Language is like Gymnastics

Courtesy of Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal:

Comments

[Vertorm]

Hahaha! That website always manages to deliver.

[Emptybee]

Even before I opened the link I knew what I'd find.

[BlazzingInferno]

Language is like gymnastics. It's an artsy way to kick someone in the face.

[PresentPerfect]

Funnily, kits showed this to me yesterday, with the suggestion that EQD reject fanfics for "being bad at gymnastics".

[Cryosite]

I'm more of a perscriptivist. Though, rather than chastise those who are wrong, I simply value the standards because they give us an agreeable thing to say someone or something did well.

I also like to use the analogy of a sport. Soccer was one I used (football to the rest of the world), and it works here. Really, there isn't anything stopping you from bringing a bat or paddle or something to use in the game. You might be able to pull off some impressive athletic stunts with it, and do well at the game as a result, but you're no longer playing soccer. Even if you score a lot of goals, you're not doing well at soccer. In some vague sense of being an impressive athlete, you could be doing well, but anyone who wants to be good at soccer should play by the rules of soccer. There are a lot of fans who enjoy soccer, and they would rightfully not be impressed by your choice to use a bat, no matter how well you use the bat, or how athletic you are with it.

Maybe you'll create your own new sport, and it will catch on. That's fine. But that new sport will have its own set of rules. Soccer will still exist though.

The only reason this is an issue with so many people though, is because the rules of English in particular, and language in general, are hard. It's easy enough for most of us to kick a ball around, and even grasp that you're not allowed to use your hands (unless you're the goalie) or bring tools like bats and paddles onto the field. Soccer's rules are simple by comparison. Being good at soccer involves an easy set of rules to learn, and becoming physically stronger, faster, and more agile. Getting better at language has manyfold larger a set of rules to learn and become familiar with. Getting better at writing for most simply involves learning the rules better and managing to follow them.

Getting to the stronger, faster, and more agile part of writing is something few do. Just like walking and running are things we do everyday outside of the soccer field, talking and communicating is something we do outside of any artistic endeavor with language. Again though, the way that language is so much more difficult and complicated brings about this conflict. People, ignoring the rules, get comfortable using language simply for practical communication, and develop habits for various errors, and rail against learning that they are errors. When practical communication prompts the use of some language convention to convey a subtle or niche idea, rather than research how the language already covers that niche use through vocabulary or grammar, most invent some new convention or term, further bloating the language.

It can be frustrating that our language offers so many tools and pieces to make beautiful art with, but we can't make use of them because so few people have the kind of vocabulary to understand the words, and so few people understand things like the difference between using the Oxford Comma and not. Elegant ways to convey information are lost on too many.

Chastising others may come across as pointless hostility, but it is a frustration that the tools are there and can be elegant, but they require a joint effort on both writer and reader to learn them, use them, and accept the rules, so we can all play the same game, and get on with being stronger, faster, and more agile. So that we can be impressed that someone is skilled at the game, instead of constantly seeking to invent new games.

[Blagdaross]

3137553 There's a flaw in almost any sports analogy, though, at least with respect to English: there's no definitive set of rules.

So, if we're in the US and playing golf, and we have an argument about the rules, the correct rulebook to consult is the USGA Rules of Golf. (Other countries have different associations, but all US courses play by USGA rules.)

If we're playing soccer, then, at the end of the day, the official rules are the ones laid down by FIFA, unless we agreed to some other set and/or modifications (ie anything past that tree is out of bounds)

If we're speaking French, then the Académie française has final say on the correct way to speak French. Our Quebecois friends might not agree with all of the rules, but they are the official rules.

English has no such governing body. There is not one final set of rules for English, in any country.

So if you say that "you can't split an infinitive" and I say "of course you bloody well can!" - neither of us are right, and neither of us are wrong - we have a difference of opinion (although your hypothetical opinion in this case is a stupid one and you should be ashamed of it) because there is no higher authority to appeal to - just other people's opinions.

[Cryosite]

3137794
There should be. Even if they decided to officially make some stupid rules, like splitting infinitives, as long as there was a central authority governing the language, I'd get over it and follow the rules.

I'd even like to say that I'd prefer one universal language for the whole world. If it ends up not being English (which would probably be for the better with how awful English really is), I'd take the effort to learn the new language, master it, and so on. Simple talking to another person should not be as hard as it is. Being well-defined and regulated would not prevent language from producing beautiful art. A universal language that all people know and adhere to would just make that beauty accessible to all.

[Titanium Dragon]

3137484
I'm pretty sure you guys already do so.

Or did he just mean list that as the reason it was rejected?

