lingüística

words & concepts

send words to: words at linguistica dot rocks
  • There are two reasons for studying something, be it a language, a technology, a degree, whatever.

    Wishing to learn and wishing to know.

    Wishing to learn is to enjoy the process, the journey. Enjoy the discovery process, enjoy every second of it. Even if you were never to use the final knowledge, it would still have been worth it.

    Wishing to know is wanting only the end result. The diploma, the paper. The line on the resume. The result of the knowledge, in fact, not the knowledge itself, and certainly not the way that led to the knowledge. That way can be painful, it can mean sacrifice. If you fail your final exam after years of study, or that knowledge gets invalidated, outmoded, outdated, then it was all for nothing. You'll have "wasted" your time.

    Of course, ideally, you should want and enjoy both. And sometimes you don't really have a choice.

    Yet, there are three things you can do to get it right:

    • pick your fields of study carefully based on the above;
    • hack your mind into enjoying the process, even if you started out for the results;
    • find ways of making the process fun and enjoyable, even if it usually isn't (if you're not learning (lernen [de]) but teaching (lehren [de]), that is of course your first assignment).
  • The Wire. Not only a magnificent fresque [fr], the modern equivalent both in form and content of say Balzac's La Comédie humaine, not only a deep commentary on social issues, but also a linguist's delight.

    Double Verbs

    • ought needed [en]

    • mighta coulda [en]

    • done fell [en]

    • did got [en]

    Acknowledgements

    • true that [en]

    • most def [en]

    • word [en]

    Superlatives

    • onliest [en]

    Thank yous

    • much obliged [en], the equivalent of muito obrigado [pt]

    Double negatives

    Don't matter to me none if they did. Me and the people I keep close, we don't talk on the phone none.

    Neologisms

    • hypopulate [en]

      It's dope fiend for hypothesise + postulate = hypopulate.

    Nice words revived

    • venture to say [en]
    • fool [en]
    • equivocate [en], think of equivocarse [es]

    use ambiguous language so as to conceal the truth or avoid committing oneself.

    Adverbs

    • leastwise [en]

    Untranslatable sentence structures

    just make sure the Towers look like they do

    Them

    the one that lays them golden eggs

    Them, a definite article somewhere between "the" and "those".

    one of them good problems

    No never mind

    Don't make me no never mind.

    Latin

    • De fucking facto.

    Y'all

    • y'all [en], plural "you", think ustedes [es] or vosotros [es]

    Indeed.

    Indeed.

    1. The right frame: There are no "foreign" languages.

      Whether you think you can, or you think you can't–you're right.

      – Henry Ford

      You don't, can't, and won't learn a "foreign" language. A foreign language is a language you don't speak. If you speak it, it's not foreign. Even though you don't speak it perfectly, that doesn't make it foreign: You could spend your whole life learning a language, even your mother tongue, without knowing all of its subtleties. It's a perpetual journey. If you don't enjoy it, don't embark on it. There is no foreign versus non-foreign language, there are only various languages, and a level of skill in each.

      If you don't want to learn a language, don't learn it. If you want to learn it, then you want to learn it, and you're learning it. That means you love it and are motivated to learn it. That means you enjoy learning it.

      Happiness is forgetting to be unhappy. Learning a language is forgetting you don't know it.

      There are no "foreign" languages. There are only beautiful languages giving you access to fascinating cultures and means of communicating with great people. You are about to enjoy this great experience: of learning a new language and enjoying every minute of it. It's both a journey and a destination.

    2. The right method: You don't learn by learning, you learn by wanting to learn.

      If you want to build a ship, don't drum up the men to gather wood, divide the work and give orders. Instead, teach them to yearn for the vast and endless sea.

      Antoine de Saint-Exupery

      The classical school system for learning languages is a farce. You don't learn words by learning words. You learn words by putting yourself in a situation where you're curious to learn words.

      We're programmed for survival, not learning per se. Learning is a means to an end. If you're unclear about the end, get clear about the end first.

      Don't learn tables of conjugation. Get yourself in a situation in which you're curious to know the conjugated verb form. Then, and only then, lookup the conjugation.

      Don't learn grammar rules. You don't learn grammar rules by learning grammar rules - your brain will learn them by reconstructing them out of applied cases. In most languages, there are usually more rules, exceptions and special cases than there are actual application cases. You'll find out the proper way of saying things. Once you do, you might be curious about the rules to connect the dots. Check them out then - not before.

    3. The right material: Cultural immersion

      Self-education is, I firmly believe, the only kind of education there is.

