Language Thread

[bob_fox]

One must also remember that in the time in which the book is set, Newspeak is not yet universally used in the region. Perhaps such a thing would be impossible (though the book never indicates this).

In addition, Newspeak alone didn't achieve the Party's "mind control." Rather, if I remember the book correctly, it was developed as an accessory in solidifying the Party's ideals.

Intriguing book. I remember I was completely captivated the first time I read it.

[alchemi2]

A thing I've noticed at work (very multi cultural both staff and customers) is how many foreigner's slip English words into their conversations in their own language and how easily English staff slip the odd word from various languages into their conversations.

I've always thought of English as an ever expanding language as it does seem to easily incorperate bits from other languages.

[MrFlibble]

Word borrowing is in fact a very powerful process. You'd be astounded at how easily English words that are incorporated into Russian get all the necessary grammatical characteristics, e.g. inflection for nouns, they lacked in English.

I think borrowing a word from another language during interlingual communication is in its basis the same process as learning a new word in one's native language.

Unfortunately, the downside of borrowing is that the language of youth in Russia, for example, gets littered with whatever comes from the popular culture, i.e. (American) English borrowings. It is completely unnecessary and often stylistically inappropriate, although from purely linguistic POV, such phenomena are not anomalous.

This, by the way, returns us to the monolinguistic prospects of language development.

[bob_fox]

Word borrowing is in fact a very powerful process. You'd be astounded at how easily English words that are incorporated into Russian get all the necessary grammatical characteristics, e.g. inflection for nouns, they lacked in English.

This happens in Swedish too. Sometimes the spelling itself can even change to suit the Swedish language - though this usually only happens in informal situations - e.g. "mail" becomes "mejl," and "timing" becomes "tajming," as in: "Vilken bra tajming!" ("What good timing!") ;D

This, by the way, returns us to the monolinguistic prospects of language development.

Hm, but I wonder how far this could progress. In India, for instance, they speak a lot of English, but it's quite different from what many native English speakers - including me, a South African English speaker ;) - would consider acceptible English. This remark is not meant as an attack on Indian English, but rather as an illustration of how much Englishes can differ from one another.

[MrFlibble]

it is obvious that language changes over time, but the trick is that its unity is achieved by "synchronizing" the changes within a linguistic community. It is likely that any such community will use the same variation of a language, while two isolated communities will develop different variations (up to divergence into separate languages). Mass media and educational standards both may serve as means of "synchronizing" language changes over large communities, even those living across the world. A monolingual society would probably still have differences in local varieties, but the same standard official language could be more or less easily maintained across the globe.

[bob_fox]

'Nuff said! Sounds awfully boring, though, having no more languages to learn. :'( We could learn dead languages, I suppose - like many people learn Latin today - but we wouldn't really be able to use them.

[MrFlibble]

but we wouldn't really be able to use them.

Why not? of course, this wouldn't be the same Latin as Caesar or Cicero spoke, but never the less it would be quite functional. AFAIK, many (or at least some) philologists who study Latin or Old Greek are able to speak these languages quite fluently (e.g. at their conferences). And if you're running out of languages, you can always invent one ;)

[bob_fox]

I suppose we would be able to use them, but what I was actually referring to were languages that each function as a native tongue to at least one group of people. This is what makes living languages a special case.

[MrFlibble]

Hmm, I think that it could be at least theoretically possible to create a situation when a group of people would start using a language different from their native one (even a language considered "dead"), and with time, this new language would become native to the next generation of people living in this community. This is what actually happens to many immigrant families as they are slowly assimilated into the new environment.

[bob_fox]

Wouldn't this be eventually detrimental to international monolingualism? (I love this discussion.)

I personally believe, even taking into account the spread of a number of international languages - English being the most prominent among them - that these "monolinguistic prospects" you mention don't seem too realistic.

[MrFlibble]

Heh, I never said it's actually going to happen. The prospect of monolinguism may not be likely, but it is theoretically not impossible.

[bob_fox]

Oops! :-[

Which language should I learn next I wonder: German or Spanish? I must say that I'm leaning a bit more towards German at the moment. Although Spanish would probably be a more useful language to know, German would be easier to learn since it's more closely related to English, Swedish and Afrikaans, all four being Germanic languages. 

[Acriku]

I would say German if it was one or the other (Japanese otherwise :D). Spanish would be more useful due to the number of people who speak it, but I would be more at home to learn German.

[bob_fox]

Of course, an enormous amount of words in Spanish are recognisable to an English speaker, owing to Latin influence.

Japanese otherwise :D

Yes, but I don't think I'm ready for the commitment.

[MrFlibble]

I wanted to learn Spanish just for the sake of learning a foreign language, but I don't have time for it right now. Because of the same issue I had to scrap my plans to study Old Egyptian, which I'm kind of interested in.

[nemafakei]

German has more difficult vocabulary, because although the basic vocabulary is more similar to the other Germanic languages, the extended vocab is all based on compounds. Spanish shares the more difficult vocab, but some of the more basic stuff will be less familiar.

German also has a 4-case, 3-gender noun system to get a grasp of.

Of course, being harder in one respect or another may make it more fun...

[bob_fox]

It's a good thing I learnt Swedish (has two genders), because it would've been very difficult to grasp the German gender system from scratch (English only has one gender, as you know).

[MrFlibble]

Swedish (has two genders)

Neuter and non-neuter I suppose? A friend of mine knows Swedish and I guess I've heard that somewhere else (two-gender system opposed to three-gender as more archaic), but I've never studied Germanic languages systematically (apart from English that is). My knowledge of German is, so to say, passive, since I have no trouble reading texts of varying complexity (although it remains a mystery to me how exactly I've learnt to do that - no, seriously! :)), but hardly ever got a chance to practise oral speech.

[bob_fox]

Neuter and non-neuter I suppose? A friend of mine knows Swedish and I guess I've heard that somewhere else (two-gender system opposed to three-gender as more archaic)

Yes, exactly. They generally only use the neuter and common (masculine/feminine) genders, but they can under certain circumstances use the masculine gender as a separate gender, though it's considered somewhat formal/archaic. (I feel silly explaining what a native Swede could much better.)

[MrFlibble]

(I feel silly explaining what a native Swede could much better.)

Heh, I doubt that every native speaker of Swedish can explain the processes that occur in their language, albeit they have no trouble using it properly. BTW, many brilliant grammars and other studies of national languages were written by linguists who were themselves not native speakers of those languages.

[bob_fox]

Russian seems a grammatically complex language. So many inflections - at least, for the nouns. (I once had a Russian classmate - haven't seen him in a while, though.) But I suppose most languages have a complicated inflection system compared to English.

[MrFlibble]

Most IE languages seem to have taken the path of reducing the number of noun cases to a minimum, but English is the only one known to me that got rid of them completely (there's the non-nominative case for the pronouns and the possessive case though). Usually six cases, two numbers (singular and plural) and three nominal inflection types are singled out in Russian, plus the exceptions, plus we've got the adjectival and the pronominal inflection as well. Just for comparison, Old Church Slavonic had 3 numbers (singular, dual and plural), 7 cases and 14 nominal inflection types (depending on the type of sound the noun's stem ended with).

[bob_fox]

Sounds worse than Latin.

[MrFlibble]

Ever tried Sanskrit? ;)

[nemafakei]

Spanish, French, and Italian get rid of cases apart from in pronouns. They don't even have genitives like English.