![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
Wednesday Reading
Sep. 25th, 2019 11:55 pmI am meeting my professor on Friday and have to give a talk next Wednesday. Do I feel remotely prepared for either of those? Do I heck.
Have Read: While reading the (very poorly edited) Horseshoe Crabs and Velvet Worms, I was genuinely starting to wonder about how slowly I was moving through the text and whether it was the writing (even though it didn't seem that bad) or if it was me. And then I read In the Land of Invented Languages at my usual reading speed and could hardly put it down. So I'm blaming the writing.
Anyway, Invented Languages is a very good book! I already knew a little about conlangs - it's hard not to read a little about them if you've ever done worldbuilding research, and I've definitely used a couple of concepts/tools from conlangers to name things. But I had no idea how far back their history stretched. I thought the author did a really good job of exploring that history, the different phases of language-making, and the whys and hows the language creators put into their creations. (And also how some of those creators were real jerks.)
I found it fascinating how many people were utterly convinced that the problem with natural language was that it wasn't clear enough, wasn't logical enough - that we could just say what we mean if only we had a better language, that we wouldn't get duped into believing horrible things if the words were more clear. She breaks this down in a very interesting way early on, when she tries to translate a sentence into an early 'logical' thesaurus-structure language and starts driving herself crazy with how she does and doesn't understand what basic words like 'clear' mean. She also provides a kind of back-translation of her translation, which turns a sentence or two into more than a page of explanation.
The later example of Lojban takes this to an extreme by literally trying to turn language into something like predicate logic. As someone with experience with predicate logic who codes: I do not feel any urge to learn anything like Lojban. Besides, human beings, on the whole, are bad at even basic logic. No wonder she describes Lojban learners struggling to construct sentences and avoid natural language-isms. It's a cool idea, but not a very practical one.
It was also interesting to read about her interactions with two other constructed-language communities. The first was Esperanto; I've never had that high of an opinion of it (creating a universal language is staggeringly unlikely to work, and isn't it basically an artificial Latin language?), but reading about Esperanto culture really surprised me and I have a more positive idea of it now. Everyone sounded like they were having fun. It even sounds, to some extent, like it's actually achieving its goal of connecting people from different cultures, though I wonder how much of that is because of the type of person who wants to learn Esperanto. The Klingon section was a bit more wobbly over her usual line of 'this is ridiculous'/'I am defending this idea', but I did appreciate the explanation of how Klingon both follows linguistic principles and also uses them to create something totally alien.
One language experiment she talked about, Blissymbols, as a tool to aid children with disabilities in transitioning to reading/writing, intrigued me. I know tablets nowadays make it easier to create custom picture charts and more/less complex picture dictionaries, but I wonder if the symbols, or a similar system, are still in use? Or have been more formally researched? I glanced over Google Scholar and mostly saw stuff from the late 80s/early 90s and papers measuring how easy it was for the children to learn them.
Another experiment I found memorable was a language designed 'for women'. To be entirely honest, I'm still not entirely sure what this means even after re-reading the section, and the author does point out that at least one of the language features is in there because the creator thought it was cool. There are more words to describe stereotypical female experiences? Indicating what speech act you're doing (questioning vs. stating vs. promising) is supposed to have something to do with women? Maybe I'm too genderqueer and alienated by this form of feminist thinking to understand it, IDK.
I did have a few minor annoyances with the book:
-For the most part, the writing is very clear, but there were a couple of parts where the linguistic vocabulary was too dense for me.
-There were also a couple of times where I found the author's inserted opinions to be annoying. Like 'Solresol just sounds crazy'. Not to me? (Granted, I am biased because I find Solresol a fascinating concept in terms of being a language that can be written in so many mediums. I know it's not the most viable conlang, but I keep wanting to make a game where a human kid encounters aliens whose dialog is all in colors as Solresol, or something.)
-At one point, she writes: "I'm no philosopher, and I am not qualified to make claims about whether thought is possible without language (although I think it is), or whether there may be other means than language by which we can give shape to the muddle (sure, why not?)." I found this one sentence more irritating than is probably reasonable. I see that she has written about this more recently, but even as someone who does generally think in words, there are a lot of people out there who have talked about thinking in, say, images, or who have been unfortunately deprived of language. The topic has naturally come up in several conversations with separate people for me. (I've even had the experience of 'thinking' in logical structures and code while programming.) Had she, an actual linguist, never heard of any of this? This paragraph doesn't really even add that much.
...but only these small quibbles. It was an interesting and entertaining read. I might rec it to my dad because of the 'logical language' sections; I think they would make for a good discussion.
Am Reading: Still not done with the horseshoe crabs, but I am near the end, at least. I might end up writing a GR review for this one just because of the poor editing.
