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The Politics of Language | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : General discussion |  | |
| Chung Diglot Senior Member Joined 7158 days ago 4228 posts - 8259 votes  20 sounds Speaks: English*, French Studies: Polish, Slovak, Uzbek, Turkish, Korean, Finnish | Message 17 of 27 07 September 2014 at 2:35am | IP Logged | ||||||||
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Chomsky. *snort*
With all of his spouting off on topics outside linguistics for the last couple of decades it's been hard for me to take him seriously. It's almost as if linguistics has gone from serious academic pursuit to a mere toy as he's become keener on stroking his ego by appealing to a broad group of intellectuals and wannabe intellectuals with his political views and grandstanding as opposed to sticking to linguistics and trying to refine his linguistic theories. 4 persons have voted this message useful | |||||||||
| aokoye Diglot Senior Member United StatesRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 5543 days ago 235 posts - 453 votes Speaks: English*, German Studies: Dutch, Norwegian, Japanese | Message 18 of 27 07 September 2014 at 3:23am | IP Logged | ||||||||
So I'm going to assume that you haven't heard of sociolinguistics which is all about culture. Semiotics also has a lot to do with culture (or perhaps more specifically social constructions) as does pragmatics, psycholingistics (to an extent), ecolinguistics, and ethnolinguistics to name a few branches. This isn't entirely directed at you but I'm tired of people claiming that linguists (as a group) don't know this and that or linguistics doesn't touch XYZ when what they're saying couldn't be farther from the truth. 3 persons have voted this message useful | |||||||||
| shk00design Triglot Senior Member Canada Joined 4446 days ago 747 posts - 1123 votes Speaks: Cantonese*, English, Mandarin Studies: French | Message 19 of 27 07 September 2014 at 3:42am | IP Logged | ||||||||
I got educated in a Cantonese-speaking school. My parents made the decision that our generation should preserve our Chinese language & traditions. I know a people in my apartment who were enrolled in a Chinese school and those who were in an English school. At the time we were always busy studying and weren't aware there were actually more English schools than the Chinese ones. I know 1 lady who emigrated to Canada after studying in an English high school in Hong Kong watches Chinese TV programs regularly and is able to read books in Chinese & English. Someone else who studied in a Chinese school in Hong Kong until high school ended up losing the ability to read Chinese characters, not even a restaurant menu. Part of maintaing a language is the environment you were brought up and the other is your conscious efforts to use a language later in life by reading books & newspapers. In the years after the 1997 handover to China, there is an increase use of Cantonese for writing on the Internet. People in Hong Kong used to write in standard Mandarin and after 1997, a new set of characters native to Cantonese sounds were introduced such as: 乜嘢 instead of 什麼 in standard Mandarin for "what". Edited by shk00design on 07 September 2014 at 3:52am 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||
| Henkkles Triglot Senior Member Finland Joined 4255 days ago 544 posts - 1141 votes Speaks: Finnish*, English, Swedish Studies: Russian | Message 20 of 27 07 September 2014 at 11:47am | IP Logged | ||||||||
I've not met a single linguist who would disagree.
Noam Chomsky is hardly an example of an average linguist, but I think you've misunderstood the universal grammar hypothesis. As for his other views, I don't know them so I can't attest to whether he actually thinks all languages are interchangeable. So like humans have a genetic code that makes every human have more or less the same fundamental blueprint, head, two arms, etc, and since our brains are structured a certain way as well, the proposition is that there would be a fundamental blueprint for languages as well, for example nouns and verbs seem to be found in most languages linguists have analyzed, and subjects and objects are in separate categories.
This paragraph and what it tries to exemplify has nothing to do with the universal grammar hypothesis. The universal grammar hypothesis is mainly concerned with language acquisition; since languages are infinite, how is a child to pick up a language if the brain is a blank slate? That's the question it starts off with. 3 persons have voted this message useful | |||||||||
 Iversen Super Polyglot Moderator Denmark berejst.dk Joined 6705 days ago 9078 posts - 16473 votes Speaks: Danish*, French, English, German, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, Dutch, Swedish, Esperanto, Romanian, Catalan Studies: Afrikaans, Greek, Norwegian, Russian, Serbian, Icelandic, Latin, Irish, Lowland Scots, Indonesian, Polish, Croatian Personal Language Map | Message 21 of 27 09 September 2014 at 10:59am | IP Logged | ||||||||
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Chomsky... well, that man had the intention of making linguistics more 'scientific', but the result of his activities is that practical language teaching/learning has been separated from the gibberish escaping the ivory tower where his pupils try to express themselves using a system that would make medieval scholastics look like an ABC for small children.
