[330/365] Lingthusiasm
Nov. 26th, 2019 06:06 pmLingthusiasm is a podcast that was recommended to me (by ![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
sfred, I think?) early on in its life.
Each year around its anniversary they ask that people tell their friends about it. This year, they've particularly asked for peopel to share something that's stuck with them from the podcast: a fact or a story or whatever.
I think my favorite one is Gretchen on the episode about "untranslatable words."
But this gets into linguistic stuff I find really interesting like "what is a word?" Actually I think "word" is one of those concepts, like "langauge" or "dialect," that is literally just impossible to define once you reach a level of linguistic knowledge. Linguists talk about lexemes or lemmas or strings or types vs. tokens and all kinds of things that...sorta...mean what laypeople mean by "word" but also definitely do not mean that.
Like non-linguists say stuff like "that's not a word" or "that's not a real word" when what they really mean is to pass judgment on somebody else's use of language. (There's a whole nother Lingthusiasm episode about this: Every Word Is a Real Word.) And they also want "whether or not a language has a word for X" or "how many words the language has (or doesn't have) for Y" to mean something, to tell us some fundamental truth about the people who speak it. Like, whether "Eskimos" (ugh) have fifty words for snow or not. This one bugs me because well first of all it's inaccurate and almost certainly made up from whole cloth.
But also because I'm from Minnesota and we have a lot of words for snow too! Since I've moved to the UK I've learned that they call all kinds of things "snow" here that I never word: I'd call them sleet (this one's usually called "hail" here, though), or flurries. Or what TV meterologists call "wintry mix" these days, which seems like a particularly cozy kind of snack but is in fact awful. When I talk to my parents about the winter precipitation, I say stuff like "it isn't sticking/accumulating", the latter being another TV-weatherperson word but it is actually a really useful distinction so it feels a bit awkward in conversation but it's something I wouldn't find too remarkable if I heard it. And they can talk to me about blizzards, snowbanks, powder, snowdrifts, hardpack, (a) dusting... English has plenty of words for snow too!
We have words for as wide a variety of things as it makes sense to distinguish. Manchester and the UK generally have plenty of words for rainy weather that I hadn't heard before I moved here, like dreich or mizzle (which felt like such a modern portmanteau, but it's late Middle English!). Honestly more than one person I know here uses "Manchester" as a verb to mean that kind of fine but penetrating rain that defies almost any waterproof or umbrella and gets you wet no matter what. If I ask someone what the weather's like and they say it's manchestering, I know all I need to about how fun it will to go outside (none at all).
And yes to some extent, our thinking is affected by the langauge(s) that we are thinking in, but not to nearly the extent that a lot of people seem to like to think.
Like, I remember reading years ago that English isn't a hopeful language because it doesn't have a word for the future tense. This somehow made it pessimistic about the future, like it was rare or impossible for English speakers to think about the future, either as a cause or an effect of us not having a proper future tense. But of coruse English can talk about the future just as well as any other language! In a minute I am going to get on a bus to go with Andrew to an appointment. Then I will do some uni reading. My friend wants to have lunch tomorrow. All of these are ways that English talks about things that happen in the future.
But I bet if I told that to the author of this terrible take, they'd get huffy and say that I know that they didn't mean "I'm going to" or "I will" or just indicating a time in the future like "tomorrow" or "next Tuesday" or "in 2020" or whatever. They'd say they meant English doesn't have a word for future tense -- it doesn't indicate future by changing its verbs, like it does for past tense (e.g. jump vs. jumped). And that's true! It doesn't. But is that really the point? It doesn't tell us anything inherent about English or its speakers, who can use more "words" to convey the same meaning just as well as languages that indicate future tense with verb conjugations.
For whatever reason, maybe hearkening back to our synthetic Old English roots or maybe because of centuries of thinking Latin (which is has a ridiculously, um, rich system of cases and inflections and declensions) was a better language than English is, English speakers just love things to be a word. "I bet the Germans have a word for that" is a familiar response to a person expressing some complicated emotion or situation that takes a bit of explaining.
It's not that German has more words or anything (English arguably has the most, but of course it depends on what the word "word" means). It's just that it's the German convention to splice together compound words with no spaces in between. English actually shares that compounding habit with German (English is a Germanic language, after all), and sometimes splices together its compounds, like lunchtime or teapot, but English just happens to separate longer compounds with hyphens or spaces, like toilet paper holder or car boot sale. German has words like Donaudampfschifffahrtsgesellschaftskapitaenswitwe meaning "widow of a Danube steamboat company captain," and Kraftfahrzeug-Haftpflichtversicherung: "automobile liability insurance." But as you can see, these words are perfectly translatable to English, and they'd be considered compounds in English too, so they're just as much "words" here as they are in German.
Anyway, these are the kinds of delightful (to me) trains of thought that Lingthusiasm inspires in me. You can read more about it, and find links to everything about it, here.
sfred, I think?) early on in its life. Each year around its anniversary they ask that people tell their friends about it. This year, they've particularly asked for peopel to share something that's stuck with them from the podcast: a fact or a story or whatever.
I think my favorite one is Gretchen on the episode about "untranslatable words."
But one of the things that I always think about what I think about these lists of “oh, here’s a bunch of words that are untranslatable,” is first of all, well, here is this convenient column B where someone just provided a bunch of nice translations for them. So how untranslatable are they, really? And also that if you look at a language just through the lens of its lexicon, you can end up with some really weird conclusions....That "here are some untranslatable words!" genre of listicle had always gotten to me in exactly the same way: like there's the list and then here are the translations so hmm, right.
