Complexity in Language.

Distinction between oral and written languages seems quite arbitrary.

Kozin invented a term – “oral literary language” to describe the register of 12th century Mongolian in which large parts of the “Secret History of Mongols” are written.

You see, it is a historic fact that Mongols had no written language in 12th century, but they had a literary language nevertheless – quite complex and fully developed (by the looks of it, with many centuries of history).

It was used in diplomatic correspondence, for example, which was composed in this oral literary language and sent with envoys who memorized it word by word. It differed quite significantly from colloquial language – in fact, it appears that considerable skill was needed to understand such oral messages (for ordinary people they sounded like riddles).

So I would say that the difference the author seeks lies in social complexity, not in writing per se which is just a technical tool.

Language of Skaldic poems comes to mind as western example – yes, the Vikings did have a kind of writing, but it’s use was rather restricted and their literary language was primarily oral, but so complex that needed decipherment even by native speakers.

Homeric Greek wasn’t very simple either.

I once read there’s a Samoyedic language with such a literary register that makes a point of accumulating rare verb forms.

Make sure you read the part at the end, about scientific writing!

I have a few details to add to it:

The decline in sentence complexity may also be due to scientists no longer trying to write in a register appropriate for literature, which may be part of the same phenomenon as no longer wearing suits & ties to conferences. Alternatively or at the same time, it may be an effect of the increased speed of science: some scientific publications of earlier times were clearly designed to be pleasurable to read; there’s no more time, and often no more space, for that, so scientists now strive to get the point across as quickly and clearly as they can manage. (Then as now, individual abilities and sensibilities differ.)

The rise of noun compounding may have a few additional sources: calquing from German up to the mid-20th century*; native speakers of Romance languages who overestimate what noun compounding can do because they aren’t used to it; native speakers of Chinese who are used to long strings of morphemes that may or may not be classified as nouns and aren’t used to the stricter word classes of English. I suspect that the last two influences have given us the yeast artificial chromosome, patterned after the less questionable bacterial artificial chromosome.

* Darwin once ran across leglessness or limblessness (I forgot which) in a translation from German and found it very curious; he wrote about it in one of his many letters. Today it seems to be unremarkable in, say, works on the origin of snakes.

These languages now churn out relative clauses with boundless enthusiasm but their common ancestor, Proto-Indo-European, may have lacked the necessary grammatical tools to produce them at all.

What about the relative pronoun *h₁jo-?

In fact, heavily recursive sentences like those found in the Declaration of Independence have already been dwindling in written English (as well as in German) for some time. According to texts analyzed by Brock Haussamen, the average sentence length in written English has shrunk

There I wonder if the effect has been as strong in German, because short sentences are authoritatively considered good style in English, while in German that never happened. I’ve even read a style guide that says the natural written German sentence instead has one main clause and one subordinate clause; it illustrates its point by a short quote from a saga that exhausts the reader by being all action-action-action-action – it’s all “they seized Thorgrimm, slew him, and…”

Andreas Dulson (native German speaker) learned Ket after studying it for 20 years.

So I suppose, any human language, no matter how hard is it, can be learned by another human being.

Every language, whatever the nature of its structure, is routinely learnt by infants.

What about the relative pronoun *h₁jo-?
According to some treatments of PIE I’ve read (can’t remember my sources), there were no relative pronouns in PIE and *h₁jo- was something else (e.g. an anaphoric pronoun).

Je n’ t’ l’ai pas d’mandé
On phonological and adverb-insertion grounds, however, these are three words: je n’ t’ l’ai, pas, and demandé.

Very Chinookan, and even more complex!

While we’re at that, I’m reminded of an actual (supposedly) Chinook example – Lev Uspensky quotes a word inialudam (or similar – иниалюдам in the Russian text) from “the language of the Chinook Indians”, where every phoneme is said to be its own affix, and the actual root is just /d/; it supposedly translates to “I arrived to give this to her” (in Russian, “я прибыл, чтобы отдать ей это”).

Is it an actual real example of actual Chinook? I don’t know anywhere remotely near enough about of it to be sure, but Uspensky attributes the example to Sapir, who would have probably known better.

(But yes, French is sometimes similar. I’m often wondering how do native speakers understand it…)

(And now I’m wondering what’s the Chinook for “She told me you had been to her, and mentioned me to him” [and similar phrases in the rest of that “poem”]. Or the French, for that matter.)

January: Give me a little time and I will check Boas’ grammar of (Lower) Chinook.

Sapir did some fieldwork in one of the dialects, and Boas included a couple of pages by Sapir in his grammar, but I only know one short article by Sapir on the language. Sapir’s notes may have been consulted and quoted by later linguists though.

January: Lev Uspensky quotes a word inialudam (or similar – иниалюдам in the Russian text) from “the language of the Chinook Indians”, where every phoneme is said to be its own affix, and the actual root is just /d/; it supposedly translates to “I arrived to give this to her”

I can’t find this form in Boas’ grammar, but judging from similar examples it probably means only “I will give it to her”, possibly in a related dialect. The writer (or whoever wrote what the writer copied) probably took this word from a longer sentence and used the complete translation for the single word.

The part meaning ‘give’ is indeed /d/, but the previous /u/ is a prefix which occurs with the majority of verb stems (some of which are very short, others longer), so speakers would probably think of /ud/ as the verb. Final /am/ means ‘future’. I hesitate to identify the initial prefixes, but they must include pronouns for ‘I’ and ‘her’ and perhaps ‘it’ (as in French!).

p.s. I think that the use of ю in иниалюдам assumes that Chinook has the same /l/ as English, identified by Russian speakers as their own palatalized one. This interpretation is not valid for Chinook any more than for English.

I never quite understood what connection the article was trying to make between polysynthesis and lack of syntactic complexity. Rather than compare Ket and German, wouldn’t it make more sense to compare polysynthetic Hungarian or Turkish and their non-written relatives, or isolating written and non-written Sinitic languages?

p.s. I think that the use of ю in иниалюдам assumes that Chinook has the same /l/ as English, identified by Russian speakers as their own palatalized one. This interpretation is not valid for Chinook any more than for English.

Difference of palatalized and non-palatalized /l/ is a major feature for Russian speakers, but as far as transliteration from English goes, there is total confusion of which form to use. There is a possibility of a more subtle difference here. I am pretty sure that overwhelming majority of Russians who did not study phonetics are not conscious about the difference between у and ю (when it follows the palatalized consonant). But the first letter stands for /u/ sound and the latter for /y/.

Not being conscious doesn’t mean not hearing the difference. The choice of ю over у might be decided by it.

Disclaimer: I am not even an amateur phonetician. Ask your doctor about possible side effects.

It’s Grimm-shifted!

Inialudam: it seems that indeed the original claim belongs to Sapir.

I found the article really sloppy in its reasoning and assertions at times. For instance, the judgements on what English speakers might say and the contrast with ‘many of the world’s oral languages’ strike me as patronising.

An English speaker might say: Would you teach me to make bread?

But a Mohawk speaker would break this down into several short sentences, saying something like this: It will be possible? You will teach me. I will make bread.

Really? In the oral English I know, it’s more likely that you’d say “Could you teach me how to make bread?” True, this is not three short sentences, but with the ‘how’ in there (‘Could you teach me? How to make bread?’) it’s one step closer to the primitive-looking Mohawk version.

In English, you might say: He came near boys who were throwing spears at something.

A Kathlamet approximation would go like this: He came near those boys. They were throwing spears at something then.

Really? That’s normal spoken English? In ordinary oral English, I could imagine someone saying “He saw these boys, they were throwing spears at something.” Which isn’t far off the primitive-sounding Kathlamet approximation. This whole approach based on comparing written English with word-by-word glosses of non-English languages strikes me as superficial.

Speakers within a small, tight-knit community have an immense store of shared knowledge. This allows shortcuts in communicating with each other, so that many aspects of meaning can be left implicit. But these shortcuts are not available to speakers of big, sprawling languages who communicate with each other across divides of culture, experience, and specialized knowledge.

This reminds me of certain Australian English speakers of the less literacy-conscious variety speaking to speakers of English as a foreign or second language. I can understand them perfectly, but I pity poor non-native speakers listening to the colloquialisms, the round-about expressions, the appeals to a shared background, the use of words in non-dictionary meanings, etc. I can’t think of any examples and any made-up example can hardly do justice but (and please excuse the use of orthography to represent ordinary oral pronunciations):

You gotta think what the other bloke’s tellin’ ya, I might go in and I’ll be thinkin’, ‘Yeah, this is how it oughta be’, but you know, they might be comin’ from somewhere else and if you don’t think about that you’ll suddenly find no one really knows what the other side’s sayin’ and in the end you gotta go back and start from scratch, ’cause no-one knows what the other bloke’s talkin’ about’

This is actually a pretty literate hypothetical example. There are a lot of people who speak far more enigmatically than this.

The final part of the article arguing that the splintering into small specialised sub-disciplines using ‘noun pile extravaganzas’ brings our language close to polysynthetic languages spoken by small communities strikes me as pretty vague and sloppy in its reasoning — especially when she invokes headlinese like state hate crime victim numbers.

The article is food for thought but appears to be heavily driven by the author’s desire to prove her thesis — “syntactic complexity arose among written languages that served vast and diverse communities and we’re now moving away from that as we splinter into smaller subdisciplines, bringing us closer to small pre-literate communities using syntactically simple polysynthetic languages”. This causes her to make vague, broad, and unsubstantiated assertions that ignore or distort the actual facts.

“Constraints on multiple center-embedding of clauses”

That’s an interesting paper!

Bathrobe: A Kathlamet approximation would go like this: He came near those boys. They were throwing spears at something then.

This has to come from Boas’ collection of Kathlamet Chinook tales, of which I have a well-thumbed and studied copy.

One problem with tales collected before tape-recorders or other means of recording speech in real time is that when someone is speaking slowly in order for someone else to write everything down, the speaker is probably going to simplify their speech, especially in the narrative portions, which will consist or short, apparently simple sentences which the recording person will also repeat to the speaker to make sure the words are right. In such cases, possible subtleties tend to be avoided, and to disappear both from the original language and the translation.

Although I have struggled with the language of the Kathlamet tales, it has never been my major area of study, so I won’t try to give examples, but the indigenous language I know best is found in another of Boas’ works, “Tsimshian texts – Nass River Texts”, a volume of 70-odd pages with the English text on top and the original with word-for-word translation below. This was my first contact with the Nisqa’a language of the Nass River (British Columbia), before I met any speakers. I found the English text extremely boring! Short sentences, linked by “and then”, with the actions often occurring in the wrong order. It took me several tries to finish the whole thing. After a few months of learning the language with actual speakers (unfortunately not by immersion), I was able to read the texts with some degree of fluency, without constantly looking at the translation. The texts started to come alive! Not only could I correct many of Boas’ mistakes (he had retranslated the texts after collecting them through Chinook Jargon), but I began to understand the flow of events: Boas had used the same simple past tense when he should have backtracked with the pluperfect, for instance. With several years of continuous study of the language I understood and appreciated the tales more and more. Boas had thought that the texts were “only moderately well-told” compared to similar ones he had collected from a speaker with better English. Let’s say that his translation was not even “moderately” good.

The moral of the story is that hastily transcribed and translated texts, even from people known as good story-tellers, are rarely models of the best that a poorly known language could offer.

isn’t Sumerian supposed to be pretty close to being polysynthetic

Given that polysynthesis in the hardcore Mark-Bakerish sense is actually not all that common, it’s interesting that the unequivocally Bakeroid-polysynthetic Classical Nahuatl was not only a widespread interethnic language in one of America’s more elaborate cultures but probably the most “written” of American languages after the European invasions.

Seems to me that the notion that polysynthesis goes with premodernity in anything but a purely coincidental way would need a lot better evidence than is ever likely to be forthcoming in this age of major language death.

Though I did read somewhere lately an interesting speculation to the effect that “big” languages might, as it were, have got some of their rougher edges knocked off in the process of being serially adopted by absorbed groups that have lost their own original languages – repeated imperfect acquisition.

Doesn’t seem to have worked for French …

There also seems to be an element of question-begging: polysynthesis is lost in the face of the demands of communication in complex societies because it’s just too complex as a linguistic strategy, which just shows how polysynthesis must be more complex than elaborate analytical syntax … oh, wait …no, polysynthesis is too simple to express the demands of complex communication … er …

isn’t Sumerian supposed to be pretty close to being polysynthetic

It’s more agglutinative than polysynthetic. Verbal morphology is the least well understood (and the coolest!) part of the language, but it’s uncontroversial that they’re marked for subject, direct object, dative object. The standard dedication formula that kings had stamped on bricks was:

Ninŋirsu-ra Enanatum-e mu-na-n-řu-Ø
god.name-DAT personal.name-ERG ???-3.HUMAN.DAT-3.HUMAN.ERG-build-3.ABS
“(the king) Enanatum built (it) for (the god) Ninŋirsu

Sumerian didn’t have full-blown noun incorporation, but it did have a sort-of productive system of semantic incorporation, with the incorporated object often an inalienably possessed body part and the semantic object in an oblique case. Most verbs of perception and cognition are like this:
en aratta-k-e gig-e igi bi-n-duḫ-Ø
lord aratta-GEN-ERG wheat-OBL eye APPL-3.HUMAN.ERG-spread-3.ABS
The lord or Aratta saw the wheat

Sometimes the compound verb’s meaning is kinda opaque like “šu teŋ” (hand approach) which means to receive. There’s one late loan word where the Akkadian verb “šūḫuzu” (to burn) was reinterpreted as “šu ḫuz” (hand ḫuz). There are also pairs like “tag” (touch) and “šu tag” (hand touch) where the distinction isn’t really clear. The system gets pretty elaborate and the interpretations more contentious.

Intriguing. My own guess would have been [ʃnətlɛ] for the first chunk, is that allowed? Or [ʒnətlɛ]? (Not sure if [ʒn] works as an onset)

ʒ only devoices to ʃ before a voiceless consonant. I recall Étienne saying that schwa-insertion in French so-called pronoun groups has a fair amount of free variation. That said, [ʒnətlɛ] sound weird to me, but I’m not a native speaker.

That said, [ʒnətlɛ] sound weird to me, but I’m not a native speaker.

I think it puts too much stress on ne, which should be as unstressed as possible.

Whoa, are ᴘᴇᴊᴏʀᴀᴛɪᴠᴇ and ᴄᴏɴᴛᴇᴍᴘᴛɪᴠᴇ really two different morphemes in Ojibwe?

That’s what the Wikipedia article says, illustrated with meanings like “bad canoe” for ᴘᴇᴊᴏʀᴀᴛɪᴠᴇ and “some car or something” (presumably “who cares”) for ᴄᴏɴᴛᴇᴍᴘᴛɪᴠᴇ.

ə de vivre: I recall Étienne saying that schwa-insertion in French so-called pronoun groups has a fair amount of free variation

True, within the group, and there is personal and regional variation. For instance, je me le demande ‘I wonder about it’ (lit. I ask myself (about it)” can be je m’ le d’mand’ or j’ me l’ demand’ (I tend to use the second one myself). I think that some people say j’ me le d’mand’.