      – Isaac Asimov

      It's quite simple when you think of it. Which language do you speak best? Your mother tongue. How did you learn it, through grammar books? No: through immersion and contextual deduction. It's a mystery to me why anyone would assume you should learn all subsequent languages in any other way.

      You learn your first language by being immersed in a cultural context, surrounded by the language and people speaking it. Then, your brain uses contextual deduction to guess meanings of words you don't know yet from context and add them to your mind's ever-expanding "concepts <-> lexicalized concepts" dictionary.

      Cultural context is the people you talk to, the movies you watch, the games you play, the books you read, the music you listen to, the language you take notes in.

      The first option is the real immersion, where you need the language to survive. That's how you learned your mother tongue.

      The second is the linguistic immersion you get when moving to another country, whatever the length of time. The only challenge there (failed by most people) is to stick to this frame, and not revert to some other language whenever you can.

      The third option is the cultural immersion you can achieve from home, through books, music, movies, and computer games. Watch a movie, read a book. Think of something you want to say in the language. Lookup phrases whenever you think of something to say and don't know it yet. You'll find out quickly that whole conjugation tables are usually irrelevant. Think of a few common sentences you're likely to say, then check out only those. You'll find out what you really need is first and second person, of the most essential verbs: to be, to go, to want.

      To get a kick start, a good method is audio programs. Many podcasts are available for free. This should help you get quickly to The Sweet Spot. This is the first practical phase of the learning.

      Your first priority is to get into The Sweet Spot of the language learning curve. This is the spot where you know the language enough so that you can watch movies or play computer games in the language with subtitles in the same language. You're able to deduce most unknown words from context, and you can look up the few words you can't. Basically, you're learning effortlessly. This is the second practical phase of the learning. There is no third phase.

      You should enjoy both of these practical steps. The first is the curiosity of sheer discovery. The second is the pride of not needing any learning-oriented material at all, and yet more discovery, combined with making sense of everything, filling the dots, and solidifying all that you already know. These two phases partially overlap and strengthen each other. If you get bored with phase one, phase two should get you motivated. If you get demotivated by phase two because you don't know enough yet to connect enough, phase one should get you in shape.

      Enjoy the process, enjoy the journey.

      Addenda (2017)

      1. I found out afterwards that the great RAW said pretty much the same thing, in different words:

        The human brain is capable of mastering any symbol-system if sufficiently motivated. Some people can even play Beethoven's late piano music, although to me this is as "miraculous" as any feat alleged by psychic researchers; people can learn French, Hindustani, differential calculus, Swahili, etc. ad. infinitum—if motivated. When the first circuit security needs have been reimprinted and second-circuit ego-needs have been hooked to mastering a new semantic reality-tunnel, that tunnel will be imprinted.

      2. Regarding the vocabulary needed to get you into The Sweet Spot, 1000 well-chosen words should be more than enough. Duolingo's 3000 words courses can do the trick, although they include too many unneccessary ones (animals, parts of speech, etc.). An approach that seems closer to ours is Language Transfer.
  • Hello, stranger, and welcome abroad.

    Strangers or strange land

    Robert A. Heinlein's Stranger in a Strange Land, besides having brough us the beautiful word-concept to grok [en] (to understand and accept completely), also, in its very title, highlights the two aspects of a stranger: he's seen as strange, but he can also see the land he's in as strange. If you care to see things in a bright light, the stranger can help you put into perspective all that you consider as a given, by seeing as strange what you see as normal, whereas you see as strange what he considers normal. His very existence proves that there are more than one language, more than one country, more than one culture, more than one "morality", etc., and thus forces you to acknowldege the non-absolute nature of your point of view.

    The premise of the book is actually identical to that of Voltaire's L'Ingénu (see also his other great classic Candide: the two words have the exact same meaning as naïve [fr] - yet another French word!).

    The word stranger [en] has roots in old French, thus comes from the same Latin root (extraneus [la]) as étranger [fr], straniero [it], extranjero [es]. But since stranger has other meanings as well, if you wish to refer to someone born in country A and living in country B, you're more likely to use foreigner [en], immigrant [en], if you reside in country B, and emigrant [en], or expatriate [en] if you reside in country A. (Likewise, English has both border and frontier [en] (from French frontière [fr]), but frontier also has the beautiful meaning of limit of current knowledge, science or exploration that we can overcome.)

