Rebecca Coffey at Forbes reviews Morten H. Christiansen and Nick Chater’s book The Language Game, which deals with the question of why humans are the only animals with advanced language skills:
Christiansen is the William R. Kenan Jr. Professor of Psychology at Cornell University and a professor in cognitive science of language at Aarhus University in Denmark. Chater is a professor of behavioral science at Warwick University. Together, they are engaging storytellers relating how philosophers, historians, naturalists, linguists, anthropologists, and even mathematicians and computer scientists have tried to disentangle the mysteries of language. In telling their tales, the authors plunge down a warren-full of rabbit holes. Do all modern people speak some evolved variation of a primal, “Adamist” (as in “Adam and Eve”) language? Looking for clues to answers, the authors turn to the book of Genesis, the work of St. Augustine, the ideas of the early twentieth-century philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein, and the code written by Navajos working with the United States military in World War II. […] They […] suggest that a more interesting question than “How did the human brain become so well adapted to language?” might be “How did language become so well adapted to the human brain?”
This is because language, according to Christiansen and Chaten, is not so much an invention as an improvisation, a “community-wide game of charades, where each new game builds on those that have gone before.” It is constantly re-contrived generation after generation. Children acquire words and phrases not by assimilating rules or by vocalizing according to patterns they were somehow born to express but by jumping into the game and extemporizing freely.
“We talk without knowing the rules of our language just as we play tennis without knowing the laws of physics, or sing without knowing music theory. In this very real sense, we speak, and do so skillfully and effectively, without knowing our language at all.”
According to The Language Game, individual people and entire cultures chaotically recombine the building blocks (or “prefabs”) of communication as novel situations demand new words and phrases. When speaking, a person’s primary concern is not to be correct but to be understood. Necessity is the mother of invention.
The theoretical approach that Christiansen and Chaten suggest about the acquisition and evolution of language closely mirrors ideas that Charles Darwin formulated about the evolution of biology. Darwin suggested that biological variations arise by accident and become stable attributes only if they are useful. Ditto, Christiansen and Chater might say, for language—though “by accident” may not be the best term to describe what underlies change. “Via ad-libbing” probably does the job better.
“Words do not have stable meanings,” the authors advise us.” “[T]hey are tools used in the moment.”
None of this can be proved, of course, but I like the general approach. Thanks, Martin!
It all sounds pretty Wittgensteinian (not a bad thing at all in my book.)
The idea of W-style language games evolving is interesting, though; in fact, once the notion has been put forward, it seems intuitively obvious that they must evolve.
It’s a little reminiscent of Dawkinsite “memes”, though it sounds better thought through. Talking of memes, God and Wittgenstein, local patriotism impels me to mention
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dewi_Zephaniah_Phillips
whose works, however, despite being predisposed in their favour by being interested in both theology and St Ludwig, I find rather annoying (partly because he had a bad habit of describing positions he disagreed with as “unintelligible.” Try harder, DZ!)
This seems very similar to the runaway sexual selection theory of the origin of language that has sounded the most plausible to me for some time. I don’t remember if it was Dawkins, Dennett, Pinker or someone else that first proposed it? Christiansen and Chater’s idea, as described here, seems mostly identical to it.
It sounds as if much of what they’re on about is chronologically quite a bit later than the origin of language and more to do with its subsequent development and adaptation, both by individuals and by entire cultures. By that point, language games must surely have been “evolving” continually, as they continue to do today, but that would not have anything to do with biological evolution.
Presumably the “origin” of language, in this model, is to be identified with the first language games. I’m not sure that “games” in Wittgenstein’s sense are confined to human beings; on the other hand, that could well be a feature rather than a bug in the theory, if you’re looking for an explanation as to how language came about in the first place. You could make a good case for incremental development of human from non-human communication like this; much less implausible than a Chomsky-style sudden appearance of human language ability virtually full-formed in one generation.
“We talk without knowing the rules of our language just as we play tennis without knowing the laws of physics, or sing without knowing music theory. In this very real sense, we speak, and do so skillfully and effectively, without knowing our language at all.”
I would advise the reviewer, and perhaps the authors as well, to go out less, and instead stay home and do some basic reading. A subject that Ryle covered at length in the world-famous post-war blockbuster The Concept Of Mind [1949] is the difference between someone’s knowing how to do something, and being able to use special terminologies to describe how he/she does it, or describe what he/she is doing when she/he does it.
A native speaker of a language knows that language, ain’t no two ways about it, and therefore knows its rules. He might not know specialized parts of that language that are used to describe language as governed by rules, rather than to just use it, as he does. Big deal.
When speaking, a person’s primary concern is not to be correct but to be understood.
Have these guys never seen how merciless kindergarteners are to kids who don’t speak like the others? Not getting mobbed may be more important than being understood. (Having learned workplace Swedish as an adult myself, I could have saved oceans of effort by keeping to English or even Danish and I would have been understood perfectly — but even though they didn’t mob me, it had huge social value to fit in, language-wise).
(Of course I had an advantage in being able to “know” facts about Swedish in their sense so I could read grammars and otherwise systematize the information gathering, so to speak, but I don’t know how much effort that really saved me).
@stu
In the context of that quote, I cannot accept your reading. What appears to be meant by speaking English without knowing it here is that the L1 speaker is viewed by the author at least in principle as only an oracle able to answer specific questions like “is this correct?” but not capable of summarising various paradigms or stating any rules, not because of not knowing the language for such a summary or statement but because the knowledge is purely implicit and not available to the conscious mind. I do not agree fully, and would say that people have varying degrees of conscious recognition of grammar features.
people have varying degrees of conscious recognition of grammar features.
Absolutely. To take a case where there is absolutely no tradition of half-remembered and poorly understood school grammar to confuse the issue:
My Kusaal informants had no trouble whatsoever providing noun singulars, plurals and combining forms, and once he got the idea of what I was after my best informant had no trouble producing verb imperfectives and imperatives and deverbal agent nouns and the like on demand.
On the other hand, it was a complete waste of time asking even the most sophisticated and self-analytical speakers what the focus particle nɛ “means.” Like asking an English speaker what “the” means.
I think this is pretty typical: morphological paradigms are easy to elicit, suggesting that speakers have a good bit of explicit understanding of them, not just an oracular ability to get it right; whereas knowledge of pretty much anything to do with syntax is almost entirely implicit.
English speakers have no trouble forming passives, but the vast majority can’t actually identify passives correctly. And English speakers (apart from those with TEFL qualifications) hardly ever know that English verbs are divided into dynamic and stative, with important differences in tense formation, even though they never actually make mistakes in this area.
Phonology, too, falls squarely into the “implicit knowledge” category. I remember a Kusaasi informant being astonished when I demonstrated the effect of saying a clause with and without the verb tone overlay which marks not-subordinate status. “Who taught you this?” (“Well, you did. You just didn’t realise you were teaching it to me.”)
It occurs to me that the “simplifications” that McWhorter and his like obsess about in creoles may (so far as they are real) actually cluster in the very parts of language structure that speakers are consciously aware of. It would make a kind of sense: you can’t simplify something if you aren’t aware that it’s complicated in the first place.
No sure if this really works, mind. I’ll have to think about it.
embroidering DE’s idea, which i like a lot (also without thinking too deeply yet about it):
or the parts that they think of as complicated, which aren’t always the same thing! the things i hear “simplified” in anglophone baby-talk or foreigner-talk aren’t generally things that i ever hear folks who learn english as adults have trouble with.
