I think I might have found the greatest thing on the fabled internetz ever.

While not exactly linguistic in nature per se, the Geoffrey Chaucer hath a Blog page is wildly entertaining, and I can always claim that I posted it due to the ongoing fascination in linguistic blogs around the net with the LOLcats dialect(?), and other language trends online. Here you may find posts such as this;

“No thyng hath plesed me moore, or moore esed myn wery brayne than thes joili and gentil peyntures ycleped “Cat Macroes” or “LOL Cattes .” Thes wondirful peintures aren depicciouns of animals, many of them of gret weight and girth, the which proclayme humorous messages in sum queynte dialect of Englysshe (peraventure from the North?). Many of thes cattes (and squirreles) do desiren to haue a “cheezburger,” or sum tyme thei are in yower sum thinge doinge sum thinge to yt.

For many dayes ich haue desyred to maak Lolpilgrimes from the smal peyntures that Mayster Linkferste hath ymaad for my Tales of Canterburye – not oonly wolde it be a thing of muchel solaas to me, but it wolde be a good “pre writing exercise” (the which myn tutor, Archbishop Arundel, did alwey saye were of gret necessitee). And thus to-daye whanne ich had a smal spot of tyme bitwene a meetinge wyth a feng shui consultant and a recopyinge of the inventorie of carpentrie supplyes in Windsore, ich did go unto the wondrous LolCat Scriptorium of Gordon de McNaughton and did just go crazye…“

Some years back when I read Paul Kay and Willett Kempton’s article What is the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis[1] and they presented the evidence for the naming strategy, which is what they dubbed the phenomenon that people categorize by linguistic criteria instead of physiological criteria in a specific task, one thing hit me.

Let me start by putting this in context. Kay and Kempton were studying 5 native English speakers and 4 native Tarahumara speakers, in itself not exactly a mind-blowing number of subjects, and the subjects were to look at three Munsell color chips of which they were to “pick the odd one out”. These chips would all be close to the linguistic blue-green boundary of English and be arranged such that if chips A and B would be called green in English, chip C would be called blue, but A and C could easily be closest in terms of wavelength while still on each side of the lexical blue-green boundary of English. In Tarahumara, however, there’s no lexical distinction between blue and green. They use one word to cover the entire blue-green spectrum.

What Kay & Kempton found was that the Tarahumara speakers appeared to discriminate in terms of wavelength — i.e. they would pick the physiological “odd one” regardless of what an English speaker would name the color. The English speakers would pick the “odd one” by using the naming strategy — i.e. if two chips would be called blue, then the odd one would be the green one.

While I do think this experiment is very interesting, and definitely one of the better (and simpler) to be caried out in the name of categorization, there’s still one thing that bothers me. How can we be sure that English speakers aren’t simply choosing a logical way to discriminate? Remember, they’re asked to “pick the odd one out”, which necesarrily means that there must be an odd one and language seems to be a pretty logical — and obvious — choice in this situation. What would happen if they were asked to “pick the odd one out” of, say, an F-14 fighter, a can of beans and an elm tree? I’m pretty sure the subjects would find some way to do it. Maybe not uniformly, but they’d definitely be able to.

Now, a later study by Gilbert et al.[2] (involving Kay himself), has shown that the naming strategy in fact primarilly occurs when the “odd one” is in the right visual field, but not the left. This supports a Whorfian interpretation when things are processed in the left hemisphere, but won’t that be exactly where the processing is taking place if you conduct the experiment as Kay & Kempton did back in 1984?

Maybe someone has already raised these issues, maybe they’re already dealt with or maybe “zere iz no zpöön” and I’m just looking at this wrong. Either way, I urge anyone with a little knowledge of this to comment and maybe drop a reference so I may be enlightened.

—–
[1]: Kay, P. & Kempton, W. (1984), What is the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, American Anthropologist 86:65–79
[2]: Gilbert, A.L. et al. (2006), Whorf hypothesis is supported in the right visual field but not the left. PNAS 2006 103:489-494

[Note: In spite of the heated debate on Danish language policy, I'm choosing to publish this in English in the hope that it'll reach a larger amount of readers, thus contributing further to the development of linguistics as a science than it would if published in Danish.]

Domænetabet der tales så meget om i den danske sprogdebat er stort set udelukkende en henvisning til at engelsk i højere grad end før i tiden er det foretrukne sprog når der skal publiceres artikler og andet akademisk materiale. Dette skulle i høj grad gælde de naturvidenskabelige fag, men anddelen af engelske publikationer skulle også være kraftift stigende indenfor de humanistiske uddannelser.

Men der dette et problem? Er det ikke snarere et udtryk for at den uddannelsespolitik vi har ført i rigtigt mange år er en succes?

Der er visse ting jeg mener man ikke kan ændre på eller modarbejde som nationalstat uden at volde sig selv skade. En af disse ting er den så omtalte globilisering. Globaliseringen er, på trods af dens navn, ikke så meget en globalisering som en anglificering af verden. Dette er vel naturligt i en verden der efter den kolde krig har levet i et så unipolart magt- og kulturklima som vores.

En yderst central effekt af dette hegemoni er naturligvis at de førende magters sprog, der jo som bekendt for tiden er engelsk, vil være et centralt redskab og kommunikationmiddel indenfor viden, forretning, og kultur. Og det er der såmænd ingenting vi i Danmark kan gøre noget ved – vi har simpelthen ikke den økonomiske magt til at vælge fra på dette område

Dermed følger det også at de bedste hoveder her i landet indenfor de af det engelske sprog dominerede områder, ikke bare ønsker men er nødt til at erhverve sig kompetencer i engelsk. Dette er vel også et resultat af vor succes inden for uddannelsesområderne – vi skaber simpelthen for mange kloge hoveder til at vi kan ansætte dem i Danmark alene.

Sprog, i sin natur, er først og fremmest et socialt og kommunikativt redskab, og er der noget unaturligt ved at det bruges som et sådant af de grupper af mennesker hvis arbejde primært relaterer til emner der overalt i verden først og fremmest foregår på engelsk? Er det ikke i højere grad et tegn på succes, at vi skaber folk der har gå-på-mod og vilje til at forsøge at dygtiggøre sig internationalt?

Derudover er der den problemstilling at mange af universitetsstillingerne i dag er besat af dygtige udenlandske forskere. Det er vel i vores allesammens interesse at beholde disse kompetencer, såfremt der ikke frivilligt melder sig et lige så dygtigt dansk alternativ. Som eksempel kan nævnes mit eget studie – hvor det primært er udenlandske undervisere der er ansat. Jeg kan forsikre jer om at det er langt at foretrække at disse taler engelsk frem for dansk – dansk er et uhyre svært sprog at lære at tale, og vi danskere er ganske uvillige til at både forstå og acceptere selv små forskelle. Hvorvidt dette er et produkt af den herskende ‘korrektheds-ideologi’ er et åbent spørgsmål, men hvis man overvejer hvor meget vi som samfund latterligør og stigmatiserer selv ganske udbredte regionale dialekter, så er det ikke en helt ueffen teori.