So, I was talking to griffen.

[conuly]

He's apparently started to internalize ASL, which is just *so cool*, and I said it must be his "natural language". I just invented that to mean that this was easier for him to think in than many other languages, but it started me thinking - is it normal to have an internal cue towards a certain type of language structure - even when it's not your own?

Ages back, I started (but never finished, or even did very much with) a conlang that formed verbs from everything. Even though this never went anywhere, and I was done with it within a few days, since then I think things in terms of "bed-going" or "door-closing". It's just easier to say "I door-closed" than "I closed the door". Clearly, this isn't normal English structure. I'm a monolingual speaker (more's the pity...). So why do I find it easier to use this foreign construction? I shouldn't, should I? But I definitely do.

Comments

[scottrossi.livejournal.com]

you bring up a good point on languages. from what i have read, particularly noam chomsky (that man again! lol) he seems to think, and present good evidence for this thought, that humans are born with certain lingual guidelines and internalizations preprogrammed into them. he says language is something natural, something evolved and that we are instantly capable of being speaking creatures from birth, it is what we are taught that determines what language we speak. so independently, you are confirming what is being theorized by the pros!!

[conuly]

I know of his theories. The problem is that different languages have different structures. Why does a structure that is not found in my language seem easier than one that is? If that structure is more natural, why does English use an alternative structure?

[wodhaund.livejournal.com]

Because English is a stupid language. This is my firm belief.

[griffen.livejournal.com]

Try more: English is *not* a language. It's a pidgin, a trade language, made up of several other more simpler languages and handsfuls of stuff from yet others.

[conuly]

That's incorrect, Griffen.

First of all, there's no such thing as a "simple" language - except, perhaps, pidgins.

Secondly, if you would care to examine pidgins, you'll see that English clearly isn't one. A pidgin is the first language of nobody, and has no grammar. English is obviously many people's first language, and has a quite complex grammar, if I do say so myself.

Some people do argue that English is a creole, which is possible, but there is no way to argue that English is a pidgin.

*shrug*

[griffen.livejournal.com]

I'll let you argue it with my Anthropology teacher, then.

Re: *shrug*

[conuly]

I wouldn't waste my time. Give him a good intro-to-linguistics book and tell him to look up "pidgin" "creole" and the first chapter, which should involve common myths, like the idea of a simple or complex language.

Re: *shrug*

[conuly]

Or her.

(I'm in a bad mood from lack of food. Sorry)

[wodhaund.livejournal.com]

And I agree!

It is a clever smattering of languages, but a smattering nonetheless.

I do like the word smattering.

[leora.livejournal.com]

I really don't think that flows from Chomsky's work at all. He says everyone is preprogrammed for basic language and that all human languages choose options that fit with our pre-programming. But that says nothing about why an individual human would find one particular option easier than another.

I do, however, think that individual people may be biased toward certain particular choices.

Also, humans in general seem to be biased toward certain choices, since some errors occur quite commonly in some languages and the parallel errors do not occur often in other languages. Such as, most English-speaking children will use double negatives for a while until they get the hang of not doing so. Whereas I think it's less common for Spanish speakers to not use the double negatives that are required. Kids will experiment with dropping the subject if it's obvious even if they've never heard a dropped subject (hard to check for the opposite effect as I don't know of any languages that require subject dropping).

But I am not a linguist and I don't even play one on tv. So take all this with some salt, unless you are on a low sodium diet.

[conuly]

Or the th sound. In English, it's common knowledge that this is a hard sound for kids to master - and no matter how uncommon we say it is, it occurrs in a number of very common words, such as the, this, that, then, there, these, those, they.... However, I've heard of an Indian language where it's not. No clue as to why, it's just not.

[farraige.livejournal.com]

the term is 'marked'. as you know, there are some native accents of English that avoid this sound altogether (Cockney, and the tendency to -th-front is spreading wildly in this country) -- John Wells termed this "stubborn infantilism". It goes nicely with other mechanics of lazy speech evident in those accents.

[griffen.livejournal.com]

Hm, should I mention that that is actually ASL syntax?

"door-close" is one handsign.

[acheron-hades.livejournal.com]

Your post rang a few bells.