JC: It is so utterly astounding that the sequences jəm ləd mãd, jməl dəmãd, jmə ləd mãd are all in free variation!

This means that only the consonants count in order to produce and understand the pronouns. But it does not mean that any person freely uses all three: as I said, I favour the second one in my own speech.

Hmmm, popular journalism tells me that we know that Eskimos know a lot about snow because they have 35 or so words for snow. There’s only roughly one conclusion that I can draw from the fact that Ojibwe has >1 suffixes meaning pejorative~contemptuous.

I believe you have indeed heard this, but not all of Paris speaks the same!

Also, whoa, Ket polysynthesis is even worsestronger than Navajo?

Any suggestions for introductory books or articles on Ket? I didn’t find a lot that looked promising through an initial round of Googling.

Complex syntactic constructions piled one upon another are one of the most popular genres of folk oral tradition in many cultures.

“This is the House that Jack built” and all that.

Mongolian example (rather short, so it can be posted in entirety):

Manai khaany myangan langiin myangan möngön bömbgiig manai khaany myangan langiin myangan möngön bömbög bish geed öör khenii khaany myangan langiin myangan möngön bömbgiig myangan langiin myangan möngön bömbög gekh yum be?

If our king’s one thousand silver balls worth one thousand taels are not called our king’s one thousand silver balls worth one thousand taels then whose king’s one thousand silver balls worth one thousand taels can be called one thousand silver balls worth one thousand taels?

Any suggestions for introductory books or articles on Ket?

“Ket”, by Edward Vajda, in the LINCOM Languages of the Word/Materials series.

Ainu seems to be a good example of this, come to think of it: complex polysynthesis is very evident in the oral epics, the yukar, but very much less so in ordinary spoken language (though I suppose you have to allow also for the effects of language obsolescence there, which confuses the issue.)

It’s the other kinds of embeddings that are tricky.

Centre-embedding is so difficult to process that even in written language third-degree centre-embedding seems to be the greatest complexity ever observed in the wild (according to Karlsson 2007). In spoken language, even second-degree centre-embedding is virtually unknown:

The rat that the cat that the dog chased killed ate the malt.

[The rat [that the cat [that the dog chased] killed] ate the malt]

However, as Hurford (2012) points out, educated users of some languages, immersed in a rhetorical tradition which cherishes syntactic complexity (he mentions literary German, in particular), experience more exposure to centre-embedding, and therefore may cope more successfully with such sentences. Humans can reportedly be trained to process up to five levels of centre-embedding in laboratory conditions 😉

[The rat [that the cat [that the dog chased] killed] ate the malt]

Center embedding corresponds to general recursion in programming languages, whereas final embedding corresponds to tail recursion, which is just iteration by another name. When we try to understand sentences like the above, it’s the string of finite verbs “chased killed ate” that doesn’t work: we try to recall their subjects correctly but fail. In the “House that Jack Built” case, all the ]s are at the end, and the brain has no trouble processing them.

I thought someone posted a hilarious German center-embedded translation of Jack (by the way, is this the Jack of the Jack tales?), but I can’t seem to find it.

There are enough mistakes in this example that I’m unsure of the interpretation! If it is

Ich weiß, dass der Kaiser den Eltern die Kinder Fussball spielen lehren helfen soll

, then it’s straightforward enough that it might well occur spontaneously in the wild on rare occasions, and means “I know that the emperor [?!?] is supposed to help the parents teach the children to play football”.

German-speakers are accustomed to waiting patiently for the verb

Bingo.

“And that sentence is constructed upon the most approved German model. You observe how far that verb is from the reader’s base of operations; well, in a German newspaper they put their verb away over on the next page; and I have heard that sometimes after stringing along the exciting preliminaries and parentheses for a column or two, they get in a hurry and have to go to press without getting to the verb at all. Of course, then, the reader is left in a very exhausted and ignorant state.”

> Final embedding, like in House that Jack Built, isn’t actually that complicated. […] It’s the other kinds of embeddings that are tricky.

Isn’t initial embedding even easier in some cases? I can understand why “The House that Jack Built” is easy to parse, since when the whole sentence ends, necessarily all the nested clauses have to end too. But meaning-wise, is it really easy? As far as I can see, all the relative clauses are restrictive. So first we have “This is the rat… “. What rat? “… the rat that ate the malt … ” What malt? Etc, until we get all the way to the end. Only when we get to Jack, whom we know, do we know what house, and what malt, and what rat we’re talking about.

That’s not cognitively easy. Because the old info is all the way at the end. Embedding at the beginning with pre-positioned relative clauses (like in e.g. Japanese) would be much easier to understand, since you can start with the old information and move towards the new information. With that kind of embedding the understanding would be as easy as:

You know Jack? Yeah.
He built a house. OK.
Some malt lay there. OK.
Some rat ate that malt. OK.
This is that rat! Aha!

(I used a shortened version of the rhyme for the purpose)

spielen lehren helfen soll — I am far from being a native speaker of German, but I have no problems parsing this infinitive pileup. Your syntax tree may be center-embedded, but it feels more like I am processing it as a single compound verb form with four NP arguments. Is that what a serial verb does?

Another Mark Twain quote:

“An average sentence, in a German newspaper, is a sublime and impressive curiosity; it occupies a quarter of a column; it contains all the ten parts of speech — not in regular order, but mixed; it is built mainly of compound words constructed by the writer on the spot, and not to be found in any dictionary — six or seven words compacted into one, without joint or seam — that is, without hyphens; it treats of fourteen or fifteen different subjects, each inclosed in a parenthesis of its own, with here and there extra parentheses which reinclose three or four of the minor parentheses, making pens within pens: finally, all the parentheses and reparentheses are massed together between a couple of king-parentheses, one of which is placed in the first line of the majestic sentence and the other in the middle of the last line of it — after which comes the VERB, and you find out for the first time what the man has been talking about; and after the verb — merely by way of ornament, as far as I can make out — the writer shovels in “haben sind gewesen gehabt haben geworden sein,” or words to that effect, and the monument is finished. “

the writer shovels in “haben sind gewesen gehabt haben geworden sein,” or words to that effect,

“Or words to that effect” cracks me up.

C’mon, Hans, Uncle Thomas never wrote like that. It is merely the case that, in order to get something out of his novels, one must be high up the pole of German-across-the-centuries. He was a consummate show-off, but that’s another story.

Oh, well, the Anglosphere has Ruskin:

And round the walls of the porches there are set pillars of variegated stones, jasper and porphyry, and deep-green serpentine spotted with flakes of snow, and marbles, that half refuse and half yield to the sunshine, Cleopatra-like, ‘their bluest veins to kiss’ — the shadow, as it steals back from them, revealing line after line of azure undulation, as a receding tide leaves the waved sand; their capitals rich with interwoven tracery, rooted knots of herbage, and drifting leaves of acanthus and vine, and mystical signs, all beginning and ending in the Cross; and above them, in the broad archibolts, a continuous chain of language and of life — angels, and the signs of heaven, and the labours of men, each in its appointed season upon the earth; and above these, another range of glittering pinnacles, mixed with white arches edged with scarlet flowers, — a confusion of delight, amidst which the breasts of the Greek horses are seen blazing in their breadth of golden strength, and the St. Mark’s lion, lifted on a blue field covered with stars, until at last, as if in ecstasy, the crests of the arches break into a marble foam, and toss themselves far into the blue sky in flashes and wreaths of sculptured spray, as if the breakers on the Lido shore had been frost-bound before they fell, and the sea-nymphs had inlaid them with coral and amethyst.

Very good, Piotr. I had forgotten about Ruskin. Now Carlyle springs to mind – not so much for nested clauses as for generally whacked-out prose.

Hans, Die vertauschten Köpfe is deliberately high-flown. I read it for the first time only last year. Compare and contrast Lotte in Weimar, or Zauberberg.
Well, you said he never wrote like that, and while he was aiming for a Brahmin kind of elaboration in his prose in “Köpfe”, I could find such sentences in his work elsewhere, if I felt like going through it right now and if I wouldn’t have blisters on my fingers already from typing the examples I gave. 🙂
And sure, writers in other languages can be as long-sentenced, as has been shown.

I know now that I will never attempt to read Mann in the original

Buddenbrooks and Zauberberg are both eminently readable.

I read the novella Mario und der Zauberer at university, possibly because it was felt to be a suitable introduction to Mann for students. I remember it as having a heavy style compared with other things we read (e.g., Eichendorff and C. F. Meyer) but it wasn’t impossible, even for a first year student. It also had an interesting message.

Henry James (who is, in fact, quite readable still) meets some Python scripts.

Sedivy.

Would this name be pronounced as the ‘word’ in the line ‘a kiddley divey too, wooden shoe’?

Or is the stress on the first syllable?

What a fascinating thread! I’m very glad that LanguageHat threads never die. I seem to have missed it when it was active, probably because it coincided with my hip operation and all the tedious reeducation that followed. When I’ve been through it properly I may have something to add, but this post is mainly a placeholder so that I can find it again.

Here’s section 4, subsection 1 of the British Trade Marks Act 1938 in its entirety:

Subject to the provisions of this section, and of sections seven and eight of this Act, the registration (whether before or after the commencement of this Act) of a person in Part A of the register as proprietor of a trade mark (other than a certification trade mark) in
respect of any goods shall, if valid, give or be deemed to have given to that person the exclusive right to the use of the trade mark in relation to those goods and, without
prejudice to the generality of the foregoing words, that right shall be deemed to be infringed by any person who, not being the proprietor of the trade mark or a registered
user thereof using by way of the permitted use, uses a mark identical with it or so nearly resembling it as to be likely to deceive or cause confusion, in the course of trade, in relation to any goods in respect of which it is registered, and in such manner as to render the use of the mark likely to be taken either—
(a) as being use as a trade mark; or
(b) in a case in which the use is use upon the goods or in physical relation thereto or in an advertising circular or other advertisement issued to the public, as importing a reference to some person having the right either as proprietor or as registered user to use the trade mark or to goods with which such a person as aforesaid is connected in the course of trade.

Two years later, McKinnon LJ wrote in an opinion that he had very little notion of what this sentence (253 words) was meant to say, and that he doubted “if the entire statute book could be successfully searched for a sentence of equal length which is of more fuliginous obscurity”.

Really? Exceedingly rare in speech?

This looks to be the research referred to: Differences in sentence complexity in the text of children’s picture books and child-directed speech, J.L. Montag, 2019. The paper compares syntax in specifically child-directed speech (not speech in general) from the CHILDES corpus to a corpus of 100 picture books “selected to be representative of the books that caregivers might read to young children”. Passive relative clauses were found at a rate of 0.003 per thousand words in child-directed speech, and were 50 times more common in the picture books. (They uploaded the database — good practice! — and it turns out this means 2 examples in the speech corpus and 9 examples in the book corpus, which was smaller.)

So I’d say “exceedingly rare in speech” is hyperbole and oversimplification, and Montag should be judged on the actual paper. And yes, she did count get-passives, as well as elliptical passives like “there was a kitty trapped in there”. Interesting remarks, too, on how difficult it was to count relative clauses; they’re easy to miss.

I’m reading Lane Greene’s Talk on the Wild Side, and here in all its glory is what Greene said Pinker said Bob Dole said:

The view that beating a third-rate Serbian military that for the third time in a decade is brutally targeting civilians is hardly worth the effort is not based on a lack of undertanding of what is occurring on the ground.

Not only is that triply center-embedded, it also has a triple negation: hardly, not based, lack.

“that for the third time in a decade is brutally targeting civilians” is not restrictive but sounds perfectly natural to me.

The Cambridge Grammar of the English Language notes that some speakers accept “that” in supplementary (=non-restrictive) clauses, giving examples like:

His heart, that had lifted at the sight of Joanna, had suddenly become heavy at the sight of Ramdez thumping after her.

The examples they give actually seem rather poor compared with JC’s example. In fact, “that” sounds better than “which” here, which makes the comment parenthetical and loses some of the intended effect. However, I’m aware that some prescriptivists would condemn it.

I talk like that… and I have no trouble understanding it either 🙂 . I agree.

You don’t need all these thats:

The view—beating a third-rate Serbian military, that for the third time in a decade is brutally targeting civilians, is hardly worth the effort—is not based on a lack of understanding of what is occurring on the ground.

His heart had lifted at the sight of Joanna but it quickly became heavy at the sight of Ramdez thumping after her.

The Muriel Spark, The Mandelbaum Gate original with “that” is the best of all, because it’s in Muriel Spark’s voice, the style of wonderful Muriel Spark:

Freddy, his letter-pad useless in his hand, sat suffering indistinctly. His heart, that had lifted at the sight of Johanna, had become suddenly heavy at the sight of old Ramdez thumping after her with his woman.

ObTrivia: In the seven U.S. presidential elections from 1976 to 2000, one Republican presidential or vice-presidential candidate was named either Dole or Bush.

2004 as well, though not 1972 or 2008.

Here is a gentleman complaining about the use of ‘that’ where it doesn’t belong: Relatively incorrect.

The sentence he complains about is this:

[Patrick] Stewart found worldwide fame in the TV series Star Trek: The Next Generation that ran from the late 1980s to [the] mid-1990s.

I can’t for the life of me see what is wrong with it. If “school grammar” brands it incorrect, then the problem lies with school grammar. “Restrictive vs nonrestrictive” seems to be a really big thing in the world of English teaching but I’ve always felt that people are overconfident in asserting the distinction.

The sentence has a mild poetic tinge for me, that/which would go away if he replaced that with which ☺

Talking of unacceptability, it just occurred to me the other day that Chomsky’s pet “Colourless green ideas sleep furiously” is, in point of fact, ungrammatical. (I doubt whether I am the first to notice this.) The trouble is that you can’t have two colour adjectives at the same level in the same slot in the noun phrase. There are syntactic constraints against this in English. The semantic incompatibility is just a colourless green herring.

“Green ideas sleep furiously.”

and

“Colourless ideas sleep furiously.”

are absolutely fine. Romantic-poetic-acceptable. Gnomic, even.

So (to make it a bit clearer what I mean) is

“Colourless-green ideas sleep furiously.”

Colourless green ideas sleep furiously

you can’t have two colour adjectives at the same level

It doesn’t have to be two adjectives.

Chomsky, linguistics professor and amateur golf-course designer, was very angry when he was asked to make all nine greens appear identical. There had also been an unimaginative local council proposal to redirect traffic straight across his village green, so he was tossing and turning at night.

OR
they don’t have to be colour adjectives: The WWF has many green ideas but it’s very establishment-driven for an NGO, and so they’re all a bit colourless.

While I’m at it, ‘Under Milk Wood’ has a fine example contra the peevers who prefer ‘Active voice’ on the spurious grounds it makes the agent explicit and/or it makes the action more direct:

Time passes. Listen. Time passes.

Oy vey nothing dynamic at all; and not a passive anywhere.

