How to write the perfect sentence

Orwell advised cutting as many words as possible, Woolf found energy in verbs, and Baldwin aimed for ‘a sentence as clean as a bone’. What can we learn from celebrated authors about the art of writing well?

Every writer, of school age and older, is in the sentences game. The sentence is our writing commons, the shared ground where all writers walk. A poet writes in sentences, and so does the unsung author who came up with “Items trapped in doors cause delays”. The sentence is the Ur-unit, the core material, the granular element that must be got right or nothing will be right. For James Baldwin, the only goal was “to write a sentence as clean as a bone”.

What can celebrated writers teach the rest of us about the art of writing a great sentence? A common piece of writing advice is to make your sentences plain, unadorned and invisible. George Orwell gave this piece of advice its epigram: “Good prose is like a windowpane.” A reader should notice the words no more than someone looking through glass notices the glass.

Except that you do notice the glass. Picture an English window in 1946, when Orwell wrote that sentence. It would be smeared with grime from smoke and coal dust and, since houses were damp and windows single-glazed, wont to mist and ice over. The glass might still be cracked from air-raid gunfire or bombs, or covered with shatterproof coating to protect people from flying shards. An odd metaphor to use, then, for clear writing.

Behind Orwell’s windowpane theory of prose lies a puritan pride, a sense that the writer will be purified by a clean, sinewy style as by an early morning run and a cold shower. “The great enemy of clear language is insincerity,” he wrote. Insincere writing spat out tired idioms “like a cuttlefish spurting out ink”. Bad ideas were the bedfellows of bad prose. Fake thoughts made fake sentences.

Some of this is true but none of it is a good way of learning how to write a sentence. More ethical demand than useful advice, it forces writers back to their own reserves of wisdom and authenticity. It blames bad writing on laziness and dishonesty, when a likelier culprit is lack of skill. If you ordered me to make a blancmange, all I could come up with would be a gloopy, inedible mess – not because I am lazy or dishonest, but because, although I have some vague idea that it needs sugar, cornflour and boiled milk, I don’t know how to make a blancmange.

Orwell saw the plain English sentence as the sword of existential truth, a cure-all for the bad faith of modern life. But much of the time he didn’t even follow his own advice. “If it is possible to cut a word out, always cut it out,” he ordered. Perhaps he should have written: “If you can cut a word, do.”

Orwell’s prose, as well as ignoring his own rules when it suits, is really a beautiful contrivance. Take the last thing he wrote, in his hospital notebook: “At 50, everyone has the face he deserves.” This unforgettable sentence has an argument behind it that a moment’s thought will reveal as unfair and untrue. Orwell’s oeuvre is full of such sentences that read like eternal verities and turn out to be nonsense. “We may find in the long run that tinned food is a deadlier weapon than the machine gun.” (We didn’t.) “Serious sport … is war minus the shooting.” (War minus the shooting isn’t war.) “Writing a book is a horrible, exhausting struggle, like a long bout of some painful illness.” (Steady on.

A good sentence imposes a logic on the world’s weirdness. It gets its power from the tension between the ease of its phrasing and the shock of its thought slid cleanly into the mind. A sentence, as it proceeds, is a paring away of options. Each added word, because of the English language’s dependence on word order, reduces the writer’s alternatives and narrows the reader’s expectations. But even up to the last word the writer has choices and can throw in a curveball. A sentence can begin in one place and end in another galaxy, without breaking a single syntactic rule. The poet Wayne Koestenbaum calls it “organising lava”, this pleasure to be got from “pushing a sentence in a wrong direction without altering its sweet grammatical composure”.

A memorable sentence makes immediate sense but sounds just slightly odd. The model Kate Moss, once asked for her motto, replied: “Nothing tastes as good as skinny feels” – a terrible message to send about dieting and body image, but a well-turned sentence, surely. Skinny, usually an adjective, is here turned into an abstract noun, paired with another abstract noun, nothing. And yet skinny is also quasi-concrete, because where it lies in the sentence suggests that it can actually be felt, just as food has a taste. But feels also retains its non-sensuous sense of intuiting or experiencing something: skinny feels good. As the sentence ends with the snap of a stressed syllable, our perspective has been altered in a way that feels true, even if we don’t share the sentiment. Reality has shifted a little and then clicked back into place.

A sentence is much more than its literal meaning. It is a living line of words where logic and lyric meet – a piece of both sense and sound, albeit the sound is only heard in the reader’s head. Rookie sentence-writers are often too busy worrying about the something they are trying to say and don’t worry enough about how that something looks and sounds. They look straight past the words into the meaning that they have strong-armed into them. They fasten on content and forget about form – forgetting that content and form are the same thing, that what a sentence says is the same as how it says it.

The word “sentence” comes from the Latin sentire, to feel. A sentence must be felt by the reader, and a feeling is something that grows and fades like anything else that is alive. A line of words should unfold in space and time, not reveal itself all at once, for the simple reason that it cannot be read all at once.

Read more at: https://www.theguardian.com/books/2018/sep/21/how-to-write-a-great-sentence?CMP=share_btn_tw&fbclid=IwAR37R9lxQ61JxQwLAiYxdPoOdOpJM9KFhWLpKq5YHA2fxz5_aOJoFeEGMrg

Where the ‘No Ending a Sentence With a Preposition’ Rule Comes From

It all goes back to 17th-century England and a fusspot named John Dryden.

