More thoughts on Language and Thought, and gender

I've been sharing multiple links recently about the relationship between language and thought. One is this one from the Wall Street Journal; another is this one from the New York Times. Here's a quote that I found particularly interesting:

Some 50 years ago, the renowned linguist Roman Jakobson pointed out a crucial fact about differences between languages in a pithy maxim: “Languages differ essentially in what they must convey and not in what they may convey.” This maxim offers us the key to unlocking the real force of the mother tongue: if different languages influence our minds in different ways, this is not because of what our language allows us to think but rather because of what it habitually obliges us to think about.

This brings us (and Guy Deutscher, the author of the NYTimes piece) back to issues I've discussed like grammatical gender and relative versus absolute direction, as well as others like the defining of time periods (past, present, future). Here's another terrific quote from the article:

When your language routinely obliges you to specify certain types of information, it forces you to be attentive to certain details in the world and to certain aspects of experience that speakers of other languages may not be required to think about all the time. And since such habits of speech are cultivated from the earliest age, it is only natural that they can settle into habits of mind that go beyond language itself, affecting your experiences, perceptions, associations, feelings, memories and orientation in the world.

This really spoke to me. As a speaker of French, I have always found it difficult to remember the grammatical gender of words. I know a large core number, but once I start getting to the periphery of that, I start having to guess. It's so frustrating! For the first time, during my visit to France this summer, I started having a glimpse of the worldview that lies behind knowing all these grammatical genders - the fact that when a French speaker (or Spanish speaker, etc.) looks at an object, it simply appears inherently masculine or feminine. We English speakers have an easy time differentiating between events in the past, the present, and the future, which our language requires us to specify.

While I'm not sure I could attempt it without living in France, I got a glimpse of what the world might look like if I thought in this way. It really stretched my mind into a place beyond where it had been before, and that's one of the most rewarding feelings I can imagine. Perhaps that's why I try to share it with other people through my stories.

The Learning Curve

Learning is really important in stories. Often, a large part of a particular character's development involves learning of one kind and another. Sometimes a character learns a skill. Sometimes he/she learns a language. Sometimes he/she learns something about his/her own personality or character, or strengths, etc.

So I thought today I'd share some of my thoughts about learning.

People typically can't just pick up new things and do them right instantly. Talent is one thing. Miracles are entirely another. I know it's been done a thousand times if it's been done once, but simply handing a sword to some school kid from our world and expecting him to know how to lift it, much less fight the bad guy with it, isn't very realistic. If realism is what you're going for (as it is very often with me) then you'll want to build in the opportunity for your character to learn to use that sword. Or ride that horse. Or do the dancing/kung fu/whatever.

You can put learning in a character's background. Early in my writing, I had the experience of looking at one of my characters and asking how he got to be the way he is. I thought to myself, "He's intelligent. He knows about politics. He's also as graceful as a dancer, and strong enough to pick up a grown man. Shoot - he's a superhero!" Given that he wasn't in a story about superheroes, this was a problem. I had two options to consider at that point. Either I could give him weaknesses (which I did in one respect - he can't sing at all) or I could explain how he got to be so cool. It was that explanation that made me realize he'd been through lots of special schooling, including political training and bodyguard's training, and even training about how to move, stand, and pick up objects. This was now his background. He wasn't a superhero - he was a highly educated specialist. I could weave his experiences in schooling into his thoughts and memories, and suddenly he became a much more interesting character.

You can also put learning "on screen" in your story. If you choose to do that, start by remembering that learning is not instantaneous. Then think through the fact that learning is not linear. A learner can make progress steadily for a period of time, then appear to plateau, then start making rapid progress again thereafter. This offers great opportunities for conflict and frustration for your character. One of the factors involved in the changes in learning speed has to do with novice/expert distinctions. A novice tends to think through a task on the surface level, plowing through what comes at him/her. The novice can get faster at plowing through, but won't "reach the next level" until he or she achieves some kind of expert insight. Expert insight can mean different things, but typically it involves the ability to stand back from a problem and consider it from a meta-level, from the point of view of a larger overall pattern. Once that overall pattern has been grasped, the speed and skill with which the character accomplishes the task jumps up radically, because they don't have to plow through in order to get it done. The answer suggests itself on the basis of this larger pattern.