@AntC

Thank you for contributing your insights.
You have discovered a further poetic degree of acceptability: dylan-thomas-acceptable.

you’re talking through your hat

I thought that was encouraged at *cough* Language Hat.

That was my feeling, too. The construction is therefore [verdant green] lawns, and is not a counterexample.

Yes, I was getting ghostly memories of that gentleman, too. In the last chapter he is “married and done for”, IIRC.

The construction is therefore [verdant green] lawns, and is not a counterexample.

But neither are the [colourless green] ideas, except semantically.

Quite. So colourless green lawns are lawns that aren’t quite parched, but will be next week without some rain, given there’s a hosepipe ban.

Anyway, Chomsky merely claimed that sentence is grammatical. He didn’t give a parse for it; he didn’t claim ‘colourless’, ‘green’ are “at the same level”.

Furthermore Phrase Structure Grammar has no notion of ‘at the same level’: there’s no iteration of non-terminals, only nesting/embedding.

IOW there’s two possible parses, depending how you choose to nest the constituents. [colourless green] ideas vs colourless [green ideas]. And of course semantically the grammar does not come with a claim as to what the adjectives qualify: [fake diamond] earrings vs fake [diamond earrings] might or might not amount to the same thing. Our poor monkey brains would give an advantage there in not sweating the small stuff.

The reverse, I think; I believe that the point of it was to illustrate Chomsky’s (certainly false) idea that syntax is wholly autonomous, so that you can assess grammatical “acceptability” without having to worry your head about semantics. You can tailor your concept of “acceptability” carefully enough to make that seem true, with sufficient perverse ingenuity.

His contrast with “Furiously sleep ideas green colorless” does certainly show that there are very different ways for a sentence to be unacceptable. His deduction from this that syntax is autonomous (in the sense he meant) is of course invalid.

There are (for example) ordering constraints on English modifying adjectives depending on their meaning. (A famous example is where Conrad makes one of the very rare slips betraying that he is not a native English speaker when he writes “black long shadow.”)

But of course, that mostly works in spoken English, where stress and intonation come into play. Even with italics, the written language is only partly able to capture these aspects.

David E. His contrast with “Furiously sleep ideas green colorless” does certainly show that there are very different ways for a sentence to be unacceptable.

All that sentence needs is some punctuation: “Furiously sleep ideas, green, colorless.” It’s metaphors all the way down, but I could easily see it in, say, a novel about the struggle to achieve a blend but important compromise at a UN environmental summit.

Ever since I’ve seen an essay describing it as such, I keep thinking of “colorless green ideas sleep furiously” as a pretty good (if mildly poetic) depiction of plant buds.

“So you feel we should not anthropomorphise … people?”

The anti-behaviourist reading would be of a piece with ANC’s fight on the side of the angels in that battle. However, the offending words are from that origo malorum

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Syntactic_Structures

(as I am sure you know.)

Probably worried that Voldemort might be taken as a portrait of the artist. The name is (significantly) absent from the Janua Linguarum version.

You don’t mean …?

Enough said. Perhaps too much …

Stockton was also one end of the Stockton-to-Darlington railway, the first (1825) passenger-carrying rail line in the world, started by Mr George Stephenson himself. Perhaps he thought to himself, what town can I think of whose inhabitants will be inexpressibly happy to leave at the unprecedented and dizzying pace of 25 miles per hour?

Although they would have ended up Darlington, so only a modest step up.

Who Will Be Eaten First?

George Monbiot? George Lakoff? Victor Mair looks very much like the one in the specs and vice versa. George Clooney? George Orwell & George Stephenson have already been eaten.

Chewed up by the Chompsky. He hid the “p”, but we won’t be deceived by cheap tricks like that. His mad chanting about colourless green ideas is meant to awaken the elder gods. Be afraid! Be very afraid!

I believe in at least one bit of behaviorism. If not forced to fill so many forms so often, I would have happily forgotten my birthday.

Chewed up by the Chompsky.

All his relations, I am told, pronounce the name with /x/, and only he and his offspring use /tʃ/. As someone whose surname pronunciation (GOAT > MOUTH) was assigned by my father’s first football coach (his siblings picked it up too), I may not understand, but I do not condemn.

Similar analogies did occur to me …

I don’t think it’s quite so straightforward, though (much as I would like it to be …)

Chomskyans have made worthwhile contributions to the study of syntax: I would be the first to agree that this is in general despite being Chomskyans, rather than because of it. Fas est et ab hoste doceri.

However, as I say, the value of such contributions is nugatory compared with the damage done by the combination of pseudoscientific methods with the toxic sociological effects of the Chomsky cult in academia.

JC linked the other day to a paper by Gazdar and Pullum on this not long ago. Syntactic Structures refers to a proof in The Logical Structure of Linguistic Theory (then unpublished) that it is impossible for finite-state devices to generate all grammatical sentences of English; the proof is invalid, but the job was done.

EDIT: I think it was in fact this paper:

http://www.lel.ed.ac.uk/~gpullum/CreationMyths.pdf

The final paragraph is interesting in the context of discussing Chomsky’s influence. Pullum, assuredly no Chomskyite, writes:

SS [Syntactic Structures] is credited with a degree of originality, explicitness, and technical coherence that it does not actually exhibit, but to say that is not to deny that somehow it managed to stimulate other linguists to strive for these virtues. Its effect was catalytic rather than substantive (it contains no results that are defended in detail today). It may be that some will dismiss the foregoing discussion as just a negative book review offered fifty years too late, but in a sense that would underrate the importance of SS. Only in the light of the subsequent developments in linguistics that SS managed to encourage could my evaluation of its content have been undertaken. It would have been very useful for linguists to have access, by about 1960, to a detailed critical review of SS; but the simple fact is that it would have been impossible, because absolutely no linguist at that time could have written it.

Well, Khomsky’s parents were immigrants and he has only one sibling, his brother David (and he might have switched as well, who knows). His other relatives, older than he, were probably immigrants as well; it’s from them he got his socialist-anarchist politics.

Can’t you imagine that he might have grown out of those influences ? Gone on to more establishment views ?

Certainly. Why not? I don’t understand what point you’re making.

Idly browsing Pullum’s publications on his personal site, I find to my dismay that he has anticipated my revolutionary concept of multidemensional grammatical acceptability:

I am familiar with this view, naturally. It is basically the one defended at book length by Carson Schūtze (1996): it says that grammaticality is strictly boolean, and only the variable and idiosyncratic data of acceptability judgments exhibit gradience. I believe, on the contrary, that we should give some consideration to a way of formalizing grammars that rejects Schütze’s view, and instead takes the view adumbrated by Howard Lasnik and others (see e.g. Lasnik and Saito, 1984, pp. 266ff; Lasnik, 2004, pp. 219ff): that grammaticality is gradient, probably along several dimensions.

http://www.lel.ed.ac.uk/~gpullum/Consigning.pdf

I’ll not give up the day job just yet, then.

I say grammaticality is strictly beelzebubean.

A monodemonsional model is inadequate: all correct sentences are alike, but every incorrect sentence is incorrect in its own way. Strait is the gate that leadeth to grammaticality.

Yes, to all three. Unless they are mine and you didn’t ask the permission. Then they none of them is acceptable.

All three fine by me.

I’d say 1>2>3 for acceptability, with 3 definitely going across the line into unacceptable, and 2 just barely acceptable (1 better than 2 but still only barely acceptable).
If I saw 3 in a text I would probably think it was one of those Early Modern English syntax things.

I agree with David L about 4 and 5.

 
There is, of course, another option:

6. I took with me the three books which were there on the table.

I think 5 is better than 6 (for reasons similar to what PlasticPaddy is saying), but it’s close. All three of 4-6 would sound natural, all three of 1-3 wouldn’t.

Continuing my Pullum-browse, I found

http://www.lel.ed.ac.uk/~gpullum/Metatheory.pdf

which, despite its somewhat forbidding title, contains a quite illuminating comparison between the generative approach and Pullum’s preferred “MTS” (for “Model-Theoretic Syntax.”)

It boils down to a difference between “only what the law allows is permitted” (generative model) and “everything is allowed unless the law forbids it” (MTS), and among other potential advantages MTS gets around the problem that the generative model doesn’t fail gracefully (which is more or less what we’ve been discussing.)

“The statements was interesting, but tough.” I’ll move on to a different Pullum article, praps.

But I don’t understand how you can build a theory on flimsy stuff like this.

Acceptability judgments come before theory: If you already set in your mind a theory to the effect ‘which’ can’t be used in a restrictive context, you’re very likely to find it skewing your judgment of acceptability.

I believe on this judgment there’s a difference between BrE vs AmE: for me (BrE, never heard of Strunk & White until well after I was confident in my command of written English), restrictive ‘which’ is just as acceptable as ‘that’. It’s the comma that indicates an attributive subclause/the pause in spoken English.

Those forms with ‘there’ seem rather clunky/old-fashioned to me; I wouldn’t use them myself. I don’t find the form with ‘which’ more clunky.

There’s a thought experiment from Wittgenstein, something like: pick up a pencil, twirl it round in your fingers, roll it along the desk, tap it, scrape the blunt end along the desk, scuffle it on some paper, …; all the time saying to yourself ‘carrot’, ‘carrot’, ‘carrot’. At some point your mind will reset, that the name for thing you’re holding in your hand is ‘carrot’.

I think acceptability judgments are like that: they’re so fine-tuned they can be easily overridden; and suggestion from Fowler or S&W is sufficient to sway you.

… which is a long-winded way to say: I don’t put any store in acceptability judgments. And I think the whole Chomskyan exercise predicated on dividing word-sequences into grammatical vs ungrammatical is bunkum. A grammar is useful as (one of the) tool(s) to get the meaning out of an utterance. Then Chomsky wanting to make syntax autonomous/independent of meaning tells me only the whole enterprise is a waste of decades.

There’s a similar case in Norwegian with a felt-to-be-important bur mostly bogus distinction between the temporal pronouns da and når as relativizers.

I had to stop at this sentence:

The human language faculty is of course a computuational device.

What a breathtaking assertion, brushing aside potential questions with a breezy “of course”.

I do want to ask Hat a question: when you were professionally copyediting, did you religiously follow the prescription on “that” and “which” in relative clauses?

dark matter

than the visible matter can explain I think is the key issue, and here I’m trying to remember what Neil deGrasse Tyson says on youtube somewhere [last year IIRC]: I agree current physics can’t explain the observations. Then we can label the difference between theoretically-expected versus observed as ‘dark matter’; we can even attach a number and a position, being the gravitational effect that’s otherwise inexplicable.

That’s no more than using fancy words/numbers to say ‘our sums don’t work out’. This doesn’t prove the discrepancy is due to ‘matter’ in any sense used currently by cosmologists/physicists. It doesn’t explain how this ‘matter’ was created at the big bang or whenever. It doesn’t say it’s ‘matter’ composed of the welter of so-far identified subatomic particles or their antiparticles/whether it has charge or charm or yadayada.

Or … perhaps the measurements (observations) are just plain wrong. I note the mass of the universe (and even of our galaxy) gets re-estimated frequently, and by large orders of magnitude differences each time. We can’t see from our solar system’s spiral arm the black hole at the centre of our own galaxy, we’re guessing at its mass by seeing effects bouncing off obliquely; cosmologists seem more sure of the mass of distant galaxies that we can observe looking sideways out our disc. Cosmology is not the sort of science you can conduct experiments; you have to wait for the cosmos to throw up some sort of gravitational belch.

Ah, also note Pullum’s comment is from 2013. I just can’t remember how ‘dark matter’ was being bandied-about back then.

I might even say that a so-called explanation in terms of ‘dark matter’ is as much an unfalsifiable tenet as The human language faculty is of course a computational device. (Hopefully cosmologists would have more sense than to say “of course”.)

Pace Geoffrey Pullum, I think “dark matter” is not a pretend solution: it’s a handy label for the problem. “Dark energy” even more so. They’re ways of saying that there are huge questions for which existing theory has no adequate answers yet. Journalists misunderstand this.

That’s quite different from pseudoscientific dodges whose sole purpose is to avoid having to admit that your theory is untenable (like attributing all failures of prediction to “performance.”) The besetting sin of Chomskyanism is not that it points to huge unanswered questions, but that it claims to have all the answers. (This indeed is the assumption underlying Norbert Hornstein’s The Stupendous Success of the Minimalist Program: everything is now fully accounted for except a few minor details, so all that remains is to see how few assumptions we need while still being able to recreate the whole wonderful Theory of Everything.)

isn’t that the case for basically any complex subject one doesn’t understand?

You’ve got me there. Possibly, but the problem with Chomsky is that his explanations sound like the imposition of a world view rather than an explanation. For instance, if I remember rightly (which is highly doubtful, but even if the details are wrong the principle is correct), Chomsky has said that when cats and people grow up in the same household, only the people learn language. Therefore human beings have a hard-wired Language Acquisition Device (LAD) in their heads that cats don’t. (Perhaps he didn’t state it so baldly, but shorn of all his hedging that is what he appears to be saying.)

Sounds logical and reasonable, but it’s actually very Chomskyan. The concept seems to have come out of his head rather than actual research. His ideas seem to reflect the view that that’s the way things must be, a belief in the possibility of reaching a perfect description of language through the sheer power of thought and abstract reasoning.

That is why he is so fixated on ‘competence’, the innate knowledge of language in a person’s head, rather than ‘performance’, the way language actually emerges. Initially ‘performance’ was simply meant to filter out the mistakes, corrections, etc. of language in action and describe people’s idealised grammars. Later the concept seems to have taken on a life of its own to become an explanation why people don’t find ‘grammatical sentences’ (according to Chomskyan grammar) acceptable. Their brains are not capable of ensuring that their linguistic performance matches the theoretical competence they have in their heads. In my view, that is a really back-to-front way of looking at language.

I think the opposing view to Chomsky’s LAD is that the ability to use language is something of an emergent property, a combination (or coordination) of different capabilities that exist within the brain (and maybe the physiology) that happen to allow human beings to learn and speak languages. Chomsky doesn’t appear to like this alternative, possibly because he is so in love with his own abstractions.

Sorry I can’t be more convincing but that is how I see it.

But what happens if your judgement disagrees with somebody else’s judgement?

What answer could there be beyond “different people are different”?

How do I know? They’ve read different books, they intellectual interests are in different fields, they pay different amount of attention to what other people think, some have a better ear for language and feel fine distinctions where for others it’s just a big blur, it depends on your family and neighborhood, acceptability judgments in borderline areas are inherently unstable and the same people can have different judgments at different moments.

And finally, it depends on so many interacting factors that there is nothing more than to say “different people are different”. But I don’t think we should default to this conclusion right away.

The thing is, there are “rules” = coherent statements about language with which overwhelming majority of speakers “complies” in the vast majority of cases. Then some of those “rules” are sort of working, but not as well. Why? Worth exploring, in my view.

