Languages we speak (and talk about)

Well, hello again, everyone. A long time has passed since I posted anything significant here for the last time. So, now I return. Especially since I have some thoughts to share.

Here on the "Other stuff", we have threads dedicated to what we are listening to. And to what we are watching. I didn't found a thread dedicated to what we are reading, but possibly it is also there, somewhere.

 

Well, I intend to start another thread that is going to be both personal and political - as well as economic, social, cultural, technical, scientific, psychic and spiritual – because it would be dedicated to what I consider to be one of the most fundamental, the most wonderful and the most staggering phenomena of human existence - to the languages we speak, and to the languages we speak about.

 

Below, I will make an example of myself, an example I hope you would follow: I will tell you about two languages I speak freely already, the one I currently enthusiastically learn and the one that I may, possibly, learn some day in the future. And with each language I speak about, I will also provide you with a hint to a potential larger topic to discuss.

 

1) Russian (Русский)

 

Well, it would be natural to start with my natural tongue, isn't it? Or the mother tongue, as it is also called - even if it, at least in my case, is also father's tongue, as well as the tong of all my family, neighbourhood and the whole country I live...

 

(An interesting point to reflect on: which language is the "natural tongue" to a child whose parents come from different societies and speak different languages? The one of the mother and her close relatives? Or of the father and his ones? Or the community where the family lives? But what if they are travelling, exposing themselves and the child to the different languages? This is a real and serious question.)

 

...and this tongue, this language is Russian.

 

What can I say about Russian? It is a Eastern Slavic language, a wonderfully flexible and volatile one, open to a highly creative and poetic usage due to a great potential of word-formation by suffixes and prefixes. For example, take the simple world "cat" – in Russian, there is long range of nouns that can be used to translate it, and a great possibility to invent new ones with a skilled word-play: кот, кошка, кошечка, киса, киска, кисонька, котей, котейка, котяра, котище, котик, котина, котюшечка, котофей, котофеище, котенька, кисуля... And so on, I think you got the point. Try to do something like that with the West Germanic language like English...

 

Such structural richness also diversify the pragmatics (the specifics of communication) of the Russian language – each of the "cat"-words I mentioned above invokes a different connotation in minds of the communicating individuals, from tender to crude to the hints of the sexual.

 

The richness and openness to creativity, however, has a dark side: Russian is incredibly, insanely syntactically (that is, structurally) complex. I always wondered what kind of a Herculean labour is to learn it as a foreign language, and always felt a bit of an awe toward foreigners who managed to complete such labour against all odds – especially knowing that even not all Russians speak a grammatically correct Russian. (I, personally, speak a grammatically correct Russian, largely due to the “language intuition” that, dare I say, I always seemed to possess.)

 

Sometimes, however, our knowledge of language – or of particular language-related skills, such as reading, comes to us from some yet unknown source without any effort on our part. That I can say by my own experience: I learned to read all by myself in the age of 3 (and surprised all adults around when they started to teach me how to read, but learned I can do it myself already). Yet I wouldn't call it an achievement on my part, since, as much as I can recall from such a young age, I made no systematic, dedicated effort to teach myself reading (and how would I have taught myself something that I didn't knew at all?); the understanding of letters, words, phrases etc. just came to me spontaneously, from somewhere (or from somewhen? somewhat? someone?).

 

And there are also known cases of xenoglossy, when people suddenly started to speak languages they never learned at all, or even never heard (of) during their entire previous life... And the cases of automatic writing during the mental mediumship... And so on. This suggests that the language might remain, and be used, even in the spheres beyond somatic and physical.

 

So here is the question: do language in particular, and semiotics in general, play some role in the psychic and spiritual spheres? And if yes, then what one?

 

2) English

 

Now I will turn to the language we all here know and speak - otherwise, we wouldn't be able to participate in the forum discussions, or even to read them: English, the lingua franca of our late (post)modernity, the language of international communication that unchallengeably dominates the global language sphere and deeply permeates the local ones.