Children acquire words and phrases not by assimilating rules or by vocalizing according to patterns they were somehow born to express but by jumping into the game and extemporizing freely.
But that’s only half the story, surely. There’s also feedback from teachers and parents and neighborhood busybodies on the ‘correct’ way to say things, the severity of which depends on time and place and social standards etc. So rules (or at least patterns) are drummed into us, even though neither the teachers nor the students are capable of articulating what those rules are, in any abstract sense.
Some parts of the language we are aware of, some less so. That depends on the person and the language, which require research to discern. Armchair generalizations are for pseudonymous internet commenters and such.
Likewise, our bodies are running automatically without a need for anatomical and physiological awareness, and yet anyone has some awareness of some things. Anyone can figure out the connection between the stomach and eating, and can modulate their breathing rate, and can tell muscle from bone; other things, like cell structure, are opaque to naive observation. And so it is with language, as DE demonstrates.
Usually the things a native speaker of a language would have trouble with are nothing a foreign speaker would have trouble with, and vice versa.
Y: that’s a nice analogy, and quite more literal.
Have these guys never seen how merciless kindergarteners are to kids who don’t speak like the others? Not getting mobbed may be more important than being understood.
I always assumed kids were mean to me because they couldn’t understand me (a matter of lexis and idiom, not accent). I still have the problem that I don’t know what other people know and what they don’t. Hereabouts I just talk, and assume that if you don’t understand what I say, you’ll look it up or ignore me.
It would not be fair to expect from a native speaker knowlege of the current version of generativist approach (or call lack of such knowlege “lack of conscious awareness of The Grammar”)
It’s not actually fair to expect from anyone knowledge of the current version of the generativist approach.
🙁
After my first Latin lessons at the age of seven, my first exposure to ideas of ‘grammar’, I entered a phase of inventing languages for my imaginary worlds. It was a pointless activity because I had nobody to whom I could speak them apart from myself. But I invented words and phrases for their sound, in the hope that use would reveal their meanings.
There are sites where learners post questions to native speakers. Your answer to any of them is goign to be similar to what English grammarians write in grammar books. Coming up with it will take time, sometimes days. The books in turn are a product of years of thinking. They don’t have answers for some questions. E.g. how Russian [short adjective]/[long adjective in nominative]/[long adjective in instrumental] used in predicative position in past are different? It is a very popular question among learners and Slavists wrote about it but they “have some ideas” at best. For other questions there are several answers and neither really helps learners.
Yes, speakers usually are not familiar with this particular corpus (our grammar and physics books), but:
– the way this corpus was constructed – formulations that are not obvious to a thinker until she has spent years discussing it and thinking about it – absolutely excludes such familiarity. It is “new knowlege” by design.
– it is arbitrary. If I ask a native speaker to share the grammar with me, she hardly will dictate me the exact text of a specific copy of Klingon Grammar, unless she authored it.
This is because language, according to Christiansen and Chaten, is not so much an invention as an improvisation
This is Humboldt, of course. Not ergon but energeia
i very much like this general approach (if not the little excursion into evo-psych-blah-blah, which as DE said lurches towards dawkinsoid territory) – it matches core things we know (kids acquire languages by talking and being talked to; it’s a landscape of variable, constantly changing and interacting lects all the way down; formal linguistic analysis is always imperfect in relation to actual speech) without having to resort to biologized platonism (which i’d say is what the chomskyan dogma is at heart).
humans are the only animals with advanced language skills
but i’m very leery of any conclusions arrived at by trying to explain this. not only do i not think it’s true, i don’t think we have much reason to think it is. the only way we could know for sure would be if we managed to learn at least one language* used by each and every other species well enough to communicate consistently with them. which we haven’t – i’d argue that we haven’t gotten far enough with any species well enough to assess them. cats, however, have developed a whole register used only to communicate effectively with us (in itself likely a sign of superior linguistic skills, let alone language skills).
i’m not particularly persuaded that we even recognize most of the communication among other species that we encounter on a daily basis as communication. even linguists tend to get hung up on certain sonic elements in thinking about human languages, and one thing we do know is that gesture, scent, and dance are used for communication by various other species. and there’s no reason to expect even their sonic or partly-sonic languages to have structures at all like ours (even on the level of proposed human language ‘universals’) anyway.**
i suspect that none of that will change until the scientists doing the research into other species’ communication shed the tropes applied to the languages spoken by human ‘inferiors’: rudimentary, limited, without range, undeveloped, primitive, ungrammatical, etc.
.
* we can, i think, presume that no species is monolingual. birdsongs have been shown to have regional dialects within a species – but, thinking functionally, that’s more like the way ambulance sirens are different from place to place.
** just as there’s no reason to expect extrasolar life to look anything like life on this planet. we can, i think, presume it’s out there, but not that we’d recognize it if we encountered it.***
*** elizabeth moon’s sf novel Remnant Population actually sits precisely inbetween these two points. it features a humanoid alien species with a very earth-like culture, and also a xenolinguist who can’t tell that she’s being trolled by her research subjects and won’t believe that the human protagonist has managed to teach the aliens quite a bit of her language and learn a tiny bit of theirs by using grandmother-to-children communication methods.
Could there maybe be a correlation between “awareness” and when a feature is learned in childhood? My Mexican friend says she remembers learning that it’s puesto and not ponido — and I think I remember being corrected for saying farede instead of for. So maybe the more obscure corners of verbal paradigms are learned with the same cognitive facilities as, e.g., arithmetic, which people are aware of as an ability, or in any case late enough to be recognized as “a thing you know.”
we can, i think, presume [extrasolar life] is out there, but not that we’d recognize it if we encountered it.
That strikes me as rank metaphysical spookery. From the log of the first human expedition to the planet Farrago:
Philosopher: Observe: a Farragonian life form!
Biologist: But it neither grows nor multiplies!
Chemist: What is more, it is nothing but a chunk of basalt.
Captain: With no offensive or defensive capabilities …
Philosopher: Quite irrelevant. We know by transcendental intuition that there are life forms on Farrago, but there is no reason to suppose that we would recognize them if we saw them, therefore any of the usual signs of life are inapplicable.
Others: But, but, but, but, …..
In 8 years of full formal schooling (no TELF, though) I’ve never heard of this. What is it?
There’s no territory there. Dawkins came up with the simple, basic, and obvious-in-hindsight concept of the meme. He didn’t do anything with it. All he ended up doing was giving a name to the phenomenon, making more people aware of it than before.
It’s the reason why native English speakers don’t say “I am owning a car”, and why McDonalds’ “I’m loving it” is such a bloody annoying slogan (apart from all the obvious non-linguistic reasons.)
@David M.
I am sure older grammars of English mention it (e.g. Quirk et al.)
@David E.
Well, you find it annoying, I suspect it’s because it took off after your adolescence, and in a different country. 😀 Of course, McDonald’s didn’t come up with it, they just took something relatively recent and ran away with it. I think they started using it some 20 years ago, and it was already well established in informal American English 30 years ago.
В бананово-лимонном Сингапуре
в бури
Запястьями и кольцами звеня,
Магнолия тропической лазури
Вы любите меня!
that is, literally “jingling bracelets and rings you love me”.
I guess “you’re owning me” would work too.
Lesley Gore’s “You’re Not Owning Me”
(Actually, in nine years of grammar education in America, we never discussed stative versus dynamic verbs. It was just taken for granted that we knew which continuous form to use for which verb.)
