Math majors out there will show some interest in this one: English vocabulary gives us some hints on it’s historical number system. And, interestingly, this whole business of dividing things in terms of ten may not have been an original feature.
Number systems like the one in English are regarded as “Base-10,” where 10 is an especially meaningful unit. For example, the addition of ten turns “twenty-two” into “thirty-two,” and number prefixes (“twenty,” “thirty,” “forty”) are always increments of ten. Historically, however, it would appear that English was different.
A new study suggests that the human race nearly went extinct some 70,000 years ago. Interestingly (or perhaps as we should expect), this theory is supported by linguistic typology.
The study says:
The human population at that time was reduced to small isolated groups in Africa, apparently because of drought [...] [It is]estimated that the number of early humans may have shrunk as low as 2,000 before numbers began to expand again in the early Stone Age.
In a recent typology class, two quite famous mysteries of the English language were brought up. Of course, they can’t be that famous, since I’ve never heard of them and I’m sure there are many like me, and I therefore elected to blog a bit about these two exciting enigmas.
Many of you may be familiar with the German derogative phrase “Schweinhund,” literally “pig dog.” However, did you know that “pig” and “dog” may give us clues about the who inhabited the British Isles before the Anglos (and, consequently, the Indo-European language family) arrived?
Filed under: Language-specific, Non-Verbal Communication, Pragmatics, Sociolinguistics
It occurred to me the other day: why is it called “pro-life” and “pro-choice?”
I’m putting myself in a position for some serious debate here, so let me start by making a statement: I am “pro-choice.” That being said, I’m curious as to the use of the two above terms as they relate to Pragmatics.
Let’s take a look at the first one: “Pro-life.” It sounds really nice, doesn’t it? If you say that you’re “pro-life,” you sound like someone who likes to go outside a lot and play with puppies, or perhaps has a house filled with cats and plants. The word “life,” indeed, has a wonderful connotation, and in and of itself is, possibly, one of our most treasured English words, as it pertains to our most treasured fact of humanity.
Now let’s examine briefly the other: “Pro-choice.” At first glance, this doesn’t sound bad either. “Choice” is a word commonly associated with “freedom,” in fact, and so “pro-choice” has a sort of french-revolution-y flair to it.
Or does it?
The problem here is the suffix: “pro-.” The use of “pro-” implies a “con-”, which is the opposite of whatever concept lies after the suffix. In other words, the deeper connotation of these words is thus:
• If you are not “pro-choice,” then you must be against choice (or freedom, as it were).
• If you are not “pro-life,” then you must be against life… so no more playing with puppies for you.
In fact, these words are horribly inaccurate descriptions of viewpoints on abortion. Certainly, pro-choice is not so harsh as its counterpart, but both words really do not play fair… linguistically.
For example, to be “pro-life” has implications dealing in the “abortion clinics are baby-killers” area, which one might expect, as that is the position of many who are “pro-life.” But those supporting abortion rights are not “anti-life;” rather, they disagree (on a philosophical level) that abortion is killing. Scientifically, fertilized eggs may be expelled from a would-be-mother… in fact, it is not uncommon for fertilized eggs to be expelled by a woman much in the same way that an unfertilized egg is. All that needs to happen is the egg not attach itself, and voila: from the “life-begins-at-conception” viewpoint, a good percentage of women are murderers without even knowing it.
This is what makes “pro-life” inherently inaccurate: those who are not “pro-life” do not believe that they are killing anything. Therefore, the connotation of the term (which is heard constantly in the media) unfairly demonizes those who support abortion rights.
To better illustrate this concept, let’s imagine the terms in reverse: keeping the “pro-choice” term as our “control variable,” let’s imagine a new term for “pro-life” called “anti-abortion.” Now then, look at the two next to each other:
PRO-CHOICE ANTI-ABORTION
The term on the left seems good (at a subconscious level) while the one on the right seems bad (simply because it starts with a negative prefix).
There is another problem, however: just what else would “pro-choicers” be called? After all, they aren’t actually “pro-abortion,” but rather they support the right to have an abortion, not an abortion in every case.
I suppose the closest you could come to being fair with connotations would be thus:
• Use a positive prefix with each term.
• Use an accurate descriptive word after each prefix.
In short, both “pro-choice” and “pro-life” fail pragmatically, both because of the words “choice” and “life,” respectively. Indeed, there may not be a way to designate two diametrically opposed viewpoints without giving one a more negative connotation than that of the other. The closest that I could come up with was:
ABORTION RIGHTS ADVOCATES ABORTION RIGHTS OPPONENTS
Of course, both new terms smack of American political correctness… which is never a good thing.