 

What I can I say about it? As the global inter-language, it has an undeniable advantage – syntactic simplicity and straightforwardness, and, thanks to it, an notable easiness and swiftness of learning process, even for adults.

 

And for a child, learning it is, eh, child's play, as I have experienced myself. I started learning it in the age of 10, after I moved from one school to another and found out that all other kids were being taught English for three years already. So, I started private lessons with a hired tutor… and was surprised how easily I could learn: I can feel the language intuitively, and this was most important In a year, I was at the level of all other students; in two years, I left them all far behind. Yet I continue to learn and perfect myself, until in the university I found out that I speak somewhat better English than the professors who were teaching it.

 

One possible problem with current linguistic dominance of English is that it, beyond playing a necessary role of the inter-language that allows the people from the different language communities to connect with each other (as we are doing now), "invades" (if it is possible to say so) all other languages, filling them with the borrowed words – words that increasingly replace the native ones. Such "Anglophonisation" (to call it so) may lead to impoverishment of other languages, and thus of other nominative-conceptual perspectives...

 

3) German (Deutsch)

 

...which is especially evident when one compares it with another West Germanic language, German. There are some words (and thus also notions) in it, that have no genuinely semantically (meaning-related) corresponding words (and notions) in English (yet there are such semantic correspondences in Russian).

 

For example, take Russian “познание” and German “die Erkenntnis”. There is no direct English counterpart for it; nether “learning”, nor “cognition”, nor “comprehension”, nor “understanding”, nor “knowledge” can grasp the semantic content of these Russian and German words completely. And in Russian, there are yet another word, “постижение”, that has neither English nor German direct counterpart; one can try to describe it as “learning” with a more sublime, exalted connotation, but such description still fail to grasp the full semantic spectrum of the Russian word and expressed notion.

 

Another such word is Russian “народ” and German “das Volk”, that also has no analog in English. “People”, “populace”, “nation”, “community”, “ethnicity”, “culture”… Each of these words covers some small part of the Russian and German semantic spectrum, but neither of them – nor even all of them in sum – can express the whole semantics behind the words.

 

Yet one more example: both in Russian and in German there are two semantically differing words to translate the English word “experience”: “переживание” and “опыт” in Russian, “das Erlebnis” and “die Erfahrung” in German. Both in Russian and German cases, the former words are more emphasising subjective and ontological aspects of experience (experience-as-consciousness and experience-as-existence), and the latter words – objective and ontological ones (experience-as-learning and experience-and knowledge). That’s why, I think, why the German word for the “near-death experience (NDE)” is “die Nahtoderfahrung (NTE)”, rather than “das Nahtoderlebnis” – it helps to clarify the externally, socially verifiable – and thus objective, epistemologically sound and intriguing – components of such experiences, rather than represent them as something purely subjective and subject-ontological. And all these on a level of verbal semantic spectrums.

 

(An interesting addition: unlike English, the subject-ontological semantic correlates of “experience” – “переживание” and “das Erlebnis”, respectively – are derived from the word meaning “life”: “жизнь” and “das Leben”, thus connecting consciousness and lived existence even on a verbal level.)

 

There are, of course, opposite examples, when an English word has no suitable counterpart in another language: so, the difference between “mystery” – something unknown because of the general state of events, and “secret” – something deliberately kept hidden by one (group of) actor(s) from the other(s) – is harder to express, since both these words would be called “das Geheimnis”.

 

(Harder but not impossible: if I would be expressing the difference between “mystery” and “secret” to a German-speaking person, I would probably differentiate between “das Geheimnis” (the hidden as such) and “die Geheimhaltung” (the determination to keep something hidden, and the practice of such keeping-hidden)).