THERE ARE THOUSANDS OF INDIVIDUAL rules for proper grammatical use of any given language; mostly, these are created, and then taught, in order to maximize understanding and minimize confusion. But the English language prohibition against “preposition stranding”—ending a sentence with a preposition like with, at, or of—is not like this. It is a fantastically stupid rule that when followed often has the effect of mangling a sentence. And yet for hundreds of years, schoolchildren have been taught to create disastrously awkward sentences like “With whom did you go?”

The origins of this rule date back to one guy you may have heard of. Of whom you may have heard. Whatever. His name was John Dryden.

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BORN IN 1631, JOHN DRYDEN was the most important figure throughout the entire Restoration period of the late 17th century. He was more prolific, more popular, more successful, and more ambitious than any of the other writers of his era, and his era included John Milton. He was England’s first official poet laureate. He wrote dozens of plays, poems, works of satire, literary prose, and criticism. The best modern edition of the collected works of John Dryden took the University of California Press about 50 years to create, and runs to 20 gigantic volumes. He invented the heroic couplet. He was the most important translator of classics into English for hundreds of years, possibly ever. He was, without a doubt, the guy in the London literary scene of the late 17th century, and that was a very important scene.

That said, Dryden was roundly mocked by his contemporaries. He does not seem to have been particularly well-liked. “There is more hostile response to Dryden than there is to any other early modern writer—I think than any other writer, period,” says Steven Zwicker, a professor at Washington University in St. Louis who is one of the premiere Dryden scholars in the world.

Dryden twice stated an opposition to preposition stranding. In an afterword for one of his own plays, he criticized Ben Jonson for doing this, saying: “The preposition in the end of the sentence; a common fault with him, and which I have but lately observed in my own writing.” Later, in a letter to a young writer who had asked for advice, he wrote: “In the correctness of the English I remember I hinted somewhat of concludding [sic] your sentences with prepositions or conjunctions sometimes, which is not elegant, as in your first sentence.”

Dryden does not state why he finds this to be “not elegant.” And yet somehow this completely unexplained, tiny criticism, buried in his mountain of works, lodged itself in the grammarian mind, and continued to be taught for hundreds of years later. This casual little comment would arguably be Dryden’s most enduring creation. It’s a little bit sad.

FOLLOWING THE DEATH OF OLIVER Cromwell, England was in a pretty weird place, and the English language was in a weirder one. The monarchy had been restored, but during Cromwell’s reign an awful lot of English writing had been stunted; for a time, plays were even banned, for fear of public political criticism. That’s a bigger deal than it sounds, because during the latter half of the 17th century, literacy rates in London—by far the highest in the country—were only around 20 percent. The language evolved on the stage, and that development was paused for a few decades.

At the time, there were at most a handful of what are called English grammars: basically, books instructing the proper way to use the English language. In the Restoration period, when Dryden was a star, the discussion of exactly what the English language was (and, in turn, who the English people were, and what England was) began to really rapidly evolve. Dryden is not very well-known today, but at the time he was the leading literary rockstar, and his words carried a huge amount of weight. He wasn’t really one of the leading grammarians of his time, being focused more on his plays and criticism, but he did, says Zwicker, have very firm opinions about what he considered good writing and what he considered bad writing.

Other writers of the time were hostile to Dryden, attacking him for changing his religion from the Church of England to Roman Catholicism, his political affiliation, for his ambition, and, it seems, because he was sort of a boring and witless conversationalist. You might expect that the guy to ban preposition stranding would be a pithy Mark Twain or Oscar Wilde type, full of great barbed quotes. But Dryden wasn’t that at all. “No one admired him for his verbal wit,” says Zwicker. “Certainly his writing is wonderful and clever, but he had practically no verbal presence at all.”

It is actually a bit of a mystery why he was so loathed at the time; Zwicker suggests some of it was probably envy at Dryden’s success, some was legitimate criticism of his style, and some was vague personality stuff. But a lot of this stuff seems like subtext, as if Dryden was attacked because he was Dryden and the reasons given might not have been telling the full story.

Dryden loved the classics; he was easily the most prominent translator and critic of Ovid, Horace, and Virgil, although his translations (like a lot of his own writing) were sort of bombastic and larger-than-life. He was fluent in Latin and worshipped the classics. And English was in a place where it was about to accelerate; it had been paused and now it was un-paused. Dryden’s ideas about what English should be were heavily motivated by Latin and Latinate ideas. It’s believed this is where his preposition thing comes from; in Latin, the preposition, as indicated by the first three letters of the word “preposition,” always comes before the noun. It is assumed that this is what motivated Dryden to make this case.

This is kind of a paradox as well; Dryden worshipped the classics, and was motivated by classical Latin, but was a defiant modernist, maybe even a progressive. He critiqued Shakespeare and Ben Jonson, applauded the newer writers of his own era, invented new forms which he then sought to popularize. But that’s the hold that the classics have: even when you’re trying to push things forward, the classics are always there.

WHAT’S SO FRUSTRATING ABOUT THIS whole preposition thing is that there doesn’t appear to be an easy answer as to how it became so completely lodged in formal English grammar. There are all these little hints as to why it might have taken hold—it is an easy-to-understand grammarian rule that came about at a time and place when English grammar was rapidly taking form, and it came from the mouth of the biggest literary figure of the time. But like Dryden himself, it’s a hard rule to get ahold of. Of which to get ahold.