Technorati Tags: language, abortion, connotations
Humans develop language; indeed, it is (perhaps without question) impossible for a human not to acquire language. In the case of computers, however, human language remains a difficult proposition. In fact, making computers process or synthesize human language can be very difficult.
Firstly, generative grammars on computers must be completely explicit in nature. If they are not, the computer will spit out something unintelligible to humans. As it turns out, this required level of explicitness is of great interest to linguists, as teaching a computer to “talk” requires a deep understanding of language itself.
If we are to create such a grammar on a computer, we must place in front of us several goals for success:
• The grammar must be fully explicit to the point that only grammatical sentences are produced by the computer.
• The computer must be able to produce all possible grammatical sentences using the lexical and semantic base that we provide (ie the number of words we give it).
• The computer must be able to produce these sentences in polynomial time; that is, it must render them faster than exponential time in order to make the use of a computer-language processor practical.
The programming language that I’ll be using is called SWI-PROLOG. It seems well suited to programming human language as, unlike most other computer languages like C or Pascal, PROLOG is logic-based instead of procedural in nature. That is to say, with most programming languages, the computer must be explicitly told how to perform an action, and it then carries out a sequence of such actions exactly as it was told. PROLOG, on the other hand, learns logical relationships between items in a program, and then solves new problems which are prompted by the user (It is important to note that PROLOG is a child of the Artificial Intelligence movement in computing in the late 1960’s. The PROLOG wiki can be found here).
To illustrate why PROLOG is well suited to human language (insofar as a programming language can be), consider how prolog solves problems.
For example, let’s say that we place the following PROLOG statements into a PROLOG program:
Example 1.A
parent(george,bobby).
parent(gracie,bobby).
The above are referred to as predicates in PROLOG lingo. Basically, we have told the PROLOG interpreter 2 things:
• There is an entity named “george” who is a parent of “bobby.”
• There is an entity named “gracie” who is a parent of “bobby.”
It is important to note that the order in which items are listed in predicates (ie george,bobby versus bobby, george) is completely arbitrary from the standpoint of PROLOG’s interpretation. However, it is logical to set up a simple convention at this point, namely that the predicate title (in this case “parent”) describes the first item listed, and the second item is related to the meaning of the first in some obvious way. For example, “george” is the parent, and “bobby” is the child of the parent (another example might be president(lincoln,usa), where “lincoln” is the president, and “usa” is his country of presidency.
As I stated before, PROLOG works by solving problems. Put simply, a variable in PROLOG is one that starts or consists of all UPPER case letters. After having the PROLOG interpreter (in this case, SWI-PROLOG) consult our small program (example 1.A), we can then have it solve a problem:
Example 1.B
?- parent(george,X).
The above presents PROLOG with a goal: find X. Obviously, it should return the following result:
Example 1.C
X = bobby
This isn’t too exciting; after all, we told PROLOG explicitly that “george” was the parent of “bobby.” To better illustrate PROLOG’s logical abilities, consider a revised program:
Example 1.D
parent(george,bobby).
parent(gracie,bobby).
child(X) :- parent(Y,X).
Now we’ve added a little bit for PROLOG to learn. We tell it now that something may be referred to as a “child” if that something is also listed as the second item in a “parent” predicate (note that the special operator :- means “if” in PROLOG, essentially making line three of example 1.D child(X) if parent(Y,X).).
Now, we might ask PROLOG if “bobby” is a child.
Example 1.E
?- child(bobby).
Yes
Notice PROLOG responds to simple predicates with no variables with a Yes or a No. Next we’ll see if PROLOG truly understands the parent/child relationship by asking it if “george” is a child:
Example 1.F
?- child(george).
No
And there you have it: we never had statements in our program like child(bobby) explicitly telling PROLOG who was a child, but still, PROLOG understood the relationship and was able to respond based on logic. It is this logical basis that makes PROLOG well-suited for the formation of generative grammars, a topic which I will begin to cover in Part II.
Technorati Tags: computation, prolog, language
If you’re like me, your penmanship is horrible.
As a consequence, I type everything, which meant two things when doing linguistics assignments:
• I had to find fonts that contained APA or IPA phonological characters.
• I had to learn keystrokes to use those fonts.
Luckily, I use Macintosh, which lets you use the “American Extended” keyboard layout to type, allowing the use of APA/IPA characters and diacritics to get the job done. However, when I started this site, I came up with another question: is it possible to show phonetic characters in HTML, and if so, how?
Luckily, I soon found this site, which lists most phonetic characters and how to display them using Unicode. Thanks to the listing, I can do this:
[ɛksəlɛnʔ] !!!
