There's something that amazes me about language

[conuly]

No, that's a little inaccurate - everything amazes me about language because the ability to speak is inherently amazing. I mean, you have an idea in your head, and you make mouth noises, and some other person hears those mouth noises and now the idea is in THEIR head. And they make mouth noises back at you about your mouth noises! Automatically, without at any point pausing to translate, just as easy as breathing! And sometimes you make squiggles on a surface and other people look at those squiggles and connect them to mouth noises, just like if they heard you talking!

But there's so much more, and something else that amazes me about language is the fact that we're constantly making new conventionalized expressions and idioms and phrases. Every day we expand words from the literal to the figurative. Every day we take sets of words and start using them as units of their own, units that are somehow more than the sum of their parts. Every day it's like people wake up and say "Here's this thing that's been going on forever, and I need a way to talk about it without explaining it all the time" and then find a consensus on how to say that thing.

Obviously we need new words for new inventions like "computers" and "email", but who knew we needed the phrase "ripping the bandaid off" before it was a phrase? How did people even talk about that before they had that easy metaphor?

Every single day, there's a new phrase entering the lexicon, not as a one-off, but as another lexical unit, and people don't even know it's happening as it happens.

Language is freaking amazing.

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Comments

[wpadmirer]

Language is amazing. It's beautiful, too.

[nodrog]

Well, hey, you; long time no hear!
(Speaking of grammar, below…)

What I like are conlangs, constructed languages.  Esperanto is the grandfather example, but it’s only one of a great many, ranging from Quenya, Tolkien’s Elvish speech, and Tsolyáni with its 33 forms of ‘you’ (respective social levels are taken seriously!) to Klingon, which is now a complete language.  People can and do learn to speak all of these.  (At one point in my life I tackled Tsolyáni, and was making headway  [“Chegúkh, fa'árli máisur, lúumra tlahétlakh!”]  until I recognized the waste of time & switched to Russian, which is more useful!)

[malinaldarose]

Love me some language.

[alexseanchai]

love language so much

[adafrog]

Word.

[mindstalk]

Stuff like this is part of why I see a huge cognitive difference between humans and other animals.

[conuly]

There certainly is a very clear and distinct difference between language and all not-language forms of communication. You'd think it'd be a fuzzier line, like tool-using turned out to be, but it really isn't.

[conuly]

(This does assume, of course, that no other animal has language. If they do, they've been hiding it pretty well.)

[peristaltor]

Lots have language; they just don't have nearly our vocabulary. Ten distinct words is usually the limit, from what I've heard. Not surprisingly, other primates hold those records.

There was a This American Life or Radio Lab episode where an animal language researcher in a jungle in South America was walking back to the lab, listening to the birds and monkeys and such. They were all using their words meaning "Jaguar!"

After 20 minutes or so of this, he realized these words were all behind him, meaning he was being stalked. He quickened his pace.

[conuly]

No, what they don't have is grammar. That's the difference between language and not-language - it isn't the words you know, it's your ability to combine them in novel ways that are automatically understood by another person who speaks the same language. That's grammar.

[peristaltor]

I define language more broadly as the ability to share distinct concepts (like warnings of specific danger) with symbolic utterances/gestures. It starts with single words. Grammar comes later, as a refinement.

That's just me.

[siderea]

A Huge Discovery in the World of Viruses

Holy wow!

[conuly]

I know!

[nodrog]

Thank you for linking to that feed - I subscribed immediately.

[conuly]

The Atlantic? Yeah, I've got a few of them. I often prefer to link to their articles here on DW to bypass the paywall.

[maju]

After I learnt Indonesian I was fascinated at being able to communicate in a different language from my native tongue. It seemed more magical to use these previously unknown-to-me mouth noises and have them mean something to other people than to be able to communicate in English.

[conuly]

There's a tiny part of me that still can't quite make itself believe that other people aren't actually translating everything into and out of English really very fast.

[maju]

Made me laugh.

[nodrog]

Slang is a special case, and likewise fun.

Somewhere in my archives I have a Terry and the Pirates strip from WWII, where Terry and Burma, knowing their Japanese captors are listening, converse in hep-cat jive slang that leaves them (literally) dumbfounded.

Re: Optical illusion

[nodrog]

Now, there has to be an explanation for that.  And I’d bet it’s related to why one ‘wise’ is “clockwise,” and not the other.

Re: Optical illusion

[conuly]

I'm sure there is, but damned if I know how to find it.

[sporks5000.livejournal.com]

There were a lot of things in the documentary "Paris is Burning" that surprised me, but I think that the one that hit me the hardest was how much language has evolved since then. The footage is only from the early 80's - not that long ago at all... but there are sequences where people are trying to describe what they're experiencing, what being gay was to them, and they stumble and falter because even though they've LIVED it, the concept is one so alien to the culture of the time that it was hard to put words together to make it make sense to other people...

...And watching it today, you just want to reach back in time and hold their hand and say "There's a word for that now. That thing that you just took five minutes trying to explain but you're not even sure you got right? There's a SINGLE word you can say to express ALL of that, and people will know what you mean accept it!"

[conuly]

It's amazing.

[sporks5000.livejournal.com]

<3

[tcpip]

Apart from a slight obsession with learning languages, pragmatics is one of my favourite subjects and has been for over 25 years.