primeideal | Entries tagged with linguistics

Nonfiction book about the changes in writing, standardizing, and digitizing Mandarin Chinese over the 20th century. Occasionally dry but a lot of stuff I didn't know.

Excerpt from an 1875 report on telegraph wires (which were mostly foreign- owned and operated at that point): "The foreigners bury their telegraphic wires in the ground, burrowing through and forcing their way across in all four directions until the earth's veins are all but severed, making the burial sites vulnerable to wind and flood. How can this sit well on our conscience?"

Morse Code was designed for alphabetic writing systems; a letter in the Latin alphabet (without diacritics) can be represented as one to four dots and dashes, and an Arabic numeral gets a five-symbol code. To represent a character-based language like Chinese, telegraphers had to look up a character in a table that would represent it as four to six numerals, then reverse the process on the other end, which was much more laborious and expensive to send and receive.

Western-language telegraphy also involved a lot of codes and ciphers, both for classified military purposes and trying to get around telegraph pay-by-the-symbol pricing. An example of a historically known but very weak system would be the Caesar shift (ROT-n). If both parties have a matching codebook beforehand, then you can just send a short numerical code to express a precomposed sentence from the book. 214: "Composed and entirely resigned to the will of God." 7571: "You will rue the day if you do."

In 1875, Zhang Deyi became the first Chinese person to design a telegraphic table for Chinese, with a codebook consisting of 80 ten-by-ten grids, encoding 8000 characters. This allowed for quick Caesar-type encryption; you can shift every character by a predetermined amount.

In 1912, the international telegraphic community introduced delayed telegrams, as an alternative to the sneaky shortcuts people were taking to get around the pay-by-the-word rates. Delayed telegrams were sent up to 48 hours late, but at half price. However, users were required to use "plain language" rather than any codes or secret text. This created a problem for Chinese-language users, who were required to use numeric symbols, already costly and slow, to communicate. At an International Telegraphic Union conference in the 1920s, Wang Jingchun successfully advocated to make an exception in this case.

Where there's no alphabetical system, there's also no such thing as alphabetical order, so library science was also subject to subjectivity. "Bibliographic classification in China properly began in the first century B.C.E., and it was based on a perceived moral order. A Confucian scholar devised an elaborate scheme of seven main subject divisions--with thirty-eight subdivisions--prioritizing the Confucian classics first, with science and medicine--astronomy, geomancy, pharmacology, sexology, etc.--occupying the last two categories." (Compare Borges' Celestial Emporium of Benevolent Knowledge.)

The Wade-Giles Romanization system, which has mostly been replaced by modern pinyin (at least in mainland China), was based in part on a system used by a British officer named...Thomas Wade. (If you've read "Death's End," part 3 of the Three-Body Problem trilogy, you know why this is funny.) This brings us to the adventures of the famous Lion-Eating Poet in the Stone Den.

In jail during the Cultural Revolution, Zhi Bingyi started experimenting with different methods of character input in a computerized context; he had to write on the lid of his teacup because he didn't even have toilet paper. Hardcore.

Because there are so many characters, in the early days of computers, they couldn't be saved as raster/bitmap images because that would take too much memory. So they needed to be saved as vector images, and compressed/decompressed; Wang Xuan worked on this problem. Then there's the issue of standardizing character sets; ASCII only took seven bits (later eight), but was useful for American English and not much else (it's the telegraphy problem all over again!) So then Unicode came along, and rapidly became a big deal...

If you enjoy technology and/or linguistics, I think you'll get a lot out of this!

"It's not their fault they exist." In "A Desolation Called Peace," one of the characters says this about a species of space cats who have gotten into the vents of his flagship after a recent military engagement, and now, the ship just has to put up with them, because when you're a travelling warship you pick up strange but cute creatures in your travels, it's what you do. Hold that thought.

"A Desolation Called Peace" is the sequel to "A Memory Called Empire," and both novels sort of tell you where they're going in their dedications. In "Memory," the dedication is to people who are "falling in love with another culture that's destroying your own..." This is the context in which we meet Marit Dzmare, the ambassador from small Lsel Station to the vast Teixcalaanli Empire. Marit appreciates Teixcalaanli poetry, but feels like she can't really fit in there because she's from Lsel. But despite that intro, I thought the dedication set up the story to be bleaker/heavier than it turned out to be in the end. (Granted, I am working off memory from three years ago.) There was a whole lingering Chekhov about evil aliens in the background that never got resolved, though, so that's the sequel hook.