One thing about the sort of “how far can we push recursivity” sort of examples is that they reflect a mindset that insists on a sharp division between “grammar” in the sense of syntax and everything else (pragmatics, sociolinguistics, etc) that influences how grammatical sentences are and aren’t used in actual practice. “Performance” and failures thereof is not only a characteristic of speakers/writers but of listeners/readers and the more syntactically complex an utterance becomes, the more cognitively demanding it is for the listener/reader to figure it out and different listeners/readers will hit the limit of either their ability or their actual willingness to do so at different points. (Oftentimes that point will be in a different location for reading than for listening.) On the other hand, the “performance” capacity of listeners/readers is often so good in the other direction that when the speaker/writer makes a performance error (produces a sentence we would judge ungrammatical if our attention was focused on it as a proposed example sentence) we don’t even notice because we subconsciously replace the defective sentence with a corrected version that is probably what the speaker/writer intended and keep moving forward from there.

Even the notion of “idiolect” may have different boundaries for speaking v listening (and parallel for writing v reading). Consider register. There are quite a lot of AmEng native speakers who cannot themselves get the most formal register of the language right and if they try they will fall into comical errors and hypercorrection. But they can understand it reasonably well, and *maybe* (this is where I’d be interested in seeing some rigorous research) notice (at least in a vague, that doesn’t sound quite right way) if someone speaking in the formal register slips up and violates the specific grammatical rules of that variety. And the same in the other direction — people not fluent in a given non-prestige variety of AmEng (whether a variety marked by region, race/ethnicity, or class) will often get it comically wrong if trying to imitate it even if they can generally understand that variety perfectly well when they hear it spoken by someone fluent in it. And again it would be interesting to see research on whether they’d notice if someone speaking that variety started making errors within that variety’s own grammar. And maybe the answer is sometimes yes, sometimes no — e.g. the standard account of AAVE grammar provides that copula deletion is okay (maybe even mandatory?) in some contexts but not others, but because the contrast drawn is not one that is explicitly marked in many other varieties of English, if someone speaking otherwise plausible-sounding AAVE got that rule wrong and just omitted/included copulas (copulae?) at random, an outsider might not notice.

The more J.W. Brewer expands on their (?) views about linguistic phenomena, the more I find myself in agreement with them [referent ?]. It’s a pity that those views have an air of common sense about them, since to exercise common sense is no longer generally acknowledged as being only common sense.

Innit.

I think “dark matter” is not a pretend solution: it’s a handy label for the problem. “Dark energy” even more so.

Dark energy is definitely a label for a problem.

Dark matter, though, is a label for a set of problems that can be, to general surprise, be seen as the same problem. There wasn’t any reason to think the wheel-like rotation of most galaxies and the gravitation lenses next to the Bullet Cluster could be explained the same way, and yet there it is – I haven’t presented the math because I don’t understand it and haven’t seen it, but it has of course been done.

That has at the very least the potential to be a great breakthrough like the insight that electricity and magnetism are sides of the same coin, or that matter for the purposes of gravity and matter for the purposes of inertia are identical.

The occasional speculations about what dark matter is are another issue. The particles predicted by the theory of supersymmetry would have been good candidates, but so far they’re not showing up in the LHC.

What answer could there be beyond “different people are different”?

Specifically, different people infer different grammars from the input they get when they learn their native language(s). That’s also an important mechanism of language change.

J.W. Brewer:

One thing about the sort of “how far can we push recursivity” sort of examples is that they reflect a mindset that insists on a sharp division between “grammar” in the sense of syntax and everything else (pragmatics, sociolinguistics, etc) that influences how grammatical sentences are and aren’t used in actual practice.

I actually think that the Chomskyan distinction between “grammaticality” as a purely syntactic property, and issues of semantics and pragmatics related to whether something is meaningful and comprehensible, is a pretty accurate description of how my brain interprets sentences. There is probably no level of recursion, for example, that would make a statement ungrammatical or “unacceptable.” It might make it incomprehensible (or at least inelegant), meaning that it is not useful for communicative purposes, but that is, in my mind, a separate issue. I am sure that not everyone thinks about grammaticality judgements this way, and I may be vastly in the minority on this question in practice. However, I am also sure that I am not unique in this regard; I am just far to one side (along one particular axis) of the multidimensional distribution space of individual internal grammars.

Separately, on the subject of dark matter: It is by far the most parsimonious explanation for the behavior of matter on galactic and cluster scales that the predominant component of matter in the universe (“matter” meaning stuff that gravitates conventionally and thus naturally clumps around galaxies and similar structures where there is other matter to attract it). It explains gravitational rotation structure and gravitation lensing in many, many different situations. As for the objection that it is not explained by our current understanding of particle physics, that is a red herring. A stable, heavy elementary particle that only interacts through the gravitational and (maybe) weak interactions is simply not something that we would expect to have observed directly! In fact, the fact that the dark matter particle(s) interact so minimally is a large part of why they would have survived since the early days of the universe. There is nothing special about the energy scales that are currently accessible to us, and there is no reason to believe that there not (and, in fact, every reason to believe there are) elementary particles that are much more massive than the roughly electroweak scales at which recent generations of accelerators have operated.

Kusaal speakers in the 1800s

It’s not inconceivable.

On the one hand, Kusaasi have strong notions about correct speech: for example, my middle-aged informants quite often complained about the incorrect grammar of the young (which I suspect of being a human universal) or constructions that they thought were Mooré rather than proper Kusaal.

On the other, Kusaal just loves multiple layers of embedding and recursion, even in quite informal styles.

So the ingredients are present, at any rate, for a nineteenth-century Kusaasi A-Brett.

I actually think that the Chomskyan distinction between “grammaticality” as a purely syntactic property, and issues of semantics and pragmatics related to whether something is meaningful and comprehensible, is a pretty accurate description of how my brain interprets sentences.

@Brett I think you should tape yourself talking informally/un-selfconsciously (if possible) in conversation with others; and observe how often you’re perfectly well able to understand less-than-grammatical utterances; and how often you even echo back the same structures for sake of keeping the conversation going, without gagging at the prospect.

OK after the fact you might say some utterance is ungrammatical, but I suspect that’s your rule-based side of the brain analysing language, not performing it/not interpreting in real time. You should read the Pullum MTS paper, particularly section 4.2 ‘Gradience of Ungrammaticality’ and sections following.

I’m very much reminded of the musical theory drummed into me at school. And then the be-bop jazz that clearly broke all the ‘rules’ but entirely works as music. I then go back in history to find that Bach was criticised in his day for breaking rules; indeed the Cathedral committee several times docked his pay for introducing too much opulence into the Lutheran churches. His response? Listen to the overture of the St John Passion: just when you think it can’t get any more dissonant he heaps on another plangent discord in the high woodwind. Of course he knew all the rules and was perfectly well aware what he was doing. An artist’s reply to just criticism: up yours!

@Brett did you try my suggested experiment? Or read those suggested sections? Or am I to take your remarks as unburdened by evidence.

You seem to be talking only about the inside of your head. Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent.

I have consistently asserted that grammaticality judgements should be scalar, not binary. Then you need to stop regurgitating Chomskyanism. Those Pullum sections provide plenty of explanations for why acceptability judgments are a gradient and multi-dimensional; and for why judgments differ between speakers and differ for the same speaker in different contexts.

@antc, bathrobe, brett
I think this may be a matter of terms. Acceptability and grammaticality are not necessarily the same thing. I would have thought grammaticality represents purely syntactic elements of acceptability and is a theoretical, rule-based judgment. It is true that there are fuzzy or overlapping/contradictory rules which result in many borderline cases, especially for “unnatural” constructed examples.

@AntC: I have indeed read Pullum’s paper (which I basically agree with, in the main). I also explained the reasons why your suggested experiment was not really germane to what I was talking about.

@Bathrobe: None of what you say about other languages seems to have any relevance to my introspective conclusions about how I judge grammaticality of my native American English.

Both you appear to be so accustomed to debating with orthodox adherents of Chomsky’s theories that you have failed to recognize that I was trying to express a somewhat different observation. This seems to leaves you arguing against an apparition—a viewpoint that is not present either in what I said or what I believe. I was not “regurgitating Chomskyanism,” and I tried to make it clear that the way I process grammaticality was not universal at all. In fact, the observation that I do think of grammatical correctness in something rather like the way Chomsky suggested actually shows how applying pure introspective analysis could have led Chomsky and others to mistaken conclusions about the ultimate nature of grammatical evaluation. For someone like Chomsky, who presumably has a rather algebraic turn of mind, the rule-based way he described judgements of correctness might have been reasonably accurate (in the abstract; in practice, the rule set was always too spare to reflect real processing). But there is a fundamental error in the Chomskyan presumption that everyone makes those judgements in the same way.

We define grammar differently. That’s because we still haven’t decided exactly what grammar is. And I think that boils down to the uncomfortable fact that grammar doesn’t really exist. Grammar is whatever our hyperefficient patternfinder makes out to constitute a system, or at least a set of partly integrated subsystems. All a grammarian can do is to describe widely agreed interpretations of patterns in a general and fairly coherent manner.

None of what you say about other languages seems to have any relevance to my introspective conclusions about how I judge grammaticality of my native American English.

I’m not accustomed to debating with generativists and I didn’t regard you as one. But yours represents a fairly orthodox modern linguists’ view of language, not purely Chomskyan, I might add, and you did appear parochial in presenting it as you did.

However, I take your point that what you said perhaps illustrates how “applying pure introspective analysis could have led Chomsky and others to mistaken conclusions about the ultimate nature of grammatical evaluation”.

@ David M

Yes, I’ve peeked into that parallel-universe Hattery, and I found it a dreary, parochial, masturbatory sort of place. You are very brave trying to engage with these people — in fact, the only other one at that post was spam from a translation service. Unlike Pullum, I could never debate with them on any terms because we don’t speak the same language or share the same interests.

@ Trond Engen

All a grammarian can do is to describe widely agreed interpretations of patterns in a general and fairly coherent manner.

Linguistics!

“Nobody can make a grammaticality judgement except a grammar theorist; the rest of us can only make acceptability judgments.” —me

Holy pseudoscientific fabulising! I retract all the aspersions I cast on cosmologists. To build on J.K.Galbraith: Economic Forecasting was invented to make Astrology look respectable. The Language Faculty was invented to make Economic Forecasting look respectable.

Following a few links from David M’s AntiHattery got me to Berwick & Chomsky 2019 ‘All or nothing: No half-Merge and the evolution of syntax’

we both agree that it is important to determine how Merge is implemented in the brain. In …, we advance a specific proposal about this neural “wiring,” grounded on recent explicit neurological and comparative primate findings

an explicit proposal about the use of content-addressable memory, as this sort of memory is often considered more congenial with known neuroscience

it would be important to discover the long evolutionary history that preceded the appearance of Merge.

That appears to mean primate/human evolutionary history. I hope anthropologists are busy analysing DNA to find the Merge gene.

This is utterly unfalsifiable metaphysical claptrap. ‘Merge’ might or might not be a effective/efficient rule or syntactic mechanism with descriptive power in some model of syntax. There’s no possible evidence humans use such a rule, or any rule; indeed there’s no evidence humans’ mental processes are effective/efficient or use high-level rationalisations. All the evidence about language-processing performance suggests quite the opposite.

Breathtakingly stupid!

I looked at WP. Takeaway: Merge is an ordered pair, and MP syntax is the theory of ordered binary trees.

I’ve always assumed it was the Emperor’s New Clothes.

@David Eddyshaw: I think it’s easy to underestimate how bad the psychological understanding of language (among other things) was when Chomsky started working. The behaviorists were overwhelmingly in control of the field, and most of their ideas about language were just as over-broad and obviously false as Chomsky’s. Both Skinner and Chomsky started with interesting and not useless ideas that offered new ways to look at cognition. When scientists saw those ideas, they recognized that they contained germs of usefulness; at the very least, they offered new lenses through which certain forms of learning could be studied, and those lenses seemed potentially useful in precisely the areas where the previous paradigms of understanding had been failures. However, both sets of ideas were quickly applied far beyond the regimes where they might be useful, and they both developed collections of rote followers who looked upon the respective theories’ tenets as fundamental principles, rather than phenomenalistic descriptions of observed behavior.

I saw the remnants of the mid-century behaviorist hegemony when I was taking classes in animal and human psychology in the 1990s. There were occasional points in the discussion when the instructors would spend what seemed like inordinate amounts of time dealing with peculiar objections and explaining the experimental basis for being sure that certain alternative explanations for given phenomena could not be correct. I found myself wondering why it was felt to be necessary to rebut some of these other theories, which, quite frankly, seemed fairly bizarre at times; and I had a hard time conceiving of why anybody would ever have believed in them so strongly that they needed such careful, point-by-point rebuttals. Yet, decades earlier, when the actual experimental work in question was being done, established scientists really had made those objections, sometimes quite forcefully, and the basis of the objections was usually some point of behaviorist orthodoxy. Sometimes I thought our class time could have been better spent looking at other potential problems with the experimental conclusions—such as objections predicated on a modern ethological understanding of the evolutionary origins of behaviors.

we do have separate intuitions of grammatical correctness and performance limitations

I don’t think I’ve ever encountered this.

Much more common in my experience is where a language learner (e.g. me) says something that seems completely grammatical, and the teacher says “We could say it like that but we don’t”.

I remember one seminar in my MA course in Japan, with foreign and Japanese participants, where a bright foreign student produced the following sentence in response to the lecturer’s request to express sadness over an empty wallet in idiomatic Japanese:

Karappo-na saifu de kanashinde iru
“Empty wallet at grieving be.”

The correct form was:

Saifu-ga karappo de kanashii
“Wallet empty being [I’m] sad.”

The first is grammatically possible; the second is idiomatic. I assume this isn’t very interesting in the hunt for limits on recursion.

Britannica has an article on Chomskyan thought called Rule systems in Chomskyan theories of language.

Interestingly, it has this to say:

As suggested earlier, UG, or the language faculty narrowly understood (FLN), may consist entirely of Merge and perhaps some parameters specific to language. This raises the question of what the biological basis of FLN must be. What distinctive fact of human biology, or the human genome, makes FLN unique to humans? In a 2005 article, “Three Factors in Language Design,” Chomsky pointed out that there is more to organic development and growth than biological (genomic) specification and environmental input. A third factor is general conditions on growth resulting from restrictions on possible physical structures and restrictions on data analysis, including those that might figure in computational systems (such as language). For example, a bee’s genome does not have to direct it to build hives in a hexagonal lattice. The lattice is a requirement imposed by physics, since this structure is the most stable and efficient of the relevant sort. Analogous points can be made about the growth, structure, and operation of the human brain. If the parameters of UG are not specified by the language-specific parts of the human genome but are instead the result of third factors, the only language-specific information that the genome would need to carry is an instruction set for producing a single principle, Merge (which takes external and internal forms). And if this is the case, then the appearance of language could have been brought about by a single genetic mutation in a single individual, so long as that mutation were transmissible to progeny. Obviously, the relevant genes would provide great advantages to any human who possessed them. A saltational account such as this has some evidence behind it: 50,000 to 100,000 years ago, humans began to observe the heavens, to draw and paint, to wonder, and to develop explanations of natural phenomena—and the migration from Africa began. Plausibly, the introduction of the computational system of language led to this remarkable cognitive awakening.

