation structures within the receiving cell [individual].

any takers, or should i try to access deep structures through glossolalia?

A

12:34 / 11.02.02

I have heard it put forward that language doesn't just shape thought, but that it allows thought.

I have also heard that learning a new language allows you to have thoughts that you could not have before.

Apparently, certain Native American tribes had no word for, or concept of, lying.

So i think that it's fair to say that, at least to some extent, it is quite possible to influence people's thinking by controlling the language they use, and therefore the concepts they have access to.

I think that the idea of "swear words" is perhaps an example of this. All of our English swear words refer to sex, (primary or secondary) sexual organs, or something that involves those sexual organs- fuck, cunt, shit, piss, dick, cock, tits, arse etc...

This makes it difficult, for example, for a woman to refer to her genitals without being "rude" (cunt), clinical (vagina), or euphemistic (pussy, beaver, complete this list yourself.) And this, in turn, leads to frank and open discussion of sex being rather more difficult for people than it ought to be, which no doubt suited whichever moralists invented the concept of "swearing" just fine.

(Apparently "cunt" was the standard Olde English term at one point, but i don't know when it came to be considered "rude".)

Actually, even the very concept of "swearing" is one that i think would be very difficult to grasp if you hadn't grown up taking it for granted. Imagine trying to explain it to someone who grew up in a language without swear words (i am assuming that such languages exist).

Does anyone know when the concept of swearing was introduced into the English language? I assume, as they're sometimes called "curse words", that at one time certain words were thought to have certain supernatural power, and that this somehow got perverted to it's current state, but i'm starting to get off track here.

If language does indeed allow thought, then apes being taught sign language has some interesting implications...

The Invisibles mentions the idea of "control languages" quite a bit, but i'd have to re-read it to be more precise. Even Grant Morrison's JLA has hints of this, with the word "freedom" being deliberately left out of the android Tomorrow Woman's vocabulary.

13:11 / 11.02.02

If I'm babbling uselessly, pardon me.
The idea of cursing is an old one, not necessarily a moralistic one. I look to Rome and to some extent Greece for numerous examples of apotropaic statutes. Lots of "scholarly" work done on the subject. And lots of theories about the vast number of statues and images involving genitalia prominently displayed to ward off evil. The main idea being that someone trying to do evil can't do the job if they're laughing at the enormous penis you have in your garden. Not really tied in all too closely with modesty because these statues are contiguous with nude statues exploring the beauty of the human form. (The difference seems to center on context and emphasis. Apotropaic statues emphasize the genitals by enlarging them.) All of this is certainly not to say that later moralistic constructs have developed to put the shame into sex, but IMHO it's a Christian neurosis.

As for language in general, I'm proponent of the dual forces at play theory. On one hand, you have the need for standardization to facilitate communication with someone else balanced against the individuality of thought and perception. The incorporation of other languages when you find a word someplace else that explains/expresses something your language doesn't is part of that. Which brings me to one of my favorite quotes about English, in particular, and the foolishness of trying to standardize language.
quote: The problem with defending the purity of the English language is that the English language is as pure as a crib-house whore.
It not only borrows words from other languages; it has on occasion chased other languages down dark alley-ways, clubbed them unconscious and rifled their pockets for new vocabulary.

-James Nicoll

Disco is My Class War

03:53 / 12.02.02

Perhaps language as an emergent structure which attempts and fails at various political and communication/power games is the theory that rocks my boat the most.

And I'm not sure I like memetics as an idea. It has no critique of power. It's like a populist reading of Foucault with all the important bits taken out.

(Mind, I just had a swim and my brain is fogged up like wet goggles, so if I didn't really make myself clear, please excuse. I'll come back and edit.)

12:18 / 13.02.02

The concept of cursing might be clearer in spanish. In Spain, agressive expresions have more religious context (¿me cago en la hostia!=I shit on the holy bread), but when the spaniard missionaries taught spanish to the locals, they took out the religious refferences, and left only the sexual ones (hijo de la chingada= son of a raped woman). So, mexican spanish was influenced by the religious views of those that taught it.

I do not know if there's something similar with english

12:50 / 13.02.02

quote:Originally posted by count adam:

(Apparently "cunt" was the standard Olde English term at one point, but i don't know when it came to be considered "rude".)

i don't know if anyone can back me up/ prove me wrong on this, but i heard that 'cunt' was derived from 'fecund', which is kinda lovely, organ of fertility and all that. switch to vulgarity as example of power game by dominant patriarchy, perhaps?

12:57 / 13.02.02

quote:Originally posted by Flyboy:

dialects are about localised communities communicating based on informal rules and mutual understandings that have presumably developed in a much more organic, decentralised - one might almost say democratic - fashion.

Even the word democratic was originally a perjorative term directed at Americans by the British.

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