Discourse analysis

So I'm taking a DA class this semester.

I'll be honest: the formal linguistics stuff fascinates me. I'm only interested in the applied insofar as it relates to acquiring language. Particularly L2 and L3. But I've been taken by discourse analysis. The first thing is that it is hard. Not in the sense of hard science, but difficult hard. The reason is two-fold.

I'll get an example that is based off of what I'm doing. I'm fiddling with More's Utopia right now. The main angle I'm working on is that Utopia is a political attack on Henry VIII, which was not a safe thing to do. So the first trick is to show that it's a political work rather than religious. So I've done a frequency analysis of the vocabulary. I feel pretty confident that Utopia is political in nature. Why? I've compared vocabulary frequency of Cicero's de re publica against Utopia. A lot of the frequencies for critical words line up pretty nicely. Especially "publicus" and "magistratus". It's a nice sleight of hand trick. So now that I feel I've established Utopia as a political work, I want to show how More deals with Henry. Mostly I'm going to cast it as a politeness thing. By putting social distance between Utopia and the king, More increases his safety.

So as you can see, it requires a lot of clever work to make a good point. You can't screw around with sloppy thinking. Except that they do. By which I mean dragging in that old scheißkopf, Karl Marx. Marxism is a terrible political philosophy that put too many people on the wrong side of the dirt in the 20th century. If that weren't enough to discredit a philosopher, I don't know what would be. But yet I keep seeing his name dragged up as if he had something useful to say. And that just makes me angry. And this is the second class I've seen a book mention him, so it's not exactly accidental.

Anyway, I wish there were a less ugly philosophy to analyze some of this stuff from. Maybe we need a Misesian angle. I'd tell you how I'm the one to develop it, but I'm not.

Reading Plautus

I've read Plautus before, but this time I'm doing it 21st century style: on a computer. Well, not entirely. I'm also using a Bristol commentary. Anyway, it's new for me.

My problem is that I really like reading on paper. I grossly prefer a book. Call me old school. But I've also been spoiled by Geoffrey Steadman. Have you seen his Greek commentaries? While I don't need the extensive support in Latin, I like having it available. Especially for vocabulary. I understand the value of looking up words, though the power of extensive reading outweighs that. Call me crazy.

Anyway, I'm reading Pseudolus. For fun. My goal is to finish it this week. Here's my progress bar, so you can hold me to my goal. I'll be updating.

1337 / 1337
(100%)

So why do we set up our readers in such a way as to discourage reading for fun? Why do the very people who love Latin the most seem to be publicly hostile to reading for fun?

End note:
75 / 1335 on Monday
137/1335 end of night Monday (not strong progress, is it?)
230/1335 end of night Tuesday
370/1335 end of night Wednesday, I may not finish this week
537/1337 Thursday evening, I may read a bit more tonight
766/1337 end of night Friday
904/1337 Saturday evening
1337/1337 following Wednesday, holidays got in the way, but I'm done.

Language contact in the ancient Mediterranean

I saw an call for abstracts that got me thinking.

There's all sorts of languages in contact today. People are bilingual with varying degrees of skill. They carry their languages forward. And nothing is new. People were doing those exact things thousands of years ago. The differences are two. One, we can't interview or record any of those people. Two, what evidence they did leave us has problems.

The evidence is often in the form of the literature of the elite layers of the societies. Evidence that comes from more ordinary people is often fragmentary in nature. Broken pottery, graffiti, papyrus fragments. Some of that evidence is so fragmentary that we don't even have complete languages. For example, Venetic is a relatively poorly known language. Some are relatively well known in scholarly circles, like Oscan. Others are more commonly known, like Latin.