I will leave it to the reader to decide what to make of this.

@AntC:

It’s not necessary to call it grammatical correctness in order to have a feeling for it. In Kusaal, a language in which few people are literate, and for which there is no established grammatical tradition at all, all informants will nevertheless say without hesitation that la na’ab kpiya is impossible for “the chief has died”, which must be na’ab la kpiya. That is surely based on a grammatical intuition, unless one is a true-believer behaviourist who disbelieves in any kind of intuition ex hypothesi. The fact that they wouldn’t call it a grammatical intuition is neither here nor there.

In contrast, in Kusaal as in English it’s easy to make up sentences involving multiple layers of recursion which in practice exceed anybody’s likely processing capacity. My limited experience with trying out such things on informants (not a very fruitful exercise in trying to discover the grammar) is that they dither about acceptability just as English-speaking informants do.

It’s certainly true that we have no direct access to other people’s grammatical intuitions, and can even make mistakes about our own, so at the end of the day the actual process of working out a grammar does in fact proceed by analysing (speech) behaviour. In that sense, whether people do have an I-language is in principle irrelevant. That doesn’t entail the conclusion that it is just an illusion engendered by formal grammatical education.

Perhaps people actually differ in this regard. I remember an old music teacher, surprised at my hopelessness at sight-reading, asking if I didn’t hear a voice speaking the words when I read ordinary text, and being obviously astonished when I said that I didn’t. Brett and I both have such a strong sense that we possess an I-language that it seems obvious: you and Bathrobe evidently don’t. And we’re all linguistically sophisticated Hatters, so that can’t be the distinguishing feature.

I will leave it to the reader to decide what to make of this

ANC seems very taken with this idea of single mutation producing language. As I’m not the first to point out, this implies the scenario that language-users conquered the human world after one family acquired the power of presumably very rudimentary speech (but only with one parent, and half the siblings.) It’s natural for a linguist to daydream that superior linguistic ability makes you irresistible to the opposite sex, I guess …

I am renting a bike

That is indeed likely to improve performance.

These sort of relational/linkage verbs that do not take a progressive are quite subtle. For example, I think one could say “I am loving my time in X” but not “I am loving my mother and father” and “I am being awkward” but not “I am being hungry”.

Looks like a native English speaker to me, possibly African. I just googled the phrase. Youn (ger than me) people use “loving” in circs that I wouldn’t, all the time, is my point. “I’m loving this X” rather than “I love this X” as I would say.

Thanks Language, and maybe my ignorance of linguistics is just distracting here (you must say, I won’t be offended!) However on the facebook person, others with the same name are Nigerian and I’m guessing this one is too. They (others with that name) are using English as if it were a first language, if not exactly like we would:
Enjoy rain dosen’t fall on one roof,it may be my turn 2morrow mhiz rachy [Ms Rachael] is knocing at de door yet to come

@ David Eddyshaw (again)

Imagine that you are correcting an essay written in English by a foreign student who speaks a language don’t know. You come to a section that makes no sense at all. You can’t make head or tail of it. You don’t know what he/she is trying to say. The words seem wrong. The logic seems wrong. The grammar seems wrong. You can’t figure out what the problem is because you don’t know exactly why the student made those mistakes.

Once you ask the student you realise. They’ve used the wrong word here. The grammar is mixed up. The connectives are wrong. Etc. But only after you ask the student do you realise what the problem is — syntactic, semantic, or pragmatic.

This is where I would agree with AntC. Many unsophisticated native speakers (and even sophisticated ones) are perfectly able to perceive when something in English is wrong. They know the English is flawed and will possibly be able to offer suggestions for improvement based on what they think the person is trying to say. But they won’t necessarily go through the syntactic, semantic, and pragmatic components to locate the error. They are much more likely to try and figure out the message and suggest improvements or corrections based on this.

I’m reminded of an occasion years ago when a Russian-American friend of mine asked me to look at a short piece she’d written in English. She’d emigrated as a young adult, and her English was excellent but not native (she worked as a translator). The only thing wrong with what she’d written was that she had put ‘the’ in a couple of places where it wasn’t appropriate, and had left a couple of ‘the’s out in places where they were needed. I was about to (try to) explain the reasons, but she cut me off and said, “Don’t bother, no one knows why, you just have to get used to it.” She was right. Maybe an ESL teacher could have provided a semi-plausible explanation, but I don’t think I could have.

only after you ask the student do you realise what the problem is — syntactic, semantic, or pragmatic

Maybe sometimes, but not always, or (I would have thought) typically. For example:

(a) This analysis not is correct.
(b) Because you insulted me, my heart has gone white.
(c) I hear that tomorrow you’re going to Accra. God will help you walk.

(a) is obviously a syntax error. (b) and (c) are perfectly “grammatical” English. No syntax errors at all. However “my heart has gone white” does not mean “I am angry” in English: a semantic error. As for (c), while you perfectly well could say that to someone leaving on a journey, as a matter of fact L1 English speakers don’t. Pragmatic error.

I don’t think you’d actually need to know Kusaal to see what kind of errors (b) and (c) were, though it would immediately explain why those particular errors had been made.

One might argue about semantic vs pragmatic, but the distinction between those and syntactic errors is usually pretty clear, it seem to me, unless the student has come up with some sort of complete word salad.

I don’t want to protest too much here: not only do I not subscribe to the Chomskyan view that syntax is quite autonomous and can be treated in isolation from semantics and pragmatics, I think it’s a fundamental error. But that’s not to deny that a lot of syntax can be treated as if it were autonomous: without such thoroughgoing regularisation we’d all have to communicate in holophrases all the time.

What distinctive fact of human biology, or the human genome, makes FLN unique to humans? … a requirement imposed by physics, since this structure is the most stable and efficient of the relevant sort. Analogous points can be made about the growth, structure, and operation of the human brain.

Evolution whilst it sometimes produces amazingly subtle ‘designs’, in general does not lead to the most ‘efficient’ solution: it leads only to something sufficient for the species to survive; there’s plenty of evolutionary examples of ‘solutions’ that are bloody awful (no engineer would do that), but just good enough. (The human female reproductive tract, for example; the human appendix; haemophilia; lack of resistance to viruses.)

I see no reason that within the human brain, something corresponding to FLN has arrived at a mechanism that is most parsimonious in terms purely of managing language. I see it as far more likely there are general cognitive abilities which are effective for many purposes, and very far from the most ‘efficient’ for one particular purpose. (Leaving aside the question of what are the criteria for ‘efficient’.)

It’s true that of a kitten and a child growing up in the same environment, one will learn language, one won’t. Also one will learn to operate the dishwasher, one won’t. Then is there a dishwasher-specific gene? No: quite possibly one of those clever parrots or an octopus might figure it out. But only humans can design/build dishwashers and the plumbing/electrical system; and plumbing/irrigation goes back through human history. Is there a hydraulics gene? Yes lots of the requirements for gravity-fed hydraulics are imposed by physics. So what?

Of course I’m spouting more unfalsifiable metaphysics. The point is this is insoluble; and nothing turns on the solution anyway. Please stop wasting public money on it; please put the money into recording endangered languages.

“But only humans can design/build dishwashers.”

An epitaph for the human race.

An epitaph for the human race.

“Dishwashers are made by fools like me,
But only God can make a tree.”

In the end, aren’t we all just washers of dishes?

“Take [our pet bird] Diego – he should be in the woodlands of Brazil with other sun conures, not flying around a house with primates.”

Do you think they’re doing it on purpose? I know some newspaper subeditors derive job satisfaction from writing obscure double meanings in headlines. Mark Lieberman at Language Log said the incidence of typos in the Guardian was nowadays no worse than in other papers, but that just means he’s not paying attention. It’s MUCH worse than in the New York Times (say).

I like the idea (which I think was once mooted in this august assemblage) that there was a pre-linguistic facility for symbolic reasoning / world modelling even among the ‘higher apes’ with enough of an evolutionary advantage that it would be universal, and that the language virus was the trick of mapping sounds to those internal symbols so that ideas could be shared — and that possibly that trick was what conferred great selective advantage on even larger brains and the linked neoteny (giving longer time to learn).

I don’t have the specialist knowledge to tell if this is utter bollocks, of course.

Anyone convinced?

Utterly not. If it was an unknown saying that stuff, I’d call it the ravings of a madman; similar to some of the more vertiginous parts of ‘A Beautiful Mind’.

Leaving aside the specifics of Merge itself, why (in the first few minutes) is there any need to talk about genetics or 100,000 years ago? Nothing turns on it beyond saying language is distinctively human; and humans have distinctive cognitive abilities, of which language is an example — also using tools. Other species exhibit some such abilities, but at such a quantitatively lower level as to make a qualitative difference.

Also: Whilst I accept that the expression of this cognitive ability is not restricted to the oral/auditory channel, I’m puzzled by the claim Merge is independent of sequencing. All means of representation of thought exhibit sequencing — even and especially the stuff ANC draws on the blackboard. Why try to subtract that from language? (Don’t I remember some early Chomsky observing that even in allegedly free word-order languages, random word salad was ungrammatical?)

What distinguishes humanity from apes, birds & bugs is the seemingly innate anxiety that causes it to draw a hierarchical tree with itself at the top: a) different and b) better than all the other species. Fish cannot do this; they cannot draw with their stubby little fins. A micro version is racism, and all the way at the top, the most needy and anxious to be best-of-all, is Trump.

There are some [allegedly free word-order languages] in Australia that really seem to have completely free and random word order, unlike Latin poetry where all the prepositions stay prepositions at all times.

Hmm. I am presupposing we know what is a word in those languages, but … Do they have inflection? Are they agglutinating?

Can the inflection appear randomly beginning/middle/end of a word? Can the elements to agglutinate be freely reordered? Or is there at least strict sequencing within a word? Is that really any different to restricting prepositions to be preposed?

(Of course you can represent sequences using superficially non-ordered sets: for example Kuratowski’s model for ordered n-tuples https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ordered_pair#Kuratowski's_definition. Toward the end of the video that might be what ANC is trying to say in his typically state-the-bleedin-obvious-backwards way. But that seems to this particular monkey-brain to be far from the most parsimonious explanation. I still can’t understand why it’s so crucial that the theorist be modelling the inside of a brain; rather than merely giving a model that corresponds to observation. Of course we must remember that it’s the Minimalist Program, not a theory.)

There is even a garbled version of Kuratowski in WP:Merge — since there seems to be a ‘primordial’ merge without the head/dependent relation, and a second one with it. I’m not sure if that tries to imply something about when children become capable of using head/dependent structures.

It shows that Chomsky has progressed from the view that grammaticality is to be determined by introspection the the more advanced view that the entire basis of Language itself is to be determined by introspection.

It’s interesting that (in among this masterclass in handwaving) he states as if it were obvious the notion that the ultimate basis of language must be the very simplest that we can imagine. I can think of no actual reason to believe this at all.

The principle he comes up with is the notion of set membership. He then smuggles in the idea that there are two kinds of set membership, depending on whether one element includes or resembles another element of the same set (producing two kinds of “merge”, a concept which then has to do all the work of reconstructing his whole generative system, which he still believes in.) If he means “resemble”, then we need to know what constitutes this “resemblance”: it implies at its very simplest a whole set of equivalence classes, which will then need in reality to be (an unacknowledged) foundational part of his universal grammar. If he means only “inclusion”, he has recreated the industry-standard definition of ordered pairs, as AntC rightly points out. That does seem to be his intention, which means the wittering about minimalism is pointless, really. Only fellow-cultists believe that the concept of ordered pairs is by itself enough to encompass all you need for an adequate account of syntax, of course: here, Chomsky does a sort of meta-version of his E-language/I-language dodge: absolutely everything about actual grammatical systems which cannot be “explained” by ordered pairs is due to pragmatic constraints of one kind or another, like processability.

Here, in fact, one can actually agree with the man: absolutely everything about language which is non-trivial falls outside the scope of his overarching theory, which itself has no substantive content whatsoever. And, who knows, maybe the human race did acquire his pet gene 100,000 years ago – a gene which does nothing in particular.

I now incline to the view that Chomsky’s entire career has been an elaborate (and perhaps somewhat cruel) prank, along the lines of the Sokal affair.

Incidentally, I think it’s true to say that there are no languages with completely free word order. There are plenty in which word order does not serve syntactic purposes as it does in (say) English: but there are always reasons for a particular order, typically to do with information structure. The idea that this sort of thing “doesn’t count” as grammar is, of course, one of the many things fundamentally wrong with the entire Chomskyan project.

I still can’t understand why it’s so crucial that the theorist be modelling the inside of a brain; rather than merely giving a model that corresponds to observation.

I suspect the answer is (and I’ve seen notions something like this cited in defence of the Minimalist Program) is that grammars have been through the observation-based phase; the Minimalist Program gets at the roots of grammatical theory. We can no longer be satisfied with these older approaches.

The Wikipedia page on “merge” shows that pair-ordering is indeed what is meant by all this jargon about two kinds of merge, as you need that in order to have head-dependent structures. The word “recursion” is flung about in a way that suggests that the writer is not quite clear on what it actually means (it need not involve head-dependent relationships at all in real-life grammar: perhaps it has to for Chomskyans, presumably by definition.)

Putting all this in set-theoretical form seems to serve no purpose, other than presumably impressing the groundlings. There is absolutely no value to linguistics in exhibiting a mathematical definition of an ordered pair, any more than there would be in constructing Peano arithmetic (we use numbers in our grammars …)

That’s what I thought it looked like the Wikipedia article was saying too, but I naively thought it was allegorical or something. Not literal, at least.

Over against Chomsky’s declaration that the fundamental basis of language must be simple (for some reason), a real philosopher of language wrote:

Die Umgangssprache ist ein Teil des menschlichen Organismus und nicht weniger kompliziert als dieser.

This was something Wittgenstein clearly never changed his mind about.
It would make a fine epigraph for any competent descriptive grammar, now I think of it (up there with Sapir’s “All grammars leak.”)

The most convincing is the last panel of the first pdf. Is it a silent cry for help?

Proofs within Chomskyan linguistics are structurally impeccable

Yes, indeed. This is true rigor (as in mortis.)
The author does seem to have taken on board the fact that language is complicated. In fact, he seems to feel that the usual descriptions are not complicated enough, and it’s up to the followers of the One True Path to remedy this sorry state of affairs.

One can only applaud such industriousness.

For some reason I was reminded of this:

https://xavierleroy.org/stuff/how-to-prove-it.html

I did at one stage wonder whether the Grand Plan for Universal Grammar was indeed for it to softly and suddenly vanish away, leaving real grammarians in effective possession of the field, but it’s clear that ANC and the ANColytes in fact still regard all the government and binding stuff and the like as eternal verities, which is why such ingenuity is needed to get the facts to fit the theories. Perhaps with yet greater ingenuity, it might prove possible to render genuine grammatical insights into a form that the Chomskyites mistook for Orthodoxy: it is, after all possible in principle to translate any Lisp program into Brainfuck.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brainfuck

I have to say that this has been an instructive thread, if only as an opportunity to get better acquainted with Chomsky’s theories (I won’t say “understand”) and hear the acerbic views of some Hatters.