[Titanium Dragon]

3137838
English is so prevalent in part because of how powerful it is; it is a very practical language, and it has a lot of positive features. Having only twenty-six letters, for instance, is a huge advantage. There are a lot of things we can do to make ourselves clear even using relatively simple language, and there is an enormous amount of depth to the language.

Plus we've pretty much plundered Old English, French, Latin, and Greek for vocabulary, and have continued to pillage and plunder other languages as required.

It is also so prevalent because the US is hugely powerful, and before us, the UK.

The main problem with linguistic rules is that language is constantly changing because people are constantly changing. We add new vocabulary all the time, and lesser-used words are lost over time and become obscure as new ones rise up in their place. Cool/awesome/radical/rad/groovy/ect. are words which have a lot of churn in them, and there is the constant euphemistic treadmill.

The reality is that establishing strict rules for language is likely to result in the language changing anyway and you becoming irrelevant. Many languages are becoming very corrupted by English right now because so many people know at least some English, and they pass into everyday parlance; it is a very difficult process to stop because people do it because it is practical. And indeed, English constantly adopts words from other languages as well when it is convenient to do so. We've basically adopted Latin as a means of coining new words, despite the fact that English is not a Latin-based language, because it is convenient to do so.

That's why creating linguistic rules is problematic - language changes over time. I hear people say "lol" in real life. Not even "L O L", they pronounce it like loll. I've also heard people say rofl (rhymes with waffle) out loud. People have turned "Google" into a verb.

That's how it goes.

[Cryosite]

3138872
None of the examples you gave would hinder a clear set of rules. You've spent a great deal of effort describing the status quo, and basically just stated "this is how it is, so this is how it is."

Lets take one bit that we both are aware of: borrowed words. That is merely a vocabulary thing. Indeed, new vocabulary should be invented to cover new concepts and ideas. German, for example, creates words by combining existing words. This can lead to some long and unwieldy terms. But this is a set of rules. English, as you pointed out, tends to borrow words from other languages. English isn't unique in this practice, but that does offer a "rule" we can follow. When no word exists in our current vocabulary, but another language does, we borrow it. Easy. English also has had a practice of "anglicizing" words from other languages. Indeed, any study of etymology will show you how many languages borrow words from their neighbors, and then spell them in a way more comfortable to their own usage of characters and sounds. It is a old tradition, and there are "rules" for how to do it, but they aren't well know or followed anymore.

Rules can be made to intelligently allow for evolution of a living language. Indeed it is impossible to not have rules for a language at all. Otherwise you don't have a language. What we need is a collection of vocabulary terms to cover everything everyone needs to talk about. That covers the evolution and change of language as it is actually used, just fine.

Where we get into the rules that don't need to change is when we create a standard for things like grammar. Sentence structure, spelling, and indeed the way letters/characters are used to represent various sounds.

26 letters is not actually an advantage of English. English uses more sounds than that, and applies different sounds to the same letter in some cases, and the same sound to different letters in other cases. There is actually no rhyme or reason to how spoken sounds match up to specific letters, and a large reason for this is the multitude of borrowed words that have retained their original spelling, or something close to it. Some languages might use more symbols, but those are more precisely able to identify certain sounds that English fails to identify. There is also a problem where some sounds exist in some languages, due to common use, but do not exist in other languages. Some of the more famous ones are "L" in Japanese and several Asian languages, or "wh" sounds in German and French. English lacks one of the kinds of "R's" Spanish has, and so on.

English is only practical in a cultural dominance sense. As you point out, America and before our time Great Britain have/had a huge ifluence on world culture, and knowing English is incredibly useful for trade purposes. But English is still hard to learn. It is incredibly difficult to learn to non-native speakers compared to learning many other languages for non-native speakers of those languages.

In a sense of "teaching children a language that will be useful to know" English has practicality because of the current status of the world. If the world could somehow be made to adopt one universal language though, then that language would have that practicality. I would hope that whatever language was chosen would not be English, even though that would make things harder for me personally, because learning a new language and abandoning English would be harder than simply sticking with English. But in the long run, I imagine a unified language would be easier to learn for anyone growing up learning it, and anyone who, like me, would have to adapt to it.

And, to give examples of what I am talking about, read up on Esperanto and Interlingua. These languages are constructed so that the use of characters for spelling is more rational and consistent. Grammar structures are intuitive. Vocabulary is borrowed from other languages, but worked into the language's rules, rather than left in original form.

If things like letters making sense and being consistent were a thing we all agreed on, used, and conformed to, then things like spelling words would become much easier. Because rather than rote-memorizing that "way" and "weigh" sound the same, for no discernible reason is education time/effort that could be spent on larger vocabulary. If the basics are easier and more elegant, and everyone can learn the language more easily, we can spend more time using the language instead of fighting with it.

