I am going to break my own unwritten code (no pun intended) and mention my life as a programmer. But just to make an analogy.
I've noticed that all software projects, if they last long enough, eventually reach the "feature bloat" stage. That is to say, what the program "does" becomes not a well-defined thing but a laundry list. I usually do not have the patience to see my own projects to this point, or even to analyze why I hate this stage of development so much. But I'm starting to. It is because the program itself becomes conditional instead of structural. The beautiful layout of objects, and the relationships between them, is slowly eroded by piecemeal if-statements and case blocks meant to deal with features as they arise in the necessity of the moment.
And now to the analogy part. I think that I detest language for this same reason. There is still an element of the structural--we have grammar, I suppose--but by and large this structure has been eroded by conditionals. Or "exceptions to the rules" if you please. The original rule for making a noun plural in English might have been "add an s to the end", but after the onset of conditionals we have
And so on. Language is ugly, or at least severely lacking in aesthetic quality. Like some hideous software project that's been going on for thousands of years...shudder...
Posted by Alan at December 9, 2002 11:19 PMWell, aren't we crabby today. You "detest" language, do you? Don't be ridiculous. But as long as we're overgeneralizing and creating these vast, sweeping analogies, I think your dislike for the so-called conditional is purely a result of your unwillingness to deal with paradox. (Maybe it isn't, really, but one thing we're both quite good at is overstating our respective cases.) And for the record, there are perfectly good reasons why the plural of "mouse" is "mice," reasons which are in fact governed by processes which are not only entirely natural but also completely universal. There is less chaos in language than you think.
Language is severely lacking in aesthetic quality? So is granite--unless you're a sculptor. Asking paradigms to be beautiful in and of themselves is a bit much, really. It's what you make of the raw materials that counts. But even if language weren't beautiful per se, language is the stuff of poetry and conversation....detest it at your peril.
Posted by: Katyeva at December 10, 2002 12:43 AMWonderful. I found myself hoping you would read this, since you definitely own the debunking rights in this case. (In this case? There I go again, a case-based view of the world...)
So. Overgeneralization? Of course, because my reason for generalizing and my reason for saying I detest language are one and the same. I say that there is no beauty in the piecemeal, but that's probably just a coverup for my own lack of storage space upstairs. Any case-based system is going to require a lot of storage space, whether the system be the German language (prior to reform) with it's 52 comma placement rules, or the source code for a piece of feature-bloated software. Generalization is a form of compression. (Unfortunately it is usually compression with information loss, which is, I'm guessing, your chief complaint with it?) So in order to use my gray matter for other things--for storing processes, like how to find a fact or case quickly--I generalize. I refuse to be a database.
If you need a label for this feel free to use "reductionism." I will accept the label if you will accept "holism" and then we can go around the prickly pear at 5 o'clock in the morning. But I don't think you really are coming at it from that angle, and pigeon-holing makes any discussion either boring or too personal, since it's just a modern form of tribal warfare.
Anyway back to language. To a large extent I agree with what you say you admire in it: the ability to create beauty under adverse conditions. It's the same reason I admire Bach for creating music, in spite of fugue.
If you wish to impart a love for language which no one has given me to date, show me what things you term "completely universal," and I would be grateful to you for it. Since you used these magical words, I suspect that you actually belong to my tribe, in which case (ha ha) this whole thing is probably just a matter of me presuming to know more than I'm entitled to, and you calling me on it. Wouldn't be the first time. ;-)
Posted by: Alan at December 10, 2002 01:48 PMOkay. I'd need to write an essay if I really wanted to respond to everything you're bringing up. But here are my preliminary thoughts on the subject:
You're right and you're wrong. You're right in guessing where my sympathies lie (how do you do that?). I can completely understand your hatred of allomorphy (technical linguistic term which basically refers to what you're calling conditionals).
And the chaos you dislike so much extends farther than you think. Take your so-called simple plural rule of adding an -s to a noun. Actually, that -s can be realized in at least three distinct ways: /s/ in "cats," /z/ in "dogs," and /uz/ in "sponges." Not to mention the fact that "add -s" was not the original pluralization rule for English--it's a relatively recent innovation. English, like German, was an inflecting language originally and had as many ways of forming the plural as Latin, so in some sense at least the system we have now is a lot simpler than the one Beowulf's author had to use. But I would point out that language is not progressing either from complexity to simplicity or from simplicity to complexity--all languages are constantly progressing from one state of complexity to another.