Reading arguments against Chomsky around the Internet the case against him seems pretty clear. Reading defences of Chomsky, on the other hand, is like an excursion into the surreal.

Norbert writes like an exasperated parent speaking to a retarded child, essentially claiming that true universals can only be formulated in terms of Chomskyan rules:

as a matter of logic, it takes more than a review of contrasting surface patterns to debunk a Chomsky universal. It requires a discussion of the rules that generate said surface forms (i.e. a discussion of the generative procedures (i.e. Gs)). As we shall see, Evans’ discussion is entirely oblivious to this, and this makes his critique entirely worthless, as will become clear as we proceed.

Then we are treated to Norbert’s forte: examining sentences to see how far he can push the envelope without your eyes glazing over.

He came up with the following sentences:

* a) Where1 did the supermodel say that the window cleaner had to get off the train t1 to meet her?
b) Where1 did the supermodel say t1 that the window cleaner had to get off the train to meet her?
c) Who1 did the supermodel ask t1 whether the window cleaner had to get off the train to meet her?

I read and reread these sentences, but I think I must have missed something. According to Norbert,

a), which is asking where the cleaner had to get off the train, is grammatically incorrect.

b), which is asking where the supermodel uttered her remark, is grammatically correct.

c), which is asking who the supermodel asked, is grammatically correct.

But damn it, a) is fine for me! It’s a bit long but it’s grammatical. Use pronouns and it’s something I might even say.

a’) Where did she say she had to get off the train to meet her?

It goes on with even more mind-numbing discussions of island effects. I blame myself for not having made a detailed study of grammatical issues in sentences like “The book that John asked whether to review”. Obviously we need to explain why some sentences work while others fail, and since I haven’t worked out a detailed theory of movements and constraints I am in a poor position to criticise those who do. But I am convinced that people who pronounce a) to be incorrect have had their brains addled by exposure to too many edge cases. Which doesn’t seem like a good start to finding linguistic universals.

I agree that (a) is fine.
(Norbert may need to look up the term modus tollens.)

it takes more than a review of contrasting surface patterns to debunk a Chomsky universal

says he. Of course. Nothing can debunk a Chomsky universal. The very idea is absurd. If it conforms to a Chomsky universal, it’s grammatical, whether “acceptable” or not; and vice versa, of course. This is kindergarten stuff. I’m surrounded by fools. Fools, I tell you! Bring me my Death Ray!

Bathrobe, I think that offending word in 3a) is supposed to be “that”. Without “that” the sentence seems to be ok (I am not going to use dangerous terms such as grammatical or acceptable) though unnecessarily leaden. With “that”, I don’t know. As a general matter, if you truly believe in Universals (which, I assume, supposed to be universal, that is valid in all cases, if not, ignore this whole sentence), you have to look at the edge cases, they are the best tests for your theory. If that addles someone’s mind, well as Russians say “science requires sacrifice” (apparently, not only Russians, but they say it a lot).

I think I have seen the light!

We Followers of the Way have been troubled by the fact that the fully developed government-and-binding apparatus has (how shall I say this) a certain unnatural quality, as if the system might seem perhaps to be in some respects arbitrary and gratuitously complicated. [The fact that the system is a poor fit for the, like, data, is not a bug but a feature: a whole industry of matching the facts to the theory depends on this being difficult, so as to generate papers, theses, tenure … why do you suppose it’s called generative grammar?]

The (apparent!) unnaturalness is a problem though. It’s unaesthetic, and it makes it seem (whisper it!) implausible that the whole shebang is both genetically determined and the same for all normal human beings.

Happily, the Master Himself has come to the rescue. He has shown us that all this apparent complexity is simply due to the effect of wholly contingent pragmatic effects operating upon an underlying scheme of truly breathtaking simplicity: so simple, in fact, that it is intuitively obvious to all but the unaccountably prejudiced and those who (not to put to fine a point on it) are frankly out of their league when it comes to the intellectual grip necessary to follow the inevitable process whereby government-and-binding [or whatever] is a simple logical consequence of the basic principles!

I was wrong to assert that the ever-increasing abstraction of Universal Grammar is simply a way of avoiding making refutable claims. I’ve been blind. It is simply a principled way of showing that criticism of the complexity and opacity of generative grammar is misguided (if understandable, in those less sadly able to deal with complex intellectual arguments than ourselves.) In a Pickwickian sense, the system is not only simple, but as simple as we can possibly imagine. That’s how we can be confident that it is the Truth! Evolution always leads to the simplest solution!

If that addles someone’s mind, well as Russians say “science requires sacrifice”

Germans say: “Wer schön sein will, muß leiden“.

It’s not a retreat: it’s an origin myth.

Physics envy!

“In the beginning, there was nothing, which exploded.”

Huh? Of course, it’s physics envy. I thought everyone knew it. That’s how greatest achievements in physics work. There is a seemingly bizarre idea (left alone, any object will move with constant velocity indefinitely; electricity and magnetism are two sides of the same thing; speed of light is the same no matter whether the source stays or moves; electrons are particles and waves simultaneously) which, when worked out in sufficient detail, satisfy all “surface” observations/experiments. Chomskian idea of innate universal grammar and generative process of speech production (I confess that details are hazy for me here) is not even all that bizarre.

Physics envy or not, the problem I have with (what I’ve seen of) chomskyan analysis is that it has no explanatory value. It’s not that they dont use data, but that it always ends up in making adjustments to the underlying model so that it might have predicted the data, not using the model to predict (and thus explain) what they do and what they don’t see. That might be a worthy endeavor if there were any evidence that the process actually converged on something rather than nothing, and if experimental psychologists and neurologists working on the origin of language didn’t believe their results would have to be given a chomskyan interpretation, thinking that UG represents a consensus among scientifically based linguists. It’s as if particle phycisists thought relating their results to epicycles would somehow help bridge the gap to cosmology.

Except that physics has nothing to do with linguistics.

Of course not, I just thought it is obvious where intellectual framework (maybe it is called meta-theoretical or philosophical, but I am afraid of big words) comes from.

I am not in a position to describe the relationship of theoretical physics to experiment, it is complicated and multilayered, but by and large it requires a model to mediate between theory and experiment and than physicists prefer to look at a situation where there are some core features of both theoretical prediction and phenomenon, which can be related through the model and in which the precise details of everything else can be ignored.

* a) Where1 did the supermodel say that the window cleaner had to get off the train t1 to meet her?
b) Where1 did the supermodel say t1 that the window cleaner had to get off the train to meet her?

When Norbert says that (a) is ungrammatical, he’s literally correct: it violates the grammar he and his colleagues have devised. But neither (a) nor (b) can be unacceptable, because what people say doesn’t contain de Bruijn indices or trace markers: they are theoretical posits. Indeed, (a) and (b) are the exact same sentence: their acceptability stands or falls together.

But we can interpret Norbert’s asterisk as follows: the string (s) “Where did the supermodel say that the window cleaner had to get off the train to meet her?” cannot mean what (a) means in his theory, but can mean what (b) means in this theory. This presumably is true because Norbert-et-alii cannot say (s) when they intend (a), whereas Bathrobe-et-DE-et-alii can say (s) when they intend (a). My own introspection makes me stand with Norbert, unless the sentence is an echo question spoken just after the speaker has partly failed to hear “The supermodel said that the window cleaner had to get off the train at … to meet her”, where “…” is mumbled. In which case it is indeed too long.

So again Norbert is right to say “Structures are ‘grammatical’ or not, sentences are ‘acceptable’ or not.” But what he’s lost track of is that the structures are inferred from the acceptability or non-acceptability to Norbert-et-alii of the sentences. Or anyway that’s the best sense I can hack out of this thicket. But if I had my druthers, I would just burninate it all, screaming “WE HATES THEM, YES WE DOES, WE HATES THEM FOREVER!!”

Bring me my Death Ray!

The Death Ray is regrettably off line. Will you settle for your Arrows of Desire, Master? I have the Bow right here (ignites it with fire-starter).

Man maa lide noget for stadsen!

Quoth GT: “You have to like something for the city!” But I suspect it of being more like “Il faut souffrir pour être belle.” Haroun go bragh.

Passion.

Schönheit muss leiden.

Jeg kan godt lide det

Northern German: ich kann das gut leiden “I like that”, ich kann das nicht leiden “I can’t stand that”. I think the positive is more often used of people, though.

Just out of curiosity, is this sentence ok?

Where did she say I had to stop the car to pick her up?

It’s ok for me but perhaps not everyone would agree.

However, I do think that if I were at the wheel of a car scanning the street for a spot to stop, it would seem a mite uncooperative to answer (as Norbert obviously would) “In the living room”, unless that particular detail was of overriding interest to the people in the conversation.

Fine for me, though as JC notes, it would be more readily acceptable if it had a contrastive stress on “where”, as in the context of asking a question to refresh your memory about something you knew in principle but had forgotten.

This sort of fine-in-the-right-context phenomenon is exactly what the Chomskyan scheme is most inadequate at dealing with, as I think we’ve all concluded. Not accidental: the doctrine that grammaticality can be determined without reference to communicative function in context is likely to result in a theory unable by design to cope with everyday phenomena like this. The theory is too impoverished to account for the data.

Roy Horn’s white tiger attacked him on stage

He succumbed in May from the Covid virus.

XKCD hits the nail on the head (again right on time)

The ‘problem’ could be the mass discrepancy in galaxies; or the annoying propensity of people to be unsure about perfectly grammatical sentences.

Economists do it with models (according to the T-shirt, anyhow.)

I found myself wondering why it was felt to be necessary to rebut some of these other theories, which, quite frankly, seemed fairly bizarre at times

A particularly notable case is U.S. high school biology textbooks, which explain Lamarckian evolution, then Darwinian evolution, then the neck of the giraffe, each text copying from its predecessors. (Nobody actually knows just why giraffes have long necks, natural or sexual selection or who knows what.)

Incidentally, I think it’s true to say that there are no languages with completely free word order. There are plenty in which word order does not serve syntactic purposes as it does in (say) English: but there are always reasons for a particular order, typically to do with information structure.

That is precisely what has been denied for a few languages in Australia. Unfortunately I probably got that from a book that I don’t have here right now, though I’ll probably get a hold of it tomorrow. I can’t remember which language the examples were from either. But what I can remember is that word order did not seem to have anything to do with emphasis or whatever, and when repeating or quoting a sentence, people would repeat the words but not their order, as if they didn’t remember the order at all.

Also, in languages where word order is not completely free, it’s sometimes surprising which parts are. A few days ago we had a German case where two word orders have the exact same range of meaning, and which part of that range actually comes across depends on intonation instead. In Nunggubuyu, word order isn’t completely free either (demonstrative pronouns “often directly precede or follow a coreferential noun”), but word order is not used to distinguish nouns from adjectives (nothing else is either), members of noun compounds (which don’t exist either, unless you count the small closed class of lexical prefixes, some of which are cran morphemes, and many of which are irregular “in form and meaning”), which words are negated and which are not (instead, negative concord is driven to dizzying heights), or to distinguish agents, patients or experiencers; even the order of prefixes in the verb is determined by the animacy hierarchy instead, so that “I saw him” comes out as 1sg-3sg.m-see-PAST while “he saw me” comes out as 1sg-INVERSE-3sg.m-see-PAST.

There are some [allegedly free word-order languages] in Australia that really seem to have completely free and random word order, unlike Latin poetry where all the prepositions stay prepositions at all times.

Hmm. I am presupposing we know what is a word in those languages, but … Do they have inflection? Are they agglutinating?

Can the inflection appear randomly beginning/middle/end of a word? Can the elements to agglutinate be freely reordered? Or is there at least strict sequencing within a word? Is that really any different to restricting prepositions to be preposed?

All these languages have lots of inflection, and the order of affixes is fixed as far as I know, but bound and free morphemes can easily be distinguished. That the Latin prepositions are not bound is evident from the fact that other words can be inserted between them and the nouns they refer to.

There is a fixed phrase “mihi contra” used in Latin prose and poetry, meaning something like “but i don’t think so”. I don’t know how this is parsed, since contra takes accusative as a preposition. And of course there is mecum/tecum.

These are left over from an earlier stage in which the pre- were postpositions. In several other Italic languages, en remained such a strict postposition that it became a locative ending (South Picene esmen vepses vepeten “buried in this tomb”), but in Latin it was a strict preposition.

The syntax of -que is that it attaches to all words (not phrases) except the first, as in Sanctus Matthaeus Marcusque Lucasque Iohannesque. Occasionally in poetry we find it on the first word as well: hominumque ferarumque ‘both of men and of beasts’ (Georgics III). Semantically it indicates a tighter connection than et, which is the regular conjunction and the only one to survive into the Romance languages.

The words being connected don’t have to be nouns: they can be pronouns (me meosque ‘me and mine’), infinitives (augeri amplificarique ‘to be increased [in one way] and to be increased [in another way]’), or even adverbs (saepe diuque ‘often and for a long time’). There is also a reduplicative use: plus plusque/minus minusque ‘more and more / less and less’. Finally, there are many words with the clitic frozen into them: atque ‘and’ < ad ‘to’, neque or nec ‘not’ < ne ‘not’, ubique ‘everywhere’ < ubi ‘where?’, quisque ‘each one’ quis ‘who?’ (ablative quoque ‘also’).

The second most famous (or notorious) instance of -que today is in the Latin version of the Nicene Creed: qui ex Patre Filioque procedit ‘who proceeds from the Father and the Son’; the insertion of filioque was one of the reasons for the Catholic/Orthodox split. Note, however, that when the Catholic Church recites the Creed in Greek, either ad hoc or in a Greek Catholic particular church, nothing corresponding to filioque is present. Per contra, the Anglican Orthodox Church uses the regular Anglican form who proceeds/proceedeth from the Father and the Son but omitting the last words.

There is an Anglican Orthodox church? My mind is blown.

I was wrong to speak of the Anglican Orthodox Church (also known as the Orthodox Anglican Church) in this connection. They are one of the groups who left the Anglican Communion because gay marriage, ordination of women, etc., though much earlier than most. I should rather have spoken of Western Orthodoxy, a vaguely similar group of parishes who use Roman or Anglican liturgy and ritual that have been corrected to remove “post-Schism corruptions”.

Western Orthodoxy is a tangled mess even by Orthodox standards: there is the Orthodox Church of France, and there are parishes associated with the Russian Orthodox Church Outside Russia or with the Orthodox Church in America or with neither. In addition, there are French and British offshoots that accept all seven Ecumenical Councils as doctrinally correct, but say that only the first three were truly ecumenical, so that they recognize both Eastern Orthodox and Oriental (Ancient) Orthodox churches as sister churches. This is, to say the least, a very unusual position.

“Christians agree that Christians agree on the major points of the Faith and disagree only on the minor points. Unfortunately, which points are major and which minor is itself a point of disagreement!”