"Desolation," however, is dedicated in part to "Stanislav Petrov, who knew when to question orders." So already, for those of you who recognize the name (and/or Wikipedia it), you can guess where the book is going. Which means some of the rising action/inaction felt kind of redundant--like, yeah, we know imperialism is bad, WMDs bad, let's see some aliens.

There are several different plotlines; one follows Eight Antidote, the eleven-year-old Imperial heir. His tutor, Eleven Laurel, tries to teach him puzzles about the history of Teixcalaanli military conflict, and this provides an effective way to get up to speed on who some of the major admirals are and why getting promoted to a commanding officer might be a double-edged sword.

Eight Antidote loved the constraints best of all. Delimiters. This happened, so it must be possible. Solve it.

I got Ender Wiggin and Mazer Rackham vibes from these two right away! And to some extent, it feels like "Desolation" is trying to be a subversion of "Ender's Game"--like, kids can be very smart and good at solving puzzles, but they also might have panic attacks trying to navigate a crowded spaceport for the first time, because life is scary when you're eleven. On the other hand, Ender's Game (uh, spoilers) confronts the "if you annihilate an entire planet, but there's only one hive mind there, are you really only killing one person?" issue more effectively than "Desolation." If you have qualms about annihilating a planet, it should be because killing a planet (one individual or many) is bad, not because it might have knock-on empathy effects for other beings nearby!

There's a general sense of "the military department doesn't trust the civilian intelligence agency, who doesn't trust the science department, who doesn't trust the postal service..." Which, as anyone who has worked in the government bureaucracy can tell you, felt absolutely spot-on, A++.

In physics/philosophy, there are several different variants of the "anthropic principle," which in some way boil down to "conditional on intelligent observers perceiving the universe, the universe has to be like it is, because if was vastly different, then we wouldn't be here." Some are tautological, some are stronger. First-contact books sometimes border on a medium form of the anthropic principle: if you're gonna have aliens, they will probably be very different than humans in many ways, but if you want them to influence the plot (say, by talking to humans), they need to have at least something in common with us, physically and mentally, so that we can communicate with them. A type of creature who lived on timescales that were orders of magnitude greater or lesser than ours is never going to be able to carry on a conversation with us. Finding single-celled organisms on another planet would be fascinating, and in a different subgenre "what will humans do when they meet non-Earth life?" could have carried the plot, but for a book about "can we make peace with the aliens," there has to at least be a possibility of intelligent communication, even if its forms are different from human language. So I thought some of the "oh no, they communicate, but they do so without language! And their sound waves make my ears hurt? Whatever shall we do?" panicking was unnecessary. Can't you at least copy-and-paste reproductions of sound waves on your computer without listening to them? Even Ryland Grace knew how to do that. :p And maybe it's just the linguist in me talking, but Earth linguists tend to keep tweaking the definition of "language" so that "anything sapient, self-aware creatures like humans do is 'language;' everything else, no matter how complex [bees wiggling!] is just 'communication.'"

The flagship where this first-contact and/or war drama is playing out is called "Weight for the Wheel." And I'm not quite sure I get the joke. Is it a pun on Farscape's "Wait for the Wheel?" The Hope Eyrie "weight of the wheel?" Daenerys from Game of Thrones who wants to break the wheel of history? Help me out here. (On the other hand, "I feel like there's a subtle cultural allusion here that's going way over my head" is an extremely Teixcalaanli mood, so there's that.)

Okay, so--you know how I said "Memory" was less preachy/didactic than the dedication primed me for? This one felt more so. Fortunately, the Petrovian "patience and prudence" approach wins--it would be extremely disappointing to make it through almost 500 pages and then not--but Mahit's struggles with Teixcalaan felt more lampshaded here (again, I haven't read "Memory" in three years and may be misremembering). Guess what, in Teixcalaanli "Empire" and "world" mean the same thing, so there are no real "people" outside the "world!" (Hi, Sapir-Whorf!) Guess what, Teixcalaanli people tend to call anyone who isn't Teixcalaanli "barbarians," and that's bad! Guess what, Mahit enjoys Teixcalaanli poetry, and hates herself for it, because she'll never be accepted like a real Teixcalaanli! What's the point.