[Jondor]

3138933

I vote we bring back þe þorn.

[Titanium Dragon]

4453192

Where we get into the rules that don't need to change is when we create a standard for things like grammar. Sentence structure, spelling, and indeed the way letters/characters are used to represent various sounds.

The thing is, a lot of things function the way they do for a reason. For instance...

26 letters is not actually an advantage of English. English uses more sounds than that, and applies different sounds to the same letter in some cases, and the same sound to different letters in other cases. There is actually no rhyme or reason to how spoken sounds match up to specific letters, and a large reason for this is the multitude of borrowed words that have retained their original spelling, or something close to it. Some languages might use more symbols, but those are more precisely able to identify certain sounds that English fails to identify. There is also a problem where some sounds exist in some languages, due to common use, but do not exist in other languages. Some of the more famous ones are "L" in Japanese and several Asian languages, or "wh" sounds in German and French. English lacks one of the kinds of "R's" Spanish has, and so on.

English has an alphabet. A written form which uses a letter for every sound is known as a syllabary.

Syllabaries have the advantage of writing always being phoentic. They have the disadvantage of being significantly more difficult to read.

Consider goose, geese, and gosling, or gus, gis, and ˈgɒzlɪŋ. Gosling being related to Goose and Geese makes sense; ˈgɒzlɪŋ looks nothing like gus or gis, having literally one character in common.

Having words spelled the way they sound is inferior to having words spelled the way they mean, and unfortunately, syllabaries are very bad for the latter unless your language has very regular pronunciation, something few non-constructed languages possess. Words which are spelled in a manner which reflects their roots are much easier to decipher while reading, and reading is more important than writing. Moreover, if roots are used in a regular manner, it makes figuring out how to spell a word easier.

Unfortunately, a lot of people have gotten it into their head that spelling not being phonetic is a bad thing without understanding the fact that phonetic spellings frequently sacrifice comprehensibility, which is significantly worse. It is better for it to be a bit harder to write and a lot easier to read than vice-versa. And it isn't even clear that it makes them harder to write. You can understand many words without understanding how to pronounce them correctly because you can figure out their meanings from their roots, and you can predict a lot of spelling from roots. Literate people don't sound out words when reading - that's not how reading works. If it was, we couldn't read as quickly as we do.

As far as 26 letters goes, 26 letters is actually a huge advantage. The more characters you have to learn, the harder it is to learn how to read and write in the first place, the more likely confusion is to occur between characters, and perhaps most importantly, the harder it is to type.

It so happens that we only have ten fingers, and they only are so long and have so much reach and so much accuracy while typing quickly. Our typewriters and keyboards already have to have four rows of keys to contain all the required characters (numbers, letters, and common punctuation marks), and we have a fifth row for shortcuts. There really is not a huge amount of space for more characters. The main places to sacrifice would be the right-hand side shortcut keys, something for your right thumb to press, and maybe [{ }] \| and `~. I think somewhere around 35 letters would be the most which could be reasonably managed on a keyboard; having less than the maximum makes typing easier, as we can fit all of our letters onto three rows instead of four, which positively impacts typing speed without sacrificing readability - people can read many hundreds of words per minute in English.

If you want to go for the extreme example of Chinese - the higher information density of Chinese characters is counteracted by the fact that you have to spend more time deciphering each character, and as it turns out, tests on reading speed indicate that people read English and Chinese at essentially exactly the same speed as a result. Average word length for Chinese is 1.5 characters; for English, it is 5.1. But English readers take in more letters at once than Chinese readers, and consequently, in both English and Chinese, the reader takes in about a word and a half worth of characters in an eye movement while reading.

The main advantage Chinese has is that it saves you on physical space, but it comes at the cost of being a pain in the ass to write by comparison to English. Electronically, it saves you no space at all.

Given that typed text is the primary mode of communication these days, and that most of that is electronic, space considerations are largely irrelevant, while typing considerations are paramount.

But there's another thing worth considering: alphabets have won historically, and it is likely they did so for a reason, even without typing being a consideration.

There's a reason that alphabets are so prevalent and were adopted by so many languages when syllabaries existed both then and now. Indeed, alphabets are all descended from Ancient Phonecian and became very widely adopted by a wide variety of languages, even ones which had previous writing systems. This suggests that there is a strong advantage to alphabets over other writing systems, given the broad-scale displacement that has occurred over time.

upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/b/b9/World_alphabet_distribution.png

Almost everywhere uses an alphabet, most of the places that don't use abjads (which omit vowels). The only places that still really use logographic or syllabic languages are China, Korea, and Japan. The fact that these things have been so successful indicates rather strongly that alphabets are just better, as cultures ditched their previous writing systems (when they had them) and switched over.