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https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/why-cant-you-end-a-sentence-with-a-preposition

Resistance to changes in grammar is futile, say researchers

Linguists say that random chance plays a bigger role than previously thought in the evolution of language – but also that ‘English is weird’.

When it comes to changes in language, there’s no point crying over spilt milk: researchers charting fluctuations in English grammar say the rise of certain words, such as spilled, is probably down to chance, and that resistance is futile.

Comparisons have long been drawn between evolution and changes in language, with experts noting that preferences such as a desire for emphasis can act as a type of “natural selection”, affecting which words or forms of grammar are passed on between generations. 

But a new study shows that another evolutionary mechanism might play a key role : random chance.

 Should the Americanisation (or Americanization) of English worry us?

Rebecca Rideal

 

Read more

The authors of the study say that the work adds to our understanding of how language changes over centuries.

“Whether it is by random chance or selection, one of the things that is true about English – and indeed other languages – is that the language changes,” said Joshua Plotkin, co-author of the research from the University of Pennsylvania. “The grammarians might [win the battle] for a decade, but certainly over a century they are going to be on the losing side.”

Writing in the journal Nature, Plotkin and colleagues describe how they tracked different types of grammatical changes across the ages.

Among them, the team looked at changes in American English across more than one hundred thousand texts from 1810 onwards, focusing on the use of “ed” in the past tense of verbs compared with irregular forms – for example, “spilled” versus “spilt”. 

The hunt threw up 36 verbs which had at least two different forms of past tense, including quit/quitted and leaped/leapt. However for the majority, including spilled v spilt, the team said that which form was waxing or waning was not clearly down to selection – meaning it is probably down to chance over which word individuals heard and copied. 

“Chance can play an important role even in language evolution – as we know it does in biological evolution,” said Plotkin, adding that the impact of random chance on language had not been fully appreciated before.

For just six of the 36 verbs, the rise of one form over another was clearly not only down to chance, but was largely a result of active preference – akin to natural selection.

The study also revealed that a flower today is more likely to be “smelled” rather than “smelt” and that the neighbour’s cat probably “dove” behind the sofa – although, as Plotkin notes, British felines remain more likely to have dived.Specifically, “woke” is increasingly preferred over “waked” and “lit” more popular than “lighted”, while “weaved” and “snuck” are on track to eventually overtake “wove” and “sneaked”, respectively. 

But there was a puzzle. “The prevailing view is that if language is changing it should in general change towards the regular form, because the regular form is easier to remember,” said Plotkin. However, four of the six verbs show a rise in the irregular form of the past tense.

That, the team note, might at least in part be down to whether the word sounds similar to other commonly used words of the age. For example the increasing popularity of “dove” rather than “dived” in American English coincides with the development of cars, and hence the rise of soundalike “drive” and past tense “drove” in describing journeys. The team add that they suspect similar effects might be at work in a number of the verbs that currently look like they might be changing by chance alone.

 After Brexit, EU English will be free to morph into a distinct variety

Cathleen O'Grady

 

Read more

The authors add that the research suggests rare words are more likely to vary over time and be subject to random chance.

The study also explores the use of negation in sentences, such as “I say not”, across English texts dating from the 12th to the 16th centuries, revealing that the placement of the negative word has changed more than once due to selection, possibly because of a desire for emphasis.

“There a was period of time where double negation ... was the way to negate things, just as it is in French today,” said Plotkin.

Dr Christine Cuskley, from the Centre for Language Evolution at the University of Edinburgh, agreed that similarities to commonly used irregular verbs could affect which form of past tense is on the rise.

But she said that it was likely that there were other pressures affecting which form of a past tense is favoured. What’s more, Cuskley added, it is not clear if the conclusions from the latest research could be applied to other languages.

“English is weird,” she said.

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https://www.theguardian.com/science/2017/nov/01/resistance-to-changes-in-grammar-is-futile-say-researchers?CMP=share_btn_tw

Trump just revealed his official inauguration poster and it has a glaring typo

President Trump’s official inauguration portrait went up for sale with an obvious typo on it this evening.

The print of Trump, sold on the Library of Congress’s website, features a quote from the president which mistakes “too” for “to.”

“No dream is too big, no challenge is to great. Nothing we want for the future is beyond our reach,” the quote says.

Social media users quickly mocked the misspelling, prompting the print’s swift removal from the website.

_______________

http://usuncut.com/news/trump-just-revealed-official-inauguration-poster-glaring-typo/

Noam Chomsky on the Evolution of Language: A Biolinguistic Perspective

Human language is crucial to the scientific quest to understand what kind of creatures we are and, thus crucial to unlocking the mysteries of human nature.

In the interview that follows, Noam Chomsky, the scholar who single-handedly revolutionized the modern field of linguistics, discusses the evolution of language and lays out the biolinguist perspective -- the idea that a human being's language represents a state of some component of the mind. This is an idea that continues to baffle many non-experts, many of whom have sought to challenge Chomsky's theory of language without really understanding it.