I have an example of this from language learning, where people talk about the "U-shaped curve" of learning. This curve is observable quite often in child language. Let's take past tense endings. For quite some time, a child will appear to be learning steadily how to make past tense verbs. They'll say:

"had" "hit" "walked" "stood" "cooked"

Then all of a sudden their performance (from a testing point of view) will take a sharp decline, and they'll say:

"hadded" "hitted" "walked" "standed" "cooked"

Notice that I said their performance declined from a testing point of view. What has actually happened here is that the child has suddenly grasped that there is a rule for creating the past tense. Before that, the child was having to memorize each instance of past tense. So if you asked the child with perfect performance to create the past tense form of a made-up verb like "quanch," they wouldn't be able to answer. The child with the apparent problems in the second set of examples (which could be the same child just a bit later) would be able to tell you that the past tense of "quanch" is "quanched." It's at that point, once the rule has been grasped, that the child goes about re-instating all of the exceptional cases, until they get back to:

"had" "hit" "walked" "stood" "cooked"

While this isn't always directly applicable to non-linguistic learning, it does bear some similarities to the difference between novice and expert performance. Grasping higher principles of mathematics, or techniques for how to approach a problem - or even seeing a sword duel in terms of body relations and dynamics rather than blow-by-blow - is where I think the similarity lies.

Language learning isn't always like other types of learning. It's often glossed over in books, and understandably, since it typically takes a very long time and progresses in fits and starts. I've spent so much time studying the details of it that I can tell you it's not worth trying to pin it down to a step-by-step progression - not for story purposes. But make sure you think through how the person grasps the different elements of the language from phonology through syntax and semantics, and also pragmatics. Explanations of these can be found in my "How Linguistics Can Help You!" series in the left nav bar. A person can have bad pronunciation but still do really well with grammar. Or the reverse. Or they can have good pronunciation and grammar and bad pragmatics, and be taken for a social boor. The possibilities are endless, so I won't go into them here.

Lastly, learning isn't just about learning skills. It's also about putting together clue-puzzles, figuring out mysteries, realizing what the bad guy is up to, realizing that you're in love with the girl/boy/etc. Watch out for realizations that happen without any appropriate build-up, because they can be just as awkward as when the schoolboy gets the sword. Think through the underlying components of the realization - the clues - and make sure they're all in place, and in the right order. Then think about what factor might be the single one that clicks everything together for your protagonist. Don't leave that last piece out, either, or readers will be confused. If the realization is important to your story, give it the time and words it deserves. Your story will be stronger and readers will trust you more.

It's something to think about.

Deciphering an unknown language...

This post is a response to Marian's question of a few days ago.

I have seen some of the instances Marian refers to, of humans trying to decipher alien communication beginning with numbers. David Marshall also has a good point about chemistry. In effect, the idea behind these approaches is to try to find understanding by starting with something we know we must have in common.

I'm not convinced that these things would work in actual practice, simply because they rely in large part on our own perception of the separation of objects.

However, in SF generally there is a degree of commonality embedded in the premise. Sometimes the only assumption is that of common perception of objects and numbers. Sometimes it's greater, as when an author asks you to accept a computer that is able to process and decipher language, or when an author asks you to accept a machine translator (or babel fish!)

In her Xenolinguist stories, Sheila Finch often deals with thorny questions related to how alien contexts and physiologies would influence language form - and in fact, she'll be guest blogging here in the next day or so to talk a bit about her design of the Xenolinguists' universe.

In my own stories, I like to pick up at a point where linguists feel they've already got the language largely under control, and deal with the fine points of culture, dialect, and the significance of language.

But the question was how to get past numbers into deciphering more of a language. The key, I think, is context.