The interesting thing about phonological change--which accounts for probably 98% of linguistic entropy--is that when it happens, it happens across the board. Finals prevent me from expanding on this point, but the paradox is that the sound changes which occur without exception have the overwhelming tendency to create exceptions in the grammar.
So while you're wrong on the micro-level (you don't really understand why language is the way it is--in some sense it's not nearly as random as you think), on the macro-level you've hit the nail on the head. Language is not and will never be reducible to a set of rules which a programmer could handle. Language is governed completely by rules that function without exception, but we'll never be able to list all of those rules. Yet the amazing thing is that you already know all of those rules, at least for English. The human brain is capable of intuitively understanding all the complexities of any given language, which is why everyone speaks his or her own native language with fluency.
But for heaven's sake, blame entropy. Blame the universe--don't blame language. If you must express your hatred for complexity beyond what your mind can categorize, don't restrict it to one or two manifestations of that complexity. Pour out your wrath upon the cosmos or upon the human mind--language is merely an innocent bystander in THAT debate.
Maybe I am a holist. In some ways I feel that one has to learn to accept the fact that it's impossible to compress systems without information loss. And since my mind is not fully aware of all the information that could be lost in such a process, I'm unwilling to attempt it or even to wish that it could be attempted. And in that sense, I think, the programming analogy breaks down (this is probably what I take most offense at, really). A bloated program is ugly--it's trying to do things it doesn't need to do. But a language must be complex in order to accomplish its purpose. Language is far more organic than programming. We cannot simplify it without losing necessary parts of it, any more than you could reduce me to a program so you could know what I was thinking at any given moment. It might be convenient, but that's not what life is about.
Posted by: Katya at December 10, 2002 06:59 PMInteresting. I hadn't realized that sound was the primary agent of change in grammar, but now that you say it seems hard to imagine grammar changing for any other reason. Certainly not because someone somewhere said to himself "I'm fed up with this crummy inflective pluralization" and start simply appending s's.
"Don't blame language"--of course I'm not really blaming or attacking language, just as I'm not blaming or attacking you. My irritation is ultimately with the underlying human affinity for needless complexity and not with its manifestations. I detest messily written software, just as I detest ad hoc grammar, just as I detest looking for something in a supermarket, just as I detest games of trivia, just as I detest tax forms--for the human acceptance of arbitrary complexity that makes it possible. I just marvel at the people who look at this and don't see anything in need of repair, who don't see a more efficient way, who don't see the ugliness and can't understand my desire to make it beautiful.
In the only manifestation I guess I have a right to speak about it can be pretty bad. Most coders, I've found, have an amazing tolerance for ugly complexity, and leave in their wake bogs of obfuscation that no one will be able to decipher later, or only with great difficulty. These are the people who brag about how many lines they've written. Well, I've taken to doing the opposite. I show people what I've done and then I brag about how few lines I've written. And I believe that my code will outlast the others, because it possesses simplicity, efficiency, and beauty. Why, honestly, would you wish to create something else? I can't understand it.
So a question to you. Haven't you ever been tempted to design your own natural language which possesses these qualities?
If you're busy with finals you don't have to answer me here and now, we can talk about all this and more over a cup of coffee at Denny's. I'm going on a ski-trip tomorrow and probably will be away from my computer until I return on the 15th.
Posted by: Alan at December 10, 2002 11:52 PMHallo Alan Grow,
wir hoffen, Sie sind gut wieder in ihrer Heimat angekommen. Hiermit bedanken wir uns für den netten Eintrag in das startlodge-Gästebuch. Wir freuen uns, dass es Ihnen in Deutschland, bei Siemens und im Gästehaus startlodge so gut gefallen hat.
Über das Tagebuch hier im Web haben wir miterlebt, was Sie während Ihres Aufenthalts in Deutschland erlebt haben, welche Freundschaften Sie geschlossen haben und was Ihnen so bei uns aufgefallen ist.
Sie waren ein gern gesehener Bewohner in startlodge. Wenn Sie mal wieder nach München kommen: Sie wissen es, in "startlodge" gibt es immer eine Möglichkeit für ehemalige Bewohner (siehe August 13, 2002)!
Brigitte du Frieder du Mesnil de Rochemont
landlady an landlord of startlodge
http://www.startlodge.de