Year: 2017

An Introductory Key To Linguistics

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For those who don’t know, I really enjoy conlanging. For those who don’t know what on earth that last word was, it means to construct a language; hence the term. I’ve not yet finished one, but I love the process of thinking hard about creating new words, about building a grammar from the ground up, about constructing a writing system, and so on and so forth. When I’m more comfortable with the progress of my conlang (constructed language), I’ll most likely put it up here, but until then, I’d like to examine a simple sentence, explore it, talk about what we can learn from it, then add more to it and see what we can learn from that. A disclaimer before I start: I’m largely self-trained, so please don’t take anything here as gospel truth. That being said, let’s get started!

Our sentence today is the following:

I lost my keys.

We can say a few things immediately. Firstly, this language uses an alphabet. This means that consonants and vowels have equal weighting amongst letters (also, that this language uses letters, where are a type of graphemes, a grapheme being the smallest unit of a writing system). This means that the writing system is not an abjad, where each grapheme corresponds to a consonant, and vowels are non-existent or optional, with such examples as Arabic and Hebrew; and that the system is not an abugida, where each unmodified grapheme represents a consonant, and vowels are shown with a diacritic or by modifying the consonant, with such examples as Devanagari (used for Hindi), and the wonderful Ge’ez script, used in Ethiopia. Furthermore, this means that the writing system is not a syllabary, where each grapheme represents a syllable, such as in Japanese kana; and that it is not a logography, where each grapheme represents a whole word, such as in Chinese.

We’re still going with the letters, by the way. We can also tell that these words do not exhibit (and here’s a long technical term that I am about to explain) phonemic orthography. Phonemic means relating to the sounds of the language, and orthography means the rules of the writing system in the language. Phonemic orthography means that each sound perfectly corresponds to one grapheme, which of course is totally untrue in English. The letter “y” in the example sentence above corresponds to both an /aɪ/ sound, as in “my”, and is part of the /ɪ/ sound in the word “keys”. Those things in between the forward slashes correspond to parts of the International Phonetic Alphabet, which tries to codify and standardise the potential sounds across all human languages.

Got that? Alright. Let’s go into the structure of the sentence.

First, the basic word order of the sentence. English is primarily an SVO language, which means the sentence will have, in order: a subject, which is (roughly) the thing doing the verb; the verb, which is the action; and the object, which is the thing that the verb is acting upon. In the example sentence, “losing” is being done, “I” am the one that is losing the things, and “keys” are the things being lost. In something like a VSO language, the sentence may run, sans the word “my”, “Lost I keys.” This is the sort of thing that gets very complicated when you get into languages that don’t classify noun types in the same way as other languages (what’s referred to as morphosyntactic alignment), but we can’t stop now, so we must keep moving.

There’s more! The word “my” is what’s referred to as a possessive pronoun, which often acts like an adjective, and it tells us that these sorts of words appear before the noun in English. This doesn’t necessarily have to be the case; “I lost keys my” may sound odd in English, but plenty of other languages put their adjectives after their corresponding nouns, and they do quite well enough for themselves.

This sentence also tells us how words inflect, which is how words change in order to represent different properties. The word “lose” has conjugated (the inflection of a verb) to represent past tense, and the word “key” has declined to represent a plural (“decline” meaning the inflection of a noun, the noun form of decline here being declension). This also tells us the extent to which words inflect in the language. Languages like Mandarin have much less inflection than English – the equivalent sentence in a language with no inflection may be literally translated as “I lose past-tense my key plural“. On the other hand, some languages (most, actually) have more inflection than English. An example sentence that corresponds to our example one may be “I-lost my keys”, or even “I-lost-my-keys”. I won’t get into this too much, but the thing to look up if you’re interested is morphological typology.

I’m going to leave it there for our simple sentence, though there’s still more I could talk about – the fact that pronouns inflect for case but nouns generally don’t and the fact that “lose” is conjugated irregularly (i.e. it’s not “losed”) being two examples. I would like to move on, however, to talking about one concept – the idea of the perfect aspect.

Let’s consider the following three example sentences.

I lost my keys.
I have lost my keys.
I had lost my keys.

The first sentence tells us only about what happened in the past. However, the second and third sentences tell us something interesting – they tell us the relevance of what happened in the past. Take the following two sentences: “I lost my keys, but now they’re here.”, as well as “I lost my keys, and I don’t know where they are.” Both of these sentences feel totally natural to read, because nothing about the simple sentence that we started with contradicts the last part of the sentence.

A bit of a side note here: the word “but” functions pretty much exactly the same as “and”, but implies some sort of surprise or contrast between the two phrases it conjoins. It’s interesting!

Alright, let’s take these two sentences: “I have lost my keys, and I don’t know where they are.”, and “I have lost my keys, but now they’re here.” The last sentence feels odd, and rightly so – the use of “have lost” is what is referred to as the present perfect, and means something that has happened in the past and still has relevance in the present.

The last sentence is what’s called the past perfect, sometimes referred to as the pluperfect. It refers to something that has happened in the distant past, and has relevance to the more recent past; consider the sentence “I had lost my keys before I found them again.”

Finally, there is something that is often confused with the perfect, known as the perfective aspect. In its essentials, the perfective aspect refers to an action viewed as a whole or that is completed. This is contrasted with the imperfective, which is (roughly) an action viewed as a process, or something that is not completed. A good example would be the difference between “I lost my keys” and “I was losing my keys.” The former refers to the action as a whole, and the latter refers to the process. You can even combine the perfect with the imperfective, as in “I have been losing my keys.” This last sentence here could be called present perfect imperfective (sometimes also called past perfect progressive), because it’s referring to the process, and it’s referring to something that’s happened in the past and has relevance in the present.