 

I think you do get the point, don’t you? It is impossible to express the whole semantic continuum of human “meaningfulisation” (let me coin such a term…) with one language alone. (Well, probably even the summation of all living, dead and yet-unborn languages would probably fail to exhaust the unimaginable human potential to weave multi-layered networks of meaning to project them on the totality of yet-unnamed experience by the acts of individual, collective and massive will.) So, the loss of any language is also the tear of in the net of meaning-exchange, a gap in the potential comprehension of the experiential and the blinding of the will. One should speak at least two languages just to start to grasp the importance and magnitude of the problem.

 

Oh, well, I moved too far from the personal and into the global. As for my personal story with German language, it is such: while German is not the first foreign language I learned, it is the first one I encountered: being about 4 years of age, I found some German magazines and audio records in my grandmother’s apartment, was surprised by the strange Latin letters (as I told above, by this time I had already learned the Cyrillic alphabet of Russian) and found out that people speak different languages. I felt a kind of premonition that one day I will know and speak this language.

 

So, when I had to choose the second foreign language (after English) during my university courses, I had no hesitation and chose German. And I chose well: I really like German. It is a beautiful language, with a great potential for an inventive metaphysical use, indeed a language for philosophers and poets. For the few coming years, I will be perfecting it until I speak it as freely and fluently as I speak Russian and English. After that, I would probably make a pause in language learning, to divert my attention to other projects. And later…

 

4) Dutch (Nederlands)

 

And later, I would, maybe, turn my attention to one more language I feel some kind of intuitive sympathy, and an obscure premonition of the close acquaintance coming in the potential future – to the Dutch.

 

Well, this is quite an unusual preference, isn’t it? Dutch is a relatively small, not very popular or influential language, much unlike large, leading languages like German, French or Spanish – or, to a lesser extent, even Italian, Portuguese or Russian (let alone the prime and dominant English). Yet the unusualness is nothing to me; I’m doing what is my will to do, not something that is “popular” or “common”. And then I encountered Dutch, I felt an obvious willful impulse toward it, an inner drive to learn and comprehend. This is what is important to me.

 

Yet another notable advantage of Dutch for me personally is that it is a West Germanic language like English and German. Syntactically, it appears to stand somewhat between German and English, being much closer to former rather than to latter. So, for a person who speak freely both English (as I do already) and German (as I will soon), learning Dutch appear to be quite easy. In fact, due to its evident closeness to German, I can comprehend the meaning of some simple Dutch texts already, “translating” them into German in my mind by association of similar words and grammar structures.

 

But, with all advantages of Dutch, comes a notable, severe disadvantage: since, as I said already, a small language that is not highly popular as a foreign language to learn. And it means that there is no vast, universally accessible learning infrastructure for this language. If one tries to learn German, French or Spanish, one can find a private tutor (or a language course) virtually anywhere, as well as a good selection of a complete, full-course, from-beginner-to-advanced learning literature sets. With Dutch, finding someone to teach you from the start to finish (which is crucially important – learning language without guidance is largely a futile effort), and something to teach yourself with, consecutively, through all this time, is much more difficult, especially if you are not living in your country’s capital.

 

So, I’m not sure whether I will try to learn Dutch, after all: it will take a real effort, and a lot of inventiveness, to find a way to learn it to the point of speaking freely – even if the learning itself would be easy and pleasant.

 

Anyway, it is not a problem of the near future – as I said above, now I’m perfecting German; and, after I’m certain of my German language mastery, I’ll make a pause to busy myself with activities beyond language-learning. And then… who knows? If my determination will still be strong enough, maybe I’ll find a way. Or maybe the external circumstances will overcome my willfulness. Or maybe my desire will wane by then, and I’ll give up this plan. Since I don’t know the circumstances of the future – or even myself-in-the-future – I can tell nothing definite right now, expect that, as for now, my willful impulse still persists.