Journalist and ''radical chic" reactionary writer Tom Wolfe was the latest to do so in his laughable new book, The Kingdom of Speech, which seeks to take down Charles Darwin and Noam Chomsky through sarcastic and ignorant remarks, making vitriolic attacks on their personalities and expressing a deep hatred for the Left. Indeed, this much-publicized book not only displays amazing ignorance about evolution in general and the field of linguistics in particular, but also aims to portray Noam Chomsky as evil -- due to his constant and relentless exposure of the crimes of US foreign policy and other challenges to the status quo.

C. J. Polychroniou: Noam, in your recently published book with Robert C. Berwick (Why Only Us: Language and Evolution, MIT Press 2016), you address the question of the evolution of language from the perspective of language as part of the biological world. This was also the theme of your talk at an international physics conference held this month in Italy, as it seems that the scientific community appears to have a deeper appreciation and a more subtle understanding of your theory of language acquisition than most social scientists, who seem to maintain grave reservations about biology and the idea of human nature in general. Indeed, isn't it the case that the specific ability of our species to acquire any language was a major theme of interest to the modern scientific community from the time of Galileo?

Noam Chomsky: This is quite true. At the outset of the modern scientific revolution, Galileo and the scientist-philosophers of the monastery of Port Royal issued a crucial challenge to those concerned with the nature of human language, a challenge that had only occasionally been recognized until it was taken up in the mid-20th century and became the primary concern of much of the study of language. For short, I'll refer to it as the Galilean challenge. These great founders of modern science were awed by the fact that language permits us (in their words) to construct "from 25 or 30 sounds an infinite variety of expressions, which although not having any resemblance in themselves to that which passes through our minds, nevertheless do not fail to reveal all of the secrets of the mind, and to make intelligible to others who cannot penetrate into the mind all that we conceive and all of the diverse movements of our souls."

We can now see that the Galilean challenge requires some qualifications, but it is very real and should, I think, be recognized as one of the deepest insights in the rich history of inquiry into language and mind in the past 2500 years.

The challenge had not been entirely ignored. For Descartes, at about the same time, the human capacity for unbounded and appropriate use of language was a primary basis for his postulation of mind as a new creative principle. In later years, there is occasional recognition that language is a creative activity that involves "infinite use of finite means," in Wilhelm von Humboldt's formulation and that it provides "audible signs for thought," in the words of linguist William Dwight Whitney a century ago. There has also been awareness that these capacities are a species-property, shared by humans and unique to them -- the most striking feature of this curious organism and a foundation for its remarkable achievements. But there was never much to say beyond a few phrases.

But why is it that the view of language as a species-specific capacity is not taken up until well into the 20th century?

There is a good reason why the insights languished until mid-20th century: intellectual tools were not available for even formulating the problem in a clear enough way to address it seriously. That changed thanks to the work of Alan Turing and other great mathematicians who established the general theory of computability on a firm basis, showing in particular how a finite object like the brain can generate an infinite variety of expressions. It then became possible, for the first time, to address at least part of the Galilean challenge directly -- although, regrettably, the earlier history [for example, the history of Galileo's and Descartes' inquiries into the philosophy of language, as well as the Port-Royal Grammar by Antoine Arnauld and Claude Lancelot] was entirely unknown at the time.

With these intellectual tools available, it becomes possible to formulate what we may call the Basic Property of human language: The language faculty provides the means to construct a digitally infinite array of structured expressions, each of which has a semantic interpretation expressing a thought, and each of which can be externalized by means of some sensory modality. The infinite set of semantically interpreted objects constitutes what has sometimes been called a "language of thought": the system of thoughts that receive linguistic expression and that enter into reflection, inference, planning and other mental processes, and when externalized, can be used for communication and other social interactions. By far, the major use of language is internal -- thinking in language.

Can you please expand on the notion of the internal language?

We now know that although speech is the usual form of sensory motor externalization, it can just as well be sign or even touch, discoveries that require a slight reformulation of the Galilean challenge. A more fundamental qualification has to do with the way the challenge is formulated: in terms of production of expressions. So formulated, the challenge overlooks some basic issues. Production, like perception, accesses the internal language but cannot be identified with it. We must distinguish the internalized system of knowledge from the actions that access it. The theory of computability enables us to establish the distinction, which is an important one, familiar in other domains.

Consider, for example, human arithmetical competence. In studying it, we routinely distinguish the internal system of knowledge from the actions that access it, like multiplying numbers in our head, an action that involves many factors beyond intrinsic knowledge; memory constraints, for example. The same is true of language. Production and perception access the internal language but involve other factors as well, including again short-term memory, matters that began to be studied with some care in the early days of concern with the Galilean challenge, now reformulated to focus on the internal language, the system of knowledge that is accessed by actual production and by perception.

Does this mean that we have solved the mystery of the internal language? For example, the whole idea continues to be questioned in some quarters, although it is widely accepted, apparently, by most scientists.

There has been considerable progress in understanding the nature of the internal language, but its free creative use remains a mystery. That comes as no surprise. In a recent review of the state of the art concerning far simpler cases of voluntary action, two leading researchers, neuroscientists Emilio Bizzi and Robert Ajemian, write that we are beginning to learn something about the puppet and the strings, but the puppeteer remains shrouded in mystery. That is even more dramatically true for such creative acts as the normal [everyday] use of language, the unique human capacity that so impressed the founders of modern science.

