Rediscovered notes
24. June 2012
Signage is not language. One cannot fully appreciate the meaning of a ‘Give Way’ sign without contextual knowledge of traffic rules (that there may be cars coming from the sideway direction) — it’s not simply an imperative phrase demanding action (i.e. it’s not asking a pedestrian reading this sign to step aside immediately).
Room numbers in hotels help you get to where you want to go, but it’s not language. Arguably, neither are those signs saying ‘Returns’, ‘Tickets’ or ‘Cafeteria’. This can be indeed confusing. I make this argument because the meaning is largely external to these signs: i.e. “You can place the books in the chute, they will later be handled by library staff, and you will have fulfilled your obligation of handing the books back to the library.” That is the full meaning. I would say that “Throw the books in here.” is language, it is a complete meaningful instruction (though without explaining why).
This is partly the reason I insist that phrase-books are far from using a language (cf. Lana the chimpanzee).
Then there’s the question, what is language useful for anyway? To watch television? Say we are watching some drama, the characters are carrying out a dialogue, is this language? These are professional actors, reading scripted lines out aloud — they could be just as well singing in opera, or interpretive-dancing. I would at least concede what they do resembles/simulates language.
Text is not language. It is a technology, of representing language (think of Swiss-german speakers writing in German, or people in both Scotland and Australia writing in the same English) — of reminding people there was language, and this is a snapshot of it, as a trigger to regenerate it or call it up in your mind again. A sepia picture of an apple is not the apple itself, neither is a pixelated or hi-def live video stream of the apple. An apple is an organic thing of its own — embedded with cells, expressions and mechanics.
The same thing could be said about utterances, e.g. “This morning I shot an elephant in my pyjamas…” Note that the information about who’s actually wearing the pyjamas is external of the content — it is implicitly understood by common-sense inference that it should be the hunter (rather than the elephant) that wore the pyjamas.
Then consider phrases like ‘stay put’ or ‘put up with’, the situations they are referring to, i.e. their meaning, is not a property of the word ‘put’ (an inherent attribute that’s attached to this word by virtue of “this word should include this sense”). It is possibly by convention of usage — that is — it is inherent that an expression can be interpreted in multiple ways (imagine a group by glyphs, symbols or ideograms) — it is by convention of use that it’s taken to be a certain meaning.
I once saw in a book “put out the candle as a signal” and “put out the candle to avoid being discovered” — the meaning is derived from context. In English, “you must be quick” can either be an opinion or an imperative, depending on context. “I shot a bear” and “I shot at a bear” mean different things by conventions, whereas in other languages the aspects may be distinguished by verb inflections. Whereas in English, due to lack of these inflections, the convention was so formed so that different ‘expressions’ are used to denote the differences between ‘it helped’ and ‘it nearly helped’. We mostly already understand the differences between a situation referred to by ‘perfect’ and ‘imperfect’, i.e. between ‘shot dead’ and ‘fired at’ — even when lacking the ‘grammatical tools’ to call upon them precisely with corresponding inflections — we would then ‘use an expression’ to say just the same thing — if there wasn’t a word, we’ll come up with a phrase. It so happens the phrasal verb ‘put out’ is useful for discussing permissiveness, in place of a handy adjective — in other languages people also discuss permissiveness (one would imagine), and they may use some expressions that are completely unrelated to any part of the intrinsic meaning of the word ‘put’.
(Wait, does this mean, that not only the sound associations are arbitrary i.e. it just so happens that the word meaning ‘put’ is called /pʊt/ — what the word can be used (as part of an expression) to refer to (i.e. concept or meaning) is also arbitrary?) People can say “extinguished the candle”, they may find it counter-pragmatic; or they can say “doused the candle”, if that sounds better. Personally I never use candles, but I’ve heard many times ‘to put out a fire’, I know what it means, and I know how to use this expression.
Adults already understand the situations that the expressions are referring to, e.g. they understand what it is like to suffer/tolerate something, then they learn that the expression can be ‘to put up with’; and there are other ways of expressing it. It is by learning this expression that they can understand the reverse: that when they hear ‘put up with’, they know what situation it is referring to. This gives some support to the ‘production first’ approach, i.e. teaching the learners a large library of expressions, expressing the same ideas with multiple pragmatics.