I studied German for three years at school; I wasn't much good at it at the time, mainly due to to confidence and concentration issues, but since then I've noticed that I quite often think internally using German word order, and join words the way they do. It's not quite the same as you described above, but it's close.

It's also made me think about OO v. non-OO computer languages. Again, the distinction's not quite so clear cut, but..:

struct door *the_door;



close_door(the_door);

(C) v.

door *the_door;



the_door.close();

(C++)...

Also, I was thinking about language issues (http://www.livejournal.com/users/polydad/161730.html?thread=449474#t449474) at polydad the other day, and there's some stuff (http://www.reciprocality.org/thirdage/chapter1.html#cree) in The Third Age of the World (http://www.reciprocality.org/thirdage/) about language:

In the Hopi language for example, there are no nouns at all! It's all done with verbs. There are no words for "cup", "flagon" or "bucket". Instead Hopi speakers have to say things like "for sipping water", "for gulping water", or "for filling bathtub".

[kibbles.livejournal.com]

When I moved back to the United States after living in Germany, I spoke English but with German sentence structure.

Took a while to unlearn.

I don't get what you are saying about there being no nouns in Hopi. You have nouns in your example!

[acheron-hades.livejournal.com]

Yes, that's because it's in English — I don't know, but I suspect in Hopi, "water" is probably a word meaning "flowing" or "that which flows" or something like that. Similarly "bathtub" might be "for washing" or "for containing" or something like that (maybe with modifiers?). If you run into any Hopi speakers, I'd love to explore this in more depth..

[kibbles.livejournal.com]

http://keywords.oxus.net/archives/2004/08/21/whorf/

Now this site says they have no mass nouns, just individual ones...

http://www.native-languages.org/hopi.htm has a small SMALL list of words, some of which are nouns, and the person quoted in the first link, Whorf, is apparently NOT a language expert. http://www.xpdeveloper.com/xpdwiki/Wiki.jsp?page=HopiLanguage and not everyone is too keen on what he has to say about them.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hopi_language and lastly the wiki entry on it. I think this all stood out because my daughter did a project on them, and this didn't come up.

What was fantastic about doing her project was the resource we had. The Museum of the American Indian, which is free to get into, has a library that they are very generous with. You can walk in without an appointment, and use it, and they are very helpful there.

You know, next time I go I think I will stop in the libary and just ask. :D

[acheron-hades.livejournal.com]

Interesting links - thanks..

[conuly]

Love that museum - best public bathrooms in the city :)

Now, if I recall correctly (which I probably don't), Hopi has a polysynthetic structure, which leads to tons of compound words. Doesn't mean much, though.

[amberite.livejournal.com]

Well, I know I'm absolutely no good at sign language, and can't even remember most of the basic signs they taught me as a kid -- they just went, uh, in one eye and out the back of the head, I guess. I even specifically tried to remember my friend merovingian's purposely silly phrase, "I turtle lesbian very," but now I'd be damned if I could repeat it. I know it has something to do with wiggling your thumbs.

But English, now, English I'm fabulous at. Furthermore, written English is more natural to me than spoken; I used to have mental images of text accompanying whatever I heard or said, and even now I can't remember a name without knowing a spelling for it, or being able to fabricate one. (And I just got accepted at University of Southern Maine's long-distance MFA program for creative writing -- eeeee!)

[conuly]

Congrats :)

I know what you mean about seeing spellings of words all the time. Bit distracting for me, though.

[farraige.livejournal.com]

I think the main reason is economy and whether you believe in thinking in mentalese or in English (I'm strictly a mentalese advocate). Also, I wouldn't forget about the semantic-pragmatic issues common amidst our kind and what it entails: whether your language is speaker-first or cognition-first. I suspect it's speaker-first, as in my case. Fluent speakers though we may be, we frequently incorporate cross-linguistic parsing and output (hence case studies of autistics speaking with an accent not associated with their geographical location or even their parents' accents). You may be reaching out for a parser that allows you to bring a minimal structure, like, ultimately a morpheme, and a semantic unit together -- which is what Oriental languages do. Oh they're very, very economical from that point of view.