Space cats are cute and adorable. And you can't blame them for existing, because it's not their fault. However--and I recognize that this probably says more about me than the book--you also can't keep raising the Reverse George Bailey problem and kicking it down the road. If you feel like you should jump off a bridge, you can maybe wish you'd never been born and hopefully an angel will persuade you of the error of your ways. If you actually feel like you, or your culture, or your empire, ought to never have been born, what are you supposed to do? If there's anyone who has that answer, they're probably not writing science fiction novels.

Oh uhhhh I almost forgot bingo. Set In Space, Readalong. "Memory" is on the /r/fantasy LGBTQIA list so this might count as a sequel even though it came out later? I don't think there's enough of an alien setting to count as "weird ecology," although the aliens themselves are weird biological creatures.

I was going to post this on

fictional_fans but it got rambly so I'm just going to link it there, heh.

As You Know, Bob, language is always changing over time. Example: this Tumblr post with the Biblical 23rd Psalm as expressed in English at different eras. Written language is less likely than spoken language to change over time--in Shakespeare's poems, "proved" and "loved" rhyme, and we still spell those the same way even if they're pronounced differently. And even though I would have no idea what "Drihten me raet, ne byth me nanes godes wan" means out of context, thanks to the Internet I now know that it's Psalm 23. Yay internet!

( General setting spoilers for Crying Suns )

This week in my family's music league competition, one of the entries was "Should I Stay Or Should I Go." I enjoy Stranger Things, where that song is a plot point, and my parents are Clash fans so I've heard it around. But what caught my attention this go-round was the Spanish language lyrics in the background. According to Genius, one member decided he liked Spanish, so he called up the tape operator's mother, who speaks Ecuadorian Spanish.

They translate "so ya gotta let me know" as "Me tienes que decir," which is literally something like "you have to tell me"--this seems to be very accurate as well as fitting the meter well, so thumbs up there. The reasoning I'm mentioning this is because somewhere along the way, and I don't know whether I subconsciously knew about the actual Spanish or what, somehow a rough translation of a few lines got into my head.

Me tienes que decir;

¿Debo quedar? ¿Debo ir?

Si yo voy, habrá problemas;
Si yo quedo, yo tendré más.

Very roughly:
You have to tell me:
Should I stay? Should I go?

If I go, there will be problems:
If I stay, there will be more [problems].

Paralleling:
So ya gotta let me know
Should I stay or should I go?

If I go, there will be trouble
If I stay, there will be double

And, if my pronunciation is correct, the Spanish lines roughly fit the meter as well as appear to rhyme in Spanish.

So did I just, one day, stumble upon this rhyme and think "hey this sounds like pretty good translation, I'm awesome" and keep it rolling around in the back of my head? That sounds like something I would do. But did I not know there were actual Spanish lyrics, and most of them are not correct? Maybe I just...never got as far as verse three? I don't know.

Tsakhiagiin Elbegdorj, the president of Mongolia, has twenty-five children, five biological and twenty adopted. He goes by the personal name "Elbegdorj;" Tsakhiagiin is a patronymic. Hmm, I wonder what Mongolian names are like:

There is also a tradition of giving names with unpleasant qualities to children born to a couple whose previous children have died, in the belief that the unpleasant name will mislead evil spirits seeking to steal the child. Muunokhoi 'Vicious Dog' may seem a strange name, but Mongolians have traditionally been given such taboo names to avoid misfortune and confuse evil spirits. Other examples include Nekhii 'Sheepskin', Nergüi 'No Name', Medekhgüi, 'I Don't Know', Khünbish 'Not A Human Being', Khenbish 'Nobody', Ogtbish 'Not At All', Enebish 'Not This One', Terbish 'Not That One'.

One of the top 20 baby names as of 2012 was "Ganbold," which means "steel-steel."

"Since 2000, Mongolians have been officially using clan names...on their ID cards...Many people chose the names of the ancient clans and tribes... Others chose the names of the native places of their ancestors, or the names of their most ancient known ancestor. Some just decided to pass their own given names (or modifications of their given names) to their descendants as clan names. A few chose other attributes of their lives as surnames; Mongolia's first cosmonaut Gürragchaa chose 'Sansar' (Outer space)."