In formulating the Basic Property, we are assuming that the faculty of language is shared among humans. That seems solidly established. There are no known group differences in language capacity, and individual variation is found only at the margins. More generally, genetic variation among humans is quite slight, not too surprisingly, given the recency of common origins.

The fundamental task of inquiry into language is to determine the nature of the Basic Property -- the genetic endowment that underlies the faculty of language. To the extent that its properties are understood, we can seek to investigate particular internal languages, each an instantiation of the Basic Property, much as each individual visual system is an instantiation of the human faculty of vision. We can investigate how the internal languages are acquired and used, how the language faculty itself evolved, its basis in human genetics and the ways it functions in the human brain. This general program of research has been called the Biolinguistic Program. The theory of the genetically-based language faculty is called Universal Grammar; the theory of each individual language is called its Generative Grammar.

But languages vary greatly from one another, so what's the link between Generative Grammar and Universal Grammar?

Languages appear to be extremely complex, varying radically from one another. And indeed, a standard belief among professional linguists 60 years ago was that languages can vary in arbitrary ways and each must be studied without preconceptions. Similar views were held at the time about organisms generally. Many biologists would have agreed with molecular biologist Gunther Stent's conclusion that the variability of organisms is so free as to constitute "a near infinitude of particulars which have to be sorted out case by case." When understanding is thin, we expect to see extreme variety and complexity.

However, a great deal has been learned since then. Within biology, it is now recognized that the variety of life forms is very limited, so much so that the hypothesis of a "universal genome" has been seriously advanced. My own feeling is that linguistics has undergone a similar development, and I will keep here to that strand in contemporary study of language.

The Basic Property takes language to be a computational system, which we therefore expect to observe general conditions on computational efficiency. A computational system consists of a set of atomic elements and rules to construct more complex ones. For generation of the language of thought, the atomic elements are word-like, though not words; for each language, the set of these elements is its lexicon. The lexical items are commonly regarded as cultural products, varying widely with experience and linked to extra-mental entities [objects entirely outside of our minds, such as the tree outside the window] -- an assumption expressed in the titles of standard works, such as W.V. Quine's influential study Word and Object. Closer examination reveals a very different picture, one that poses many mysteries. Let's put that aside for now, turning to the computational procedure.

Clearly, we will seek the simplest computational procedure consistent with the data of language, for reasons that are implicit in the basic goals of scientific inquiry. It has long been recognized that simplicity of theory translates directly to explanatory depth. A more specific version of this quest for understanding was provided by a famous dictum of Galileo's, which has guided the sciences since their modern origins: nature is simple, and it is the task of the scientist to demonstrate this, from the motion of the planets, to an eagle's flight, to the inner workings of a cell, to the growth of language in the mind of a child. Linguistics has an additional motive of its own for seeking the simplest theory: it must face the problem of evolvability. Not a great deal is known about evolution of modern humans, but the few facts that are well established, and others that have recently been coming to light, are rather suggestive and conform well to the conclusion that the language faculty is near optimal for a computational system, the goal we should seek on purely methodological grounds.

Did language exist before the emergence of Homo Sapiens?

One fact that does appear to be well established is, as I have already mentioned, that the faculty of language is a true species property, invariant among human groups -- and furthermore, unique to humans in its essential properties. It follows that there has been little or no evolution of the faculty since human groups separated from one another. Recent genomic studies place this date not very long after the appearance of anatomically modern humans about 200,000 years ago, perhaps some 50,000 years later, when the San group in Africa separated from other humans. There is some evidence that it might have been even earlier. There is no evidence of anything like human language, or symbolic activities altogether, before the emergence of modern humans, Homo Sapiens Sapiens. That leads us to expect that the faculty of language emerged along with modern humans or not long after -- a very brief moment in evolutionary time. It follows, then, that the Basic Property should indeed be very simple. The conclusion conforms to what has been discovered in recent years about the nature of language -- a welcome convergence.

The discoveries about early separation of the San people are highly suggestive ... [they] have significantly different externalized languages. With irrelevant exceptions, their languages are all and only the languages with phonetic clicks, with corresponding adaptations in the vocal tract. The most likely explanation for these facts, developed in detail in current work by Dutch linguist Riny Huijbregts, is that possession of internal language preceded separation, which in turn preceded externalization, the latter in somewhat different ways in separated groups. Externalization seems to be associated with the first signs of symbolic behavior in the archaeological record, after the separation. Putting these observations together, it seems that we are reaching a stage in understanding where the account of evolution of language can perhaps be fleshed out in ways that were unimaginable until quite recently.

When do universal properties of language come to light?

Universal properties of the language faculty began to come to light as soon as serious efforts were undertaken to construct generative grammars, including quite simple ones that had never been noticed, and that are quite puzzling -- a phenomenon familiar in the history of the natural sciences. One such property is structure-dependence: the rules that yield the language of thought attend solely to structural properties, ignoring properties of the externalized signal, even such simple properties as linear order.

To illustrate, consider the sentence birds that fly instinctively swim. It is ambiguous: the adverb "instinctively" can be associated with the preceding verb (fly instinctively) or the following one (instinctively swim). Suppose now that we extract the adverb from the sentence, forming instinctively, birds that fly swim. Now the ambiguity is resolved: The adverb is construed only with the linearly more remote but structurally closer verb swim, not the linearly closer but structurally more remote verb fly. The only possible interpretation -- birds swim -- is the unnatural one, but that doesn't matter: the rules apply rigidly, independent of meaning and fact. What is puzzling is that the rules ignore the simple computation of linear distance and keep to the far more complex computation of structural distance.

