EL1102: Lecture No. 4 (Part 2)

EL1102 Studying English in Context
Lecture No. 4 (Part 2)

Recap from Part 1 of lecture

Centripetal force > ‘attraction’ > convergence > accommodation [please note spelling: two c’s and two m’s]
Centrifugal force > ‘repulsion’ > divergence
Regularisation > naturalisation > eg phonological assimilation

Language and thought (reality)

tentative and commonsensical model
sees new thing experience it name it
made-up word or an old word used in a related or new way; a combination of several old words; a word borrowed from another language?

language reflects new physical, environmental, social or cultural situations.

Different language for different realities: examples

Examples in lexis
bluff, creek, gulch, rapids and swamp in North America;
coomb (cwm), fen, heath and moor in Britain; and
bush, paddock and outback in Australia.
human or urban environment, as in:
dhobi (washerman), dhoti (loin-cloth), lathi (long, heavy stick), sahib (sir, master), tiffin (luncheon) and charpoy (light bedstead) in South Asia or the Indian subcontinent; and
shophouses, void decks, five-foot-way, the MRT, HDB flats in Singapore.

More examples:

Some South Asian lexis familiar to Singaporeans (dhobi, tiffin and charpoy), some ‘internationalised’ as people become familiar with South Asian culture (dhoti).

The new reality of science? New forms of language

‘The past is a foreign country: they do things differently there’ (L P Hartly, The Go-Between). Presumably the future is like a foreign country.
rise of science and empiricism, a new set of vocabulary and a new style of grammar were required

New scientific vocabulary

lexis
By borrowing words from Latin (the traditional language for doing science) — altitude (15 c.), stria (16 c.)
By borrowing words from Arabic — azimuth (14 c.), alcohol (17 c.), algebra (16 c.)
Borrow words from Greek — diagonal (16 c.), hypotenuse (16 c.)
By refashioning existing word — mean in maths (16 c.), gravity (= weightiness) to gravity (=force, in physics; 17 c.)
By using someone’s name — pasteurise (19 c.), Boyle’s law (19 c., although interesting the scientist lived in the 17th century)

A little aside

How can we find out about word origins?

OED (Oxford English Dictionary) on ‘tea’

(perhaps through Malay te, teh) Chinese, Amoy dialect te, in Fuchau tiä = Mandarin ch’a (in ancient Chinese prob. kia) …. The form te (thé) was brought into Europe by the Dutch, prob. from the Malay at Bantam (if not from Formosa, where the Fuhkien or Amoy form was used). The original English pronunciation (te:), sometimes indicated by spelling tay, is found in rhymes down to 1762, and remains in many dialects; but the current (ti:) is found already in the 17th c., shown in rhymes and by the spelling tee.

New structures of science

I poured the chemical into the jar and it exploded [parataxis]

Because I poured the chemical into the jar, it exploded [hypotaxis]

Because the chemical was poured into the jar, it exploded [passivisation]

The contact of the chemical and glass resulted in an explosion [nominalisation]

Re-evaluating the diagram

However, some people suggest that the model that we used in the diagram above is too naïve, for two reasons:

(a) the ‘thing’ can be less straightforward than it seems; and

(b) perhaps the directionality of the arrows is also less straightforward.

Example: shapes

there is one kind of ‘thing’ here — geometrical shapes;
there are two kinds of ‘things’ — rectangles and circles;
there are four kinds of ‘things’ — squares, rectangles, circles and oval shapes.

More examples: colour terms, etc.

In Zuni, there is one word for both orange and yellow in English.
The Welsh word glas covers the same range as the English green, blue and grey.
Malay has two words kami and kita for English we. Kami is the ‘exclusive’ we (ie not including the hearer) and kita is the ‘inclusive’ we
Cantonese has two words yeh-yeh and kung-kung for English grandfather. Yeh-yeh is the paternal grandfather whereas kung-kung is the maternal grandfather.
The English word privacy cannot be easily translated into many other languages. Perhaps English recognises ‘privacy’ as a ‘thing’, but not other languages?

Another model

Each language or dialect ‘traps’ us into a particular view of things, and communication between speakers of different languages and dialects cannot be totally complete, as each language and dialect divides up experience differently.