It was just taken for granted that we knew which continuous form to use for which verb.
That way of putting it suggests that your teachers knew the distinction and simply didn’t bother telling you about it because you already knew it (sort of like not bothering to tell you what “cat” means). I’m afraid it’s far worse: the teachers had no idea the distinction exists and would have been confused and frightened if anyone had tried to tell them about it. That cuts to the heart of the problem with “grammar” education: it’s conceived of as “conveying a standard list of alleged rules (which will often have to be beaten into the damn kids with a ruler because nobody talks that way)” rather than “explaining in a coherent way how the language they speak works, with rules that emerge from the language itself.” I fear even my grandchildren will not live to see a world in which the latter becomes embedded in the education system.
Native speakers, of course, have no more need to learn this formally than they do to learn when to aspirate voiceless stops; they do it all correctly in blissful unawareness that the behaviour is rule-governed at all. (A pity to miss out on the intellectual excitement of discovering that it is rule-governed, of course.)
CGEL discusses the interaction of “progressive aspectuality” with the stativity on pp167f; reasonably enough, they talk about “static situations” rather than “stative verbs”: although many verbs characteristically do express static situations (e.g. “love”, “own”, “contain”), such verbs can, for example, be used with the progressive to express a temporary state, so ultimately the question is semantic rather than strictly lexical.
I got particularly interested in this (Hatters will not be astounded to hear) because Kusaal also distinguishes a “progressive” use of its imperfective aspect from the (default) habitual/propensity meaning, which it does by following the verb with the particle nɛ:
Nidib kpiid.
“People die.”
Ninsieba kpiid nɛ.
“Some people are dying.”
There is a whole class of imperfective-only verbs with stative meanings that don’t readily accept a progressive reading (like the English “stative” verbs), e.g.
O sʋ’oe lɔr.
“She owns a car.”
They can be used with nɛ in its tense/aspect sense, but in Kusaal this is only felicitous if the clause contains either a tense marker and/or a time adverbial of some kind:
Nannanna o sʋ’oe nɛ lɔr.
“Now she owns a car” (but she didn’t when you asked for a lift yesterday.)
The situation is more complicated in Kusaal than English because this particle nɛ is also used to focus verb objects:
O da’ nɛ lɔr.
“She’s bought a car” (not a bicycle or a helicopter.)
In principle, there can be ambiguity, but in practice restrictions on the availabiity of the progressive meaning of the imperfective with many verbs and in many constructions mean that this doesn’t actually happen very often.
@hat
The one who is paying for the education (this is not the pupils or their parents; mainly it is a local or central government) has (or at least should have) a set of objectives that serve as an input to curriculum definition. For English, these would include
1. Provide 1 hour childminding each day.
2. Familiarise pupils with cultural models as exemplified in selected texts.
3. Teach pupils to write cogent and coherent sentences and paragraphs expressing their (the pupils’) thoughts, opinions and feelings.
4. Acquaint pupils with the formal spoken and written registers and important regional variations.
5. Provide pupils with a basic understanding of grammar terms to assist them in the eventual acquisition of another language.
Objectives 3- 5 require only a little teaching of grammar, and the school should probably not include structures peculiar to English, with which the pupils have no problem anyway. For schools with a higher proportion of L2 speakers, there might be additional teaching required, but I think for kids, the grammar would be taught through examples.
the school should probably not include structures peculiar to English, with which the pupils have no problem anyway.
I entirely agree, but I doubt there are any schools which grasp this concept.
“explaining in a coherent way how the language they speak works, with rules that emerge from the language itself.”
@LH, I do not know if that would be any better.
I am curious about my language. I have always been so. Moreover, children do discuss langauge and joke about language (and some books about language are popular among children). Nevertheless “Russian language” was the most most boring discipline in school (also PE. English lessons also created an athmosphere of boredom – but I did not take part).
And I suspect it would remain so.
They do not teach children in Moscow (I am less sure about villagers who speak a different dialect) to follow this or that rule that could possibly affect their speech.
They try to make them write without orthographical mistakes.
And they make them remember conjugation/declension classes (the two verbal classes themselves have to do with homophonous verbal endings spelled differently – that is, they are good (or torturous?) for native speakers) and exceptions, to mark morphemes, subjects, adjuncts etc.
Some of this (sort of) theory is subordinate to the goal of proper spelling, and some is not. And it is TERRIBLY boring.
The part which is not subordinate to the goal can be interpreted as a perverse realisation of your proposal, maybe.
I agree, but I just mean: if you change the “set of objectives that serves as input” or even if you change what you proposed to change nothing may change because many other things should be changed.
Imagine:
2 hours of lecturing about how grammar should only be descriptive and not be prescriptive.
30 hours of drawing X-bar schemas.
exam.
“Explaining how the rules emerge from the langauge itself”, ha-ha-ha.
(P.S. just demontrating that it is easy to realize your proposal in a very perverse way.)
(P.P.S. “ha-ha-ha” was evil laughter of an evil character who did that.)
I’m not sure that learning about grammatical terms in the context of one’s mother tongue is actually all that helpful (or necessary) when one goes on to study foreign languages. I don’t think I was actually familiar with very much in the way of grammatical terminology at all before I started Latin at school, at the age of about ten. It didn’t seem to be a problem in practice.*
Mind you, what we were taught about English grammar was not particularly illuminating. Even at that age, it was easy to pick holes in the doctrines. I particularly remember being unimpressed by the way “adverb” was used as a sort of dustbin category for pretty much anything that the teachers couldn’t readily identify as as (pro)noun, adjective, verb, conjunction or preposition (and sometimes for some of them as well.)
As a Hatter in embryo, I would naturally have been fascinated by actual evidence-based explanations of how English really worked, but I don’t think it would actually have been of any straightforward direct benefit to me at the time. Pronouncements by Gradgrindian governments like our current dismal, corrupt and mendacious crew about the vital importance of “grounding” all pupils in English, and (of course) mathematics, are virtually always the outcome of quite stunning ignorance of actual linguistics (and actual mathematics) on the part of the politicos in question. (But then they are not actually meant as real proposals, intended for actual implementation: they are merely totemic statements about cultural attitudes. Potemkin proposals …)
* It’s just occurred to me that this may align with drasvi’s notion about how “grammar” arises from comparison of different languages. Little do they know what a verb is in their own language, who have never encountered a verb in some other language …
I think there are POS classifications with an explicic category “other” (and also proposals to do wihtout parts of speech).
Here the difficult part of speech is “particle”, but sometimes they add “слова категории состояния” and “модальные слова”. The situation with them is strange, because sometimes they introduce them in university but not in school and sometimes they introduce them in school but decide to do without them in university.
And it is TERRIBLY boring.
Of course! Don’t do it that way!
I’m not sure that learning about grammatical terms in the context of one’s mother tongue is actually all that helpful (or necessary) when one goes on to study foreign languages.
I don’t care about grammatical terms or (in this context) studying foreign languages. My idea is to simply teach kids “this is how language works, some words tend to go with other words, some words get used differently than other words (and by the way all this changes over time, which is why your grandparents talk differently than you do and old books seem funny), however you do it yourself is right but here’s how some people would prefer you to use language if you want to be taken seriously by them.”
I would naturally have been fascinated by actual evidence-based explanations of English really worked, but I don’t think it would actually have been of any straightforward direct benefit to me at the time.