 

Now, from personal to global: my personal thoughts about languages large and small has lead me to the question why some particular languages are popular and influential, why others are not. I think I have an answer, or, most probably, a part of it: all large languages are the languages of violent empires, still-functioning or already-crumbled; they were spread across the world largely not by some peaceful cultural influence, but by a violent military force. Just look at it: the currently dominant language, English, is the language of the only violent colonial empire that is still fully active, racketeering and pillaging the whole world, invading everywhere, and attacking everyone, it wants – the USA. The languages that follow English in popularity are the language of the former, crumbled-nowadays but active-in-the-past violent colonial empires – Spanish, Portuguese, French, German, Italian, Russian. Compared to all these still-active or yet-inactive global gangsters, Netherlands were relatively insignificant in their own colonial imperialism (in which they did participated, to the extent). So, their language was not forced on so many people with such intensity as many others.

 

In fact, language, as a part of a sociocultural legacy, are sadly entwined with a politeconomic force: the durability and prevalence of a sociocultural framework oftentimes depends on a determination and potential of the people sharing such framework to enforce it on the people who never asked for it…

 

P.S. Mathematics-as-language?

 

Well, this is all I wanted to tell and to say. You are welcome – in fact, encouraged – to inform anyone here about the languages you speak and like, and to tell your own stories and experiences of language-learning and language-using. You are also encouraged to share your thoughts about the role and implications of language(s) in all aspects of the human existence – technoscientific, politeconomic, sociocultural, psychospiritual etc.

 

But, before I finished, I recalled yet another language, the language that all people share and speak, to a differing extent – the numerical-formulaic language of mathematics.

 

Am I correct in calling the mathematics a form of language? Does it possess only syntactics, or a kind of semantics and pragmatics as well? You may tell me what you think, I’m interested in it.

Am I correct in calling the mathematics a form of language? Does it possess only syntactics, or a kind of semantics and pragmatics as well? You may tell me what you think, I’m interested in it.

Absolutely. It's an abstract code designed to express concepts and relationships, the same as any other language.

I may later on talk in this thread about my journey into the swedish language and the interesting thoughts it has given me.  I am also lucky that I am married to a qualified linguist which helps a great deal.  I just need some time to collect my memories and data and I may work offline and post a pdf link as we share a dongle which makes it difficult to post long posts directly.

Well, hello again, everyone. A long time has passed since I posted anything significant here for the last time. So, now I return. Especially since I have some thoughts to share.

Here on the "Other stuff", we have threads dedicated to what we are listening to. And to what we are watching. I didn't found a thread dedicated to what we are reading, but possibly it is also there, somewhere.

 

Well, I intend to start another thread that is going to be both personal and political - as well as economic, social, cultural, technical, scientific, psychic and spiritual – because it would be dedicated to what I consider to be one of the most fundamental, the most wonderful and the most staggering phenomena of human existence - to the languages we speak, and to the languages we speak about.

 

Below, I will make an example of myself, an example I hope you would follow: I will tell you about two languages I speak freely already, the one I currently enthusiastically learn and the one that I may, possibly, learn some day in the future. And with each language I speak about, I will also provide you with a hint to a potential larger topic to discuss.

 

1) Russian (Русский)

 

Well, it would be natural to start with my natural tongue, isn't it? Or the mother tongue, as it is also called - even if it, at least in my case, is also father's tongue, as well as the tong of all my family, neighbourhood and the whole country I live...

 

(An interesting point to reflect on: which language is the "natural tongue" to a child whose parents come from different societies and speak different languages? The one of the mother and her close relatives? Or of the father and his ones? Or the community where the family lives? But what if they are travelling, exposing themselves and the child to the different languages? This is a real and serious question.)

 

...and this tongue, this language is Russian.