The folks who write about the numbers-based communication strategy are setting up a very hard problem, dealing as they are with signals sent at a distance. This kind of communication, much like writing, is highly divorced from the original context of communication.

Humans tend to see objects as separate from one another and assign words to them. This is the vocabulary, or lexicon. When humans are working in a close context of togetherness and shared activity, often enough only a single word is enough to evoke the correct meaning, as when the doctor says "scalpel" over the patient in the operating room. The further away one moves from immediate shared context, the more language features become necessary to get the message across. This is essentially the origin of grammar - pieces of sound (in the human case) stuck in with the object information to show relation, in cases when the relation is not immediately clear to both parties. Writing takes this phenomenon to an extreme, while transmission of data over interstellar distances pushes it even farther.

Humans have powerful language-processing mechanisms built into their brains. We are able to track sounds with powerful accuracy, identifying separate clicks even when they are delivered at quite high speeds - I saw an article on this in the New York Times while in Chicago a few weeks ago. When light flashes occur at the same rate, the eye perceives it as continuous motion and is unable to separate it.

Another thing humans are able to do is perceive frequency of occurrence. If I were to give you two words, say, "true" and "identifiable," you could probably give me an accurate ranking of which one occurs more commonly in English, right off the top of your head. This is a tremendous advantage in deciphering language, whether it be auditory or visual.

So what we do when we see communication is we try to identify patterns that repeat in similar contexts. If we went to an alien planet, the best approach would probably be to get as close as possible to aliens and begin taking samples of their language with as much contextual information as possible - both physical, temporal, and social. Since those contextual cues may not be the same ones we typically use, having sophisticated sensors and computer power at our fingertips would probably be a great help. Once we figure out correspondences, we can start assigning tentative meanings. Having a local resident to test these meanings on, even if it means playing recordings of things that human vocal tracts find unpronounceable, is an indispensable step.

Even so, this process would certainly take years.

The last thing I'll add tonight is a couple of examples of context and frequency distinctions, from the area of phonology. Linguistics talks about something called a "minimal pair," which is the diagnostic test for a phoneme. It goes roughly like this: if you change one single sound in a word, and the meaning of the word changes, then that single sound is a phoneme. The two words, one with one sound and one with the other, are called minimal pairs.

"bit" and "bat" show that short "i" and short "a" are separate phonemes from each other.

On the other hand, aspirated "t" and non-aspirated "t" both occur in English, but are allophones, or two different forms of the same phoneme, because they can be related by a rule, and don't make the difference between separate words.

"tar" contains aspirated "t"
"star" contains non-aspirated "t" - but the non-aspirated "t" is present because of the "s" preceding it.

These two types of "t" are phonemes in at least one Indian language (I can't cite a minimal pair, however, not knowing Indian languages well myself; perhaps one of my readers could give me an example).

I hope that sheds a little light on this process; I certainly have enormous respect for the linguists who have gone out into the field and taken on languages previously unknown to them. Marian, you can always let me know if you have other questions.

Language Communities, or, The Foreigners' Dorm in Kamisoshigaya

When I was writing a bio for my appearances at BayCon and Westercon, I decided to get silly and couch all my language experiences as though they'd taken place on other planets instead of just other countries. What the hey - it made me giggle, right?

But in fact, this is how the analogy translates. It's where I get my culture clash and miscommunication ideas. It's not where I get my language structure ideas, typically, but in the linguistics stories I write I always need language structure *and* cultural ideas.

So I thought I'd tell you a little about the Monbusho foreigner's dorm in Kamisoshigaya, which is essentially where I had my first "spaceport" experience. The dorm was located in a nice neighborhood, a fifteen-minute walk from one train station and a twenty-minute walk from the other. (Commuting to university sure got you in shape.) The building had four wings, and five floors; all the rooms were singles. D wing and the fifth floor were occupied by girls, while the first four floors of A-C were for boys. This gender division did make for some interesting dynamics in itself, but the real complexity was in language communities.