By “benefit” I hope you don’t mean practical benefit! The benefit I have in mind is the stimulation of the sense of wonder and the increased awareness of how being human works.
By “benefit” I hope you don’t mean practical benefit!
Indeed not: I was casting around for the right word and came up with “straightforward” when I should probably have said “Gradgrindian”; a pox on “practical” men and their belief that the only “education” of importance is vocational training! (For the Helot classes, at any rate.)
Still, I think I would still maintain that the kind of grammatical instruction I got at school reagrding English would have been no great loss to me in my subsequent life if it had been omitted.
So far as we did get teaching on “how language works” in the (surely valuable) sense you mention, I think it was a sort of benign side-effect of studying Eng Lit (rather than Eng Lang.) And we did learn such things in that way, in fact. (And many other valuable things too.)
@LH but how do we explain it to them?
I think we haven’t identified the element that makes it boring crap, because the element you named is absent from the Russian course for Muscovites and it is still boring crap. So boring crap that it remained boring even when taught byu my favorite teacher and future freind. And I think it is not coincidence that both you and I are dissatisfied with our school language lessons despite different content.
I think there is some other element, present in both systems.
I’m sure you’re right, but I’m no good at teaching (I watched Taiwanese college students literally fall asleep as I tried to explain linguistics to them), so I have no useful ideas on how to change things. I’m one of those impractical dreamers.
@DE here the famous line was “our country needs more soldiers, not [university] students!”. (1970s)
I don’t know who said it (I heard about it in the context of attacks on so called math schools).
@LH, I am not good at teaching either (even if I do it sometimes). But the school system is something I really would love to change.
David E.: such verbs can, for example, be used with the progressive to express a temporary state.
Or a recent change of state? Or a contrast in general? Or incredulity?
She never loves anyone, but now she’s loving you.
People don’t own people, but you claim to be owning 25 full-grown and fully capable men?
The Chilean philosopher Francisco Varela (a friend of my wife’s when they were younger, as it happens; she went to the first of his many weddings (though not as his betrothed)) raised the question of how one would answer a visiting Martian who wanted to know how to recognize an entity as alive (Varela, F.J., 2000. El fenómeno de la vida. Dolmen Ediciones, Santiago, Chile; if that’s not readily accessible, try Athel Cornish-Bowden & María Luz Cárdenas “Contrasting theories of life: Historical context, current theories. In search of an ideal theory” BioSystems 188 (2020) 104063). He proposed two lists:
Fly
Tree
Mule
Baby
Mushroom
Amoeba
Radio
Car
Virus
Crystal
The Moon
Computer
With some residual argument about viruses, everyone will agree that all the entities in List 1 are all alive (or can be) and that all those in List 2 are not and cannot be. So what is the difference? He said (and we agree) that the essential characteristic of a living organism is that it is capable of self-maintenance: “A system can be said to be living if it is able to transfer external matter/energy into an internal process of self-maintenance and production of its own components.” Note that reproduction and capacity for evolution don’t enter into this definition. Varela thought (as we do) that these are secondary consequences of life, not fundamental.
@DM:
dawkins proposed elemental units of culture, that operate according to darwinian principles (amounting, in his interpretation, to a cultural version of adam smith’s invisible hand). two separate dubious-at-best hypotheses, that he’s done nothing to demonstrate. it’s simple and basic, all right, but with any even marginally historically aware attention to cultural change, it’s just plain garbage. which is why it’s basically only used (and not even usually cited when it is used) by people telling just-so stories, especially using evo-psych/sociobio pseudoscience, not in actual cultural history or social history.
(and that’s not even getting into critiques of dawkins’ view of genes, on which his ‘meme’ notion is based. i find gould’s The Structure of Evolutionary Theory pretty convincing in its analysis of dawkins’ version of darwinism.)
@JC:
i’m not doing some kind of mystical panspermia here, or denying the possibility of identifying extrasolar life. i’m just pointing out that what growth, multiplication, etc actually look like when based on an entirely different chemistry are likely not to bear any particular resemblance to what those things look like on this planet. and that’s gonna make them quite hard for us to recognize – not impossible, but far from the science-fictional usual of instant recognition (because the differences are purely cosmetic). the most obvious axis of difference that would have that effect is the time scale that life processes operate on; but that’s hardly the only possibility.
@trond
She never has loved anyone, but now she loves you.
Similarly “you claim to own / be the owner of…”
Well, the Russian verse is poetical play, but it is perceived as demonstrating a new side of the word, not as violation of Rules.. And it is subtle enough. The whole song is playful: the singer speaks about his lover (who he is addressing “magnolia of the tropical azure” and in polite plural of course) who is fantacising about him all night long in Singapore on a yellow hide (during the storm that about to break the banana tree). Fantacizing involves jingling bracelets apparently, which makes one think that sexual revolution happened here somewhat before 1917 (the song is old). The love detail is not striking. That is, it is striking that the singer uses a song to display this self-confidence, I not the aspect of love revealed by the fact that it is accompanied by jingling bracelets.
Or a recent change of state? Or a contrast in general? Or incredulity?
Never a change of state, because the verbs in question only appear in the imperfective aspect; however, the construction does basically imply a contrast with some other time at which the state of affairs did not obtain:
Nannanna o nɔŋ nɛ dau la.
“Now she loves the man.” (It must have been that car he bought her.)
Contrast in general is different; if you put the particle nɛ phrase-finally, it focuses the verb:
O nɔŋ dau la nɛ.
“She loves the man.” (Yeah, yeah, yeah …)
(In general focus need not be contrastive, but focus on the verb phrase is the default unmarked state, so explicit focus marking like this must be taken as contrastive.)
To confuse the issue, nɛ also focuses a following object:
O nɔŋ nɛ dau la.
“She loves the man.” (not me. Sniff …; or just the answer to “Who does she love?”)
This doesn’t mean “She loves the man now (as opposed to some other time)” because with imperfective-only verbs you need a tense marker or an actual time expression to be present to make the temporary-state reading of the imperfective cromulent.
Incredulity can be expressed (among other ways) by extraposing the object from the VP; in texts it is only completely clear that this has happened with verb forms which have a different shape phrase-finally from phrase-medially, e.g.
O da’ mui.
“She’s bought rice.” (“What did she do?”)
O da’ nɛ mui.
“She’s bought rice.” (“What did she buy?”)
but
O da’aya mui.
“She’s bought rice.” (“Of all things!”)
Nɔŋ “love” looks formally as if it were the perfective of a variable aspect verb, with a phrase-final form *nɔŋya, but in fact it’s an imperfective-only state verb and doesn’t have a form in -ya. However, the free forms of the personal pronouns, like fʋn “you”, are contrastive in contexts where the enclitic forms would also have been permitted, so
O nɔŋ fʋn.
is likely to mean “She loves you” (I can’t think why!)
The neutral statement “She loves you” is O nɔŋif.
She never loves anyone, but now she’s loving you.
That doesn’t work for me even a little bit.
@Trond, PP:
Ah. You were asking about English.
Never mind …
There does actually seem to be a parallel, though. You can (with a bit of judicious squeezing) concoct a Grand Unified Theory of the Kusaal particle nɛ whereby its tense/aspect uses derive from its focus use (where it picks out a verb or verb object as being presumed to be new information to the hearer and/or in implied contrast to some other option.) With imperfective-only verbs, it is easy enough to interpret the tense-aspect use as basically meaning “at the time in question in particular.” And when you think of it, that is not such a stretch for dynamic verbs either:
Niigi ɔnbid mɔɔd.