 

What can I say about Russian? It is a Eastern Slavic language, a wonderfully flexible and volatile one, open to a highly creative and poetic usage due to a great potential of word-formation by suffixes and prefixes. For example, take the simple world "cat" – in Russian, there is long range of nouns that can be used to translate it, and a great possibility to invent new ones with a skilled word-play: кот, кошка, кошечка, киса, киска, кисонька, котей, котейка, котяра, котище, котик, котина, котюшечка, котофей, котофеище, котенька, кисуля... And so on, I think you got the point. Try to do something like that with the West Germanic language like English...

 

Such structural richness also diversify the pragmatics (the specifics of communication) of the Russian language – each of the "cat"-words I mentioned above invokes a different connotation in minds of the communicating individuals, from tender to crude to the hints of the sexual.

 

The richness and openness to creativity, however, has a dark side: Russian is incredibly, insanely syntactically (that is, structurally) complex. I always wondered what kind of a Herculean labour is to learn it as a foreign language, and always felt a bit of an awe toward foreigners who managed to complete such labour against all odds – especially knowing that even not all Russians speak a grammatically correct Russian. (I, personally, speak a grammatically correct Russian, largely due to the “language intuition” that, dare I say, I always seemed to possess.)

 

Sometimes, however, our knowledge of language – or of particular language-related skills, such as reading, comes to us from some yet unknown source without any effort on our part. That I can say by my own experience: I learned to read all by myself in the age of 3 (and surprised all adults around when they started to teach me how to read, but learned I can do it myself already). Yet I wouldn't call it an achievement on my part, since, as much as I can recall from such a young age, I made no systematic, dedicated effort to teach myself reading (and how would I have taught myself something that I didn't knew at all?); the understanding of letters, words, phrases etc. just came to me spontaneously, from somewhere (or from somewhen? somewhat? someone?).

 

And there are also known cases of xenoglossy, when people suddenly started to speak languages they never learned at all, or even never heard (of) during their entire previous life... And the cases of automatic writing during the mental mediumship... And so on. This suggests that the language might remain, and be used, even in the spheres beyond somatic and physical.

 

So here is the question: do language in particular, and semiotics in general, play some role in the psychic and spiritual spheres? And if yes, then what one?

 

2) English

 

Now I will turn to the language we all here know and speak - otherwise, we wouldn't be able to participate in the forum discussions, or even to read them: English, the lingua franca of our late (post)modernity, the language of international communication that unchallengeably dominates the global language sphere and deeply permeates the local ones.

 

What I can I say about it? As the global inter-language, it has an undeniable advantage – syntactic simplicity and straightforwardness, and, thanks to it, an notable easiness and swiftness of learning process, even for adults.

 

And for a child, learning it is, eh, child's play, as I have experienced myself. I started learning it in the age of 10, after I moved from one school to another and found out that all other kids were being taught English for three years already. So, I started private lessons with a hired tutor… and was surprised how easily I could learn: I can feel the language intuitively, and this was most important In a year, I was at the level of all other students; in two years, I left them all far behind. Yet I continue to learn and perfect myself, until in the university I found out that I speak somewhat better English than the professors who were teaching it.

 

One possible problem with current linguistic dominance of English is that it, beyond playing a necessary role of the inter-language that allows the people from the different language communities to connect with each other (as we are doing now), "invades" (if it is possible to say so) all other languages, filling them with the borrowed words – words that increasingly replace the native ones. Such "Anglophonisation" (to call it so) may lead to impoverishment of other languages, and thus of other nominative-conceptual perspectives...

 

3) German (Deutsch)

 

...which is especially evident when one compares it with another West Germanic language, German. There are some words (and thus also notions) in it, that have no genuinely semantically (meaning-related) corresponding words (and notions) in English (yet there are such semantic correspondences in Russian).

 

For example, take Russian “познание” and German “die Erkenntnis”. There is no direct English counterpart for it; nether “learning”, nor “cognition”, nor “comprehension”, nor “understanding”, nor “knowledge” can grasp the semantic content of these Russian and German words completely. And in Russian, there are yet another word, “постижение”, that has neither English nor German direct counterpart; one can try to describe it as “learning” with a more sublime, exalted connotation, but such description still fail to grasp the full semantic spectrum of the Russian word and expressed notion.