All of these languages were in contact with each other. They were affecting each other. Just like languages today. And there is little easily available information on this topic. There is some work being done on the topic, but it is expensive. For example:

•Early Civilization and Literacy in Europe from $164 used
•Bilingualism and the Latin Language from $57.98 used

Some of the nearest copies of these books are in libraries that are difficult to get to—or as I'm starting to think of them, walled gardens of scholarship. Articles about these topics are in databases that cost real money to have access to—or at least that's what my tuition costs would lead me to believe. It is a disgrace that in 2012 that credible information on obscure topics is so difficult to find in easily accesible ways. Forget that. Keep an eye on this blog. (And if you bought either of those books to you, I'd write a haiku for you on this blog.)

Sanskrit isn't Indo-European?

I just ran across an article—maybe excerpts from a vanished article—that suggests that it is colonial to claim Sanskrit as Indo-European. Please note, I may refer to things with rather strong language, but pseudoscience deserves no less.

Some further reading (here and here) makes me think that this is some sort of reaction against perceived erroneous history. The gist of it is this: the Brits when colonizing India saw that Sanskrit shared deep similarities to Ancient Greek and Latin. If that is the case then there must be some common language. Since white people—according to the grossly misinformed thought of the time—were superior, and people in India come in a variety of skin colors, then there must have been white invaders who brought Sanskrit to India. Apparently the colonizing Brits couldn't imagine that maybe, just maybe, the initial Indo-European population had skin darker than theirs. Pity their lack of imagination.

The problem with the old notions is that they are junk. This junk in turn, rightfully, raises a horrified reaction among Indians. So far so good. One should be outraged by bullshit pseudoscience. The problem is when one reacts to junk by inventing more junk. The pseudoscience starts off with a howler.

For instance, in Hungary, there is a growing body of scholars who are extremely uncomfortable and dissatisfied with the manner in which Hungarian was excluded from the Indo-European framework.

I feel bad for the Hungarians who want in on the IE, but that's how science goes. It doesn't always come back with the answers you want. Tough. Believe what you like, the science is the science.

there are some Indian language scholars who have suggested that a computerized analysis of Sanskrit and Latin lexicons might yield a far more limited overlap than would be rationally implied by the “Indo-European” classification.

Of the tiny bits I know about  Sanskrit, I know that counting to ten is an awful lot like modern Persian and telling your name is an awful lot like Latin. This is daily use, low rate of change stuff. I also wouldn't expect there to be massive overlap between Latin and Sanskrit—particularly when getting into descriptions of local flora and fauna. This book has a whole chapter about non-IE words borrowed by Sanskrit. Fancy that, a language that borrows words.

…Building primitive lexicons that show similar roots for certain common words can hardly be an adequate basis of linguistic classification.

Actually this is what I'd expect. Quick, say the past tense for see and dive. What were your answers? Saw and dived are the correct answers as of this writing, though dove is making inroads. Highlight the blank if you are curious. One is not being changed, the other is. Care to guess which? If you said that see is maintaining its historic form, you'd be right. Why? Because it's a basic word in heavy use. Dive? Not so much.

Moreover, it [IE theory] has strengthened the now increasingly untenable view that there is no continuity between the Indo-Saraswati Harappan civilization and Vedic civilization, and that India’s languages (both in the oral and written forms) must have been brought to India by more “civilized” outsiders.

The same way that English sprung up in England without any help from continental invaders? While I have no doubt that language displacement can also disrupt cultural transmission, I don't know that language displacement necessarily causes cultural discontinuity. One (cultural discontinuity) has happened without the other (language displacement) in Greece. But I'm not an archaeologist. Until you've got better evidence, stick with what the data tells you. The data, so far as I can see, tells me that there was some sort of linguistic invasion. These things happen, otherwise I might be writing this in a Celtic language.

In this entire body of work stretching, from Sakatayana to Panini, there is virtually nothing to link Sanskrit to any European influence.

No shit. I wouldn't want to put words in Sir William Jones's mouth, but I'd venture to say he didn't know about the connection and was surprised at the similarity too. Oh, why don't I just let him speak for himself.