“Cows eat grass.” (A timeless truth.)
Na’asieba ɔnbid nɛ mɔɔd.
“Some cows are eating grass.” (Here and now, boys!)
The only difference is that dynamic verbs lend themselves to this interpretation more naturally.
At a pinch, you could claim that this is true of the English progressive too … or not. As you may think.
[I have restrained myself from talking about tense/aspect nɛ following perfectives. I am a fundamentally kind person.]
Try singing it while wearing a cowboy hat.
Pragmatics!
Better yet, pragmatics with hats!
rozele, it is impressive how different people can get different impressions by reading the same thing. Dawkins never proposed any grand theory of cultural evolution. He just noted that some people insert ‘s’ in “Brittania, rule[s] the waves” by mistake and others repeat it because they learn lyrics through hearing. And it is somehow similar to the biological evolution. And that there are many examples like this where culture changes through repetition with modifications. Saying that Dawkins is responsible for evolutional psychology (on validity on which I pronounce no judgement) is about as valid as saying that Jesus known as Christ is personally responsible for the crusades (or that Paul of Tarsus for building St. Paul’s cathedral).
I didn’t read Gould’s last volume, but it is a strange choice to call a theory of biological evolution “Darwinism”. It is about as meaningful as calling mechanics “Newtonism” or atomic theory “Daltonism”.
Now (I am in a quarrelsome mode today) to provide a counterpoint to drasvi, I didn’t find school instruction in Russian grammar (in Russian-language school) as more boring than any other school subject. They were all equally boring.
@DE, I intended to ask you if
Nannanna o sʋ’oe nɛ lɔr.
O da’ nɛ lɔr.
are formally different and if not, what is the reason to think that the focus/aspect marker in the former is an aspect marker and not a focus marker… “Now” is naturally contrastive.
I’m all for calling atomic theory “Daltonism” (or would be, if the word didn’t mean “red-green colour blindness.”)
Come to that, I propose “Paninism” for the Science Formerly Known as Linguistics.
You can never have too many eponyms.
Hat: That doesn’t work for me even a little bit.
Oh well. Non-native introspection apparently has its limits after all.
But wait… Is it the first or the second part that fails? Would it work with “She’s never loved anyone (in her life), …”?
Oh, that. That was just taught as more or less lexical, IIRC.
Perhaps. I’ve never read one, older or newer 🙂
At that age I had just finished learning pretty much all the traditional grammatical terminology for German, and it made Latin grammar transparent 2 years later.
All linguistics should be broken into multiple little domains, each called “— Grammar”, where “—” are as varied and obscure as band names.
It used to be common to call theories of evolution by mutation and selection “Darwinism”. For the reason you bring up, that has practically died out except among creationists, who want science to sound like an ideology, and to some extent among the French, who may still feel a need to contrast it with Lamarckism.
“is loving” and “is owning” are Just Wrong.
“is loving” and “is owning” are Just Wrong.
Exactly.
Michel DeGraff’s response to McWhorter’s The world’s simplest grammars are creole grammars (there is a whole volume of responses) was On the origin of creoles: A Cartesian critique of Neo-Darwinian linguistics…
(Later he would also co-author Aboh, E., and DeGraff, M. A Null Theory of Creole Formation Based on Universal Grammar,, Oxf. Handb. Univers. Gramm. 2017, 401–458.)
@drasvi:
I intended to ask you if … are formally different
It depends on whether you interpret nɛ as one basic word with an uncomfortably large range of uses or two (or more) distinct particles which happen to be completely homophonous. I don’t myself think that questions like that actually have unequivocal answers; it comes down to a matter of taste, really. Or descriptive simplicity.
I think that in origin, at any rate, the tense/aspect meaning was a specialised use of the focus particle. But even if you do conflate the two, you’d have to say that
Nannanna o sʋ’oe nɛ lɔr.
“Now she owns a car.”
and
O da’ nɛ lɔr.
“She’s bought a car.”
are different constructions, because the scope of the nɛ is different: in the first case it goes with the (unmarked) tense, or perhaps with “now”, whereas in the second it goes with the object.
It gets more complicated in potentially ambiguous cases, like
Ba ɔnbid nɛ mɔɔd.
“They eat grass.” OR “They are eating grass.”
In practice, it is quite difficult to come up with truly ambiguous cases. For example, perfective verb forms, like da’ “buy” in the example above, can only be followed by nɛ in a tense/aspect sense if the verb admits a resultative-perfective stative-like interpretation. Generic verb arguments are not compatible with the progressive sense of the imperfective, so in this particular case, the interpretation is therefore usually clear from the antecedent of ba “they”:
Niigi nuud nɛ ku’om. Ba ɔnbid nɛ mɔɔd.
“Cows drink water. They eat grass.”
but
Na’asieba nuud nɛ ku’om. Ba ɔnbid nɛ mɔɔd.
“Some cows are drinking water. They are eating grass.”
(The tense/aspect interpretation, where it is possible, usually trumps the constituent-focus sense.)
Having said that, I do wonder whether seeing two distinct possible constructions in Ba ɔnbid nɛ mɔɔd might just be an artefact of translation into English. There is no difference in the junction between nɛ and the verb in the two cases (or if there is, I could never hear one.) Texts write the nɛ solid with the preceding verb when it is recognised as having a tense/aspect meaning, but I think this is based on analogy with the English and a (definite) misanalysis of the form as being a flexion (in the Toende dialect, sandhi changes make this a very natural analytical mistake.) There are also plenty of “errors” in this word division in carefully written texts, confirming that this is just a spelling convention and doesn’t reflect a real spoken language feature.
The problem is seen throughout Western Oti-Volta, incidentally, except in Mooré, which has sensibly cut the Gordian knot by just making the occurrence of the cognate particle(s) purely dependent on the position of the verb in the verb phrase (and I’m not sure about Boulba.) Mampruli and Dagbani actually have two particles corresponding to Kusaal nɛ, in Mampruli respectively ni and la. I was excited when I first discovered this, but my hopes were to be cruelly dashed: it turns out that they are just in complementary distribution, with ni phrase-final, la elsewhere; thus in Mampruli:
U dugri ni “She is cooking.” = Kusaal O dʋgʋd nɛ.
U dugri la sinkaafa “She is cooking rice.” = Kusaal O dʋgʋd nɛ mui.
Peter Trudgill’s International English describes some kinds of English where progressive stative verbs are possible, unlike American and English English:
Yes, I associate such forms with Indian English.
want see own are different stories…
ownership is not temporary.
wanting is understood as a momentary condition when it is some sort of physical desire. Possibly also with wanting items. Even if you always want something you want it every moment (but it is different with wanting peace on Earth and with wanting to do something other than to fulfill a physical desire).
seeing is a problem for Russian speakers because English “can you [see, hear…] me?” is Russian “you me [see, hear…]?”.
I’m not sure that physical-perception verbs like “see” actually are “stative” in the sense that “love”, “own” etc are.
The standard modern UK English equivalent of “I’m seeing it very well” is not in fact “I see it very well” but “I can see it very well.”
In Kusaal (which has taught me much about English grammar, thereby proving drasvi’s point about grammar again) these verbs are used not in the imperfective but in the perfective, which otherwise has a present perfect sense when it appears without tense markers:
M nyɛɛ li sʋ’ʋŋa.