Thank you @JC re Latin -que

So to the point of (allegedly) free word-order Latin: -que is very much positionally specified. (It must appear on the non-first of connected words; optionally also on the first.)

Re Filioque I was boggling at how minor of a point it is possible to have a doctrinal dispute about. These are the people who became trolls as soon as there were chat groups, right(?)

For the benefit of someone who hasn’t paid close attention to doctrine since … well, since ever, but especially since I noticed there weren’t any female priests in English Anglican churches and there were in Baptist/Methodist/etc: to say ‘who proceeds from the Father and the Son’ presumably either alleges the Son had carnal relations whilst on earth; or ascribes as much primogenerative power to the Son as to the Father. Given that all God’s creations can procreate, why emasculate the Son specifically?

It’s the Catholics who insist on celibacy, not the Orthodox, so I’d expect the lack of proceeding-from to be the other way round(?) Foolish of me! As with internet trolls, logic/consistency has nothing to do with dogma.

@AntC: I have to agree with you about the seeming absurdity of people arguing about these doctrinal differences. However, we did have an interesting discussion of the topic just last month, and while I did not find the arguments for why these disputes should be important very convincing, it was an illuminating debate.

@Rodger I’m completely at a loss to know which two of the several things I mentioned are the particular two that you think I said have to do with each other. (Trying out that sentence as a Complexity in Language exercise … for a friend 😉 My “Foolish of me!” should clue you that logic had already abandoned hope.

@Hat re my “Troll”. Somewhere in last month’s discussion that @Brett linked to, it was pointed out that the secular powers used to tee up some doctrinal point, get their priests to argue it out; all the time knowing which power bloc they wanted to align with, so that bloc’s doctrinal point would be what they’d agree with; meanwhile the secular powers (which of course didn’t exclude the Pope) cared not a hoot for doctrine. Professing to some doctrine became a badge of membership, irrespective of the content of the doctrine. That sense of “troll”.

My not sharing the concern/seeing the issue as absurd isn’t what makes the participants trolls: it’s that the doctrinists were being manipulated by people who at the time didn’t share the concern/probably saw it as absurd.

It was a Monty Python argument clinic. Or …

I am minded of the wearing of face masks in the U.S. currently. For us in the rest of the world, it’s an open debate whether/when/why to wear a mask: does it protect (who?) or does it in fact increase the likelihood of infection? (And early doors in the U.S. there was insufficient PPE, so Fauci/Birx wished to hold back masks for health professionals.) In the U.S. not wearing a mask has become a badge of patriotism even if it kills you (or more likely kills your grandfather). That’s the sense of “troll”/absurdity of the doctrine.

As the wiki bit I quoted above indicated, there may have been some historical confusion about what the verb “procedere” and its various derivatives meant in theological Latin, but it’s definitely conceptually distinct from “carnal relations.” The ancient heretical (because of the filioque plus it isn’t even really extant in Greek so duh) Western creed known as the Quicunque Vult, often improbably attributed to St. Athanasius, says quite explicitly: Spiritus Sanctus a Patre et Filio: non factus, nec creatus, nec genitus, sed procedens. (In the traditional translation: “The Holy Ghost is of the Father and of the Son; neither made, nor created, nor begotten; but proceeding.”) So whatever the Son supposedly does to cause the Spirit to proceed is rather different than what the Son would have needed to do in order to beget someone.

Ah! Now we see the masterful misdirection of the Arch-Heresiarch at its most awesome and perilous! Note, my brothers, that he does not deny his depth …

you evidently hope to oust Trond from his current eminence as Hattic Supreme Heresiarch

Yeah nah nah. My depths are in ignorance of heresy. I was going by English “proceed from” not theological Latin “procedere”. Would there be something actually heretical with suggesting The Son had carnal relations/that he had issue? Wouldn’t that reinforce the propaganda that he was God made flesh? Wasn’t there some suggestion about Mary Magdalene?

I was star performer at the (Baptist) Sunday School Bible Quiz; of course nothing of carnal relations or doctrinal disputes; all milk-sop Christ-in-the-manger fairytales.

My better informed judgment these days is that there was no such person as Christ; that the stories are an amalgam of at best snippets from the lives of various wandering troublemakers; heavily laced with the necessary Judaic mythology to boost the assorted doctrinal powerplays. (House of David my foot; there’s no independent evidence for any sort of Roman census at the time, let alone requiring people to return to their place of origin.)

I should demure at @Brett’s “seeming absurdity”: “tragedy” seems nearer the mark, given the amount of bloodshed Organised Christianity has engendered.

@Hat you seem to have misunderstood my point about face masks (but I don’t follow what opinion on the topic you are ascribing to me). By ‘open debate’ I mean the science is unclear and people are debating it. I am saying exactly that the rest of the world does understand the science and also understands that the science is unclear/needs subtle judgments. (Yes I’m not speaking for all of the rest of the world — in particular not for Brazil; but I am trying to keep informed about most OECD countries, shall we say — especially the ones that have the disease under some sort of control.)

The point about mask-wearing possibly increasing the risk of infection was made by our Director of Health (position equivalent to Fauci) — based on his reading of studies.

Specifically in New Zealand there has never been any medical recommendation to wear masks in general — and that applied all through the lockdown. Now that our biggest threat is from people bringing in the disease from overseas, travellers are required to wear masks whilst in transit, as are aircrew and anybody interacting with them at the borders/in their 14-day quarantine.

Some retailers here request customers wear masks; some don’t; I am happy to comply. Simply there is no heat in the debate/people don’t get into shouting matches about it/it’s not a badge of patriotism to not wear a mask nor to wear one.

Yes, what DM said.

And I agree with DM as far as it goes. So when @Hat talks of “deniers”, what opinion is he ascribing? They deny that masks protect other people from those who are infectious? They deny that masks prevent the wearer getting infected (a reasonable doubt)? They deny all the science tout court? — of that last, yes there seem to be plenty in the U.S.

To protect yourself, most masks are rather useless …; and when they get wet, they become worse than useless, Yes after more than an hour wearing the cheap paper disposable masks, they’re incubating the germs; so when the wearer fiddles with them (because they’re damp/itchy) that spreads the disease onto the wearer’s hands thence on to surfaces/people/their own eyes/mouth, whatever they touch — is the point the NZ MDofH was making.

So by that science you’d expect that in the countries that have succeeded in holding the disease at the border, they’d be neutral or actually against general mask-wearing. However other than in NZ or Aus, masks are ubiquitous; in Taiwan the government issues exactly the cheap paper disposable masks — however not in a sufficient ration for wearers to change them every half hour — even in high-contact workplaces like restaurants and hawker food stalls. And Minister of Health Chen regularly is to be seen wearing such masks in public places and press conferences, even with everybody socially distant.

Sorry to get down into the weeds, but that’s the open debate I’m seeing outside the U.S. Whereas the U.S. seems to have bifurcated into those who claim a God-given right to breathe freely (that’s more or less a quote) vs those who’ve driven to the other extreme of saying wear a mask everywhere in public.

Either doctrinaire extreme is absurd, to parallel “Filioque”. And I don’t feel at all removed from these issues.

There can be all sorts of subtexts in mask wearing. In Denmark, the officially xenophobic parties argue that concealing your face is against the open culture that “we” want (because saying that niqabs are bad because Muslim is against the constitution; as a result concealing your face in public is actually a misdemeanour these days, with exceptions for motorcycle helmets and carnivals — and health reasons). So there was never a recommendation for general mask use; on the other hand the virus was a welcome opportunity to implement a hard border closure to keep out the “other ethnic” hordes that in their world view infest the neighbouring countries.

Luckily, solidarity is a strong trait here and there has been almost no resistance to social distancing and frequent application of sanitizers — except of course among the rebellious youth whose job it is to attract the reprobation of their elders — and the R number was quickly slashed enough to make the head health honcho happy and keep infection numbers low. (I suspect that many ethnic Danes are still a bit leery about all that hugging stuff and standing too close when you talk, so it was not really a hardship. Though handshakes have been a hard habit to shake).

Sweden kept shopping centres, gyms, bars, and schools open, and of course that meant public transport was stuffed to capacity as well even though private companies let many desk workers work from home. Denmark never had a curfew or internal travel restrictions (or masks), ‘just’ a work-from-home policy including all public workplaces except health care and only essential shops open — the few times I took a bus there were only two-three passengers in it.

The major beauty product chain defined itself as essential because what would I ever do without my favourite lip gloss — and they also sell stuff like incontinence pads — but that was allowed to pass.

The issue is that, due to simple lack of information, lots of people believe the point of a mask is to protect the wearer.

I wonder if there’s a bit of deliberate obfuscation on the part of public health messaging: to tell people wearing a mask is protecting others is to stigmatise the wearer as a carrier/as infectious/as a danger. Whereas if people wear masks (for whatever reason they choose to believe), that promotes the right behaviour, even if for the wrong reason.

If that obfuscation is part of the intent in the U.S., it’ll play right into the hands of the conspiracy theorists who suspect the State/the experts are talking down to the citizenry whilst serving their self-interests.

Contrariwise, in Sweden there’s been too much trust of public health officials, who have served the self-interest of avoiding the hospital systems getting overwhelmed, whilst failing to foresee that a large amount of the medical treatments ended up taking place in rest homes, which were ill-prepared, under-equipped and under-staffed.

The evidence is indeed not that (ordinary unfitted) masks protect the wearer, but that they may protect others from the wearer. The evidence is weak, and there are really are concerns about what happens if you wear such a mask for longer than quite a short time; it is quite possible in principle that they could do more harm than good. “Common sense” is a very unsafe guide in such matters.

We actually stopped using masks in the operating theatre some years ago after reviewing the literature about it (all different now, of course.)

There does, on balance, seem to be evidence for a weak protective effect (to others) from wearing an ordinary mask. However, this is not quite the right way of looking at it. Measures which on an individual level have only marginal effects may still affect the course of the pandemic if adopted widely. Our own inept government in the UK has made a pig’s ear of explaining this to the public (but then, explaining complex facts clearly to the public is not their preferred modus operandi; I don’t think they know how to any more.)

There is a tragedy-of-the-commons aspect to this, as AntC implies. (As with vaccination, of course.)

David Eddyshaw, J. W. Brewer: Thanks, that’s exactly what I meant. I was even about to pull in the Athanasian Creed.

The Mormons are quite sure that Jesus has descendants, including their Mr. Smith.

As for Jesus’ existence in the first place, if it’s good enough for Ernst Bloch and Hyam Maccoby, it’s good enough for me.

one main difference from other Nordic countries is a massive failure to keep nursing homes free from virus early in the epidemic

Yes, that’s been quite drastic.

As for Jesus’ existence in the first place, if it’s good enough for Ernst Bloch and Hyam Maccoby, it’s good enough for me.

…It’s not like we’ve learnt nothing since them, though.

Maybe you could work a trifle harder to get past your simplistic/xenophobic division “outside the U.S.” = good, “U.S.” = bad.

With the Internet and particularly Facebook, the views and actions of a relatively nutty part of the American population are transmitted almost instantly to the rest of the world, whether it’s armed protesters in front of a State capitol or the wacky views of a small community in Florida (“I don’t wear underwear because things have to breathe”). Not to mention the views and actions of your president. That’s the world we live in and it’s difficult to be objective with all this “viral” information around.

possessing no substantial claims to historical fact. says the wiki. That’s not what I said. (Anytime soon the Hat is going to object we’re no longer talking about language or doctrinal schisms based on exegesis, and ask us to take this outside.)

I’m quite happy with the idea there were a bunch of Aramaic-speaking troublemakers circulating in the Roman province of Judea, some with grandiose delusions of divine descent; quite possibly some of them were named Jesus; quite possibly some of them were sons of Josephs; even maybe some of them claimed to be descended from the House of David. I’m saying there wasn’t a single individual source for all the Gospel stories. I’m saying (for example) that the myth of the Virgin Birth and Roman census needing travel to Bethlehem was tacked on long after. I find it implausible the Romans would have left no record whatsoever of such a census.

‘Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence’ breaks both ways: I can’t prove there wasn’t a single individual who mysteriously slipped through the cracks of historical record; any more than anybody can prove there was, subject to a modern ‘beyond reasonable doubt’ test.

Somewhere on the interwebs there’s a debate between a theologist and Christopher Hitchens, where (and this is one of the few occasions I’ve seen Hitchens dumbfounded) the theologist says that if it were possible to prove Christ existed, and all the stories were of one individual, and that God existed, and that Christ was God made flesh; then that would be a question of scientific knowledge, not belief. So to count as a (true?) believer you must believe precisely in the face of insufficient evidence/indeed better still in the face of counter-evidence.

The trouble I see is that this lack of evidence is equally strong for the Catholic God or the Protestant God or the Orthodox God or the God of the Jews (who at least has historical precedent) or the Muslim God or the mythology around the Buddha or … And (to try to get back to “Filioque”) equally strong for the Spirit proceeding from the Son or him having descendants named Smith, etc, etc. Why does it need close textual reading of the Scriptures if you can just consult your internal belief? Why carry disputes about textual readings to the point of killing God’s creations?

Boys, if you are going to fight in here, do it outside! But that’s not Hat’s style.

Inb4 “Liberty Hall.”

those who’ve driven to the other extreme of saying wear a mask everywhere in public.

I fail to see what is extreme about this position

John I apologise: I wasn’t trying to alarm anybody. Merely, if a more nuanced debate were possible away from the noise of “a relatively nutty part of the American population “; the mask-wearing is of less priority than the social distancing and the scrupulous hand-hygiene. Pointing that out will of course just escalate those protections into the same confrontational status.

I usually slip the mask up or down if I can see that there is no one …

Apply sanitizer to your hands before touching the mask; apply sanitizer to your hands after touching the mask and before touching other surfaces or people. Failing that, slipping the mask down is (marginally) worse than not; and maybe worse than not wearing a mask at all — is the current advice from the science I can see at the moment. (I’ll say that very much sotto voce lest the “nutty part” overhear.)

This is self-interest, since I am a diabetic …

I very much feel for you. In your position I would be driven half-mad out of worry for my own health and my family’s. I would say NZ should offer sanctuary to the vulnerable; but of course the virus is so sneaky it’ll hitch a ride with just anybody — like all those who ‘escaped’ the Plague in C17th London, only to infect the rest of the country.

@antC
I do not think that the objective of Christian apologists is to facilitate the molestation of children or to allow crazed albino members of the Jesuit order to emulate agent 007, when they are not too busy mortifying their flesh. So why bring up such matters in the context of a discussion on the merits (or “logic”) of the apologist’s position on the existence of God? I would observe that some atheists seem to evince a visceral reaction to an idea or complex of ideas involving authority, societal control and individual freedom, which they (probably correctly) associate with mainstream Christianity, although I think it is difficult to distinguish corresponding Christian beliefs from the folk myths and beliefs of the societies in which believers are embedded.