…yet [Sanskrit] bearing to both of them a stronger affinity, both in the roots of verbs and the forms of grammar, than could possibly have been produced by accident…

I hate it when that happens. I also hate this too.

both Sanskrit and Tamil are syllabic languages and both treat consonants and vowels very similarly.

All languages have syllables and treat consonants and vowels very similarly, when viewed through the lens of being syllabic. Well, except for maybe a pesky example or two in the Caucasus mountains. Nice try though.

From the point of view of classifying languages based on the organizational principles that govern their written scripts no logic would permit the Sanskrit-derived North Indian langauges to be placed in the same language group as the European languages.

Writing systems don't count at all when comparing languages. Just the spoken end. I get the sensation that the author isn't a linguist.

Writing in Language in India (9, Jan, 2002), G. Sankaranarayanan observes how repeating words and forms is a significant feature that extends across the Indian subcontinent and includes not only the Sanskrit and Tamil derivatives but also Munda and languages from the Tibetan-Burmese group.

It's called sprachbund. It happens all over. The interesting part here—to me anyway—is that the Indian sprachbund includes non-related languages. Nothing to see here.

Note too that Indic languages permit the dropping of pronouns (which become implied). …would be impermissable in English.

Dropping pronouns—even obviously assumed content words—is fine by Latin. No one disputes that Latin is IE. Spanish also thinks dropping subject pronouns is fine. Dammit. I hate it when I pick bad examples like English to almost but not quite make my point. Moving along, our pseudoscientist goes on to talk about word order.

In this respect, Indian languages are similar to each other [in regards to a more free word order] but not to less flexible “Indo-European” languages like English. On the other hand, Russian and Czech (like Hungarian) [no cheating, you need to compare IE to IE] do not require a fixed or default word order.

Oops. I think you're hurting your own argument there.

In conclusion, it might be stated that the present scheme of bifurcating Indian langauges into the “Indo-European” and “Dravidian” scheme is unsatisfactory in many ways.

For whom?

…it has also precluded comprehensive comparitive studies between these Indic languages and other Indic langauges such as the Munda or those from the Tibetan-Burmese stream.

Who is being stopped? These studies might actually be fruitful, but they only count when peer-reviewed.

Sh Thadani [the author, has] a Post-Graduate degree in Computer Science from Yale…

Aha. I was right. Not a linguist. Look, I'm not claiming authority here, but if you're going to write a "research" document it may help to have some formal training in the subject at hand. I don't trust my plumber to fix my car, why does a computer science guy get to look like a linguist?

Anyway. This has put some fire under me to learn Sanskrit. I think I'll put some effort to it over the summer. Well, once I've got True Story read. 

LING 401: Textbooks

I've gotten the textbooks ordered. One of them is from some sort of s used textbook clearinghouse called Bookbyte.com that looks a hair dodgy seems ok. We'll see if they're worth anything. I'll let you know. (Update, 6 Dec 2011: Book arrived on promised day in promised condition, so I don't quite know what the complaints were.)

Here are the textbooks for Linguistics 401: Fundamentals of Modern Linguistics—the class I am taking in the spring:

O'Grady, William et al. Contemporary Linguistics, 6th ed. Somewhere out East       (Boston/NY): Bedford/St. Martin's, 2009. ISBN 978-031261851-3.
Matthews, P.H. The Concise Oxford Dictionary of Linguistics, 2nd ed. Oxford: OUP, 2007. ISBN 978-019920272-0.

The O'Grady book is way too expensive. It retails at Amazon for nearly $90. It is difficult to find used, though I did. While I have no doubt that there are developments in linguistics that merit an up-to-date book, six editions seems suspicious. The fourth edition was released in 2000. What?! Linguistics is moving so rapidly that you need not one, but two updates in nine years? In the age of the internet, that defies belief. Your book is out of date the instant you send it to press. It's just the nature of things.

Well, I'm getting carried away. I suspect the real answer is that the editions coming one atop the other has more to do with making it look like the book is cutting edge. After all, all things being equal, do you want the book that came out this year or last year? Or do you want to read a blog about it?