Re: Go, "Western" vs. "Asian" Thinking - Not What I Had In Mind... : (

Dear Wenbier,

your little essay is interesting and well written, but I think your
claims are not sustantiated.

WenBier a écrit :

Let me start by saying that languages typically rise to a high point,
and subsequently fall until the culture that gave birth to the
language dies (or becomes relatively insignificant). Not

An interesting theory, but just like Milts argument about games it
looks like it lacks meaning, unless you are able to pinpoint a measure
of "high" and "low" in languages. What do you mean exactly? I'm
outlining the actual kind of difference in the appendix below, but how
can you tell what is high and what is low?

surprisingly, the rise and fall will roughly reflect the rise and fall
of that culture. In ancient Greek culture, for example, we have Attic
Greek, the high point, and with the dieing away of Athenian culture,
so went the language. Roman culture showed much the same pattern. It
is worth pointing out that cultures start going down once they abandon
the ideas that propelled them to greatness in the first place.

As for proving that modern language conveys less information, consider
the following simple example. In (high) Elizabethan English we
distinguished between the third person singular, thou, and the third
person plural, you. It is obvious that eliminating 'thou' conveys
less information.

True, that is the kind of development that has usually taken place. The
interesting question is: what drives this development? The loss of
expressiveness must surely be compensated by some important advantage,
why would it have taken place otherwise?

Does it sound insignificant? Well, it is not.
With the sudden change from the King James Bible to modern English
translations, no small amount of confusion has ensued because of this
change. For example, "When thou prayest..." from the KJ Bible verses
"When you pray..." in the modern translations. The first introduced
instruction for you (the individual) on where to pray. The second
introduced instruction for you (as an individual or you a group, which
is it?) on where to pray. The very point is lost in translation, and
can only be recovered by in introduction of periphrasis.

Most ancient languages are very sophisticated instruments when
compared to their modern counterparts. If you don't believe me try
studying one of the following: Classical Greek, classical Sanskrit, or
Old (classical) Chinese. Part of the difficulty that you will find in
studying these languages is that they were clearly the product of
minds that though far more carefully and deeply than we do today. It

How could that be possible?

is not that these ancient people simply were thinking the same way
that we do, but expressing their thoughts in a different way. The
difficulty arises from the fact that we now think on a much lower
level. (10k perhaps.) This is precisely why it is so impossible to
come up with translations of these ancient thinkers and artists that
are equal (or really even close) to the original.

It may be a shock for many to hear this, but they were in many ways
our betters. No, they did not fly from city to city in sophisticated
jetliners. Nor did they work on computers with blazing fast
processors. But are we always better for such things? Perhaps, just
perhaps, when you live in a world in which that trip takes ten times
as long and puts you very life in peril at the same time, you might
put a bit more thought into the trip, and just a bit more thought into
what you will do and how you do it once you get there.

Personally, I am not an evolutionist, but even if I were the men of

You mean that you don't belive in biological evolution?? What do you
believe then, that mankind and all the species were created a few
thousand years by a personal god and has not evolved since then? Allow
me to say that that's ridiculous and contrary to known facts. I read
recently that 50% of the americans don't belive in evolution, I think
that is both amazing and horrifying.

ancient Greece, or ancient China were not so far displaced down the
time line to make a difference in who they were, genetically speaking.

Quite true, there aren't any significant biological differences between
us and people living in antiquity. So how can you justify your belief
that they were more sophisticated?
Your assertion seems quite unreasonable to me.

The classic languages were spoken in a time when the vast majority of
people were obviously illiterate, maybe nomads or at best peasants.
Their environment was much poorer than ours in every respect. Fewer
objects. Fewer means of communications. Fewer people around. Fewer
kinds of relations between people. Fewer reasons for abstract thinking
and far less of the stimulus from previous thinking that can be
absorbed by reading, media, surfing on internet, in school, at
university etc. If your assertion and your premises are true, we are
facing a complete mystery.