    It all loses much of its relevance if you try to involve countries C and more, of course. In the age of globalization, you can be born in one country, live in a second, have the citizenship of a third, pay your groceries in the money of a fourth, sell services on-line paid in the currency of a fifth, and, ideally, pay your taxes in a tax haven sixth country. So who's a foreigner, and who isn't? And what's a foreign language? And what could "foreign country" possibly mean? Hey, Americans and French people, do you know you live in a foreign country according to most of the world?

    Answer: everyone is someone's foreigner (likewise: on est toujours l'imbécile de quelqu'un [fr], everyone is someone's idiot) and there are no foreign languages.

    It's like that old French hamster joke:

    Un hamster stupide se balade au bord d'une rivière. Tout à coup, il aperçoit son copain le hamster crétin sur l'autre rive. Il veut le rejoindre et l'appelle :

    -Eh ! Hamster crétin, comment t'as fait pour passer de l'autre côté de la rivière ?

    -Mais, imbécile ! T'es déjà de l'autre côté !

     

    A stupid hamster is walking alongside a river. Suddenly, he notices his friend the moron hamster on the other bank of the river. He'd like to join him and so he calls out:

    -Hey, moron hamster! How did you manage to get on the other side of the river?

    -You idiot! You're already on the other side!

    Or this Russian anecdote (a Russian Jew is interrogated by the KGB):

    -Родственники за границей есть?

    -Нет...

    -А здесь написано, что у Вас брат, сестра, родители и дядя в Израиле...

    -Так они — на родине, это я — за границей.

     

    -Do you have relatives abroad?

    -Nope.

    -But it says here that your whole family is in Israel?

    -Ah yes, but they're the ones who're home -- I'm the one who's abroad!

    Nevertheless, the word-concepts involved tell us a lot about the history of the perception of the movement of people.

    Immigrants or emigrants

    Even a mere 100 years ago, migration was mostly free throughout most of the world. Not only that, but immigation was even encouraged and welcomed: the Statue of Liberty was completed in 1886. And not only encouraged, but sometimes even coerced, through the penal transportation system.

    Australia, ah the irony.

    Notice also the once common practice of deporting nationals - now only "foreigners". Notice that foreigners could once hold political office, play important political roles. Hell, in general, resident alien suffrage was legal in the US until 1928.

    Therefore, the concern was over emigration, not immigration. Expatriation was something you were a victim of, not something you'd undertake on your own (to the possible annoyment of the inhabitants of the (un)welcoming country):

    III.− Emploi subst. Toutes les couches de la misère humaine, les expatriés, les excommuniés, les déshérités (Hugo, Corresp., 1856, p. 250).

    expatrié [fr]

    Today's meaning of expatriate [en], inasmuch as it is different from immigrant, usually comes down to either being pushed by a foreign company to move (thus the same notion of "unwilling" migration as émigré [fr]), or, conversely to socio-economic factors, to distinguish the glop [fr] foreigners from the not glop [fr] (better yet: unglop) foreigners (glop and unglop are used to deride a too reductionist dichotomy, from French comics character Pifou, who knew no other word-concepts but these two):

    The differentiation found in common usage usually comes down to socio-economic factors, so skilled professionals working in another country are described as expatriates, whereas a manual labourer who has moved to another country to earn more money might be labelled an 'immigrant'.

    Abroad or "foreign countries"

    -¿Dondé esta el extranjero?

    -El extranjero es un país muy grande.

     

    -Where is abroad?

    -Abroad is a very big country.

    Las malas intenciones

    Similar to the welcome emigrant and the unwelcome immigrant, the currently negative perception of "foreign countries" was once the positive perception of "abroad", especially in the prison-countries of Communist regimes: in Czechoslovakia, zahraničí [cs], that which lies beyond the borders, as opposed to cizina [cs] that which is foreign. In Russian, заграница [ru], which is probably what Ayn Rand, who fled Soviet Russia, had in mind when writing about abroad [en]:

    Consciously or not, in the mind of any rebel in Soviet Russia, particularly of the young, there is only one court of final appeal against the injustice, the brutality, the sadistic horror of the inhuman social system in which they are trapped: abroad.

    The meaning of that word for a Soviet citizen is incommunicable to anyone who has not lived in that country: if you project what you would feel for a combination of Atlantis, the Promised Land and the most glorious civilization on another planet, as imagined by a benevolent kind of science fiction, you will have a pale approximation. “Abroad,” to a Soviet Russian, is as distant, shining and unattainable as these; yet to any Russian who lifts his head for a moment from the Soviet muck, the concept “abroad” is a psychological necessity, a lifeline and soul preserver.