To ramble further, an expression is like a piece of the puzzle — within the vast network of how an individual’s life events/situations are mapped (i.e. their understanding of the world). An adult who’s familiarity with insurance concepts can quickly pick up the narration about insurance in another language — because the concepts are already there, only the expressions are different — and it would help this learner to connect the dots, to make things ‘click’ more quickly, if we include an elaborate discussion about the insurance concepts — this is not to teach him on the spot about these concepts, but to help everything light up more quickly, to ‘click’ into what situations the narration is referring to — situations that the learners already understand.
Whereas for someone who do not already know these concepts, to teach the concepts ‘on the spot’ (to give a dictionary style definition) would be ineffective — someone who does not have a full appreciation of insurance concepts will not learn about finance (and all the background behind it) within those few lines.
This idea of ‘elaborate narration’ i.e. talking about a concept is to draw to surface all those implications, all those potential meanings that are not obvious, e.g. ‘Sharks’ meaning it’s dangerous to swim here, or ‘Give Way’ meaning cars maybe coming from your right (or your left, contextually dependent on where you see it) — e.g. ‘second cousin’, ‘cousin twice removed’ probably means the same thing, in some languages there maybe dozens of different terms describing various kinds of cousins, at least differentiating gender, in English there aren’t; but anyway, I have no idea what it means, I know the technical definition, mathematically, but I have no second cousins, i.e. no personal experience, nor have I watched dramas depicting relations between second cousins — much like I don’t know what a ‘joiner’ does — I have a vague idea of the definition (tradesman working with wood), but it means nothing palpable to me. To someone who has extensive experience and interaction with their second cousins, they *know what it means*, a lot of ideas or reminiscences come to mind, it may be vivid, multi-dimensional, they have a very elaborate idea of how close or distant the relation is, because there are all those background anecdotes of other relatives and how everything fits into the picture. You cannot fully understand the term ‘second cousin’ without understanding all the other relations related to it (and even including how this entire coordinates relate to you).
(Does this mean that experience, and therefore language use, cannot be universal? And what can we do about that? Maybe sub-setting, use a more universal term, say, most people have relatives and experiences thereof, so if you talk about ‘relatives’, more people will understand — even though under the same umbrella term, it still means different things to each person, with a variety of breadth and depth).
This goes back to the Chomskyan notion that a dictionary does not tell you what a ‘house’ is, it helps you ‘click’ into something you already know, that you are already familiar with, only now in addition you know that it’s called a ‘house’. It helps you make this connection. And once this connection is made, when you hear the word ‘house’, you know what the speaker means — but way before you become capable of this listening comprehension task, you already knew a lot about houses — the listening task does not teach these concepts.
I know what a bear is, I’ve been to the zoo and seen many films/documentaries featuring bears — I have no idea what a bison is — heard the word many times, I know it’s an animal, possibly hunt-able — but you can define the animal with words all you like, it’s probably not going to tell me what a bison is — until I see a picture, “Okay, that’s what it’s like”.
There’s no way to define ‘bison’ for an audience who’s never seen a bison — you can say it’s an animal, it’s a mammal, it has fur, it’s like a buffalo, it has a hump on the back — so far you have not defined bison (specifying the being of a bison), you are enumerating concepts associated with bison, concepts the audience is already familiar with: they already know fur, buffalo and hump. The definition in a dictionary is a word-guessing game. Maybe in some languages they literally call it ‘hump-buffalo’, that name is more intuitive but it doesn’t define the animal, perhaps only the chromosomes of a bison do. I know what a unicorn is, it’s not just “a horse with a pointy horn on its head” — you have to have been exposed to all the other bits of information about it.
Another analogy: I’m a native speaker of Mandarin, but I learned about the subject of civil engineering (as well as many other subjects) entirely in an English environment, I have no idea what the terminology counterparts are in Mandarin (and it’s hard to just make them up) — but if I’m told once, e.g. with a list of what these terms are called in Mandarin (and maybe some ‘corpus exposure’ i.e. example conversations), I can very soon start talking about civil engineering in Mandarin with ease. By learning the list, I did not learn what those terms mean, or how to talk about civil engineering in Mandarin. I already knew about civil engineering. I already spoke Mandarin.