Three hundred and sixty students lived there, from about 60 different countries. It was amazing. The student population naturally formed itself into groups and specialized. It was well known, for example, that if you wanted to throw a really good party, the Americans had to be in charge of the scheduling and food, the Australians had to be in charge of drinks, and the Brazilians had to be in charge of music.

The language groups were stronger than the functional groups, though, and they came in layers. The entire dorm population could be divided into two main communities:

1. People who spoke English better than they spoke Japanese
2. People who spoke Japanese better than they spoke English

This division was made possible by English's status as an international tongue, and the fact that everyone at the dorm was studying Japanese. If it came right down to it, everyone there could use Japanese to communicate on some level, but the Japanese-dominant and English-dominant groups were the strongest. Usually if you were in the English-dominant group, you wouldn't know the students from the other group very well, and vice versa.

Chinese, Thai, Korean, and other Asian students usually fell into the Japanese group. So did a number of Brazilians and Peruvians of Japanese descent, and some eastern Europeans (like Bulgarians).

Filipinos, however, fell into the English group, as did western Europeans and a goodly number of South Americans (and naturally the Aussies, South Africans and New Zealanders).

Within each of these two groups, then, were linguistic sub-groups. Native English speakers had their own group, which given the status of English as a popular lingua franca, was pretty open to anyone who wanted to speak English. The French and Italians tended to clump together for some reason (romance languages that aren't Spanish, perhaps?). Spanish speakers from all over the world had their own social group and they spent a great deal of time together, including having amazing parties that would last until 4 or 5 in the morning. The Chinese-speaking students had their own social group within the Japanese-dominant group.

So how does this apply to our visions of a spaceport, then?

If a lingua franca is available (or more than one) then this kind of fluid group-membership can probably be expected. If there is no obvious lingua franca to use, then pidgins might result (basically, mixtures of words from more than one language with a very rudimentary grammar - but more on those another time).

There's nothing quite so reassuring as hanging out with people and knowing that when you open your mouth, they will actually understand what you need. Of course there are cultural commonalities that can apply when people are accustomed to using the same language.

One little caveat: just because you and another person share a native language doesn't mean you can assume that cultural expectations associated with its use will also be the same. My Australian husband and I learned that early on when we started dating!

But that's a whole different story.

Thoughts on Speaking with Aliens

I was recently directed to this terrific post. If you are interested in the various ways that science fiction authors have dealt with the language problem, it's a great source, because it covers many years and many approaches to language, and it also cites the authors who have taken these various approaches (everyone from Douglas Adams to Vernor Vinge and C.J. Cherryh, etc.).

Take a look, and then go read the books - why not?

Gender: real and grammatical

Dave (a.k.a. Meindzai) directed me to this terrific NPR article, and asked me if I had any experience with the idea of grammatical gender interacting with real gender.

Oh, yes, indeed.

In case you haven't gone over to the article, I'll give you an idea of what it says: people who have grammatical gender in their languages will tend to describe nouns in ways that give them characteristics associated with actual physical genders.

I once read a study (and I wish I could now remember which one) that said that young children who spoke languages with grammatical gender were able to identify their own gender earlier than those who didn't. And, no surprise, children who were asked to assign voices to cartoon characters of objects would give male voices to the grammatically male objects, and female voices to the grammatically female objects. This was not the case with English-speaking kids who haven't had to develop such awareness.

Your native language fundamentally influences how you characterize objects and their relations to one another. For example, a picture is "on" the wall in English, but "up (op)" the wall in Dutch. If you ask friends who speak other languages, you'll be surprised how many tiny subtle differences you'll find.

It might be fascinating to consider putting this distinction, or some other seemingly arbitrary grammatical distinction, into a story. I'm guessing you could get cool misunderstandings, or even disasters similar to that resulting from English vs. metric measurement. I remember hearing that a famous linguist got his inspiration from the idea that words had power over thought, such as when people labeled gasoline cans as "empty" and people were negligent around them, believing they were safe when in fact the gasoline vapor made them far more dangerous around sparks than when they were full.