 

Another such word is Russian “народ” and German “das Volk”, that also has no analog in English. “People”, “populace”, “nation”, “community”, “ethnicity”, “culture”… Each of these words covers some small part of the Russian and German semantic spectrum, but neither of them – nor even all of them in sum – can express the whole semantics behind the words.

 

Yet one more example: both in Russian and in German there are two semantically differing words to translate the English word “experience”: “переживание” and “опыт” in Russian, “das Erlebnis” and “die Erfahrung” in German. Both in Russian and German cases, the former words are more emphasising subjective and ontological aspects of experience (experience-as-consciousness and experience-as-existence), and the latter words – objective and ontological ones (experience-as-learning and experience-and knowledge). That’s why, I think, why the German word for the “near-death experience (NDE)” is “die Nahtoderfahrung (NTE)”, rather than “das Nahtoderlebnis” – it helps to clarify the externally, socially verifiable – and thus objective, epistemologically sound and intriguing – components of such experiences, rather than represent them as something purely subjective and subject-ontological. And all these on a level of verbal semantic spectrums.

 

(An interesting addition: unlike English, the subject-ontological semantic correlates of “experience” – “переживание” and “das Erlebnis”, respectively – are derived from the word meaning “life”: “жизнь” and “das Leben”, thus connecting consciousness and lived existence even on a verbal level.)

 

There are, of course, opposite examples, when an English word has no suitable counterpart in another language: so, the difference between “mystery” – something unknown because of the general state of events, and “secret” – something deliberately kept hidden by one (group of) actor(s) from the other(s) – is harder to express, since both these words would be called “das Geheimnis”.

 

(Harder but not impossible: if I would be expressing the difference between “mystery” and “secret” to a German-speaking person, I would probably differentiate between “das Geheimnis” (the hidden as such) and “die Geheimhaltung” (the determination to keep something hidden, and the practice of such keeping-hidden)).

 

I think you do get the point, don’t you? It is impossible to express the whole semantic continuum of human “meaningfulisation” (let me coin such a term…) with one language alone. (Well, probably even the summation of all living, dead and yet-unborn languages would probably fail to exhaust the unimaginable human potential to weave multi-layered networks of meaning to project them on the totality of yet-unnamed experience by the acts of individual, collective and massive will.) So, the loss of any language is also the tear of in the net of meaning-exchange, a gap in the potential comprehension of the experiential and the blinding of the will. One should speak at least two languages just to start to grasp the importance and magnitude of the problem.

 

Oh, well, I moved too far from the personal and into the global. As for my personal story with German language, it is such: while German is not the first foreign language I learned, it is the first one I encountered: being about 4 years of age, I found some German magazines and audio records in my grandmother’s apartment, was surprised by the strange Latin letters (as I told above, by this time I had already learned the Cyrillic alphabet of Russian) and found out that people speak different languages. I felt a kind of premonition that one day I will know and speak this language.

 

So, when I had to choose the second foreign language (after English) during my university courses, I had no hesitation and chose German. And I chose well: I really like German. It is a beautiful language, with a great potential for an inventive metaphysical use, indeed a language for philosophers and poets. For the few coming years, I will be perfecting it until I speak it as freely and fluently as I speak Russian and English. After that, I would probably make a pause in language learning, to divert my attention to other projects. And later…

 

4) Dutch (Nederlands)

 

And later, I would, maybe, turn my attention to one more language I feel some kind of intuitive sympathy, and an obscure premonition of the close acquaintance coming in the potential future – to the Dutch.