[kayt-arminta.livejournal.com]

sounds like Turkish *laughs*

[sparkofcreation.livejournal.com]

ASL came really naturally to me, too, when I was studying it. I did the first year of a four-year ASL interpreting course, so basically I learned one-third of ASL (three years of learning the language, one of interpreting). The syntax, word order, etc. make so much more sense to me than English.

I've always assumed this is related to how visual I am—I can't learn languages by hearing them and I can focus on IM conversations much, much more easily than phone conversations.

Unfortunately, I've forgotten all of it.

[scottrossi.livejournal.com]

you bring up a good point on languages. from what i have read, particularly noam chomsky (that man again! lol) he seems to think, and present good evidence for this thought, that humans are born with certain lingual guidelines and internalizations preprogrammed into them. he says language is something natural, something evolved and that we are instantly capable of being speaking creatures from birth, it is what we are taught that determines what language we speak. so independently, you are confirming what is being theorized by the pros!!

[conuly]

I know of his theories. The problem is that different languages have different structures. Why does a structure that is not found in my language seem easier than one that is? If that structure is more natural, why does English use an alternative structure?

[wodhaund.livejournal.com]

Because English is a stupid language. This is my firm belief.

[griffen.livejournal.com]

Try more: English is *not* a language. It's a pidgin, a trade language, made up of several other more simpler languages and handsfuls of stuff from yet others.

[conuly]

That's incorrect, Griffen.

First of all, there's no such thing as a "simple" language - except, perhaps, pidgins.

Secondly, if you would care to examine pidgins, you'll see that English clearly isn't one. A pidgin is the first language of nobody, and has no grammar. English is obviously many people's first language, and has a quite complex grammar, if I do say so myself.

Some people do argue that English is a creole, which is possible, but there is no way to argue that English is a pidgin.

*shrug*

[griffen.livejournal.com]

I'll let you argue it with my Anthropology teacher, then.

Re: *shrug*

[conuly]

I wouldn't waste my time. Give him a good intro-to-linguistics book and tell him to look up "pidgin" "creole" and the first chapter, which should involve common myths, like the idea of a simple or complex language.

Re: *shrug*

[conuly]

Or her.

(I'm in a bad mood from lack of food. Sorry)

[wodhaund.livejournal.com]

And I agree!

It is a clever smattering of languages, but a smattering nonetheless.

I do like the word smattering.

[leora.livejournal.com]

I really don't think that flows from Chomsky's work at all. He says everyone is preprogrammed for basic language and that all human languages choose options that fit with our pre-programming. But that says nothing about why an individual human would find one particular option easier than another.

I do, however, think that individual people may be biased toward certain particular choices.

Also, humans in general seem to be biased toward certain choices, since some errors occur quite commonly in some languages and the parallel errors do not occur often in other languages. Such as, most English-speaking children will use double negatives for a while until they get the hang of not doing so. Whereas I think it's less common for Spanish speakers to not use the double negatives that are required. Kids will experiment with dropping the subject if it's obvious even if they've never heard a dropped subject (hard to check for the opposite effect as I don't know of any languages that require subject dropping).

But I am not a linguist and I don't even play one on tv. So take all this with some salt, unless you are on a low sodium diet.

[conuly]

Or the th sound. In English, it's common knowledge that this is a hard sound for kids to master - and no matter how uncommon we say it is, it occurrs in a number of very common words, such as the, this, that, then, there, these, those, they.... However, I've heard of an Indian language where it's not. No clue as to why, it's just not.

[farraige.livejournal.com]

the term is 'marked'. as you know, there are some native accents of English that avoid this sound altogether (Cockney, and the tendency to -th-front is spreading wildly in this country) -- John Wells termed this "stubborn infantilism". It goes nicely with other mechanics of lazy speech evident in those accents.

[griffen.livejournal.com]

Hm, should I mention that that is actually ASL syntax?

"door-close" is one handsign.

[acheron-hades.livejournal.com]

Your post rang a few bells.

I studied German for three years at school; I wasn't much good at it at the time, mainly due to to confidence and concentration issues, but since then I've noticed that I quite often think internally using German word order, and join words the way they do. It's not quite the same as you described above, but it's close.

It's also made me think about OO v. non-OO computer languages. Again, the distinction's not quite so clear cut, but..:

struct door *the_door;



close_door(the_door);

(C) v.

door *the_door;



the_door.close();

(C++)...