There must have been driving forces of some sort pushing the
development of language. I would expect that one has to think in terms
of efficiency and economy somehow. Maybe utterances become clearer and
less ambiguous when many words are used? If the meaning of a sentence
hangs on some minor suffix in every word, maybe it is easier for the
listener to get it wrong when there is some disturbance on the line,
compared to a language where many words are used? If this is the
driving force I still find it strange that the development has taken
place while written language has become more and more important - when
reading there are fewer possibilities for misinterpretation. Do we have
more time available now, compared to ancient times, so that we can live
with expressing ourselves in more words? Doesn't sound likely to me.

From your eloquent praise of ancient Athens one almost gets the
impression that you believe language to be formed by the educated few,
rather than by the vast majority of speakers. Could one theory be that
recently the stupid majority of people have more influence, compared to
antiquity? Unfortunately that's completely out of the question as well,
the elite has much more power to shape the behaviour of ordinary people
today than in ancient societies, particularly in such a fundamental
thing as how they speak.

Looking forward to more interesting contributions to the discussion,
best regards,
H.

Appendix.
I'm not a linguist, but I studied a few languages. For those who are
not familiar with the classic languages I'd like to describe the
essential differences compared to modern ones, as I see them.
Basically, what used to be expressed in few but more precise and
differentiated words is now expressed in more words.

There are the verbs for instance, where the difference is most easily
appreciated by comparison with anvient greek. I learned french at
school and discovered the difference between the imperfective and the
passé simple / passé composé:
"j' allais" = I was going
"j'allai" = I went.
In english the -ing form is used to express the same thing. In swedish
for instance, there is no equivalent and the concept has to be
expressed in more words. In french, this difference occurs only in the
past tense and stands out as a peculiarity. The grammatical term for
this kind of distinction between something ongoing or repeated and
something that just happened suddenly is "aspect" of the verb. When I
took up studying greek many years ago, I discovered to my delight that
aspect in greek was not just a peculiarity that occurred in one finite
verb form, but a fundamental cathegory of all verb forms, even of the
infinitive and participles. Greek verbs come with three different
aspects in all forms: the imperfective (ongoing), the aoristic (happens
suddenly) and the perfective (is finished, but may influence the
situation at the time the phrase is expressed in some way). Greek verbs
are also conjugated in all tenses according to "mode", i.e. the way the
speaker realates to what is being said, like indicative (simply stating
a fact), subjunctive (expressing doubt or feelings about what is said),
optative (expressing a wish) etc. Likewise greek had in all forms of
the verb what is called "genera verbi", three different forms
expressing active, passive and medio-passive (I did something myself,
rather than arranging for it to be done by someone else). The verbs are
clearly conjugated according to tense (past, present, future), person
(I/we, thou/you, he/they) and numerus (singular, dualis(2) and plural).
This way one can dispense with many extra words, since the finite verb
forms are conjugated one doesn't need to include any subject pronoun to
indicate who is doing someting, for instance. The greek verbal system
thus becomes a logical, multi-dimensional matrix with more than 1000
different forms of any verb. This would appear very clever, short and
optimised if all verbs were regular, unfortunately the most common
verbs are not, so one has to learn very many words, the forms of which
are not obvious from suffixes, prefixes etc. Nevertheless, I strongly
recommend greek studies to anyone who can appreciate the beauty of a
consistent and logical structure.

The same kind of difference presents itself for the nouns and
adjectives, in greek but even more in latin. The form of the noun,
through its case, shows the role of the word in the sentence, without
the need for prepositions. German has som remnant of this, but
redundantly uses prepositions anyway. Example: in greek or latin it
wouldn't be necessary to say "We defended ourselves with swords and
spears", but somefing like "swords and spears defended", where the form
of "swords" and "spears" shows that they were used for some purpose and
the form of "defended" shows that we were the ones who defended
ourselves. Going back 1000 years or so, swedish too had quite a lot of
declination, today it has practically none, so the direction of the
development has been the same everywhere, throughout the ages.

In classic languages more could be expressed in fewer words, in that
sense they were more powerful. I don't know any slavic or baltic
language, but I think they have retained much of the original
structure, in particular lithuanian I've been told.

.

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