 

Well, this is quite an unusual preference, isn’t it? Dutch is a relatively small, not very popular or influential language, much unlike large, leading languages like German, French or Spanish – or, to a lesser extent, even Italian, Portuguese or Russian (let alone the prime and dominant English). Yet the unusualness is nothing to me; I’m doing what is my will to do, not something that is “popular” or “common”. And then I encountered Dutch, I felt an obvious willful impulse toward it, an inner drive to learn and comprehend. This is what is important to me.

 

Yet another notable advantage of Dutch for me personally is that it is a West Germanic language like English and German. Syntactically, it appears to stand somewhat between German and English, being much closer to former rather than to latter. So, for a person who speak freely both English (as I do already) and German (as I will soon), learning Dutch appear to be quite easy. In fact, due to its evident closeness to German, I can comprehend the meaning of some simple Dutch texts already, “translating” them into German in my mind by association of similar words and grammar structures.

 

But, with all advantages of Dutch, comes a notable, severe disadvantage: since, as I said already, a small language that is not highly popular as a foreign language to learn. And it means that there is no vast, universally accessible learning infrastructure for this language. If one tries to learn German, French or Spanish, one can find a private tutor (or a language course) virtually anywhere, as well as a good selection of a complete, full-course, from-beginner-to-advanced learning literature sets. With Dutch, finding someone to teach you from the start to finish (which is crucially important – learning language without guidance is largely a futile effort), and something to teach yourself with, consecutively, through all this time, is much more difficult, especially if you are not living in your country’s capital.

 

So, I’m not sure whether I will try to learn Dutch, after all: it will take a real effort, and a lot of inventiveness, to find a way to learn it to the point of speaking freely – even if the learning itself would be easy and pleasant.

 

Anyway, it is not a problem of the near future – as I said above, now I’m perfecting German; and, after I’m certain of my German language mastery, I’ll make a pause to busy myself with activities beyond language-learning. And then… who knows? If my determination will still be strong enough, maybe I’ll find a way. Or maybe the external circumstances will overcome my willfulness. Or maybe my desire will wane by then, and I’ll give up this plan. Since I don’t know the circumstances of the future – or even myself-in-the-future – I can tell nothing definite right now, expect that, as for now, my willful impulse still persists.

 

Now, from personal to global: my personal thoughts about languages large and small has lead me to the question why some particular languages are popular and influential, why others are not. I think I have an answer, or, most probably, a part of it: all large languages are the languages of violent empires, still-functioning or already-crumbled; they were spread across the world largely not by some peaceful cultural influence, but by a violent military force. Just look at it: the currently dominant language, English, is the language of the only violent colonial empire that is still fully active, racketeering and pillaging the whole world, invading everywhere, and attacking everyone, it wants – the USA. The languages that follow English in popularity are the language of the former, crumbled-nowadays but active-in-the-past violent colonial empires – Spanish, Portuguese, French, German, Italian, Russian. Compared to all these still-active or yet-inactive global gangsters, Netherlands were relatively insignificant in their own colonial imperialism (in which they did participated, to the extent). So, their language was not forced on so many people with such intensity as many others.

 

In fact, language, as a part of a sociocultural legacy, are sadly entwined with a politeconomic force: the durability and prevalence of a sociocultural framework oftentimes depends on a determination and potential of the people sharing such framework to enforce it on the people who never asked for it…

 

P.S. Mathematics-as-language?

 

Well, this is all I wanted to tell and to say. You are welcome – in fact, encouraged – to inform anyone here about the languages you speak and like, and to tell your own stories and experiences of language-learning and language-using. You are also encouraged to share your thoughts about the role and implications of language(s) in all aspects of the human existence – technoscientific, politeconomic, sociocultural, psychospiritual etc.

 

But, before I finished, I recalled yet another language, the language that all people share and speak, to a differing extent – the numerical-formulaic language of mathematics.

 

Am I correct in calling the mathematics a form of language? Does it possess only syntactics, or a kind of semantics and pragmatics as well? You may tell me what you think, I’m interested in it.