    That concept is made of brilliant bits sneaked, smuggled or floating in through the dense gray fog of the country’s physical and spiritual barbed-wire walls: in foreign movies, magazines, radio broadcasts, or even the clothing and the confident posture of foreign visitors. These bits are so un-Soviet and so alive that they blend in one’s mind into a vision of freedom, abundance, unimaginable technological efficacy, inconceivable achievements and, above all, a sense of joyous, fearless, benevolent gaiety. And if European countries, in this vision, are shining planets, America is the sun.

    – Ayn Rand, The Return of the Primitive: The Anti-Industrial Revolution

    Indeed, she described the word-concept abroad as a magic one:

    All heads bent over the table, over a tiny, round, orange and gold box. Vava whispered the magic words: “From abroad.”

    They looked at it reverently, afraid to touch it. Vava whispered proudly, breathlessly, trying to sound casual: “Face powder. French. Real French. It’s smuggled from Riga. One of Father’s patients gave it to him—in part payment.”

    – Ayn Rand, We the Living

    Border crossing

    Notice also that the very concept of "border" is contextual to a world where states, i.e. [la] monopolies of violence (Gewaltmonopolen [de] in Weber's German), have divided among themselves the World.

    The concept thus gave birth to a whole range of related concept depending upon it, such as:

    • douanier [fr], a person whose job is to watch the border;
    • Republikflucht [de], the act of illegally crossing the border out to a better country
    • illegal immigration [en], the act of illegally crossing the border into a better country.
    • salzétrangers [fr], the "dirty foreigners", whether living in country B, or coming from country B to country A where they are welcomed by some and despised by others.
    • alien [en], a person from country A living in country B with the authorization of country B's Gewaltmonopol [de] (legal alien [en]) or without (illegal alien [en]).

    So of course, is it a coincidence, then, since the very concept of border depends on monopolies of violence, that the meaning of the words derived from it will also shift, depending on how that violence is directed?

    "Emigration" was relevant because the Gewaltsmonopolen of that time chose to exert so much violence against "their citizens" (or their belongings or activities, causing economic impoverishment) that those citizens massively wished to leave, and then to exert even more violence against those who tried.

    "Immigration" became relevant when some Gewaltmonopolen, again, chose to exert so much violence against "their citizens" (or their belongings or activities, causing economic impoverishment) that those citizens massively wished to leave. The main difference being that this time the "welcoming countries"'s Gewaltmonopolen chose to exert their violence against the current residents, in order to divert their money towards the residents-to-be. As violence begets violence, this of course causes hatred and rejection of the current residents against the "immigrants", thus, again, tainting the concept.

    So yes, in a free world, where no violence was ever legal, none of the word-concepts described above would exist, except in historical discussion.

  • You can't mention German without a perfunctory [en] nazi reference. You can't think of German without remembering a language that symbolized foreign dominion over peoples under the Austro-Hungarian Empire, an official language of Switzerland pushed down the throats of its students of non-German-speaking regions as mandatory with dumb school textbooks, and massacred in its various Swiss German dialects. Or unerotic sex, be it in the form of Germany's many legal brothels, their only-recently-banned zoophilia, or weird porn scenes (free word of the day: Stromkasten [de], electric box), or even their Erotik-Märkten [de].

    Yet, dig deeper. Forget all that, ignore the jealousy of vulgar latin languages, unlearn the crap, and start anew. You have to go beyond all that, and discover a beautiful, subtle, rich and intuitive language.

    The language of philosophy, the language of new composite words, the language that gave us such beautiful concepts as:

    • Dasein [de] (pobyt [cs]) your local and temporal existence...
    • Umwelt [de] ... in your given subjective environment...
    • Weltanschauung [de] ... from which you draw your world view...
    • Zeitgeist [de] ... influenced of course by the intellectual atmosphere of your time.

    Of course, try not to live under either of these...

    • Zwangswirtschaft [de] economic system based on coercion.
    • Zwangsgesellschaft [de] a society based on coercion.
    • Zwangsheirat [de] forced marriage.

    A language that has different good-byes depending on the means of communication:

    • auf Wiedersehen [de] (au revoir [fr], arrivederci [it], hasta la vista [es])
    • auf Wiederhören [de] (hasta la oída [es], a risentirci [it])
    • auf Wiederschreiben [de] (arrileggerci [it])
    • you can even push the idea further, and if you happen to have some German trombamica [it], and need to despedirse [es], what more appropriate than an auf Wiederficken [de]?

    And frankly, wouldn't the world be a better place if we adopted both the word Autobahn [de] and its lack of legal speed limitation? Let's not pretend that a "highway" limited to 65 mph is the same concept as an Autobahn with no speed limit.