Whether there is a universal grammar as claimed by mr. NN is a moot point. Humans definitely have an inbuilt system for language acquisition and language production which is way beyond and probably qualitatively different from that of even the most intelligent animals, but if you try to find a precise list of the rules in that universal grammar then you'll discover that it isn't as easy as it should be. The most known element isn't really a rule, but rather a concept (or a 'trick'): recursion. And recursion is definitely a very efficient way to expand the possibilities of human language. But it has become known as a universal because a mr.Everett claimed to have found a counter example with the Pirahã language. If recursion really was an inborn feature of the human brain (like an instinct) then there shouldn't be exceptions, but the quasi ubiquity of recursion could also simply be blamed on the boost to linguistic expressivity it entails. Or maybe it is a combination, like an instinct that prospered because it gave its users an advantage in the competition with those that didn't use it. You will have to look into fairly obscure sources to find any other of those socalled universals on print. What little there is about universals out there is based on Greenberg's empirical studies, not on Chomsky's abstruse theories. The discussion about recursion is relevant here because it illustrates why linguists have to care about small and seemingly insignificant languages - or rare and arcane constructions in big languages. The whole question about the status of recursion seems to hinge on the way a few hundred speakers of one single obscure Amazonian native language combine their ideas. And in the meantime there are people who are discussing cultural clashes involving millions of people - such as the way Mandarin takes over the school system of Hongkong. But science can't be limited to questions that have immediate consequences for millions of people. Sometimes the key to understanding something important is found in a hidden corner, and the scientists have good reasons to study those details. The real problem is that the results of those seemingly unimportant studies should be presented in a way that make them relevant and understandable even for people who basically aren't interested in the details, but might be interested in the conclusions. And that is where Chomsky's pupils have failed (in spite of the bewildering and suspicious diversity of their models): they have made linguistics less useful. Edited by Iversen on 09 September 2014 at 11:02am 5 persons have voted this message useful | |||||||||
| Stolan Senior Member United States Joined 4034 days ago 274 posts - 368 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Thai, Lowland Scots Studies: Arabic (classical), Cantonese | Message 22 of 27 09 September 2014 at 6:25pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
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You all also have to think about native Mandarin speakers too, their identity is also
being eroded as Mandarin is forced throughout China and will no longer be seen as a language with its own history but some medium that is supposedly less desirable to be a native speaker of than all the other Chinese dialects. Edited by Stolan on 09 September 2014 at 6:27pm 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||
| aokoye Diglot Senior Member United StatesRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 5543 days ago 235 posts - 453 votes Speaks: English*, German Studies: Dutch, Norwegian, Japanese | Message 23 of 27 10 September 2014 at 5:50am | IP Logged | ||||||||
I'm not sure what you mean by this. I don't think that being a native speaker of Mandarin will ever be seen as less desirable than a native speaker of any other Chinese dialect especially considering the push for Mandarin usage over other dialects within China. I'm honestly having trouble seeing a case were Mandarin will come out as being viewed as lesser by a large quantity of people. Can you elaborate? 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||
| aokoye Diglot Senior Member United StatesRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 5543 days ago 235 posts - 453 votes Speaks: English*, German Studies: Dutch, Norwegian, Japanese | Message 24 of 27 10 September 2014 at 6:11am | IP Logged | ||||||||
I think saying that Chomsky's pupils "have make linguistics less useful" is pretty loaded and really quite presumptuous. There is so much more to linguistics than Chomsky and to imply otherwise is showing ignorance of the topic at best and perhaps a hindrance to others' and your own learning/exploration of linguistics at worst. It is not the job or responsibility of the researcher to write papers for the layperson to understand. It is the job of the professor or the teacher to help students learn how to understand academic discourse. Beyond that it is also the responsibility of learner (who may or may not be learning in the context of school) to attempt to educate themselves and there are plenty of resources that are far cheaper than paying to accessing academic journals (or enrolling in classes at a college/university) to do that. Additionally most academics are consciously not writing for the average person because that is not their audience. A number of academic disciplines have their own vocabularies (much like different languages have their own vocabularies) and that is something that you learn. I, as someone who hasn't taken an astronomy class, am not going to expect to be able to read an academic paper on the causes of the Jupiter without having to look up different words and/or concepts. It would be preposterous to tell an astronomer to write an academic article about that so that someone with the reading level of a 12th grader could understand that without knowing the vocabulary of the discipline. 1 person has voted this message useful |
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