I see it well
“I can see it well.” (with the perfective, nyɛ, not the imperfective, nyɛt)
versus e.g.
M da’a li.
I buy it
“I have bought it.”
This is actually analogous to the English “simple present” when used in “performatives” like “I promise to do it”* and is used in Kusaal for events which can be conceived of as simultaneous with the moment of utterance. Thus at the end of a visit you announce your departure not by saying
*M kun nɛ.
“I’m going home.”
with the imperfective “progressive” of kul “return home”, but with the perfective:
M kulya.
In fact, in terms of Kusaal verb aspect, the English “simple present” corresponds very well to (a) the imperfective in its habitual/propensity (not progressive) sense and (b) the perfective without tense marking, in cases where the action is thought of as simultaneous with the speech act.
The possibility of perfective aspect having present meaning actually means that the English aspectual system, interpreted in this way, is a much better fit for the Kusaal system than the Russian aspect system is. The Biblical Hebrew aspect system, too, is actually much more like this than it is like Russian; with many verbs the perfective actually has a stative present sense by default. Endless confusion seems to have resulted from the idea that the Slavonic aspect system is cross-linguistically normative, just because the concept of aspect was first crystallised by linguists in the study of Slavonic languages.
Aspect systems like this are the norm in West Africa (including in the English-lexifier creoles.)
* Also in e.g. sports commentary: He shoots! He scores! The crowd goes wild!
[Partly ninja’d by drasvi, proving that we are both right]
@DE, yes.
Once I tried to write some sort of a guide to Russian aspects (which is a rather desperate idea) when we were discussing perfective love, but I didn’t send it. But in brief (that’s how the guide began) Russian perfective is verbs like “I blinked” and like “I arrived”.
Judy Garland:
Robbie Williams:
There are more where they come from. So what’s going on here?
Love of a human being to a human being and love of a human being to
the PartyMcDonalds are two different verbs.the latter is a higher…The latter is more like liking…wanting is understood as a momentary condition when it is some sort of physical desire
This actually reminds me of another potentially ambiguous case of nɛ in Kusaal. “Want” is bɔɔd, which is formally the imperfective of bɔ “seek”, but has branched out on its own and behaves as an imperfective-only state verb. “I love you” in the friends-and-family-and-spousal-love sense is M nɔŋif, but to your Kusaasi lover (I am told) you would say M bɔɔdif “I want you.”
In M bɔɔdif nɛ the fact that nɛ does not follow the verb directly does not by itself rule out a tense/aspect interpretation, because nɛ cannot intervene between an enclitic and the verb; however, the absence of a tense marker or time adverbial does rule it out: so it has to mean “I really luurve you”, rather than the unromantic and deeply unchivalrous “I’m wanting/loving you [at present, anyway.]”
CGEL, p. 170:
As far as I know they are a popular topic in ESL edcuation. But not “stative verbs”.
Maybe not many learners are wanting… er, will-ing to say that they ‘are owning”.
Or maybe I just never noticed that stative.
The cognition verbs in Kusaal are either imperfective-only state verbs, like mi’ “know”, or are ordinary variable-aspect verbs; in the latter case, they use the perfective in a present sense, again just like the English simple present:
M tɛn’ɛs ye o anɛ zɔlʋg.
I think that he be.FOCUS fool
“I think that he’s a fool.” Perfective tɛn’ɛs “think”, not imperfective tɛn’ɛsid.
M siakya.
“I agree.” (Not “I have agreed”; but perfective, not the imperfective siakid.)
There are more where they come from. So what’s going on here?
Actually, both songs illustrate a contrastive aspectual sense resembling what Kusaal imperfective-only state verbs mean with nɛ: “at the time referred to in particular, as opposed to some other time.” In the Judy Garland song, the contrast is with a previous state of presumed eternal lovelessness; in the Robbie Williams song, he is contrasting his current angelophilia with previous unsatisfactory fumblings with aged (or possibly dead, or in other respects unsatisfactory) humans (I think.)
Anyway, instances of the “temporary-state” sense of the “progressive” with usually-stative verbs.
So what’s going on here?
Song lyrics, which are notoriously not written in any actual human language.
That too.
gótenyu, D.O., don’t put words in my mouth. i didn’t say anything resembling “Dawkins is responsible for evolutional psychology”. that would be (among others) e.o. wilson. but to give dick his due, here’s dawkins explaining why he developed his meme theory: “as an enthusiastic Darwinian, I have been dissatisfied with explanations that my fellow-enthusiasts have offered for human behaviour”* and wanted to improve on them. which sounds a lot like he was trying to found a new branch of evolutionary psychology.
but that’s dawkins, not me. all i said was that the evo-psych/socio-bio gang are practically the only folks who use dawkins’ meme hypothesis in the sense he proposed it**, which is precisely a “grand theory of cultural evolution”.
according to dawkins, he’s aiming at “explaining culture, cultural evolution, and the immense differences between human cultures”. his memes are cultural units like “ways of making pots”, “the idea of God”, “belief in life after death”, which are successful when they have “high survival value, or infective power, in the environment provided by human culture”. he goes on to elaborate how that works in the very specific terms of his interpretation of darwin (that’s how he defines his field: “Darwin’s theory”). his insistence on a very rigid one-to-one correspondence is hardly subtle; “somehow similar” doesn’t even begin to cover it:
I conjecture that co-adapted meme-complexes evolve in the same kind of way as co-adapted gene-complexes. Selection favours memes that exploit their cultural environment to their own advantage. This cultural environment consists of other memes which are also being selected. The meme pool therefore comes to have the attributes of an evolutionarily stable set, which new memes find it hard to invade.
and on the word “darwinism”, all theories of biological evolution, and even of reproductive selection, don’t follow darwin. one of the wonderful things about gould’s last book is its detailed exploration of the full terrain of evolutionary theory: darwinian, anti-darwinian, non-darwinian, and messily straddling those lines. but dawkins very vociferously considers himself a darwinian – or, really, The darwinian – and has often tried to police a line between what he defines as the One True Faith and the ideas of those he considers heretics. dawkins’ thinking is darwinist***, just as jacob hutter’s is anabaptist: not to the exclusion of larger categories, but because that is the specific version that he professes.
.
* all the dawkins here is from The Selfish Gene, chapter 11, which has not improved in the 30ish years since i last read it.
** and practically the only ones who use the word “meme” for anything except the online literary genre. personally, i love the fact that dawkins failed so epically at even turning his coinage into the meme (in his sense) he intended it to become.
*** i am using the respectful declension of my tradition here, rather than the neutral “-ian”. for those unfamiliar with the historical dialects of anglophone marxism: “-ist” [positive/unmarked] / “-ite” [negative] / “-oid” [dismissive]. it’s very helpful when you’re trying to work out which side of a split someone came down on based only on their writing.
rozele, thank you for your reply. As I said, surprisingly how different people can get different impression from reading the same thing. I remember (vaguely and imprecisely) those passages from The Selfish Gene, but for me they are just flights of fancy. Personal enthusiasms of an author have no bearing on the validity of what they are saying. Unless he is ready to identify and tease out specific cultural “memes” and show how they interact and evolve, it is not a (scientific) theory. Has anybody tried to actually identify those “memes” and figure out their exact history? If they did, I never heard about it. That’s not how (scientific) theories function. They are made to get tested and applied.
Co-existance of “Darwinist” and “Darwinian” is a rather unpleasant discovery. I am accostomed to the situation when both -ist and -ian are neutral (cf. “generativist”).