Feel free to comment, Dave (or anyone else!), if you'd like to further the discussion.

Don't listen too hard...

One of the things I've learned from having kids is not to listen too hard to what they say.

It doesn't mean what you think.

Think about it this way: children's minds are designed to be able to take the mess of sound constantly coming at them, filter out the non-speech sounds from the speech sounds, and pull patterns out of that so that they can develop a system of phonemes, words, and sentences. Before they've had too much of a chance to develop this system, they're trying to duplicate it based directly on what they hear - without the underlying understanding to generate it.

The result is that children's first attempts at language are often difficult to recognize. Difficult to understand, yes, of course, but sometimes a child (a baby, usually) will be saying something and you won't even realize that the sound is a language sound. Maybe as a parent you can't wait for your child's first word. Maybe you're listening hard, waiting for the first signs of language to come out of their mouths.

But if you're listening hard, chances are pretty good you'll miss it. Because the first language out of the baby's mouth won't be a hard-and-fast word, made up of hard-and-fast syllables, or even phonemes. It will be an oral gesture towards the word, a gloss of what the child thinks he or she heard.

The best approach for catching this is the same as for grasping the content of impressionist art. Stand back and let it flow in.

Now I have to go off and see if I can create a story out of this idea...

When you have no Translator (or babel fish)

What do you do if you're confronted with an unfamiliar language, and you have no translator? No language talk-box, no babel fish, whatever your device happens to be.

Well, if you're dealing with seriously different parameters, like underwater communication, or nonhuman speech sounds, you've got a tough task on your hands. Sheila Finch (author of The Guild of Xenolinguists) has argued that it would be next to impossible for us to decipher alien communication in rel life - and I'm inclined to agree on a general level. But let's say we've accepted the science fictional conceit that communication can take place, and should - in that case I think it might be useful to think about what the process of language learning would be like.

There's always the solution of the orphaned alien who speaks his own language yet grows up with humans and learns theirs. That kind of solution is simple, and conveniently hides the yucky details in a place we trust at the same time we don't understand it: the language-learning "black box" of the human (or alien) brain.

But if you've got first exposure, the process is different - and full of opportunities for writers.

Generally a person learning an unknown language will start by trying to associate strings of sounds with their appropriate contexts. The classic example used in a lot of science fictional settings is the one where people point to objects and utter names for them.

Some of you may have seen that Star Trek scene with Counselor Troi where she's talking about the difficulty of determining what an alien says while pointing to a cup of coffee (or something that looks like it). The rough idea, since I don't have the scene itself at my fingertips, is that the word uttered may not be "coffee" or "cup." It might instead be "brown," or "hot," or "enjoy." Or possibly (my ideas) it could be "mine," or "gift for a visitor."

A word, phrase or other utterance comes with a social context, and can never be entirely free of social significance. It can be fun to brainstorm the different kinds of meanings an object might have, since for every possible meaning there's another possibility for misunderstanding. Other posts of mine that relate to this are But what does it mean?(point of view) and Considering the Culture in Objects.

A linguist attempting to parse a new language using technological tools - but not a translator - might begin by making recordings in as many sensory modalities as possible. This would allow them to take time not available to a person who is simply listening. The recordings would allow the linguist to consider observable aspects of the physical situation, and possibly some elements of the social as well (depending on the number of individuals speaking, their dress and behavior, etc.) Breaking speech into words is essentially a process of looking for repeated patterns of sounds and trying to find commonalities across the contexts in which they are used. This goes also for smaller elements of meaning (morphemes).

I thought I'd also add a few notes on language processing.

When we listen to foreign language sounds, the ones that are easiest to capture are the ones at the beginning and end of the utterance.

There is a tendency among many human languages for the subject of the sentence to come first; this isn't always true, but English speakers and speakers of many other languages that follow this pattern will tend to make guesses based on this assumption.

Also, though we don't do it consciously, our brains have an excellent ability to track the frequency of different language items - that is, to say which sounds or words are more common than others.