( Those darn Episcopalians )

There will be a quiz, so pay attention. Today I overheard an interesting conversation between a couple of my colleagues about language. One of them pointed out that their mom was an English teacher, so they grew up hearing about the "right" way to speak.

Previously on Ranting About Linguistics:

Especially in English, the role of dictionaries/linguistics scholars in general is to document changes in the language, not tell people how to speak. ("descriptive" versus "prescriptive grammar.")

Linguists want to study how people actually speak (and sign!), which is called "descriptivism." Whether that be "Me and Julio Down by the Schoolyard" (not "Julio and me," or "Julio and I") or "to boldly go where no man has gone before" (not "to go boldly"). However, many "prescriptivist" rules such as "don't split infinitives," are derived from Latin, where "to go" is a single word, so inserting a word in the middle would sound really bizarre.

When I was a youngish teenager, around the mid-2000's, and making my way onto Internet forums, I was somewhat more of a grammar snob than I am now, more outwardly rolling my eyes at other posters who used "its" and "it's" interchangeably, etc. I could say that as I grew up I became less judgmental and critical, but that's probably not the case--I just became more quiet, and let random people on the internet go about their own business. Meanwhile, my dad and I still occasionally text each other when we see greengrocers' apostrophes, etc. in the wild.

Written English generally uses an apostrophe to denote contractions (can't) or possession (Alice's restaurant). Written Spanish doesn't have apostrophes; you have to use a word like "de," as in "el restaurante de Alicia," to express possession. However, you wouldn't say "a el" ("to the") or "de el" (of the); those get contracted into "al" or "del."

Obviously, lacking apostrophes doesn't make Spanish "better" or "worse" than English--it just is. But that doesn't mean I can go around writing things like "Aliciades restaurante" and be understood, because I wouldn't be writing Spanish anymore, I'd be writing some twisted Spanglish that only really makes sense in my head. The fact that conventions are arbitrary compared to each other doesn't mean they're arbitrary as in meaningless!

(Aside: when it comes to individual words, signed languages may seem a bit less arbitrary than spoken languages. English "book" and Spanish "libro" are both equally good names to refer to "bunch of paper bound together," but neither word inherently connotes that unless you know the language. The American Sign Language sign for "book," however, looks like hands opening and closing as if moving the covers of a book. So in some sense that's a "better" word to "inherently" mean "bound paper thing." But overall, considering all the signs and grammar forms of ASL, it's still arbitrary like any other natural language, as evidenced by the fact that non-signers probably can't follow a conversation.)

Anyway, why was I more prescriptivist as a young person? Maybe "young" is the operative word. If I made a habit of posting in complete sentences and avoiding slang, maybe people would think I sounded more mature. It was a point of pride for me to hear stuff like "wow, you don't sound fifteen"--I wanted to come across as intelligent, especially for my age. But as I got older, the relative prodigy phenomenon was less important.

But then there are some more operative words: "come across." Obviously, the strangers I chatted with back in the day didn't know or care about my high school GPA. They were left to form impressions of me by the way I post. So I was trying to signal intelligence.

Warning: a lot of the more accessible writeups on signalling and (counter)signalling come from tiresome hyper-utilitarians, so don't go too far down the rabbit hole if you're not into that kind of thing. But tl;dr signalling is like, "conspicuous consumption." Many people who have a lot of money, especially people who have only recently gotten a lot of money, like to buy fast cars or fancy clothes, not because they're more comfortable as cars or clothes, but because they indicate "hey, look at me, I am rich!" So probably, what I was trying to do as a younger person, was say in not so many words, "hey, look at me, I am intelligent!"

But, there's also such a thing as countersignalling. If the nouveau riche spend a lot of money on fast cars, what do the old-timey rich people do? Not that. They just dress modestly and think to themselves "I don't care whether people can tell if I'm rich; at least I won't be confused for a nouveau riche person who's just showing off. Those plebians." So, if grammar signalling is a thing, should we see grammar countersignalling too?