-ism makes sense when there is contrast. Again, not necessarily bad: “dialectic materialism”, “Judaism” etc.
—
The idea of replication of patterns is attractive. Looking on it from the perspective of selection is an attractive idea too (it may lead to some other good ideas, but it hardly can “explain everything”).
@D.O.
no, thank you. and your last few sentences are exactly my point about dawkins (and the sociobio/evo-psych zone his meme stuff is adjacent to)!
@dravsi
don’t take the distinctions i laid out as too widespread among anglophones! i think in general “-ian” and “-ist” don’t carry much semantic distinction. and, really, unless you see the name of a socialist faction-leader or intellectual ahead of the suffix, the “-ite”/”-ist” distiction probably isn’t in play.
To rozele’s point about suffixes, this negative appraisal of the just-deceased Comrade M.S. Gorbachev by one Trotskyite faction uses the pejorative “Pabloite” to describe a rival faction claimed to have deviated from the One True Way, but then uses the supposedly positive/unmarked “Stalinist” to describe the position that Trotskyism evolved in opposition to and/or distinction from. Maybe “Stalinist” (certainly used pejoratively by most Anglophones outside Marxoid subcultures!) is just too well-established, so “Stalinite” or “Stalinoid” would just sound too weird? https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2022/09/01/pers-s01.html
@languagehat: I didn’t say that the teachers or students knew the difference, to the extent that it exists, between dynamic and stative verbs—just that we knew which present form to use when. Nearly everyone I had English instruction with was a native speaker.*
Regarding the McDonald’s, “I’m Lovin’ It,” slogan, I remember thinking, when it first appeared, that it was probably chosen to be grammatically peculiar for a couple reasons. First, it makes it more noticeable; people will remember it. Second, the specific grammatical form, with the present participle, suggests that the process of loving McDonald’s food is a presently ongoing process—in other words, that the speaker is eating at McDonalds right now. (This illustrates, I might add, what I alluded to above—that hard distinctions between stative and dynamic verbs are often illusive. For another example of where, “I’m loving it,” is clearly fine, think of asking your date what they think of the play during the intermission break.**) Third, “I love it,” would clearly not be distinctive enough to be a trademark, but that’s not so clear for the actual slogan.
Regarding Dawkins: The most trenchant criticism I every saw of his idea of memes is not that the idea is wrong; indeed, in a certain sense, it practically cannot be wrong, since all Dawkins really did was define what a meme was. However, what was largely missing was the element that would make that definition useful—”a functional ecology of memes.” In fact, failure to appreciate the importance of the whole ecological interrelationship was, in my view, the greatest deficiency of the whole Selfish Gene hypothesis as well. I remember having a debate with a friend (then a biology student, now a medical doctor) in college. He asserted that DNA was, on its own, the “material” of life and the carrier of biological information. I said that the DNA on its own was not sufficient, because the whole cellular apparatus for decoding it was also necessary; without the right biological environment, the DNA means nothing. You cannot recreate a working cell just from reading its DNA; unless they are very closely related, you cannot even replace the DNA in one organism with DNA from another organism and get a functional cell of the second type. (I don’t particularly care for the way epigentics gets thrown around so much these days, but that’s what’s involved here. There are elements of life that are carried on from generation to generation without being explicitly coded for in DNA.)
* I did attend a bilingual school and class for second grade. However, the elementary schools in Salem, Oregon (and maybe the rest of the state; I don’t recall) had levelled instruction in language arts and math, for which students changed classrooms. So, while there were lots of nonnative speakers in my homeroom class, none of them were in the advanced English and Reading class with me.
** Asking while you’re in the theatre would be even more illustrative—but also very bad manners.
I think my idea of Dawkins’s thought comes mostly from Unweaving the Rainbow (which is pretty good in German translation, but apparently rather cringeworthy in the original) and a few short articles by or about him. I’m pretty sure I haven’t read The Selfish Gene.
Not the first time. Remember “Brights”?
Oh, interesting!
Unless the methylation and histone modification stuff is very important to that cell type, you can – it’s just never been done (even as a proof of concept) because it would require an entirely unreasonable effort. The histones, the ribosomal RNA and ribosomal proteins, the DNA polymerases and RNA polymerases, the proteins that import stuff into the mitochondria, they’re all straightforwardly coded in the DNA.
The only reason is that the new DNA will be used as a template to make proteins that won’t necessarily work well with the proteins that are already there.
Not very relevant for the current topic, but is the Kusaal for “now” really nannanna? That seems like a very peculiar word, especially in a language where (AFAICT) most words are a lot shorter than that. (But as far as I can tell from Google this really is an actual Kusaal word.)
I wonder if there’s any etymology for that. Obvious guess is some kind of sound symbolism/ideophone, but I have no idea why would there be an ideophone for “now” or why would it sound anything like that if there was.
(…On second thought, there’s another option: maybe it’s actually a much shorter word that is made much longer by weird representation choices in the orthography.)
To add about Dawkins, I thought that the main debate in The Selfish Gene was akin to the vitalism debate. That is, whether we have to postulate any new evolutionary principle to get the group selection correctly (like “something is done for the good of the species”) or it’s just good old selection acting on individual organisms and through them changing the frequencies of the genes which then gets repackaged as evolution of various groupings. As we all know, vitalism lost, but it is not like we can, in words of one of my teachers, “make a quantum mechanical calculation and find out why your girlfriend left you”
@Brett, it would be nice to have a definition of “can reconstruct” and I cant’think of one.
If I offer you a fragment of a sphere you will say: “it is a fragment of a sphere”. But for humans spheres are “simpler” than their fragments.
is the Kusaal for “now” really nannanna?
Yup.
It’s reduplicated: nan does exist by itself as a word for “now”, though it’s uncommon.
The final na is a deictic, also commonly found with verbs in the sense “hither”: Kem na! “Come here!”
I presume there has been a kind of progressive escalation: “now” -> “right now” -> “right now this minute.” Perhaps people just weren’t taking plain old “now” seriously enough. (After all, expressions for clock times in Kusaal are all borrowed from Hausa.)
There may have been a disambiguation motive: there is a preverbal particle nam “already” and a preverbal irrealis mood marker na, to say nothing of a verb na “join”, a verb nan “respect”, two particles naan (“in that case” and “next”), and another verb naan “starting from … do …” Also naam “happen.”
Aujourd’hui.
Zackly.
@JWB:
i think you’re right about “stalinist” (and similarly, “maoist”)!
with the smaller formations, there’s a tendency for the “-ist” form to not be very present, since a typical lovestoneite or marcyite will tend to think of themself as just a communist on the correct path, rather than a member of a eponymous faction*. “trotskyist” is i think the main exception (though most would generally say “communist”, “bolshevik”, or “fourth international”); maoists tend to call themselves “marxist-leninist” (“marxist-leninist-maoist” if there are competing “m-l” tendencies nearby) or “anti-revisionist” and a number of other things that don’t fit into the eponym+suffix form.
@Brett, @D.O.:
dawkins is at a pretty extreme end of reductionist darwinism, for sure. gould’s account and critique of him in The Structure of Evolutionary Theory is partisan (and, to me, persuasive**), but that makes it much more informative than something written by someone with less skin in the game.
.
* this is particular to the bolshevik lineage, for whom one’s own faction is never a faction. the core of that principle – the most powerful faction is not a faction – was established as law in the u.s.s.r. in 1921, by the Resolution on Party Unity of the 10th Party Congress. really, impervious to parody.