Also, I was thinking about language issues (http://www.livejournal.com/users/polydad/161730.html?thread=449474#t449474) at polydad the other day, and there's some stuff (http://www.reciprocality.org/thirdage/chapter1.html#cree) in The Third Age of the World (http://www.reciprocality.org/thirdage/) about language:

In the Hopi language for example, there are no nouns at all! It's all done with verbs. There are no words for "cup", "flagon" or "bucket". Instead Hopi speakers have to say things like "for sipping water", "for gulping water", or "for filling bathtub".

[kibbles.livejournal.com]

When I moved back to the United States after living in Germany, I spoke English but with German sentence structure.

Took a while to unlearn.

I don't get what you are saying about there being no nouns in Hopi. You have nouns in your example!

[acheron-hades.livejournal.com]

Yes, that's because it's in English — I don't know, but I suspect in Hopi, "water" is probably a word meaning "flowing" or "that which flows" or something like that. Similarly "bathtub" might be "for washing" or "for containing" or something like that (maybe with modifiers?). If you run into any Hopi speakers, I'd love to explore this in more depth..

[kibbles.livejournal.com]

http://keywords.oxus.net/archives/2004/08/21/whorf/

Now this site says they have no mass nouns, just individual ones...

http://www.native-languages.org/hopi.htm has a small SMALL list of words, some of which are nouns, and the person quoted in the first link, Whorf, is apparently NOT a language expert. http://www.xpdeveloper.com/xpdwiki/Wiki.jsp?page=HopiLanguage and not everyone is too keen on what he has to say about them.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hopi_language and lastly the wiki entry on it. I think this all stood out because my daughter did a project on them, and this didn't come up.

What was fantastic about doing her project was the resource we had. The Museum of the American Indian, which is free to get into, has a library that they are very generous with. You can walk in without an appointment, and use it, and they are very helpful there.

You know, next time I go I think I will stop in the libary and just ask. :D

[acheron-hades.livejournal.com]

Interesting links - thanks..

[conuly]

Love that museum - best public bathrooms in the city :)

Now, if I recall correctly (which I probably don't), Hopi has a polysynthetic structure, which leads to tons of compound words. Doesn't mean much, though.

[amberite.livejournal.com]

Well, I know I'm absolutely no good at sign language, and can't even remember most of the basic signs they taught me as a kid -- they just went, uh, in one eye and out the back of the head, I guess. I even specifically tried to remember my friend merovingian's purposely silly phrase, "I turtle lesbian very," but now I'd be damned if I could repeat it. I know it has something to do with wiggling your thumbs.

But English, now, English I'm fabulous at. Furthermore, written English is more natural to me than spoken; I used to have mental images of text accompanying whatever I heard or said, and even now I can't remember a name without knowing a spelling for it, or being able to fabricate one. (And I just got accepted at University of Southern Maine's long-distance MFA program for creative writing -- eeeee!)

[conuly]

Congrats :)

I know what you mean about seeing spellings of words all the time. Bit distracting for me, though.

[farraige.livejournal.com]

I think the main reason is economy and whether you believe in thinking in mentalese or in English (I'm strictly a mentalese advocate). Also, I wouldn't forget about the semantic-pragmatic issues common amidst our kind and what it entails: whether your language is speaker-first or cognition-first. I suspect it's speaker-first, as in my case. Fluent speakers though we may be, we frequently incorporate cross-linguistic parsing and output (hence case studies of autistics speaking with an accent not associated with their geographical location or even their parents' accents). You may be reaching out for a parser that allows you to bring a minimal structure, like, ultimately a morpheme, and a semantic unit together -- which is what Oriental languages do. Oh they're very, very economical from that point of view.

[kayt-arminta.livejournal.com]

sounds like Turkish *laughs*

[sparkofcreation.livejournal.com]

ASL came really naturally to me, too, when I was studying it. I did the first year of a four-year ASL interpreting course, so basically I learned one-third of ASL (three years of learning the language, one of interpreting). The syntax, word order, etc. make so much more sense to me than English.

I've always assumed this is related to how visual I am—I can't learn languages by hearing them and I can focus on IM conversations much, much more easily than phone conversations.

Unfortunately, I've forgotten all of it.