English is only practical in a cultural dominance sense. As you point out, America and before our time Great Britain have/had a huge ifluence on world culture, and knowing English is incredibly useful for trade purposes. But English is still hard to learn. It is incredibly difficult to learn to non-native speakers compared to learning many other languages for non-native speakers of those languages.

This is actually an often-repeated myth - English is not an unusually difficult to learn language. In reality, the difficulty in learning a language is closely tied to how closely related that language is to whatever language it is that you speak.

English is a Germanic language, meaning that speakers of other Germanic languages will have a relatively easy time learning it, and vice-versa.

web.cn.edu/kwheeler/IE_images/ietreecentum1.gif

And if you look at a map of knowledge of English...

upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/b/ba/Anglospeak-percentage-knowledge.svg/2000px-Anglospeak-percentage-knowledge.svg.png

The European countries which have the most English speakers are countries which speak Germanic or Nordic languages, which are the closest relatives to English, and thus have the easiest time learning it.

The lone exception to this rule is Finland, which is probably because a lot of people in Finland speak Swedish (which is a Nordic language), and because Finnish is a Uralic language, and the only other notable group of people who speak Uralic languages are the Hungarians. Hungarian is not even especially closely related to Finnish, so pretty much any language the Finns learn is going to suck for them so they might as well learn a useful one.

The idea that English is especially hard to learn is rooted in the fact that the people who complain about it are people who primarily speak non-Germanic languages. The reverse is true as well - it is harder for English speakers to learn more distant languages. We have an easier time with the vocabularity of romance languages than Germans do because of our enormous amount of borrowing from French, just as the French can recognize many English words for the same reason, but this doesn't really help us with other things, like the insane verb conjugations and gendered words that many languages use. English actually has pretty simple rules as far as that goes - the only really uniquely hard thing in English in terms of a unique feature is spelling, but that's not any worse than having to learn hundreds if not thousands of Chinese characters (though there are rules for those which make it a bit less onerous than it seems) or learning 40 different ways to conjugate the verb "to be", most of which are irregular.

For English speakers, it is easier for us to learn Germanic languages, then Nordic languages, then romance languages, then other Indo-European languages, then anything else. The same applies in reverse as well.

It is much easier for a Spanish speaker to learn Portugese than anything else because they are so closely related, but all romance languages are pretty easy for them to learn because they're all closely related. But they won't have any easier time learning Japanese than an English speaker will, and vice-versa, because they are just as distantly related.

It is true that English is a common language because of our cultural dominance, but the same can be said of all major languages - more powerful cultures spread their languages around. This is why English, French, and Spanish are all over the place, and why Chinese is all over the place in the Chinese sphere of influence.

And, to give examples of what I am talking about, read up on Esperanto and Interlingua. These languages are constructed so that the use of characters for spelling is more rational and consistent. Grammar structures are intuitive. Vocabulary is borrowed from other languages, but worked into the language's rules, rather than left in original form.

Constructed languages have the ability to do a lot of things, like, for instance, have all of your words be pronounced identically from their stems, and having 100% regular (and hopefully minimized) conjugation.

This does not necessarily make them any better, and indeed, may make them inferior because they are concerned with the wrong things. Real-world languages evolve over time to suit speakers, whereas constructed languages often focus on one aspect of them or another while ignoring a lot of usability concerns.

There's a reason very few people speak constructed languages. Indeed, it is extremely probable that all constructed languages are actually absolutely terrible as languages because language engineering is extremely poorly understood. The fact that all languages can be read and spoken at roughly the same rate of information exchange suggests rather strongly that the primary factor constraining our ability to communicate more rapidly is cognitive in nature.

If things like letters making sense and being consistent were a thing we all agreed on, used, and conformed to, then things like spelling words would become much easier. Because rather than rote-memorizing that "way" and "weigh" sound the same, for no discernible is reason is education time/effort that could be spent on larger vocabulary. If the basics are easier and more elegant, and everyone can learn the language more easily, we can spend more time using the language instead of fighting with it.

Almost all languages have homophones, and spelling "weigh" and "way" differently isn't a bad thing at all - it allows us to differentiate between the words at a glance while reading. Indeed, it is probably better for a word to be a homophone than a homograph. Writing they're/their/there is better than just using a single spelling in its place, and indeed, "they're" is a compound word (they are) which is entirely logical, while "their" follows from "our" (which is itself a homophone of "are"), while there is obviously related to here (as in, right here), even though here is a homophone with "hear" and doesn't rhyme with "there". If you were to write these all identically, this distinction would be lost, and the text would become less clear.

Linguistic construction is not a simple thing.

[PresentPerfect]

3138862
The latter. :V