I hate that you’ve made me now question my decades long distaste for Noam Chomsky. (I’m in that small group of weirdos who have not only found his political opinions distasteful, but who also find his linguistics theories to be annoying and bad for linguistics as a science. When he derisively dismisses corpus linguistics, it makes me want to throw my head through the drywall.)
And yet...ugh I can’t believe I’m going to admit this...he quote by Chomsky you included as to anarchy being a very human challenging of authority to justify itself...that is one of the best quotes I’ve ever read about anarchy, ever.
For whatever it’s worth, as a matter of political ethics, I don’t think there’s any problem with what this GrumpyCat is doing (from what little I know about him...I really don’t know or care about what the various “Steemit celebrities” do.
But from what little I’ve read about the guy, notwithstanding his political ethicality, within my own, personal, subjective morals, GrumpyCat is too mean-spirited and nasty. He can accomplish his goals without being so insincere and crotchety.
You dont Like LADD, language acquisiting diagnostic device? Yea the quote is powerful. I think Chomsky is a decent guy a little too far left for me as a minarchist/ ideally voluntarist.
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I’m not fully against the whole universal grammar thing. Some of it seems pretty sensible, like the idea that there is something innate in humans that without which language acquisition is impossible. (Although that’s not a theory as much as it’s a statement of the obvious.)
I’m more or less incensed by Chomsky’s ideas being the catalyst which largely turned linguistics into the “Study of Language Acquisition.”
The field is just overcrowded with research on language acquisition and universal grammar and psycholinguistics, while the linguistic historians, evolutionary linguists, and traditional philologists seem to get shafted on funding, attention, and publications.
So yeah, I’m irrationally bitter about that.
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yea social science is mostly bullshit from my grad school and JD experiences. Most colelge just to keep people occupied for more vacancy chains to help ameliorate technological unemploment, create distortionary incentives and lock people into debt.
Would love to read some of your research if you do anything. Sapir Whorf pretty cool, I think language definitely structures thought.
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or can at least structure thought that isn't 100% just logic/ vector information
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Haha I think we would have some great conversations because Sapir-Whorf is another one of those theories that I think is probably right sometimes and probably wrong other times, although I’m not fully sure when it’s right or wrong. (Read stuff by a Boritsky or Bordisky or something that had data showing that some tribe’s different linguistic patterns for relating to spatial concepts resulted in their thinking and understanding of spatial relationships very different then, say, speakers of Proto-Indo-European descendants.
But then, like 5 minutes later, I came across another paper (that I somehow still have bookmarked but don’t know where’s I saved the actual paper inside the firewall) which studied some Mayans and czme yo with data that had the exact opposite conclusion showing that differentiation in conceptualizing spatial relationships is probably a result of just having different landmarks and cultural ideas formed by and about those landmarks, with language being only a very small factor, if at all.
So who knows?
The one definitively good thing to come out of Sapir-Whorf was that movie Arrival.
Some really bad linguistics (and some really good too) but an amazing sci-fi flick
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0010027702000094?via%3Dihub
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havent seen that. I mean there is definitely a most efficient way to structure information, like I think google google translate translates by having it's own 3rd universal meta language that structures the information in one language in a way that doesnt distort it so that if they can create the matrices between both of the two languages and teh 3rd then can automate all things. Yea I think I read some research but I forgot the spatial stuff, I think there was discussion of colors and Sapir Whorf, not doing academia currently but maybe again someday.
Way I see it is it's likely the only "universal" language is the most efficient structuration like the google 3rd language. It is not innate at all but remains external but just as McLuhan assserts the medium is the message. But then for more abstract language things they are less universal thus for how the ontological constructs of language then becoming an input in perception.
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Your last paragraph is perfect. It's pretty much just a better way of putting my understanding of how language works. You might as well have gone into my head, rearranged all the ideas, separated out all the useless chaff, and then put it back together in a way that is digestible and makes sense.
Especially the part about there being a universal language that is really something that's necessarily efficient but is still something external to the mind, and not some inbuilt magical "language mind power" inside everyone's brain.
Although, I guess, to be fair to the hardcore universal grammar types, they would probably then just ask "Well what is it that makes it possible to have a single language that can be the most efficient? If it's the most efficient across languages, then doesn't that imply there is something internal to the human mind itself that makes this trait something universal to all languages."
To that I'd probably go with the idea that it's not the human brain this tells us anything about (or mind, if you're into the whole dualism thing), but about the structure of language.
Which they'd then say something about that being the same thing because "language is always and everywhere a brain thing."
But so is every other human activity. Just because statistically 100% of people perceive, say, pain, it doesn't tell us that there is a specific "pain part of the mind universal to all humans." Pain could very well come from all types of different combinations of human interactions with the external world and the the way the nervous system (among all the others) proceeds in its work translating those interactions into something perceptible by a conscious thinking individual.
But I'm also not a professional linguist, so I very well could be completely wrong on all this.
In any event, you have gained yourself a regular reader.
Hope we can continue conversations like these. I don't get a lot of this in my "off-chain" life for any number of reasons, so I enjoy it immensely here.
Thanks!
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well hit me up on discord if you ever want to chat direct and not have it be sprawled across posts. thefatkat on discord.
Yea send me some writing in a few months if you want some ideas. Not sure if you have ever done any programming. But I think it really opens up information processing.
For pain or any other experience I think of everything as little blackboxes. The human perceiving pain is a blackbox so to the extent they feel pain they have that sensation. To the extent past experience or maybe brain chemistry or other things can transform sensations, or even perspective or other things then there would be a different matrix that could contain all that information at the most efficient level.
Ultimately, I just think of it as a lowest common denominator that there be a most efficient objective way of preserving the information in one language and transfering it to another with minimal data corruption , or corruption below some threshold.
As a big fan of Richard Dawkin's "Selfish gene" I think one can think of all ontological social constructs as little replications of that information in a brain.
One could call this a universal language where most efficient storage and thus all laguages or structures might coalesce around different linguistic data structures, to think it is inherent in DNA I think might be mixing what the real process. More that it is the nature of reality once you define enough concepts of the zeitgeist.
Hope things are going well!!
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