Semantics (how good is English?)

The thing to remember is that the cultural meme IS the word.. that's what language is.

This can be gotten around through explicit definition of terms during a discussion. The participants need to just accept the working definition for the sake of discussion, but should not expect that a particular discussion is going to suddently change the entire society's perception of a word's meaning.

As I've said before, the actual word itself is totally irrelevant. What matters is the underlying meaning. You can always find words of a low enough granularity that you can create common working definitions that can be used in a discussion.

Yep, I agree with you about all of that Roland. Especially good point about the cultural meme being the word. That's not exactly what I mean when I say cultural meme, though. I don't mean the primary definition of the word, I mean the collateral assocations that words come to carry that eventually supplant the original definition. It seems a very akward process that leads to long periods of time where it can cause more miscommunication than communication.

Take a word like "gay" for example. How akward that must have been in the early to mid stages of its transformation of meaning... a transformation caused almost entirely by bigotry. It's still transforming. It began life as a very positive celebratory word, became an aspersion towards homosexuals, and is now becoming a word to describe things that are deemed foolish or gender inappropriate. A word meaning "festive" became a carrier of bigotry and intolerance, as if the intolerance is more important than what words mean.

Yes, but such is the nature of language... Society gives meaning to our words, and as society changes, so does our language. It's interesting, because both have effects on the other. Society influences our languages, and our language influences society.


Even going to different regions of the country within the borders of the US, you'll see major differences in how words are used.

For instance.. I grew up near Philly. When I was a real little kid, people used the term "wicked" to mean "really".. Like, "That's wicked cool". This was a phase that lasted perhaps a month, when I was in something like 3rd grade... and then it just stopped.

But when I was older, I went to college up in Massachussettes.. And I heard people say "Man, that's wicked cool."

At first I was like, "Heh.. ya right man... 'WICKED COOL!'", because I just ASSUMED the guy was joking, and intentionally invoking 3rd grade vocabulary. But eventually dawned on me... People up there actually talk like that. It's in freaking commercials on TV. It all struck me as very weird. (on a somewhat related note, a roomate of mine had a pretty thick new england accent from some region in NE Mass.... and when I first met him, I honestly thought that he was mentally retarded because he said wicked, and had such a weird accent.)

I know you do.

Hehe, I went to college in upstate NY and met a lot of people from Mass. I remember being highly amused by the same thing.

Something fun to ponder... if language wasn't maleable, and instead of words changing meaning, new words were added to the language, what effect would that have on societal transformations? Would things like intolerance and bigotry spread slower, or faster, or exactly the same? I just really wonder how much language serves as a catalyst for these things.

I stand corrected.

I wasn't thinking so much of the actual grammatical construction though, just in the everyday use of the language to impart meaning to the world around oneself. I find it harder to misinterpret someone speaking French as opposed to someone speaking English, but perhaps its more to do with the amount of slang used and the general acceptability (or not), of a particular language to alternative grammatical constructions.

Heh.. I think in reality it would just become impossible to communicate.

The fact that words gradually change their meaning is what makes it possible for things to progress... When someone uses a word in a new way, it's usually not COMPLETELY different from how you've used it in the past, and that helps you understand them.

In the second of his Uplift trilogies, David Brin plays on this subject quite a bit with one of his characters. There are nine main galactic languages and different ones are used for different goals because they each have their strengths and weaknesses and some are better suited to certain tasks than others. Earth stumbles on the scene and brings Anglic with them, and most galactics hate it and consider it a primitive language because it's so imprecise, but some love it because its imprecision gives rise to modes of expression they're not familiar with like simile and metaphor. One character in particular who is a language buff and aspiring writer adopts Anglic as his language of choice, and falls in love with classic earth literature because it's more expressive and poetic than works written in any of the galactic languages. Anyway, Brin gives some really interesting ruminations on the nature of language and how it evolves.

Cool. There is something so "Star Trek TOS"-ish about Brins works, and I love most of the ones I have read.

"Kiln People" I liked a lot, in that it's a very similar situation to SL. I read it before I came here and immediately saw the paralells when I first found out about "alts" in SL. Haven't tried the Uplift series though.

English, or more generally, "Natural" languages are ambiguous. This is a good thing. The human dimension cannot be expressed in "Formal" languages such as mathematics and predicate logic. These languages are, however, designed to be unambiguous, and you can define a subset of english that is equivalent to them. In my freshman year I had an entire course on First Order Logic, where we translated stuff back and forth, and learned how to prove theorems etc.

Great thread! Right up my thesaurus...

a) Language does control thought - a UN aid project in central Africa failed, beacuse in the native language no word (and concept) for "future" existed... Once the word was introduced, and the concept cleared very thoroughly, the people getting the aid were able to go with it, and build a future... (heard in the 70's, so don't ask for a reference).

b) The role a language takes in shaping behaviour / thought was very well addressed in a book called "Babel 17", by Samuel R Delaney. He postulates a synthetic language embedded in primitives ... similar to Arabic, as is mentioned in the book. The result is, that due to the "lazines" of people in thinking conceptually, and their preference for thinking in symbols (where I simplify, pragmatically, form plus meaning = symbol), their thinking was shaped by this language, which made them EXTREMELY ingenious and rapid thinkers, since the vocabulary and structure of the language was designed to be an extremely effective mirror of the functional world... However, several words in this language were "booby trapped", causing apparent psychotic behaviour in the people who used this language, in selective areas... (psychosis as a mis-defined concept? or a mis-associated word?)

If you can find the book, the story is very well written... If I also read this in the early 70's...