And my favourite example of this is French doesn’t have a word for “please.” Therefore, obviously, the French, they must be very impolite…maybe. But what they do have is a four-word phrase, “s'il vous plait,” which comes in another form, which is “s'il te plait,” which both mean effectively “please.” And in fact they come in formal and informal versions, this phrase that means effectively “please.” And so, sure, if we look at the lexicon of French, the individual, atomisable words with spaces in between them, like, “Oh dang, there’s no equivalent for please! Like, how do you even be polite in this language?” But if you look at it even just one step further in subtlety, of course there are lots of ways to be polite in this language! And so, seeing a language just through the lens of its lexicon – on the one hand, it gets us some of these interesting packages, but on the other hand it misses out on a whole lot of what a language actually is if all we’re doing is looking at the lists of words and their translations.
But this gets into linguistic stuff I find really interesting like "what is a word?" Actually I think "word" is one of those concepts, like "langauge" or "dialect," that is literally just impossible to define once you reach a level of linguistic knowledge. Linguists talk about lexemes or lemmas or strings or types vs. tokens and all kinds of things that...sorta...mean what laypeople mean by "word" but also definitely do not mean that.
Like non-linguists say stuff like "that's not a word" or "that's not a real word" when what they really mean is to pass judgment on somebody else's use of language. (There's a whole nother Lingthusiasm episode about this: Every Word Is a Real Word.) And they also want "whether or not a language has a word for X" or "how many words the language has (or doesn't have) for Y" to mean something, to tell us some fundamental truth about the people who speak it. Like, whether "Eskimos" (ugh) have fifty words for snow or not. This one bugs me because well first of all it's inaccurate and almost certainly made up from whole cloth.
But also because I'm from Minnesota and we have a lot of words for snow too! Since I've moved to the UK I've learned that they call all kinds of things "snow" here that I never word: I'd call them sleet (this one's usually called "hail" here, though), or flurries. Or what TV meterologists call "wintry mix" these days, which seems like a particularly cozy kind of snack but is in fact awful. When I talk to my parents about the winter precipitation, I say stuff like "it isn't sticking/accumulating", the latter being another TV-weatherperson word but it is actually a really useful distinction so it feels a bit awkward in conversation but it's something I wouldn't find too remarkable if I heard it. And they can talk to me about blizzards, snowbanks, powder, snowdrifts, hardpack, (a) dusting... English has plenty of words for snow too!
We have words for as wide a variety of things as it makes sense to distinguish. Manchester and the UK generally have plenty of words for rainy weather that I hadn't heard before I moved here, like dreich or mizzle (which felt like such a modern portmanteau, but it's late Middle English!). Honestly more than one person I know here uses "Manchester" as a verb to mean that kind of fine but penetrating rain that defies almost any waterproof or umbrella and gets you wet no matter what. If I ask someone what the weather's like and they say it's manchestering, I know all I need to about how fun it will to go outside (none at all).
And yes to some extent, our thinking is affected by the langauge(s) that we are thinking in, but not to nearly the extent that a lot of people seem to like to think.
Like, I remember reading years ago that English isn't a hopeful language because it doesn't have a word for the future tense. This somehow made it pessimistic about the future, like it was rare or impossible for English speakers to think about the future, either as a cause or an effect of us not having a proper future tense. But of coruse English can talk about the future just as well as any other language! In a minute I am going to get on a bus to go with Andrew to an appointment. Then I will do some uni reading. My friend wants to have lunch tomorrow. All of these are ways that English talks about things that happen in the future.
But I bet if I told that to the author of this terrible take, they'd get huffy and say that I know that they didn't mean "I'm going to" or "I will" or just indicating a time in the future like "tomorrow" or "next Tuesday" or "in 2020" or whatever. They'd say they meant English doesn't have a word for future tense -- it doesn't indicate future by changing its verbs, like it does for past tense (e.g. jump vs. jumped). And that's true! It doesn't. But is that really the point? It doesn't tell us anything inherent about English or its speakers, who can use more "words" to convey the same meaning just as well as languages that indicate future tense with verb conjugations.
For whatever reason, maybe hearkening back to our synthetic Old English roots or maybe because of centuries of thinking Latin (which is has a ridiculously, um, rich system of cases and inflections and declensions) was a better language than English is, English speakers just love things to be a word. "I bet the Germans have a word for that" is a familiar response to a person expressing some complicated emotion or situation that takes a bit of explaining.
It's not that German has more words or anything (English arguably has the most, but of course it depends on what the word "word" means). It's just that it's the German convention to splice together compound words with no spaces in between. English actually shares that compounding habit with German (English is a Germanic language, after all), and sometimes splices together its compounds, like lunchtime or teapot, but English just happens to separate longer compounds with hyphens or spaces, like toilet paper holder or car boot sale. German has words like Donaudampfschifffahrtsgesellschaftskapitaenswitwe meaning "widow of a Danube steamboat company captain," and Kraftfahrzeug-Haftpflichtversicherung: "automobile liability insurance." But as you can see, these words are perfectly translatable to English, and they'd be considered compounds in English too, so they're just as much "words" here as they are in German.
Anyway, these are the kinds of delightful (to me) trains of thought that Lingthusiasm inspires in me. You can read more about it, and find links to everything about it, here.