Language

Noam Chomsky’s linguistic theories have been assailed by none other than Dr. Quentin Atkinson (and Michael Dunn)! As many readers of my blog know, my name is Miles Quentin Atkinson. But that’s immaterial. What’s interesting is that the field of linguistics may face its first major paradigm shift since Chomsky turned the field on its head back in the 50’s and 60’s.
This is interesting to me for a number of reasons. Firstly, it knocks a hole in my image of Chomsky as an impenetrable fortress of intellect. Chomsky, aside from being a linguist, is the torchbearer of modern anarchism. It’s not that I necessarily agree with all of Chomsky’s politics, but I’ve said “I guess I have to be an anarchist because I don’t think I could ever beat Chomsky in a debate.” That’s probably still true, but the man’s shining white visage has been tarnished.
I’m only sort of joking.
More important is the challenge that Dr. Atkinson’s and Dr. Dunn’s papers offer to mainstream linguistic theory. To summarize, Chomsky says that humans are naturally programmed to learn language and that there is a universal grammatical structure underlying all chitchat. Just as our organs develop according to some genetic blueprint as we age, Chomsky says that our ability to learn language develops similarly. That’s a very simplistic summation, but then again, I have a very surface understanding of the topic; don’t cite my summary.
Atkinson’s paper traces languages as a function of the distance from Africa from which it originated and the number of “phonemes” that the language contains. Africa is where humanity finds its origins and “the farther you get from that continent, the less diverse, genetically speaking, people are.” The same is true of languages. Phonemes are the single sounds that distinguish one word from another: f, d, b, and s in fad, dad, bad, sad. Atkinson found that the farther away a language originated from Africa, the fewer phonemes it had. In other words, the farther away from Africa a language developed, the less diversity in sound it contained.
Dunn used computer modeling to find that almost no grammatical uniformity can be found across language groups.
Basically, this challenges Chomsky’s theory of innate language and suggests that languages are shaped much more by culture and other things that we humans create rather than genetics.
Maybe I was being too ambitious in trying to explain all of that since I don’t really know very much about it. But, it leads me to my next point, and what was going to be my main point before my thoughts turned tangential: Russian language and language in general.
I love the Russian language and I intend to become fluent in it, or at least decent. I’ve progressed more slowly than I would have liked in learning the language since I’ve been here, mainly because most of the Russians I know speak English. Recently though I’ve become friends with someone who speaks no English, and that has been good from a language-learning point of view.
Learning another language has got me thinking about my mother tongue and its great dialectical diversity, quirkiness, and structure. I’ve never thought of the different accents and regional characteristics of English as separate dialects, but there is enough variation between the speech of rural Southern black people and English speakers in India, for instance, so that the two are not mutually intelligible.
I use the example of Southern black dialect because I am familiar with it. It is interesting to note the grammatical structure of this dialect and how it often drops or misuses standard English verb conjugation: the present tense of a verb is often substituted for past tense or sometimes the past-perfect tense is used instead of past (“he had told me,” or “he tell me” instead of “he told me”) Also, as Johnson (the Economist’s language blog) pointed out in a recent post, the possessive “s” is often dropped so that “Michael’s sister” becomes “Michael sister.” Really, for the purpose of intelligible communication, the possessive ‘s is an unnecessary addendum.
Also of interest is the heavy use of intonation in this dialect. It is always fun to listen to black folk talk excitedly as their pitch flies up and down, stress is shifted around, and certain words are elongated.
Listen to the people speak in this video: If you don’t want to watch it, it’s about a teacher who is trying to get young black kids to speak proper English (“say ask instead of ax.”)
I don’t really see the difference between black “ebonics” and any other type of dialect. I mean, the Cockney and “deep South” dialects are just as incorrect in a strict grammatical sense. I do think it is important to know proper English, but I also think that our dialects are something to be respected and preserved. Just to note, many of my black friends switch back and forth between more standard English and the Southern black dialect depending on who they’re talking to.
The Russians here who are fluent in English often mention how difficult it is to understand certain English speakers. Some have mentioned how poorly the Dutch speak English, or how Indians make lots of grammatical errors. For my friends who have spent time in America, a lot of them talk about their troubles with talking to black folks. Even I am hard to understand! But, that’s mostly because I talk very quickly and have a hard time enunciating syllables when I am eager to share a thought.
What most of the Russians seem to agree about is that Canadians are the easiest to understand. I’m not sure why.
There are a lot of quirks in our language that the Russians have opened my eyes to. Contextually driven “phrasal verbs” present a major challenge to non-native speakers. For instance, how would one deduce the meaning of a phrase like “let’s hang out?” Hang out of what? Why would we want to do that?
When we “put off” work or “get over” the flu, what are we doing? Only a native speaker would know.
One of my friends asked me: “why do you say ‘he was beaten up,’ instead of ‘he was beaten’?” They mean the exact same thing, so why do we add the “up?” I told him I had no idea.
Almost every English speaking Russian makes the same kind of grammar mistakes. The most common mistake is simple word order confusion. They will say “tell us what is it,” instead of “tell us what it is,” for example.
There are certain sounds that are unique to English. The most difficult for the Russians are the “th” sound in thick, and the “w” sound in well. I just read that “th” is a sound found exclusively in the languages of the European fringe (Iceland, England, Spain, Greece, and Denmark). Interestingly, the “th” sound seems to only appear in areas where a majority of people carry the O-blood type gene.
Unfortunately, the Latin script is not so comprehensive as to include all of the sounds that we use, and for many words there is no obvious pronunciation. I’ve heard one of our Russian friends pronouncing “muscles” with a hard ‘c,’ like “muskels.” Or he will say “charger” with a hard ‘g’.
Many logical mistakes are made. I remember my friend Vasily was telling me that a man I had just talked with was a “nuclear physician” in the Soviet Union. A nuclear physician? Oh, he meant a nuclear physicist.
Russians use English words in ways that we wouldn’t; I assume this is just transposing Russian slang and colloquialisms into English because they certainly didn’t pick them up from English-language mass media or native speakers. When looking for affirmation, they will ask “is it normal,” where we would say “is that alright?” They use “legendary” as the highest endorsement, where we would say “awesome!” Many beginners will look up English phrases that end up sounding very out of place when spoken in a broken accent: instead of “thank you,” they’ll say “don’t mention it,” “not at all,” or “my pleasure.”
I’m sure I sound silly when I use the Russian slang that I’ve been taught. I certainly get laughs when I use words like “ништяк” (nishtyak) or “отстой,” (otstoy) which translate roughly to “that’s sick/cool” and “that sucks.”
Language is one of those marvels of human existence and that’s all there is to it.