The property of structure dependence holds for all constructions in all languages, and it is indeed puzzling. Furthermore, it is known without relevant evidence, as is evident in cases like the one I just gave and innumerable others. Experiment shows that children understand that rules are structure-dependent as early as they can be tested, by about age 3, and do not make errors -- and are, of course, not instructed. We can be quite confident, then, that structure-dependence follows from principles of universal grammar that are deeply rooted in the human language faculty. There is evidence from other sources that supports the conclusion that structure-dependence is a true linguistic universal, deeply rooted in language design. Research conducted in Milan a decade ago, initiated by Andrea Moro, showed that invented languages keeping to the principle of structure-dependence elicit normal activation in the language areas of the brain, but much simpler systems using linear order in violation of these principles yield diffuse activation, implying that experimental subjects are treating them as a puzzle, not a language. Similar results were found in work by Neil Smith and Ianthi Tsimpli in their investigation of a cognitively deficient but linguistically gifted subject. They also made the interesting observation that [people with average cognitive abilities] can solve the problem if it is presented to them as a puzzle, but not if it is presented as a language, presumably activating the language faculty.

The only plausible conclusion, then, is that structure-dependence is an innate property of the language faculty, an element of the Basic Property. Why should this be so? There is only one known answer, and fortunately, it is the answer we seek for general reasons: The computational operations of language are the simplest possible ones. Again, that is the outcome that we hope to reach on methodological grounds, and that is to be expected in the light of the evidence about evolution of language already mentioned.

What about the so-called representational doctrine about language? What makes it a false idea for human language?

As I mentioned, the conventional view is that atomic elements of language are cultural products, and that the basic ones -- those used for referring to the world -- are associated with extra-mental entities. This representationalist doctrine has been almost universally adopted in the modern period. The doctrine appears to hold for animal communication: a monkey's calls, for example, are associated with specific physical events. But the doctrine is radically false for human language, as was recognized as far back as classical Greece.

To illustrate, let's take the first case that was discussed in pre-Socratic philosophy, the problem posed by Heraclitus: how can we cross the same river twice? To put it differently, why are two appearances understood to be two stages of the same river? Contemporary philosophers have suggested that the problem is solved by taking a river to be a four-dimensional object, but that simply restates the problem: why this object and not some different one, or none at all?

When we look into the question, puzzles abound. Suppose that the flow of the river has been reversed. It is still the same river. Suppose that what is flowing becomes 95 percent arsenic because of discharges from an upstream plant. It is still the same river. The same is true of other quite radical changes in the physical object. On the other hand, with very slight changes it will no longer be a river at all. If its sides are lined with fixed barriers and it is used for oil tankers, it is a canal, not a river. If its surface undergoes a slight phase change and is hardened, a line is painted down the middle, and it is used to commute to town, then it is a highway, no longer a river. Exploring the matter further, we discover that what counts as a river depends on mental acts and constructions. The same is true, quite generally, of even the most elementary concepts: tree, water, house, person, London, or in fact, any of the basic words of human language.  Radically, unlike animals, the items of human language and thought uniformly violate the representationalist doctrine.

Furthermore, the intricate knowledge of the means of even the simplest words, let alone others, is acquired virtually without experience. At peak periods of language acquisition, children are acquiring about a word an hour, that is, often on one presentation. It must be, then, that the rich meaning of even the most elementary words is substantially innate. The evolutionary origin of such concepts is a complete mystery, one that may not be resolvable by means available to us.

So we definitely need to distinguish speech from language, right?

Returning to the Galilean challenge, it has to be reformulated to distinguish language from speech, and to distinguish production from internal knowledge -- the latter an internal computational system that yields a language of thought, a system that might be remarkably simple, conforming to what the evolutionary record suggests. Secondary processes map the structures of language to one or another sensory-motor system for externalization. These processes appear to be the locus of the complexity and variety of linguistic behavior, and its mutability over time.

There are suggestive recent ideas about the neural basis for the operations of the computational system, and about its possible evolutionary origins. The origin of the atoms of computation, however, remains a complete mystery, as does a major question that concerned those who formulated the Galilean challenge: the Cartesian question of how language can be used in the normal creative way, in a manner appropriate to situations but not caused by them, in ways that are incited and inclinedbut not compelled,in Cartesian terms. The mystery holds for even the simplest forms of voluntary motion, as discussed earlier.

A great deal has been learned about language since the Biolinguistic Program was initiated. It is fair to say, I think, that more has been learned about the nature of language, and about a very wide variety of typologically different language, than in the entire 2,500 year history of inquiry into language. But as is familiar in the sciences, the more we learn, the more we discover what we do not know. And the more puzzling it seems.

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http://www.truth-out.org/opinion/item/37725-noam-chomsky-on-the-evolution-of-language-a-biolinguistic-perspective?_scpsug=crawled_53670_671a21f0-e355-11e6-db5b-00221934899c#_scpsug=crawled_53670_671a21f0-e355-11e6-db5b-00221934899c

Not the oignon: fury as France changes 2,000 spellings and ditches circumflex

French linguistic purists have voiced online anger at the loss of one of their favourite accents – the pointy little circumflex hat (ˆ) that sits on top of certain vowels.

