Re: All languages are equally fit

In article
<0f79207d-cd8a-4f1d-ba09-b1d0d2eab0c6@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>,
James Dow Allen <jdallen2000@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:

On Oct 12, 12:44 am, Nathan Sanders <nsand...@xxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

I don't really know what a speaker shift could be.

Suppose A says something; B responds; A responds to that;
B responds; then A responds. That's five distinct messages
(regardless of message length). I hope this is clear, though
doubtless there's a way to express it better.
If these messages were sent by post with one week delay,
the messaging would take five weeks. "Speaker shift" may
have been a poor choice as invented term but I hope it's
clear now.

I'm failing to see how "speaker shift" is different from
"conversation" or "discourse"... do you intend for them to be
different? If so, in what way?

(c)  A main difference between Naval signalled communication
and ordinary conversation is the need to exchange only a few longish
messages, where efficient conversation might use instead several
shortish sentences.

What's the difference between a
"message" and a "sentence"?  How many is "few" and "several"?  How
long is "longish" and "shortish"?  I genuinely don't understand what
makes signaled communication look different from a conversation.

The difference is the need to minimize number of query/response
cycles. This is generally done by making each "message" longer.
Words like "several" and "longish" were intentionally fuzzy.
Does this make more sense?

It would be really helpful if you just gave a concrete example, an
actual full example of a real "speaker shift", using real sentences,
real words, real translations, and real intentions.

I'm a scientist, and I need data.

(I thought people would already have
an idea about naval signalling.)

I don't know why you would think that! I am not, nor have I ever
been, in the Navy, nor have I spent any time studying naval jargon, so
"signaled communication" is just an opaque phrase to me.

That a need for increased number of message cycles (or, without it,
risk of ambiguity) is present in Thai was demonstrated with a
simple example. The single-message English communications
* "Let's go to the market."
and
* "He went to the market."
might both use the *same* two-word sentence when expressed in Thai!

And the single-messages "You and I will go" and "He and I will go" are
both expressed with the same two-word sentence "We'll go".

Often the meaning will be apparent in context.

Which is true for ambiguity in every language. Sometimes context
helps, sometimes it doesn't, and most of the time, it doesn't matter
either way.

I just haven't yet seen any evidence that Thai is significantly
different from English (or any other language for that matter) in
having ambiguous sentences.

Given what little you've said, it's hard to tell if what you think you
see in Thai is truly something fundamentally different from English
(or any other language), or just a case of you failing to notice the
prevalence of similar patterns in English and other languages. (This
happens a lot; people are notorious for exoticizing foreign languages
and cultures by over-emphasizing apparent differences that turn out to
have analogues in their own native languages and cultures.)

I know nothing of Japanese.  I am familiar with rural Thai where
the following sort of exchange is VERY frequently heard:
  A1:  "Go market."
  B1:  Any polite query.
  A2:  Clarification.

Citing a couple of examples of ambiguity in a language tells us very
little about that language's overall ability to express general
concepts.

Note that in the two specific examples I gave, communication wasn't
merely inefficient, but actually FAILED.

If A1-B1-A2 above is one of those two examples, then I don't see the
failure. How exactly did the conversation "fail"? Are you counting
it as failure because B had to ask for clarification at all? People
ask for clarification in English all the time! What kind of
clarification counts as failure?

I also still don't know what that conversation was supposed to be
about, because there are so many missing pieces to your description:

What is A intending to express in A1? Some options I can think of:
"Let's go to the market!"
"How do I get to the market?"
"Are you going to the market?"
"They went to the market."
"I'm going to the market now."

What did B ask in B1?
"What are you planning on buying?"
"Which market?"
"Is the market even open today?"
"What are they buying there?"
"When are you coming back?"
etc.

Without knowing *precisely* what was intended and asked, it's
impossible to determine what caused the failure (or if there even was
failure), and how this failure compares to English or other languages.

(I must have missed the other example, because I don't recall seeing
it.)

Nathan

--
Nathan Sanders
Linguistics Program
Williams College
http://wso.williams.edu/~nsanders/
.

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