This barely scratches the surface in terms of the challenges of learning languages the hard way, and the tools people use to deal with them - but I hope you may at least find some interesting ideas here.

Considering Deafness

I've been thinking about deafness a good deal recently because I have a deaf character in a story I'm working on. Deafness fascinates me because it is, in one sense, a medical problem - caused by nerve defect, for example, or accident, or abuse of the ears over a long period of time - but in another sense it is a badge of membership in a language community.

The difference between auditory languages and visual languages is sometimes called a "channel" difference. Channel effectively means which sensory pathway is chosen for the language conduit, and in past entries I've discussed this a little; I know I've mentioned chemical scent languages a couple of times.

In a sense, by being born without hearing or becoming deaf, a person loses one channel. They then have two choices: attempt to "cure" the deafness medically, or use another language channel. In school I saw a fascinating video about cochlear implants, which can cause some deaf people to begin to hear. In that video was one woman who lost hearing as an adult, and she definitely felt rescued by the implant which restored her hearing. Then there were the children, and therein lay the conflict.

A pair of hearing parents with a deaf child had no hesitation about "restoring" the child's hearing.
A pair of deaf parents with a deaf child did not want to take away the deafness which was part of what defined her, didn't want in a sense to evict her from the cultural community to which they belonged.

Part of what entered into their decision was having someone assess the speech of other children who had had cochlear implants, and tell them whether they "sounded deaf" or not. They made their decision to forego the implant because they felt that giving her hearing would oust her from true membership in the deaf community, and they weren't convinced that it would give her true membership in the hearing community.

This last one is an issue of brain plasticity, or the ability of the brain to learn new language information. A rule of thumb on child language states effectively that the brain loses the ability to acquire nativelike phonological ability (i.e. pronunciation) at about age 6; grammar not until about age 13. Thus the later a child receives a cochlear implant, the more difficulty that child will have in processing the sound and turning that into natural-sounding auditory language.

Personally I thought it a shame that the child in question should miss out on hearing all the wonderful sounds of the world - but on the other hand, I understood the parents' cultural point of view.

I want to talk also about sign language a little, but I'm going to have to save that for another post.

The Feel of a Language

I've had lots of occasions lately to notice the different way that languages feel. My kids have been learning a bit of French, and there's always some Japanese floating around my house, and often enough I find myself commenting on other linguistic sources, like when I'm reading my son's dinosaur book and come across Tuojiangosaurus. To him it's a dinosaur name that's tricky to say. To me, it screams "Chinese!"

Part of the feel of a language comes from its inventory of sounds. In German, the very existence of sounds like the "ch" in "ich" changes the feel of the language, where in Chinese you get sound combinations, complex syllables, and tones to boot. But if you look at just the sound inventory for a language you can miss things, because some languages have similar inventories - like, for example, Spanish and Japanese. When I was living in a foreigners' dormitory in Tokyo with 360 students from 60 different countries, we all noticed there was a certain advantage for the Spanish speakers in pronunciation. Still, sounds alone aren't enough.

Intonation is a huge part of the feel of language - a part that I don't see described in fiction as often as I'd like.

English has syllable stress, where one syllable of a word tends to be louder and higher in pitch than the others; this influences things like the aspiration of consonants, which is when a sound like "t" is followed by extra exhalation almost like "h." It also makes for all the metrical patterns we see in poetry, and changes the feel of a sentence drastically. I know I'm always looking out for a good metrical feel when I write, even though I don't count out syllables when I do it. It influences what they call "flow."

Neither French nor Japanese has syllable stress. I haven't studied French intonation in as much depth as Japanese, but effectively, in French there isn't any syllable that sticks out in both loudness and pitch, though I do notice a slight rise in pitch at the ends of sentences. Japanese has a pattern of pitch accent which means that there's no difference in loudness, but each syllable (mora, for sticklers) has a pitch value which is relatively higher or lower, so that the speech tends to flow along, alternating between the two.