(A good question would be: “Is language inseparable from knowledge of the world?” Also, “How universal is the worldly knowledge across various populations?” e.g. there may be many who have zilch understanding of insurance)
Also, consider ‘semantic shifts’: e.g. ‘cargo’ becoming a word referring to ‘fancy gadgets’ within a certain population; or how Germans call mobile phones ‘Handy’; or maybe ‘insurance’ means solely ‘dental cover’ for some people while being solely related to ‘shipping’ to others (all of whom never had a deep understanding of the interconnected picture).
On another thought, maybe the German word ‘Handy’ has nothing to do with the English ‘handy’ (convenient) — maybe it’s a diminutive of the very mouthful ‘Handheld-compact-personal-voice-over-radio-device’.
Note-to-self: to sum all this up: to ask for a definition, “What does this word mean?” is the wrong question. The right question is: “In which situation is this expression used?”
In teaching, it is useless to say “a ticket is a paper slip with information written on it” (this is what many dictionaries do: analysing the ontological essence) — it is far more useful to describe the situation, e.g. “you need proof that you have paid for the fare” or “if you drive too fast the police may stop you and impose a fine, they hand you an official notice of the fine” — people already have an understanding of these situations, the elaborate descriptions help them make the connection.
Further on this note, for teaching materials we need 3 things:
1) an perfectly sensible, high frequency, natural, authentic and accurate example sentence: e.g. “He got a parking ticket.” in fact, it may be even better to have multiple examples (of the same word-sense) in concordance style to help triangulate the usage
2) explanation: e.g. discuss how penalties such as fines are imposed to enforce rules… etc. etc. and this official notice is called a ‘ticket’ — this elaboration is not to teach the concept but to draw more details to help connect the dots (i.e. using the details to triangulate precisely the situation/concept, which the learner already understand).
3) a gloss definition, e.g. “official notice of a fine” as a reminder/trigger to help the learner recall the situation-expression connection made in 2). The gloss does not define (describe meaning) it only offers a hint of what concept the reminder is pointing to — the function of this step can be replaced by something as brief and non-defining as: “ticket: parking”, “ticket: fine”, “ticket: movie” — just a hint for the learner to recall 2) to make sense of 1) — indeed it’s better to show the concordance here — comprehension in action.
Also today I saw a book (a report) about English teaching among ethnic Koreans in China (who can speak and are literate in both Korean and Mandarin) — the textbooks are basically elaborate versions of a phrasebook — and the standard of competence is defined as “being able to string together 5 sentences that are deemed to convey some meaning/thoughts”, (yes, exactly 5, this is for Grade 3 — for Grade 4 it’s upped to “6 sentences”) — and you can spot many peculiar expressions, e.g. a chapter titled “Mainly Revisions”, meaning (major) review.
Then I realised something: that neither the teachers nor the students would use English outside the classroom, and it’s likely the case, that even the editors and authors of the textbooks, rarely use it at all other than a subject of ‘scholarly research’. In summary, the entire practice of teaching English, is based on their peculiar version, i.e. an artificially reconstructed concept of the English language (cf. the Chomskyan view that scientific literature resembles English but is not natural language). That it’s much more like a programming language. There’s the phrase book, the dictionary (a hash), a collection of data, disconnected elements of pair-translations — and you just pick out individual elements from this recipe book, and put together something like the ‘Anus Hospital’.
(A far generalisation of this is that each English course is a manufactured version of the editors’ version of representing the language). Though I think sub-setting and proto-setting (select/construct of good version though it’s not a natural dialect) are good practices; e.g. say we model of subset of English specifically for watching well-made tv dramas: the dialogues maybe largely meaningful (rather than phatic), and filler words like, you know, ‘eh’, ‘em’, ‘er’ and all that are frowned upon. (Neither would they dare sound like EU documents). Namely, the screen-writers community has settled on a good version of the language that represents eloquent speech rather then the average speaker.
To bring up something random, maybe a good standard for being able to use a language, is to be able to consistently understand the punchline of standup comedy in that language. (Wait, does this mean people with Asperger’s are inherently hampered, as in not fully endowed with the capacity for language?) Even if someone can memorise a whole page with a glance, that is no indication of talent for language.