** in particular in the areas that you two brought up, that relate to the different ways that selection operates at different scales (as opposed to the much more linear model that dawkins proposes, where everything dervives from gene-selection).
@drasvi: I don’t know who you are quoting. Do you mean what I wrote about creating a cell from DNA alone?
@David Marjanović: I think you are wrong about creating a cell from its DNA in two different ways. Firstly, as a logical matter, something that is too difficult to do, even as a proof of concept, falls squarely in the “you can’t” category, I think. Secondly, there is no way to infer from DNA sequences alone what needs to go into a cell, in what quantity, and precisely where. The proteins and RNA are coded for, but without the self-perpetuation cellular system, they will not be organized in a fully functional way.
Has anybody tried to actually identify those “memes” and figure out their exact history?
Yes, indeed: the mediaevalist Michael D.C. Drout. He’s written several books about the application of memetics to understanding tradition, but he presents his theory pretty clearly (ignore the biological bits in the intro) in “A Meme-Based Approach to Oral Traditional Theory”. For Drout, memes do actual work and are not just finger-waving.
@Brett, yes.
You wrote “recreate”, not “reconstruct”, but I understood this “recreate” as a mental operation (someone very smart looks at DNA and can tell what a cell looks like) rather than practical.
Where a protein goes, and how easily (therefore in what quantities), depends on how strongly it binds to all sorts of stuff (other proteins, DNA, RNA, membrane lipids), in other words on its sequence. Far from every protein is understood at that level of detail, so we can’t do the mental/computational operation drasvi suggests, but we could do the practical one.
A nice example of rozele’s taxonomy of suffix usage in the title of a 2020 manifesto on an apparently-now-defunct (but captured by the wayback machine) website: “Defend Marxism-Leninism-Maoism Against Gonzaloite Revisionism!”
Now there’s a slogan we can all get behind!
Bloody Gonzaloites … spoiling it for everyone …
An actual thing: https://www.reddit.com/r/socialism/comments/ivcjru/what_is_gonzaloism/
(Not sure if “revisionism” is the first complaint I would make against the Shining Path, mind. But I expect I’m just not ideologically pure enough to cut it.)
I actually already knew what “Pabloism” is. It is possible I may have misspent my youth.
One of the great moments in Godard’s La Chinoise is when the feckless little Maoist group of would-be revolutionaries who are at its center decide that Henri, the only actual worker among them, is expressing views too close to the PCF (i.e., pro-Moscow) line and shout him down with the chant “Révisionniste! Révisionniste!” (including his girlfriend, who’s standing at the window looking out as she hollers). You can see a very brief clip of the moment at 1:16 of the trailer (set to the catchy tune “Mao Mao,” which I believe was actually a minor hit in France; lyrics available here).
Wouldn’t remember it without that thread about “gonzaloism”, but another depricating way to refer to various movements is not adding an abstracting suffix, but shortening the name. Trots, commies, repubs, you know. No one says darws to deprecate evolutionary biologsts, though.
—————————————————
JC, thank you for the ref. Above my level, but nice to see that people really try to dig deeper and not just shoot the breeze.
I am very fond of Landlordism. A Hoxha-era Albanian book in English translation I saw was full of evil Landlordists.
@David E.: the condemnation of “Gonzaloites” under that headline was rather nuanced and not quite a criticism of the Shining Path as such. The view of the writers seemed to be that Chairman Gonzalo had on the whole correctly determined how to apply the immutable scientific principles of Marxism-Leninism-Maoism to the particular circumstances of Peru at a particular point in its history. The Gonzaloite heresy, from this POV, was in overgeneralizing from the admirable example of the Shining Path’s actual sensible-in-context tactics and thinking that Chairman Gonzalo had discovered new general principles of revolutionary struggle that were presumptively applicable in other times and places such as the 21st century U.S.A.
English phonology gets in the way.
Fine in Middle Welsh, though (at least in the singular.) It’s just a pity that there weren’t any in the Middle Ages for Welsh speakers to deprecate. (One darw, two deirw, I reckon.)
I have not heard any Marxists describing us Georgists as “revisionists”, thank Ghu. The amount of explanation that would require is daunting. (Marx himself described George as the capitalist’s greatest weapon against him, because of course George is anti-monopolist and anti-capitalist only insofar as capitalists always aspire to become monopolists.)
Aha! I spy an arrant Georgeite! Pararevisionist! Parallel deviationist!
I think the relevant sense of “revisionist” can only be applied to someone who is also a self-identified Marxoid/Communist. It’s a pejorative for hereticks, not infidels.
georgoids (henry, not stefan) have been putting up posters in parts of brooklyn lately, in a decidedly odd attempt to meme (in both senses). the aesthetics are a particular kind of eyesore (gentrification twee, with powerpoint characteristics) in neighborhoods with great street art in many media, but the followers list on their twitter account (@seethecat_) is very revealing.
I grew up right next to one of the U.S.’s few surviving old-timey formally-Georgist communities, viz. Arden, Del. (and the adjoining Ardentown & Ardencroft). But those people were weirdo bohos within a very staid suburban context, and I have trouble imagining them thriving in gentrifying/hipster Brooklyn.
This Georgism? Amazingly, I had no idea of it, even though its influence seems to be everywhere.
Yes, that Georgism. I have a soft spot for it, because my late f(r)iend thegrowlingwolf was a dyed-in-the-wool Georgist, but I don’t have the kind of brain that can absorb enough economics to decide whether it’s a good idea, so I just admire it from afar.
Twitter won’t let me see much, because I’m not one of their ownees.
but I don’t have the kind of brain that can absorb enough economics to decide whether it’s a good idea, so I just admire it from afar
Nor I, and all those words in the linked WiPe article don’t make it any more intelligible. All I know is naked capitalism manacled by good intentions and bad experience. Ideologies and other avowal movements usually don’t make much impression on me.
Of course I see that I am a product of cushy bourgeois circumstances. That’s why I don’t begrudge anyone their attempts to get a better life. I always help whenever I can do so without having to clamber on a bandwagon.
Despite repeated urgings, I failed to see the cat. Also, the use of inverted pentagram is, well… strange.
I failed to see the cat
I think the underscore in @seethecat_ represents the tail.
Cats usually avoid limelight, as memorialized in the expression: “the cat crept in, crapped, and crept out again”. Perhaps you didn’t look under the sofa – not to find the cat, but what it left.
gentrification twee, with powerpoint characteristics
Thank you, rozele!
@John Cowan: Twitter won’t let me see much, because I’m not one of their ownees.
Click to say that you want to join, then decide you don’t.
darws… English phonology gets in the way.
The word does exist. It is very niche and means some kind of drawing. And some music group? I didn’t stick around to figure out more.
darws: Isn’t that “just” one of those transposed spellings the yung’uns like? Like pr0n and bnuuy and so on? I don’t think anybody tries to pronounce them as spelled, except as a joke — does that make them real words? Or is the real word the more mainstream draws?
prolly
I don’t know the proper terms, but I’m loving this whole discussion, partly because time after time the people who cite examples are owning the people who put forth rules
@ryan, trond
As one of those who “put forth rules” I want to apologise to Trond. His specific examples were of an incorrect type, but others (maybe he also) have found valid non ad-speak examples.
Apology
bluntly rejectedgently deflected. I’ve not been offended in any way.