All this from a couple of words about losing keys. We didn’t even talk about complex sentences, questions, phonotactics, correlatives, moods, and on and on and on. Language is complicated. But, of course, that’s what I find so much fun about it.

And if you ever want to make your own language, all of these concepts are things you should be thinking about.

I’ll probably put up some links to how to make your own conlang at some point, but I would specifically like to credit here three sources: Mark Rosenfelder’s zompist.com, and especially his Language Construction Kit, his Web Resources, and his three books, which I have all bought on Kindle; /r/conlangs, which is a great community of passionate and conlangers; and of course, the greatest website to ever exist, the source of all human knowledge and power, Wikipedia, may its reign last a thousand years. I say the last part only half in jest – I know technically it may not be considered a reputable source, but if we’re being entirely honest with ourselves, we all know it’s an amazing compendium of knowledge.

Thanks for reading.

Death of the Author

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I’ve been thinking recently about the concept of the death of the author, along with the broadly related concepts of prescriptivism versus descriptivism, headcanons, and to what extent authors have the right to their own work.

So as you can probably see from the menu above, I have written some poetry. And my dilemma is this: I want to explain what I meant when I wrote the poems. I feel it is important to me that my thoughts are out there. But I also want them to stand as they are. That too is important to me. And then that got me thinking – if I state my analysis of my own poetry, to what extent does that discredit other people’s analyses? If someone else sees something in my poetry that they appreciate, and I didn’t consciously intend for it to be in there, are they somehow wrong for having found it?

These aren’t rhetorical questions, I plan on answering them.

I am drawn to a conversation I once had with somebody, who told me how ‘The Lord of the Rings’ was an allegory for WWII, and who had some rather convincing arguments. Later I found out that ‘The Lord of the Rings’, although its first volume was published in 1954, was to a large extent, planned and written before the end of that war. In fact, I can directly quote Tolkien’s beliefs on this matter. This passage is from his Foreword to the Second Edition, as follows:

“As for any inner meaning or ‘message’, it has in the intention of the author none. It is neither allegorical nor topical… The crucial chapter, ‘The Shadow of the Past’, is one of the oldest parts of the tale. It was written long before the foreshadow of 1939 had yet become a threat of inevitable disaster, and from that point the story would have developed along essentially the same lines, if that disaster had been averted.”

So the question remains: was this person wrong?

To paraphrase the great Reverend Lovejoy, the long answer is ‘no’, with a ‘but’.

Allow me a brief diversion. I am a very large ‘Harry Potter’ fan. I am very much not a ‘Harry Potter and the Cursed Child’ fan. By no means do I consider it canon – as far as I am concerned, Voldemort never had a daughter, and Time-Turners do not work that way. Furthermore, I am reticent about a lot of the extra details J.K. Rowling has released on Pottermore. Specifically, she mentioned how Dumbledore retrieved the Mirror of Erised from the Room of Requirement. This is contradicted in the book series, where Dumbledore implied that he was unaware of the room while talking to Igor Karkaroff. While there are ways to circumvent this contradiction, I can’t say I’m happy with any of them.

So now a new question emerges: Am I wrong? What is my belief about the canon of Harry Potter worth in comparison to J.K. Rowling’s?

Or how about language? I strive to be grammatically correct, because I enjoy grammar. I strive to distinguish between ‘who’ and ‘whom’, for example. But I know that most other people don’t. And I know that many people don’t believe that you should start a sentence with a conjunction, as I am so fond of doing. But I do. Here are some more examples, and you can probably see which ones I tend to side with based purely on what I’ve been doing throughout this post.

With all this in mind, let me come back to my answers to those questions I asked earlier. Allow me to briefly quote Tolkien again, from the same Foreword:

“I much prefer history, true or feigned, with its varied applicability to the thought and experience of readers. I think that many confuse ‘applicability’ with ‘allegory’; but the one resides in the freedom of the reader,and the other in the purposed domination of the author.”

I can certainly sympathise with Tolkien to an extent here – there is something to be said for writing something with the intent of allowing the reader to form their own interpretations of the work. But I also sympathise with those who intend a specific interpretation of a work; ‘Animal Farm’ is a pretty direct and intended satire of the Russian Revolution and the Stalinist Soviet Union, and another interpretation of that book is almost certainly going to be in some way inferior. And to give some food for thought, Ray Bradbury’s ‘Fahrenheit 451’ is often interpreted as being about censorship, but Bradbury himself has stated that he intended it to be about the decline of literature with the rise of mass media. So who is right?

Here then is my answer, and allow me to paraphrase the aforementioned ‘Animal Farm’:

ALL ANALYSES ARE EQUAL, BUT SOME ANALYSES ARE MORE EQUAL THAN OTHERS

I believe that, generally, an author’s analysis is just as valid as the next person’s, but all other things being equal, the author’s analysis should be given some more credence until proven otherwise – one should probably trust an author to be an expert on their own work, after all. But, there’s room for a headcanon as well as canon, there’s room for applicability as well as allegory, there’s room to walk that pragmatic line between prescriptivism and descriptivism, and there’s room between subjectivity and objectivity for just a little ambijectivity.

I will be placing my notes on my poetry somewhere on this site – where, I haven’t quite decided yet. They will not, however, be on the same page as the actual poetry. I will not force my interpretation of my poetry on anybody else.