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Logic
Logic and Word Usage
2/12/10
When most people think of logic, they think of whether an idea seems possible. They say "yeah, that seems logical" in the sense that "yeah, that should work". In fact, logic doesn't have anything to do with this. Logic is merely a set of relations between things. Logic deals with groups and their relation to one another. For example, a logical statement would be something like "since every thread in this subforum is also contained within the superforum, the subforum itself is contained wholly within the superforum" This is where things like Venn diagrams and Boolean algebra (algebra dealing with things like AND, NOT, and OR) come in.
Anyway, I was reading a little bit about how logic is used in languages. I was working on my conlang Sala today which is based in logic. This led me to a discussion about how different cultures may view a word. Take the word "download" for example. In some cultures the words "download", "move", and "go/come" may be wholly unrelated. On the other hand, in some cultures they may be very closely related. Essentially, if you think about it, you may say that downloading is merely "moving files from the internet onto your computer" and that going and coming are merely "moving yourself from one place to another". In these cases the words are indeed very closely related. It's all a matter of the logic that particular language uses. In some cultures "downloading" and "moving" are considered members of different word classes, such as "things to do with computers" and "things to do with concrete objects that can be moved".
Morphology
Global Morphology and its Implication on World Cultures
2/12/10
Have you ever noticed that certain areas of the world seem to prefer a particular type of morphology? From what I've noticed, it seems that in areas around Europe, northern India, Iran, Pakistan, and that general area people prefer inflecting languages. These tend to be languages such that there are few, if any, inflections on nouns to indicate their relation to locations and to other words. For the most part these languages are fairly analytic with their nouns and form few relational connections save a few that some of these languages find important such as subject, direct object, indirect object, an object marked as a sort of owner of another object or attribute or something of the sort, and possibly even things like location and instrument and cause and whatnot in the form of all around cases that serve these purposes.
On the other hand, verbs in these languages seem to have a lot more going on as far as morphology goes. Does this indicate that these languages feel that marking things such as the state of actions is far more important than how things actually relate to one another? This gives a view of these cultures as being more action-oriented. They prefer to simply get things done, they don't care as much about who or what does them. Then we come to the southeast Asian region. Including China this region tends to prefer analytical languages with tones. The basic idea here is that every word is of equal importance and that different words can be distinguished by saying them differently. To me, this seems as though these cultures feel a sort of neutrality towards the words themselves but rather prefer to have a more artistic feel to their languages that reflect their cultures.
Next we come to the central Asian and southern Indian languages. One theory is that these languages started out somewhere near central Asia and spread in different directions. The ones heading south did so until they reached the ocean then were blocked off by the Indo-Iranians coming in from the north. These languages tend to be somewhat agglutinating in nature. This means that each type of word is generally separated from other words in the sentence but may have any number of affixes on it which indicate its relation to other words in the sentence. This seems to indicate that these cultures feel that each word is important to contribute towards the whole meaning of the sentence but that what forms a word is the main idea and everything that is related to that word in reference to other things is also important as belonging to this word. This would seem to imply that these cultures favor a community where each member is important but they're important in their own ways relative to everybody else.
Next, we come to the Amerind languages. These languages seem to be highly synthetic in that sentences could consist of nothing but a single word a lot of the time. The way this works is that there are few distinctions between word boundaries and that words can often be thought of as simply roots of meaning rather than individual parts of speech such as a noun or a verb. I'd like to discuss this idea further in a separate topic. Anyway, what this seems to indicate to me is that these cultures have more of a feeling of oneness between things. The idea that all things are related somehow and not broken up into a bunch of neatly defined categories. This is reflected in the religions and histories of these cultures.
Logographic Writing Systems
3/20/10
Logographic writing systems are simply fascinating. The two most popular and influential today are Chinese characters (漢字) and Egyptian Hieroglyphs. I guess the next most popular would be Mayan Hieroglyphs. Anyway, despite popular belief, most of the characters in these systems actually aren't based on pictures. Originally they may have started out that way, but like phonetic scripts over time they started developing into a sort of picture-sound association. Nowadays, the characters that represented pictures originally are typically used to represent a sort of associated meaning. A simple example is the Chinese character for male... it is a mix of 田 field and 力 power which combine to form 男 male.
Most Chinese characters work like this, and in actuality, so did Egyptian hieroglyphs to a certain extent. The difference with hieroglyphs is that typically a word would be formed with mixes of characters which each represented a sound or a set of sounds and after those you would have what's called a determinant not unlike the radicals in Chinese characters. An example of this type of thing would be something like the word for to eat or to speak would be followed by a determinant depicting a man with his hand by his mouth to indicate mouth-action. This is a similar feature in Chinese except that words are formed solely using single phonetic components that are connected with the radical that operates like a determinant.
A lot of these characters were based on ideas of people long ago and are sometimes difficult to conceptualize in modern times knowing what we do now about how the world works. Nevertheless, the characters have remained the same, or at least similar, for hundreds of years. This can make learning them in modern times rather challenging. Japanese adds an additional challenge. When Japan adopted Chinese characters for use with Japanese, they ran into the problem of native Japanese words that were already in existence. So they devised a rather intricate solution to the problem. Most of the new characters gained a set of readings that are used variably depending on the situation. If it is a word or common compound phrase in Japanese, the native Japanese pronunciation would be assigned to the characters with the closest meanings. If it is a word of Chinese origin or that was built up with multiple characters and didn't already have a native pronunciation, a set of Chinese-based readings were assigned for use with those characters.
This represents an interesting problem for the learner of Japanese. Not only do they have to learn Japanese grammar and the writing systems that have evolved to represent all the words not commonly written with Chinese characters, but they also have to learn both the Japanese and Chinese readings of over 2000 commonly used Chinese characters just to be able to read basic Japanese texts. The Koreans originally followed a similar pattern, but rather than evolving from Chinese characters used phonetically as in Japanese, the Koreans invented their own script called hangeul which is still in use nowadays. After the creation thereof, they ceased using Chinese characters on a regular basis and one can rarely find Chinese characters anymore in Korean. If they were retained into modern times, Korean would experience much the same unique difficulties as Japanese.