I’ve actually got Nick Evans’ grammar of Kayardild. I’ll have a look at it when I get home. Kayardild might have been specifically put on this earth to make typologists give up and retrain as dental hygienists, so if any language at all does that …

You mean, they have proven by reason that God can be believed in?

That’s what they believe.

The book is indeed Nick Evans’ Dying Words. Endangered Languages and What They Have to Tell Us in German translation.

Evans might have made a more convincing claim for another Australian language that he’s produced a masterly grammar for, Bininj Gunwok (poster child for polysynthesis. Also, cool name.)

You mean, they have proven by reason that God can be believed in?

No, the converse. Here’s the text (in English; I can’t find the Latin) of the relevant part of Vatican I:

If anyone says that the one, true God, our creator and lord, cannot be known with certainty from the things that have been made, by the natural light of human reason: let him be anathema.

Or as Lytton Strachey put it, it became a matter of faith that faith was not necessary for a knowledge of God.

along with the Englishman-abroad’s traditional SPEAKING VERY LOUD, of course.

There is a good reason for Englishmen talking loud: you can’t understand them when they mutter politely. I had a lot of trouble catching was said in the Harry Potter films. Perhaps they should have been set in America after all, as Warner wanted.

That’s definitely hard, especially from written texts where you can only guess the intonation, and in languages whose intonation is too far from what you’re used to

Very true; to which I’d add, that in elicitation work with focus it’s very easy to fall foul of a sort of observer effect, where the very setup of your elicitation alters the exact feature you’re trying to investigate.

There’s a lot of dispute about the whole theoretical basis of focus, too, even in familiar intensively-studied languages like English; and it seems to be very variable across languages, not only in terms of how it’s marked, but also what is marked.

In my Kusaal grammar I originally put in a disclaimer about the highly incomplete and provisional nature of my treatment of focus, until finally deciding that anybody who knew about the issues would find that perfectly obvious anyway.

Somewhat belatedly, this line finally sank in:

Linguistics would be in far better shape if he’d never been born.

This is the kind of devastating thought I might occasionally have about Hitler, Stalin, or Mao. And maybe Derrida or Foucault.

I hope Noam doesn’t follow this blog.

it pretty much invalidates any probing with informants as to ‘grammaticality’/’acceptability’ judgments

It doesn’t make it impossible, but it introduces a whole lot of extra sources of potential error. I was very lucky with two of my Kusaal informants, who rapidly cottoned on to what I was trying to do, and were (for example) very good at thinking up contexts in which you actually would say something that in isolation seemed unacceptable. (Just as various Hatters have been doing with English in this very thread.)

This paper is a good presentation of arguments against Chomskyanism.

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/311450032_Language_in_a_New_Key

(If we’re going to go all Godwin’s Law: N Y Marr, the A N Chomsky of Soviet Linguistics ….)

N Y Marr, the A N Chomsky of Soviet Linguistics …

Tush! Marr is profligate compared to Chomsky: he has so many as four universals (“diffused exclamations”).

(But it seems to be his naivete at Marxist dialectics that got Marr in trouble with Comrade Jugashvili.)

(After all, Evangelical Christianity has produced plenty of its own conmen. No need to coopt any Mormons. Being a conman is entirely compatible with pronouncing correct theological formulations.)

Ah. Gotcha. They all look the same to you.

To refine the point, saying that Mormonism and normative Christianity are equally suspect has nothing to do with how different they are from each other, unless you regard doctrinal differences as insignificant variations of the same absurdity.

I presume even the most Evangelical of other Evangelicals want to find some grounds for distancing Christianity from a convicted con-man

Huh? They consider him to be God. (They don’t consider him a con-man, but they do admit he was convicted and on the charges of more or less being a con-man.)

Fun fact: in 1926, before he went too deep into linguistic incoherency, Marr had came up with a new alphabet for Abkhazian – the so-called “analytical alphabet”, which had some seventy-odd letters (many of them distinguished only by tiny diactritics) and looked a lot like some kind of alternate-universe version of IPA transcription.

Perhaps in a more fortunate parallel timeline a saner Marr could instead have expanded this idea into a full phonetic alphabet for all languages (or, at least, all languages on then-Soviet territory).

@D.O.

I think AntC meant Joseph Smith. Though I can imagine a sermon based on your interpretation …

The Gospels imply that the charge in Jesus’ case was sedition, though as Jesus was a peregrinus, the procurator presumably could have him executed by cognitio extra ordinem, i.e. doing as he damn well pleased, so the matter is probably moot. (Some Hatter will know …)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peregrinus_(Roman)

I’d altogether missed the fact that Carl Meinhof was a Nazi. Early adopter, too, not merely a coward. How depressing.

Related to Ulrike, I see from Wikipedia.

Related to Ulrike, I see from Wikipedia

Her father joined the NSDAP in 1936, and was director of the Stadtmuseum Jena until he died in 1940. In her university period she wrote for Catholic publications, read Bonhoeffer and Barth (“anti-fascist theologians”), Fanon, Nietzsche etc pp.

The German WiPe tells you all you might want to know about her life, and more. How it all takes me back to my lettuce days here ! She seems to have been a typical “conflicted” product of the German Bildungsbürger set. Dime a dozen. They have gone to earth now, more or less.

In face of fideism, I have no way to tell these sects apart.

In other words, you don’t care enough to bother investigating, but that doesn’t stop you from issuing blanket condemnations.

Nobody round here seems to “bother investigating” the multiple sects of Chomskyanism. Hat yourself are happy to issue blanket condemnations; neither do you call out snide comments or selective readings.

Life is short. I am not a professional syntax-theorist nor professional atheist. I investigated a reasonably broad swag of sects within the adherents of Chomsky/the God of Abraham. They are mostly quarrelsome amongst themselves. I observe little ‘turning the cheek’ amongst Christians to other Christian sects. On the balance of probability, further investigation won’t turn up some sect which reveals the One True Path.

unless you regard doctrinal differences as insignificant variations of the same absurdity.

The difference between Syntactic Structures vs Aspects vs REST vs Minimalist Program/Merge and the difference between Mormonism vs small-o orthodox Christianity vs the interpolation of Filioque might be separable by the number of unfalsifiable/impossible things they expect me to believe before breakfast; but they don’t differ in expecting me to believe indigestible quantities of absurdity.

I see no reason to hold back from pointing out the absurdities, especially that of going to actual war ostensibly over doctrinal differences amongst sects that (allegedly) share an ethos of ‘turning the other cheek’. (So it’s not whether the content of the doctrinal difference is insignificant; it’s how any doctrinal difference could be thought significant enough to justify blighting so many God-given lives.)

Given my upbringing thrust Christianity down my throat but left me almost entirely ignorant of other major world belief systems (including of the ‘broad church’ of atheism), I’ll spend my limited time elsewhere.

@antC
I admire your tenacity and think I am coming closer to understanding it. You seem to feel that Christianity was forced down your throat, like a spiritual version of cod-liver oil, and you seem to equate this experience with abuse (maybe you even separately received what i would qualify as abuse from the same source). It might be profitable to reconsider this experience in the light of atheistic forgiveness and tolerance (for what i consider abuse some outside help might also be appropriate).

But leaving out the personal, there’s a general point that we have no objective way to discern the modern prophecies (with or without scarequotes) of Joseph Smith, Charles Taze Russell, Siyyid ʻAlí Muhammad Shírází or L. Ron Hubbard from ancient systems based on the teachings of Siddharta Gautama, Y’shua of Nazareth or Abū al-Qāsim Muḥammad ibn ʿAbd Allāh ibn ʿAbd al-Muṭṭalib ibn Hāshim, or the various movements that may or may not have been declared heresies through the ages. That doesn’t mean that the differences haven’t been important. I’ll surmise that it’s exactly because there’s no objective way to discern that the minutious theological discussion of what may look like absurd details (“angels on the head of a pin”, as the old reductio has it) has been necessary to set fences around the community of believers. And it folllows that what was extremely important at one time and place may have been completely unimportant in another era, when that specific issue had no demarcating function.

I wouldn’t disagree myself, except to say that “objective” is doing a lot of work there … and to say that (conceding that we all probably do more or less agree on what “objective” means for practical purposes), it’s not only religious prophecies that can’t be assessed objectively, but pretty much everything non-trivial in most of real life as we live it.

If you find someone (religious or not) who maintains that his [sic, likely to be male] epistemology is based entirely on unassailable self-evident truths and logical deductions therefrom, I would recommend backing away quietly without making any sudden movements. (Unless he can prove that he’s just a harmless professor of philosophy, of course.)

I was helpfully illustrating your point (with which I agree, though I might be wrong about that …)

@de
Maybe someone should invent a paradox font for statements meant only to illustrate a paradox and not meant to be taken literally. You could call it “Groucho” , as I think he liked these, the one I remember is not wanting to be in any club that would accept someone like him as a member.

I like the Second Appendix of War and Peace.

It’s a hard job, but somebody has to do it.
(OK, I may have skipped a little.)

Opinion 04

Objectively true. (As indeed are nearly all the rest.)

“There are no sects in geometry.”

You’re obviously lucky enough never to have heard of Lyndon Larouche.

Someone told me in the past that it is now hard for foreigners to learn Tibetan or Uyghur in China (this was from someone who wanted to learn them). I don’t know how accurate this is. I daresay that it wouldn’t be easy to find teachers or schools under a government that in the long term aims to extirpate these languages.

I am not sure whether this would have any ramifications for scholars in China wanting to study these languages from a linguistic viewpoint. I’m sure that research wouldn’t be restricted as long as you adopted the correct line (e.g., “the contributions that the languages have made to the Zhonghua minzu” or “the long historical connections between the Tibetan and Chinese languages”). Perhaps other Hatters have more information on this.

Blake (who was certainly no heretic)

I think he was pretty far off the wall theologically from an orthodox Christian standpoint; I doubt whether he himself would have disagreed. (Though not if I put it in in those terms, of course: no proper self-respecting heretic regards himself as a heretic. Those who loudly proclaim that they themselves are unorthodox are mere dilettanti. A true heretic regards everyone else as heretical, and quite right too.)

Blake on Jesus Christ: “He is the only God … and so am I, and so are you.”
(Quite enough to get you burnt at the stake in some circles.)

one can be a world-class Feenomanologist while remaining skeptical or outright atheistic about Feenoman

Absolutely right. And indeed one may be missing out on a considerable intellectual adventure by prissily assuming that Feenomanism is unworthy of serious attention.

A true heretic regards everyone else as heretical, and quite right too.

That confirms my judgment that he was no heretic, for he certainly did not think that. As Frye paraphrased him, Blake thought the job of the artist was neither to believe nor to disbelieve the religion of his society, but to see what it meant. For example, I don’t think it has occurred to anyone to pronounce dogmatically whether the Fall of Man also involved a Fall of “the outward Creation” , as Blake tells us in several places, most explicitly in the Four Zoas. He is simply not interested in “is so” and “is not so”, any more than Laozi was: he was a poet and visionary, not a mystic, a dogmatist, or a theologian. (Frye has been called a visionary too, though I think he would disclaim the title.)

“”What, it will be Questiond, When the Sun rises do you not see a round Disk of fire somewhat like a Guinea? O no no I see an Innumerable company of the Heavenly host crying Holy Holy Holy is the Lord God Almighty. I question not my Corporeal or Vegetative Eye any more than I would Question a Window concerning a Sight, I look thro it & not with it.”

“Whenever any Individual Rejects Error & Embraces Truth, a Last Judgment passes upon that Individual.”

but didn’t know [LaRouche] had opinions on geometry

According to himself, he discovered non-Euclidean geometry for himself in a geometry class, and grew angry when the teacher wouldn’t listen to him. (I’ve been there, but it didn’t push me off the deep end.)

He was also for a time the cellmate of Jim Bakker, the televangelist and fraudster, who described him thus: “To say LaRouche was a little paranoid would be like saying that the Titanic had a little leak.”

I don’t think it has occurred to anyone to pronounce dogmatically whether the Fall of Man also involved a Fall of “the outward Creation” , as Blake tells us

Actually, that’s mainstream Christian doctrine. Blake was perfectly entitled to have orthodox opinions as well. We’re not stingy with them …

I happily concede that he would hardly himself have thought in categories like “heresy” at all (so he is indeed a counterexample to my generalisation. More research is needed …)

However, to those of us who do recognise such categories, I think he was pretty unequivocally heretical.

I don’t think it has occurred to anyone to pronounce dogmatically whether the Fall of Man also involved a Fall of “the outward Creation” , as Blake tells us in several places

American Creationists very loudly treat it as such. The Fall of Man ruined literally everything; before it, there was no death or decay anywhere at all whatsoever, and Tyrannosaurus ate coconuts (because plants don’t count as alive).

I tell you, it all fits! After years of research, I can confidently assert that everything the voices have told me is true!

Note to the easily offended: I am not trying to make fun of those unfortunate amongst us who may in an unguarded moment have ventured out of bed without their foliform stannous headguard. There but for the grace of [REDACTED] go you and I.

The Fall of Creation wasn’t an opinion of Blake’s, it was a plot point. The poet never affirmeth.

Rather than “the Fall of Man”, I should have called it “the Fall”; that’s what they call it, and tellingly so.

I should have added from that, “Put Gilchrist alongside Blake Records and you already have an amazing library.” – J. Fenton.

The poet never affirmeth.

Lucretius affirmeth a lot.

Vance had a way with words, though I liked the style better when I was a teen. But come to think of it, the serious researcher will have procured a night cap with tin foil lining to reduce the time he (it’s always a he innit) spends unprotected.

The idea of “tending to the needs of an attractor” is actually wonderfully suited for agreement

it says.

Can’t argue with that. Wonderfully suited.

I must say, however, that the implication that girls, specifically, are made sick by syntax strikes me as a pretty clear instance of a microaggression. Should this worrying matter not be raised with the University of Maryland?

Lucretius is not a poet

Falsum, mehercle!
Just read the first twenty lines. It’s like Also sprach Zarathustra, only good. OK, he gets into deep nerdspeak later on, but he can do the poetry too. And not just when inspired by Venus.

I meant the Strauss, rather than the Nietzsche, but then again …

JC might take comfort from the fact that Strauss’s tone poem, after its bravura start, wanders off into frank anticlimax, which may also be his (deeply wrongheaded, OK, JC?) take on Lucretius.

Lucretius is anti-woo at its purest. Man’s a prophet.

In a celebrity deathmatch between Lucretius and Nietzsche, it goes ten-nil to Lucretius.

I like listening to Strauss’s tone poem in its entirety, now and then. I will admit, however, that it is actually far too long a setting for the number of good musical elements contained within.

Lucretius is not a poet

Primus Graius homo mortalis tollere contra
est oculos ausus primusque obstinere contra.

(…admittedly the only two lines I know.)

primum Graius homo mortalis tollere contra
est oculos ausus primusque obsistere contra,
– Lucretius. De Rerum Natura
Thanks, David. The Graius homo is Epicurus and there’s a detailed explanation (very interesting) here

(…admittedly the only two lines I know.)

What, not Tantum religio potuit suadere malorum?

TSE the GLP