Well, I just said, linguists are descriptivist. One of the things we* tell students in Linguistics 101 is that they shouldn't expect to be studying prescriptivist rules like "don't end a sentence with a preposition," that's not what the course is about. So to some extent, linguists are looking down their nose at stuffy old English teachers who are giving kids these days the wrong impression of how language works. But to another extent, linguists are just trying to do their job and make sure their students know what to expect.

*I am definitely not a linguist by trade. I picked up enough bits and pieces, and had a weird financial situation, so I wound up TAing several terms of Linguistics 101. But don't regard me as an ultimate authority, because I definitely am not.

There are, however, people who go on about descriptivism without seeming to care much about linguistics in general. It goes like:
Person 1: hi i r n00by whr is chat, thx lol
Person 2: ...Chat is this way, for people who can use complete sentences.
Person 3: Well actually you're just being judgmental and high-and-mighty, not everyone has had the same educational opportunities as you, so come off your high horse already.

If Person 3 ever had anything cool to say about aspirated P or ASL's relationship to French sign language or ambiguous headlines or any of the other fun things I've run across in linguistics class, I might give them the benefit of the doubt and think "well, they're just really passionate about descriptivism." But if they don't ever do that...then they're probably countersignalling because they don't want to be confused for an insecure intelligent person like I used to be. Just because language is always changing doesn't mean it doesn't have meaning at any given moment, and just because "all words are on some level made up anyway" doesn't give you, or anyone else, the right to put words in my mouth!

Quiz time: I mentioned I had a colleague whose mother was a (prescriptivist) English teacher. Is that colleague a man or a woman?

Trick question, I didn't tell you, because I referenced that person with singular they. Why? Because that's how a lot of native English-speakers talk and have talked for hundreds of years. Maybe in five hundred years we'll all use "they" instead of "he" or "she," and we'll have a different word meaning "those people [plural]." I don't know what that word would be or where it would come from, but language is always changing!

Fact: language is changing all the time. That's not good or bad, it just is.

Probably the types of change that are easiest to see on an individual timescale are changes in vocabulary. We make up new nouns/verbs/adjectives, and old ones fall out of fashion. You can "unfriend" someone (a noun, "friend," turned into a verb, "friend"="add as a friend on a social networking platform," which then combined with the existing prefix "un"); we tend to no longer call things "groovy."

On the scale of centuries, though, there are more drastic changes in stuff like pronunciation and syntax. Shakespeare rhymes "proved" and "loved," which means these words probably rhymed five hundred years ago. If you compare Latin to modern Spanish, you can see lots and lots of cognates, but Latin has different case endings for nouns (subject, direct object, indirect object, possessive, being addressed...); Spanish basically has none of this, except for pronouns.

Another fact: language change is from the ground-up. There isn't an authority that dictates "hey everybody, we're going to stop pronouncing 'e' on the ends of words now!" People just gradually change, sometimes one region or one cultural group at a time, and then it slowly spreads.

Especially in English, the role of dictionaries/linguistics scholars in general is to document changes in the language, not tell people how to speak. ("descriptive" versus "prescriptive grammar.") In other languages, there are more prestigious bodies that try to regulate the prestige dialect (the French Academy), but even they don't have the authority to arrest people for slipping in English-influenced slang.

Also a fact: spoken language changes faster than written language. I might say "I'm'a watch the ball game," where the 'a comes from "going to-> gonna -> m'a -> 'a," but I wouldn't write that in a formal document.

Also a fact: especially in this day and age (as opposed to 100 or 500 years ago), there's a lot more opportunity for subcultures to develop their own jargon that's kind of impenetrable, even meaningless, to outsiders.

A lot of my metaphors come from religion, because I'm a religious person, but also know that many of my peers are not. If I say something like "Protestants only recognize baptism and the Eucharist as sacraments; they perform ordination too, but don't consider it a sacrament like Catholics do" out of context, a lot of my friends would be like "...what...those sure are words." Which is fine. If they need to know what I'm talking about, they can get a dictionary.

But just because an authority registers some use of language as accepted within a language community, that doesn't make it any more meaningful than it was before--very likely it was already established among many people. And it doesn't mean that it reflects an objectively verifiable concept! So you can't use it as a weapon to put words in someone else's mouth.

(I have a lot of abstract rants like this, where it's easier to couch them in, say, a religious context than in terms of contemporary hot-button issues.)