Will Read: I got The Birchbark House from the library, which I have seen sold as 'Little House but it's an Ojibwa girl'. It's been on my to-read list for forever, so I was happy to realize that it was actually in our library system.
Have Read: While reading the (very poorly edited) Horseshoe Crabs and Velvet Worms, I was genuinely starting to wonder about how slowly I was moving through the text and whether it was the writing (even though it didn't seem that bad) or if it was me. And then I read In the Land of Invented Languages at my usual reading speed and could hardly put it down. So I'm blaming the writing.
Anyway, Invented Languages is a very good book! I already knew a little about conlangs - it's hard not to read a little about them if you've ever done worldbuilding research, and I've definitely used a couple of concepts/tools from conlangers to name things. But I had no idea how far back their history stretched. I thought the author did a really good job of exploring that history, the different phases of language-making, and the whys and hows the language creators put into their creations. (And also how some of those creators were real jerks.)
I found it fascinating how many people were utterly convinced that the problem with natural language was that it wasn't clear enough, wasn't logical enough - that we could just say what we mean if only we had a better language, that we wouldn't get duped into believing horrible things if the words were more clear. She breaks this down in a very interesting way early on, when she tries to translate a sentence into an early 'logical' thesaurus-structure language and starts driving herself crazy with how she does and doesn't understand what basic words like 'clear' mean. She also provides a kind of back-translation of her translation, which turns a sentence or two into more than a page of explanation.
The later example of Lojban takes this to an extreme by literally trying to turn language into something like predicate logic. As someone with experience with predicate logic who codes: I do not feel any urge to learn anything like Lojban. Besides, human beings, on the whole, are bad at even basic logic. No wonder she describes Lojban learners struggling to construct sentences and avoid natural language-isms. It's a cool idea, but not a very practical one.
It was also interesting to read about her interactions with two other constructed-language communities. The first was Esperanto; I've never had that high of an opinion of it (creating a universal language is staggeringly unlikely to work, and isn't it basically an artificial Latin language?), but reading about Esperanto culture really surprised me and I have a more positive idea of it now. Everyone sounded like they were having fun. It even sounds, to some extent, like it's actually achieving its goal of connecting people from different cultures, though I wonder how much of that is because of the type of person who wants to learn Esperanto. The Klingon section was a bit more wobbly over her usual line of 'this is ridiculous'/'I am defending this idea', but I did appreciate the explanation of how Klingon both follows linguistic principles and also uses them to create something totally alien.
One language experiment she talked about, Blissymbols, as a tool to aid children with disabilities in transitioning to reading/writing, intrigued me. I know tablets nowadays make it easier to create custom picture charts and more/less complex picture dictionaries, but I wonder if the symbols, or a similar system, are still in use? Or have been more formally researched? I glanced over Google Scholar and mostly saw stuff from the late 80s/early 90s and papers measuring how easy it was for the children to learn them.
Another experiment I found memorable was a language designed 'for women'. To be entirely honest, I'm still not entirely sure what this means even after re-reading the section, and the author does point out that at least one of the language features is in there because the creator thought it was cool. There are more words to describe stereotypical female experiences? Indicating what speech act you're doing (questioning vs. stating vs. promising) is supposed to have something to do with women? Maybe I'm too genderqueer and alienated by this form of feminist thinking to understand it, IDK.
I did have a few minor annoyances with the book:
-For the most part, the writing is very clear, but there were a couple of parts where the linguistic vocabulary was too dense for me.
-There were also a couple of times where I found the author's inserted opinions to be annoying. Like 'Solresol just sounds crazy'. Not to me? (Granted, I am biased because I find Solresol a fascinating concept in terms of being a language that can be written in so many mediums. I know it's not the most viable conlang, but I keep wanting to make a game where a human kid encounters aliens whose dialog is all in colors as Solresol, or something.)
-At one point, she writes: "I'm no philosopher, and I am not qualified to make claims about whether thought is possible without language (although I think it is), or whether there may be other means than language by which we can give shape to the muddle (sure, why not?)." I found this one sentence more irritating than is probably reasonable. I see that she has written about this more recently, but even as someone who does generally think in words, there are a lot of people out there who have talked about thinking in, say, images, or who have been unfortunately deprived of language. The topic has naturally come up in several conversations with separate people for me. (I've even had the experience of 'thinking' in logical structures and code while programming.) Had she, an actual linguist, never heard of any of this? This paragraph doesn't really even add that much.
...but only these small quibbles. It was an interesting and entertaining read. I might rec it to my dad because of the 'logical language' sections; I think they would make for a good discussion.
Am Reading: Still not done with the horseshoe crabs, but I am near the end, at least. I might end up writing a GR review for this one just because of the poor editing.
Will Read: I got The Birchbark House from the library, which I have seen sold as 'Little House but it's an Ojibwa girl'. It's been on my to-read list for forever, so I was happy to realize that it was actually in our library system.