A change in the spelling of some 2,000 French words will come into effect in new primary school textbooks being released for the start of the school year in September, the education ministry and publishers have announced.

The circumflex accent will become optional for many words, as will other spelling changes that have purists rubbing their eyes – such as onion, which can now be spelled “ognon” as well as the traditional “oignon”.

The changes, which have caused uproar on French Twitter, were first approved by the prestigious guardians of the French language, the Academie Française, in 1990.

Since then both versions have been accepted, but the new spellings only began appearing in official documents in the past few years.

The 2015 official bulletin on new school teaching curricula refers to the 1990 changes as the gold standard for teaching spelling.

“What is new is a more explicit reference” to the reformed spelling in official material, said Sylvie Marce of the textbook publisher Belin. Some publishers had already made the changes.

The changes were made to fix spelling anomalies and inconsistencies, according to a website devoted to the recommended spelling.

It adds hyphens, takes them away, tweaks spellings and removes the circumflex from the ‘i’ and the ‘u’ where the accent makes no change to accent or meaning.

The circumflex is “one of the main causes of errors and its usage is random”, said the website.

But many are not convinced.

“I will continue to use the circumflex, and to judge those who don’t,” wrote one Twitter user.

The hashtag  #JeSuisCirconflexe (I am circumflex) – a nod to the Je Suis Charlie phrase that swept social media after the attack on Charlie Hebdo in January last year – went viral in France.

In other changes, “week-end” becomes “weekend” as in English, but the word “leader” takes on a more French spelling of “leadeur” in the recommended spelling.

“This has been the official spelling in the Republic for 25 years. What is surprising is that we are surprised,” said Michel Lussault, president of the school curriculum board.

“There were strange spelling anomalies linked to historic shifts so the Academie really made sure these changes were understandable,” he said.

It was not an upheaval, he added, more a “clean-up”.

When making the new spelling recommendations in 1990, the then “perpetual secretary” of the Academie Française Maurice Druon wrote that “language is a living thing”, adding: “Work should begin again in 30 years, if not earlier.”

10 spellings that will change

Oignon becomes ognon (onion)

Nénuphar becomes nénufar (waterlily)

S’entraîner becomes s’entrainer (to train)

Maîtresse becomes maitresse (mistress or female teacher)

Coût becomes cout (cost)

Paraître becomes paraitre (to appear)

Week-end becomes weekend (weekend)

Mille-pattes becomes millepattes (centipedes)

Porte-monnaie becomes portemonnaie (wallet)

Des après-midi becomes des après-midis (afternoons)

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http://www.theguardian.com/world/2016/feb/05/not-the-oignon-fury-france-changes-2000-spellings-ditches-circumflex?CMP=fb_gu

Lingue a confronto: il cinese standard

La lingua cinese standard è il Mandarino ( Putonghua) sin dal 1913, ma in realtà esistono numerosi dialetti, perciò sarebbe più opportuno parlare di lingue cinesi.  Le lingue cinesi appartengono alla grande famiglia delle lingue sino-tibetane, i cui due raggruppamenti principali sono le lingue cinesi o sinitiche e le lingue tibeto-birmane.

I parlanti cinesi che vivono, lavorano o frequentano le nostre scuole, non necessariamente avranno una competenza linguistica legata alla lingua standard, cioè il Mandarino, anzi, è vero il contrario, cioè che molti di loro potrebbero non conoscerla affatto o comunque comunicano nei propri dialetti locali. Infatti, se teniamo conto del fatto che la maggior parte dei migranti cinesi nel nostro paese sono originari della provincia dello Zhèhiāng, la maggior parte di loro utilizzerà perciò il dialetto per comunicare all’interno della loro comunità. Ovviamente, questo non vale per coloro che hanno appreso la lingua cinese standard attraverso il proprio ordinamento scolastico di origine. Questa prospettiva ci pone davanti il problema della diversità linguistica all’interno della stessa lingua, benché si possano riscontrare dei tratti in comune tra i diversi dialetti.

Tornando alla caratteristica della lingua cinese, dobbiamo sin da subito sottolineare che si tratta di una lingua isolante, cioè non caratterizzata dalla flessione e priva di morfologia. Tutte le relazioni sintattiche della lingua cinese sono rappresentate dall’ordine di successione dei costituenti della frase e attraverso l’impiego di particelle grammaticali anziché tramite affissi e cambiamenti morfologici delle parole:

-       I nomi sono invarianti rispetto al genere e al numero: assenza di genere maschile, femminile, singolare e plurale;

-       Assenza di declinazioni, coniugazioni verbali, modi verbali, ecc.

-      I morfemi lessicali svolgono la funzione di morfemi grammaticali

Altre importanti caratteristiche sono:

-     La varietà tonale (ad una sillaba possono essere associati quattro diversi valori tonali);

-       É una lingua sillabica, con un povero repertorio fonologico;

La complessità della lingua cinese mette in luce le numerose difficoltà dell’apprendere il sistema fonologico dell’italiano da parte di apprendenti cinesi, i quali, è evidente,  hanno poca dimestichezza con combinazioni di consonanti e con strutture sillabiche articolate.