Here's an interesting trivia tidbit about English speakers learning French and Japanese: even when they're able to produce all of the right sounds, they can have trouble taking the stress out of their speech. This makes for a rather interesting accent, because it's easy to tell that they don't sound native, but hard to pinpoint exactly the source of the issue because technically all the sounds are correct.

I know I've mentioned mouth shape before, but I'll mention it again. French to me is like calisthenics for the lips, because of the variability of the different sounds and mouth positions - and without that, it wouldn't sound as French. Japanese always feels to me like it should be uttered with a faint smile on the lips, because it has much less range in mouth position. Even the Japanese "u" is un-rounded. I literally used to get my Japanese classes to pronounce words better by asking them to "smile when you say that."

Then there are the intangibles. Where do I get the feeling that French and English are playful languages? Maybe from all the puns I've heard in each? I know I get a feeling that Japanese is a graceful language, but I don't ever get the same sense of playfulness. But maybe it's just because I've been in all the wrong language-speaking situations. I could easily imagine a situation where a language-learner thought the language had no humor, just because he'd never been in the right context to hear it.

Languages have such a vast range of use contexts that it's hard to capture them in their entirety. ESL teachers in the US know that it's perfectly possible for someone to be great at playground talk, but to struggle with English for academic purposes. I know from experience that having a good ear for accents and a lot of conversational experience isn't enough to make me feel comfortable when I need to get medical help in either France or Japan. That's a specialized area of vocabulary that I've hardly touched.

In Japanese you also have the issue of formal and casual language, which are used in different contexts. Because of the amount of formal language I've studied, I feel less comfortable using casual forms, and it has the odd effect of making me feel less comfortable speaking Japanese to my kids than French. I don't want to talk to my kids as if they're colleagues or fellow students! It just feels weird.

Those are my thoughts for this evening. I've decided to go ahead with my plan to take a closer look at some characters from books, and how they feel grounded in culture and belief systems. I've been putting together a pile of books, and I hope to get started with that in the next day or two.

Manners Matter...

No, I'm not talking about Emily Post.

I'm talking about polite words.  Please and thank you, obviously, which have been drilled into many of our heads - and which I drill into the heads of my own children!  (I do try to do it gently...)  But there's also that other stuff: all the things we say to each other which seem to have no real content or meaning, but which we say anyway.  "How are you?" when we don't expect an answer.  "Fine" when we don't really feel fine.  The list goes on and on.

These things are important.  Why?  Not because they have empirical value, but because they have social value.  They express alignment, and to mark us as members of particular social groups.  They are largely unnoticed and unconscious, but that makes them all the more problematic.  

If a language learner makes a mistake in verb conjugation, we go, "Okay, that was a mistake."  And we move on.  But if a language learner makes a mistake in politeness, usually we don't say it was a mistake; we conclude that this person is abrasive or rude.  Mistakes in politeness (and pragmatics generally) tend to reflect on the person, rather than on the person's use of language.

Here's another one.  Where do we draw the line between politeness and lying?  If we don't like a friend's outfit, it would be pretty inconsiderate to tell him so - but what do we say if he asks?  If we say he looks fine, is that lying, or is it simply polite?  It's a tricky distinction, but potentially explosive, and begging to be used in a story.

Then there's mimicry, which came up recently on Kelley Eskridge's blog.  Many of us unconsciously fall into the speech patterns of the people we're talking with - it seems to feel better, to help us fit in by aligning us with those people.  But how much is too much?  How do we know when it might turn into mockery? 

I spoke Australian once.  I'd been waiting at a train station for half an hour, watching trains go by and fuming, when I suddenly realized that I'd made a mistake in reading the destination signs, and I could have caught any of about five trains that I'd seen.  This made me hopping mad (literally!  I must have been quite a sight).  But when the kind people around me asked what was wrong, some unconscious part of me decided they'd call me stupid if they knew I was American, so I launched into Australian without thinking.  Luckily I was smart enough not to try it for long, and I escaped without offending anyone.  They assumed (correctly!) that I wasn't from the neighborhood.

How many of you have been part of situations like this?

I'll come back to the topic again soon.