Hi Vortex,

You are far more of a linguist than I will ever be, however here are a few comments:

English has a number of phrases for 'cat' that do express different aspects of our furry friends (without any necessarily sexual suggestion) - cat - pussy - pussy cat - kitty cat, etc. I suspect that in general this might reduce the differences in expressibility between languages quite a bit.

The Americans and us Brits are not super linguistic nations! However, the problem is easy to see. I learned French at school, which I found essentially useless. I went to France and ordered a cup of coffee - "Je veux une tasse to cafe s'il vous plait". The waiter obviously recognised my accent and replied in English with the offer of a range of coffees that I couldn't possibly have expressed in French!

A little later I found a partner who is of Czech extraction. She has taught me a little Czech, which is an eye opener. For example, I hadn't realised that modern languages (unlike Latin and Greek) has 6  or 7 cases of nouns and full conjugations of verbs. These multiply the task of learning one of these languages by about 50! I also learned that Czech has a grammatical diminutive form - think of duck and ducking! However much of what I was taught was in diminutive form (!!), so that in a restaurant I used the expression "Mam plní bzisko" to mean I did not want anything more to eat. What I'd actually said was, "My tummy is full", which caused much laughter.

Mathematics has actually informed my limited linguistic skills, because I realised many years ago that a good third of the Cyrillic alphabet comes from Greek, and the pronunciation can be inferred from the corresponding maths symbols - λ, μ, ρ, π, etc. This makes it possible to at least make a stab at figuring out Russian words - particularly foreign ones.

As to whether mathematics is a language - well I suppose it is, but it uses a rather different logic from normal language, and has more or less spread around the globe. It would be very interesting to meet an alien species with its own version of mathematics, just to see how differently mathematics could be expressed.

David

Absolutely. It's an abstract code designed to express concepts and relationships, the same as any other language.

I may later on talk in this thread about my journey into the swedish language and the interesting thoughts it has given me.  I am also lucky that I am married to a qualified linguist which helps a great deal.  I just need some time to collect my memories and data and I may work offline and post a pdf link as we share a dongle which makes it difficult to post long posts directly.

Hi Vortex,

You are far more of a linguist than I will ever be, however here are a few comments:

English has a number of phrases for 'cat' that do express different aspects of our furry friends (without any necessarily sexual suggestion) - cat - pussy - pussy cat - kitty cat, etc. I suspect that in general this might reduce the differences in expressibility between languages quite a bit.

The Americans and us Brits are not super linguistic nations! However, the problem is easy to see. I learned French at school, which I found essentially useless. I went to France and ordered a cup of coffee - "Je veux une tasse to cafe s'il vous plait". The waiter obviously recognised my accent and replied in English with the offer of a range of coffees that I couldn't possibly have expressed in French!

A little later I found a partner who is of Czech extraction. She has taught me a little Czech, which is an eye opener. For example, I hadn't realised that modern languages (unlike Latin and Greek) has 6  or 7 cases of nouns and full conjugations of verbs. These multiply the task of learning one of these languages by about 50! I also learned that Czech has a grammatical diminutive form - think of duck and ducking! However much of what I was taught was in diminutive form (!!), so that in a restaurant I used the expression "Mam plní bzisko" to mean I did not want anything more to eat. What I'd actually said was, "My tummy is full", which caused much laughter.

Mathematics has actually informed my limited linguistic skills, because I realised many years ago that a good third of the Cyrillic alphabet comes from Greek, and the pronunciation can be inferred from the corresponding maths symbols - λ, μ, ρ, π, etc. This makes it possible to at least make a stab at figuring out Russian words - particularly foreign ones.

As to whether mathematics is a language - well I suppose it is, but it uses a rather different logic from normal language, and has more or less spread around the globe. It would be very interesting to meet an alien species with its own version of mathematics, just to see how differently mathematics could be expressed.

David

Thanks for replying, people. I has almost started thinking that the effort of writing this was wasted!