Inoltre, la loro lingua non possiede distinzioni di lunghezza e di sonorità, ma solo un’opposizione tra alcune consonanti occlusive aspirate e non aspirate. Le parti del discorso tendono a non essere distinte formalmente: una parola come il cinese 工作 gōngzuò può significare sia lavoro che lavorare, a seconda del contesto.

Inoltre, nelle lingue isolanti, l’ordine delle parole tende ad essere piuttosto rigido, in quanto svolge la funzione di identificare, tramite la posizione nella frase, i vari ruoli sintattici  - soggetto, oggetto, etc. -. Il riferimento alla cornice temporale emerge in larga parte grazie al lessico.

Nonostante la lingua cinese ed italiana abbiano entrambi l’ordine consueto all’interno dell’enunciato, di soggetto-  verbo - oggetto, il cinese costruisce i gruppi di parole  - o sintagmi - in maniera spesso  

contrapposta rispetto alla nostra lingua (Li & Thompson, 1981: 25-26):

他她在厨房里炒饭 - Tā zài chúfáng lǐ chǎo fàn

Letteralmente: Lui/lei in cucina dentro saltare riso

Traduzione: Prepara il riso in cucina

Il cinese, come è noto, viene reso grafematicamente con un sistema semasiografico, o comunemente detti ideogrammi, dove il segno grafico non veicola solo un suono, ma anche un significato. Ogni unità grafica o carattere cinese corrisponde ad una sillaba:

-       Un carattere o una sillaba può rappresentare una parola;

-       Due o più caratteri / sillabe possono rappresentare una parola;

-       Due o più caratteri / sillabe rappresentano una parola complessa, costituita da più morfemi.

Il primo studioso ad occuparsi del problema della scrittura cinese fu Xu Shen (58 d.C. – 147 d.C.), autore del primo dizionario cinese contenente l’analisi dei caratteri. Dopo aver analizzato e raggruppato tutti i caratteri in 6 categorie, Xu Shen codificò anche la tecnica per costruirne di nuovi.

Possiamo individuare 6 famiglie dei caratteri: pittogrammi, indicatori, ideogrammi, fonogrammi, deflettivi e prestati.

-       I pittogrammi (immagini dell’oggetto; caratteri-immagine) rappresentano in forma stilizzata l’oggetto che intendono evocare. 人 rén = uomo; 中 zhòng = centro; 山 shān = montagna.

-       Gli indicatori (simboli indiretti) traducono in segni le idee astratte. Si possono formare aggiungendo a un pittogramma uno o più segni convenzionali. 三 sān = tre; 上 shàng = sopra/salire; 下 xià = sotto/scendere.

-       Gli ideogrammi (associativi, composti logici) sono il risultato della combinazione di due o più pittogrammi allo scopo di formare caratteri con un significato diverso. 日 rì = sole + 月 yuè = luna -> 明 míng = luminoso (sole+luna).

-       I fonogrammi (determinativi fonetici, aggregati fonetici) costituiscono quasi il 90% dei caratteri esistenti. Si tratta di caratteri composti da due parti, di cui una portatrice di significato e l’altra determinante la pronuncia. 他 tā = lui; 她 tā = lei.

-       I deflettivi (simboli a interpretazione reciproca) sono caratteri simili nel disegno, collegati nel significato, ma con pronuncia differente. 老 lǎo = anziano; 考 kǎo = esame.

-       I prestati (caratteri fonetici in prestito) non hanno attinenza né col significato né con la funzione fonetica ma derivano solo dall’uso e sono spesso etimologicamente inspiegabili; il più delle volte si è trattato di un trasferimento di significato su un carattere omofono. 萬/万wàn = diecimila derivante da “scorpione”; 西 xī  = occidente derivante da “uccello nel nido”; 來 /来 lái = venire derivante da “cereale”.

Il sistema del verbo cinese si basa su un’unica forma priva di distinzioni di numero, persona, tempo e modo: la collocazione temporale dell’evento viene affidata molto spesso ad elementi lessicali - nomi o avverbi -.

Queste differenze linguistiche mettono alla luce come sia difficile per gli apprendenti cinesi imparare una seconda lingua straniera, in quanto già le prime differenze evidenti sono quelle legate all’assenza di alcune componenti sintattiche e lessicali, oltre che alla diversa organizzazione dell’enunciato, caratteristiche che spesso diamo per scontato anche all’interno nelle nostre istituzioni scolastiche in classi con apprendenti cinesi.

Per quanto riguarda il livello delle traduzioni inoltre, è evidente che il lavoro del traduttore è piuttosto arduo e occorre avere una conoscenza approfondita della lingua e della cultura di destinazione, cercando di interpretare il senso della frase a partire dal contesto di attuazione,  prestando attenzione alla fedeltà  dei canoni di riferimento, allo stile, alla morfologia, al lessico e all’intera organizzazione del discorso.

http://www.torkanweb.com/#!Culture-a-confronto/c1jsz/ih3uxxyj1

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Dott.ssa Giovanna Bondanese, laurea in Lingue e Letterature Straniere, laurea magistrale in Traduzione Specialistica, laurea specialistica in Scienze della Mediazione Interculturale. Insegnante di lingua inglese, francese ed italiano per stranieri. Traduttrice, mediatrice interculturale.