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From a linguistics perspective, Arrival's groan inducing. (Off-Topic)

by Funkmon @, Sunday, April 02, 2017, 21:38 (2552 days ago) @ Kahzgul

It completely misrepresents not only the nigh debunked Sapir-Whorf hypothesis as correct, but what linguists actually do, using writing as a substitute for the language in the movie, when they are very different things (among some milder facepalms).

Imagine a sci-fi movie that has a plot hinging on someone linking the electroweak force to the strong force, and he solves this problem by studying planetary motion and ballistics based on the principles of the classical elements.

As for GITS, probably won't be able to see it until Monday.


Interesting. So the Sapir-Whorf is debunked? Was it the tail wagging the dog, then, and language comes from culture rather than shapes it? That would make sense. Something else? I know precious little about the subject, but have always found it intriguing.

You know, I just saw Noam Chomsky (the Einstein of linguistics; he essentially single handedly invented modern linguistics) give a lecture about this very thing on Saturday.

Here's the consensus hypothesis, though there are others: language itself was initially developed internally, and we think people basically talked to themselves in their heads. This leads to many advantages, such as record keeping.

For example, if you develop a counting system, you can count. Those people whose languages don't have words for individual numbers cannot count in that language, and can't track the difference between 14 and 18 for example. This appears to lend credence to Whorfianism, right? No. The studies were flawed and did not answer the question posed. If you were told to not sit and count, and some guy threw 40 rocks in a bucket and 30 in another, you wouldn't be able to tell reliably how many rocks are in each bucket. You couldn't count, you had no record keeping. Therefore you are unable to count, right? No. Dump the buckets out and see the rocks, and you can do it. In the same way, these people without a counting system in their language can count, but they like to see the things they are counting. They work fine in market economies, it's just hard for them to remember things for which they don't have names.

Another example: you meet 20 people at a party and remember their names. Your wife asks who you met. You say Rachel, Steve, and so on. You can probably get 20. If you don't remember their names, you could try to describe them or what they do, but you're not going to be able to conjure up every single one. If reminded, you'll remember them all, but out of your ass, without the aid of names, you can't list them all off. So, again, you remember them all, but your language prohibits you from actually expressing this and keeping track.

As people lived together and they realized they had this capability, communicating their record keeping to others became an option. We see this happen fairly quickly on an archaeological scale, conflating culture with language. Language enables culture.

Because it appears so quickly, and all languages to which we have access follow the exact same rules, it's a very simple evolution.

Now I know what you're thinking. Languages don't follow the same rules. Not at the surface, no. But with x-bar theory, a parsimonious model of the deep structure syntax of human speech is possible, and all languages follow its rules. It's actually a complicated idea. If you want, I can explain it, but it requires a lot of information. In short, each lexical item can have adjuncts, specifiers, and complements, and each connection is treated as a slightly larger element in the final phrase. Each language follows this principle.

Hence, all languages are governed by the same simple rules, which can provide an infinite amount of variety in sentences, but not their structure.

Lexicon, that is the words of a language, are variable, and come from the origin point's culture. They also don't change how we think.

Famously, blue wasn't a color in Ancient Greek. The sea was wine dark and the sky was copper colored. However, they painted statues with blue. They used blue reliably and consistently. They knew blue, just didn't have a word.

We can determine genetic relationships between languages using words, and from this we can see that native Sri Lankan languages are cousins to the languages of Iceland and England and Spain. By the same method, we can see that Hungary has a completely different language than its neighbors, and is closely related to Finnish.

Armenia and Georgia have wholly unrelated languages, but a similar culture. The Estonians and the other Baltic countries are similar in culture...but the Estonians speak a different language family than the other ones. Compare the Sami, the fur wearing reindeer herders of Lapland, and the Hungarians. Language is highly similar, yet dissimilar cultures. The Irish and the people of Ceylon. Can we say their shared language heritage resulted in a shared culture? I don't think we can.

Again, our simple language structure, common to all the world's languages, was a biological evolution that resulted in being able to develop cultures, but the cultures are not a product of the language.

With regards to the actual movie: Remember when a fisherman in Africa caught a Coelacanth? A fish people had previously believed to have been extinct for millions of years? Given the other suppositions in the film (gravity control, ships disappearing in mist, time-memory-travel), could the linguistic elements be akin to catching a Coelacanth or is it something that just could not ever be considered plausible no matter what? I ask because I didn't understand your physics example.

The Coelacanth is a lobe finned fish, and was known to fossils, which had ended at the K-T boundary (the Cretaceous period). As we globalized, scientists discovered people in the west Indian ocean and Indonesia had been catching these fish for a long time, and they hadn't become extinct. This is surprising, but had zero effect on any models of evolution by natural selection or geology. It's exactly the same as if we found a Tasmanian tiger somewhere or an ivory billed woodpecker.

The assumptions of the movie are similar to us finding a live animal that breathes quartz and has no DNA, and we found it by studying ice cores and inferring its existence. It's possible for those two things to happen, that some aliens don't have DNA or DO breathe quartz, but this doesn't mean that humans can. Deep language structure is essentially programmed into us. All humans have the same programming.

When made up languages follow the rules of deep structure, people can use them like languages. When they do not follow these rules, peoples' brains treat them as puzzles. Idiot savants who are linguistically gifted but have zero puzzle skills cannot do artificial languages that do not have a deep structure.

Hence, we could probably translate an alien language that doesn't work like human language. We could never learn it as babies or dream in it, or have it exist in our language processing centers.

Furthermore, the language not having a time distinction isn't actually that weird. Greenlandic doesn't. Burmese doesn't. It's not like those guys are time travelers. Also, inferring this from their orthography, or writing system, is absurd.

We have had many writing systems on Earth and zero of them have had such a connection to the language whence they originated that they couldn't be adapted. For example, the alphabet was developed once. Punic, Hebrew, Latin, Greek; these were the same alphabet, adapted from disparate languages to others with zero effect on the language. Greek used to be written right to left, just like Punic. Then it switched from right to left to left to right on alternating lines. Then it moved to left to right. Is there a change in their thinking? Or their language? No. Ancient Egyptian had tons of writing systems. Hieratic, hieroglyphs, cursive hieroglyphs, all reading in different ways, some of which could be read in any direction. Did they have 3 languages? No. Did they have time travel powers being able to read in any direction with no obvious indicator (except signs were flipped L/R, but not U/D or other directions)? No.

This is because language is innate, writing is taught. Children just pick up language. They have to be taught writing. Writing was not in use for most of human culture, and was likely developed as an accountancy system, a way of externalizing and making physical language. It's as different to language as Ansel Adams photos are to Yosemite.

In the same way you couldn't hike Yosemite by watching a series of photos, you can't speak a language by deciphering a writing system.

So, we meet some aliens who breathe quartz and have no DNA (have language that humans literally cannot process as language) and we infer their existence through ice cores (we understand their language through writing). Now that we know it's possible, a really smart scientist learns to, with zero biological manipulation, breathe quartz and have no DNA by looking at ice cores (modify her brain's structure to see through time, breaking all rules of causality and biology).

That's the level of dumb it is.

However, it's just a sci fi movie. Sci Fi movies have conceits, usually FTL or something, and this one has a few big conceits relating to physics, as you mentioned, and linguistics. It's​ not what I would consider smart science fiction. Just science fiction.

PS. Minor facepalms include needing an academic as a Farsi interpreter, attaching significance to translations of a Sanskrit word, and a few other throw away references to language study.


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