The Unfolding of Language

What Hacker News says

1. mppmOct 2024
   For those interested, I highly recommend "The Unfolding of Language" by Guy Deutscher, in which he describes how languages evolve over time, to the great annoyance of purists, but without either losing or gaining sophistication in the long run. It's a very entertaining read and has considerably reduced my irritation at "incorrect" use of language.
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2. bradrnJul 2022
   Oh, this sort of thing goes way back… here’s Swift from 1712, for instance:

   > I do here … complain to your Lordship … that our Language is extremely imperfect; that its daily Improvements are by no means in proportion to its daily Corruptions; and the Pretenders to polish and refine it, have chiefly multiplied Abuses and Absurdities … Gentlemen … introduced that barbarous Custom of abbreviating Words, … as to form such harsh unharmonious Sounds … They have joined the most obdurate Consonants without one intervening Vowel, only to shorten a Syllable: And their Taste in time became so depraved, that what was a first a Poetical Licence, not to be justified, they made their Choice, alledging, that the Words pronounced at length, sounded faint and languid … Instances of this Abuse are innumerable: What does Your Lordship think of the Words, Drudg'd, Disturb'd, Rebuk't, Fledg'd, and a thousand others, every where to be met in Prose as well as Verse? Where, by leaving out a Vowel to save a Syllable, we form so jarring a Sound, and so difficult to utter, that I have often wondred how it could ever obtain.

   — A Proposal for Correcting, Improving and Ascertaining the English Tongue [taken from https://www.jacklynch.net/Texts/proposal.html]

   Or in other words: “It’s ‘dess-turb-uhd’, with THREE vowels! Not that nasty word ‘dess-turbd’ which is impossible to pronounce! What a horrible degradation of the language!”

   (For more of this, Deutscher’s The Unfolding of Language contains a highly amusing list of examples dating all the way back to Cicero in 46 BC, who complains that the speech of his day was sadly degraded from the great orators of the past. I’m certain I’ve even seen an Ancient Egyptian complaint along these lines, though sadly I can’t seem to find it now.)

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3. bradrnJul 2022
   This isn’t really true — in fact, it’s exactly the same fallacy as in Swift’s article. Certainly at a glance Greek and Latin look a lot more complicated than English does, and certainly this is true with respect to their morphology (how words are created from smaller parts), but morphology is far from the only part of language. For instance: word order is pretty much entirely unconstrained in Latin, but English has much more rigid rules about word order, which are nonetheless often fairly subtle and complex to delineate. Or: we can distinguish no less than 11 different tense/aspect combinations in English, but this is non-obvious because they rely on combinations of verb form and auxiliary verb(s), and the auxiliaries themselves nearly all have several different interpretations depending on where and how they are used (see Dixon’s A Semantic Approach to English Grammar for more).

   Besides, even when you just look at morphology alone, ancient languages are no more complex on the whole than modern ones. Thus consider Russian, which has more cases than Latin (IIRC). Or Hindustani, which uses an entirely different case system depending on the aspect of the verb. Or Swahili, where the verb inflects for both direct subject and object (but not always!), which have no less than 18 irregular genders, as well as for 28 tense/aspect/mood forms (if Wikipedia is to be trusted) — amongst other categories.

   What happens, it turns out, is that languages can grow more complex over time as well as simpler. People do tend naturally to simplify, delete and abbreviate syllables in words — but they also tend to merge words together and elaborate simple constructions to more complex ones, in order to retain the expressive capabilities of their language. I’ve already mentioned Deutscher’s bool The Unfolding of Language; I will recommend it again here, since it has a great summary of exactly how these processes work and interact with each other in order to generate complexity in language.

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4. chopsuey5540Apr 2022
   The book "The Unfolding of Language: the evolution of mankind's greatest invention" by Guy Deutscher explains this very well and has numerous examples. As a language noob, I found it fascinating!
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5. restlessbytesMar 2022
   For general linguistics: "The Unfolding of Language" by Guy Deutscher.
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6. godelskiDec 2020
   They aren't contradictory. You're working backwards to make humans like computers/interpreters. The fact that human interpretation 'doesn't care' is not so much a feature but a necessity. Ambiguity is inherent to natural languages, not a failure of them, nor a feature. On the other side, programming languages are strict my nature and it is a necessity. In programming we have a limited vocabulary and that limits our expressiveness, which is a feature. We don't want probabilistic outcomes for standard means.

   So let's look at the two parts you quotes from me and give some examples. We've conversing quite well, wouldn't you say? You understand me and I understand you? So #1 must be true, right? But have you ever played the game telephone[0]. With the general outcome of every game that must mean that #1 cannot be true, yet here we are. Like I said before, when communicating there's: what is intended, what is said, and what is heard. Usually these align pretty well. But small fuzzing adds up quite quickly. But it should also illustrate to you that what you hear (or read) isn't what the speaker (or writer) intended. Their job is to convey as best as they can to you while your job is to interpret as best as you can. Language being of this form allows us to express wildly abstract concepts, especially ones beyond our capacity to even understand. This is the usefulness of natural languages. But it is also why we created mathematical and programming languages, but why they will never be able to have the same expressiveness. You cannot program what you do not understand. But you must be able to talk about what you do not understand, if you are ever to hope to one day understand it.

   I'd encourage you to read both more about linguistics and compilers. If you're feeling lazy, Tom Scott has some decent linguistics videos and are aimed at STEM audiences. For more technical maybe see NativLang. For a book, checkout The Unfolding of Language.

   [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Telephone_(game)

   Edit: btw, you did get the meaning of finger shoes (German) even with the extreme limitations of only text based communication.

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