Whorfism
(Linguistic determinism)

A Zuni speaker might just ‘see’ one ‘thing’, whereas an English speaker two ‘things’ — precisely because of the languages that they speak.
A Welsh speaker might just ‘see’ one ‘thing’, whereas an English speaker three ‘things’ — precisely because of the languages that they speak.
This is known as linguistic determinism, or the Sapir–Whorf hypothesis, or simply Whorfism.

A plea for a ‘moderate’ version of linguistic determinism

Hudson: Most people accept a moderate version of the hypothesis, and suggest that it is possible to think thoughts that cannot be easily verbalised in one’s own language. However, different languages predispose their speakers to different thoughts. . . . It seems clear that the extreme hypothesis is wrong.

Reasons for a moderate version

Studies also suggest that speakers can also imagine or think of things that have not been encoded by their own languages or dialects. We can imagine things and experience which we cannot label. We can think about experiences that are in some sense ‘ineffable’ or ‘indescribable’, although this does mean that it is rather more difficult to think about them. This suggests therefore that it is possible to escape from the ‘prison house’ of language.
But our native language encourages us to think in a particular way.

Three metaphors

Language is like:

a receptacle
a prison
a pair of blinkers

Two quotations:

‘He gave men speech, and speech created thought, which is the measure of the universe’ (P B Shelley, the 19th-century poet, Prometheus Unbound, Act 2 sc. 4, l. 72)
‘Expression is the dress of thought’ (Alexander Pope, the 18-century poet, Essay on Criticism Part 2, l. 318)

The new model

How then is this a reason for language change?
If we accept that languages and dialects ‘reflect’ in some way the perspectives (‘thoughts’) of the speakers, then we must accept that if their perspectives change, the language or dialect has to change concomitantly.
Similarly, if a language is adopted by ‘non-traditional’ speakers who have different cultural perspectives, then the language must adapt itself to these new perspectives as well.

Language contact and pidginisation (creolisation)

A pidgin (eg Bazaar Malay in 60s) is a temporary language that arises out different linguistic communities needing to communicate. (The process of creating a pidgin is called pidginisation.) A pidgin that is learnt as a mother tongue (eg Baba Malay in 60s) is called a ‘creole’. (The process of creating a creole is called creolisation.) Sometimes, these creoles become languages in their own right. New languages or new varieties of languages can therefore arise out of these situations of language contact.

English as a creole?

For a long time, Old English had contact with Norse and Danish (from Scandinavia). For a long time too, there was contact with Norman French, and then central or Parisian French, and also with Latin. Some argue that this led to a process of pidginisation of English. English — standard English — can therefore be considered a ‘bastard’ language. Some people argue that English is so acceptable internationally because it is so very accepting when it comes to new words, so accommodating when it comes to being influenced by other languages.

Example: Latin influence

It could be argued that the hypotactic structure – result of contact between English and Latin? Up until a couple of centuries ago, most Western scholars could be expected to be fairly fluent in Latin because there were so many learned and scholarly writings in Latin. Their knowledge of Latin could be said to have influenced their English writing style and some writers are known to have deliberately cultivated a Latinate style — including writers like John Milton (Paradise Lost, Paradise Regain’d).

Latin today?

Many of our common abbreviations in today’s English come from Latin: eg = exempli gratia [for the sake of example]; ie = id est [that is]; etc. = et cetera [and others]; a.m. = ante meridiem [before noon]; p.m. = post meridiem [after noon].
Our symbol for ‘and’ (the ampersand) is basically a decorative way of writing et, Latin for ‘and’.

CSE as a creole

Language planning

Crystal: Language planning is a term used in sociolinguistics to refer to a systematic attempt to solve the communication problems of a community by studying the various languages or dialects it uses and developing a realistic policy concerning their selection and use; often referred to as language engineering.

prestigious or powerful body, like to government, to take control and dictate that a particular variety should be chosen as the standard, and then standardised, and popularised through codification in dictionaries, grammars and other texts.
need to accelerate the process which would otherwise take a long time.
Governments have had a deliberate hand in planning Swahili in Tanzania, Mandarin in China, Bahasa Indonesia, and Tok Pisin in Papua New Guinea. Standardisation in English is however only partly deliberate.

Summary

Change can be related to:

attraction/repulsion (identity)
regularisation
world views and realities
language contact
language planning/engineering

Relevant books to read include:

David Graddol, et al., English: History, Diversity and Change (London: Routledge & OU, 1996)
Jean Aitchison, Language Change: Progress or Decay? (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991)
Laurie Bauer, Watching English Change (London: Longman, 1994)

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