Paradigm Paralysis In Linguistic Systems

[Layra-chan]

I want to destroy the clausal structure somehow, but I'm not sure what I can do with that and still maintain an understandable language. I mean, nerurav gets around needing any sort of word order by explicit clausal and level markings, but if that can be done without the bulky push-pop mechanism, in a way that is natural to the language (and the concept framework underlying it) that would go a long way towards breaking away from most languages.
Since I have no idea what to replace the standard word types with, other than variants of each other along with a complicated application net. Perhaps if I didn't think in a mess of mathematics and pseudocode...  

[Eccentric Iconoclast]

Well, you can't very well say "There might be correct grammar out there somewhere! We just haven't found it yet!" There is nothing that makes it correct. It's completely arbitrary. I don't say that English textbooks don't exist, I say that they are incorrect in their assertions.
Furthermore, to assert that there is correct grammar is to deny the existence of linguistic evolution and registers of speech; something that seems a lot sillier to me to say than that correct grammar doesn't exist, because these are not arbitrary and certainly do exist.

Actually, WaffleBat seems to be denying the existence of registers of speech right now. IT IS NOT racist to say that AAVE is a nonstandard register of speech that is not socially suitable to use when, say, writing essays. IT IS, however, racist to say that the way they speak is unsophisticated and by nature uneducated.  

[Rimbaum]

Eccentric Iconoclast

IT IS NOT racist to say that AAVE is a nonstandard register of speech that is not socially suitable to use when, say, writing essays. IT IS, however, racist to say that the way they speak is unsophisticated and by nature uneducated.

Racist or not, when I hear someone speaking African-American vernacular, I get a distinct impression of them, and very often (in my area anyways) they actually DO lack the education that I have and so my impression of them is that... well, frankly, they're stupid. I'm not pulling punches with political correctness here, because I'm stating my own bias into the equation.

I have African-American friends, so I know and understand that many African-Americans are actually quite intelligent... and I can even get past most of the vernacular. But I learned while working at the zoo that mixing the simplest of plural and singular forms of words appears to be a pet peeve of mine (like when people ask me "how much dollars is these?"), and so it triggers my 'stupidity' reflex.

sweatdrop my dad would've blistered my butt if I'd pulled out a phrase like that when I was a kid, and my mom would've looked at me like I was stupid. I still hold the same bias when it comes to language.  

[Layra-chan]

Layra-chan

I want to destroy the clausal structure somehow, but I'm not sure what I can do with that and still maintain an understandable language. I mean, nerurav gets around needing any sort of word order by explicit clausal and level markings, but if that can be done without the bulky push-pop mechanism, in a way that is natural to the language (and the concept framework underlying it) that would go a long way towards breaking away from most languages.
Since I have no idea what to replace the standard word types with, other than variants of each other along with a complicated application net. Perhaps if I didn't think in a mess of mathematics and pseudocode...

Having thought about this for a while, if you get rid of the clausal system then you kind of get rid of the recursiveness of the grammar; recursive only works if there's more than one instance.  

[Fogwolf]

Eccentric Iconoclast

And Fogwolf, sorry to be so hostile but that's racist bullshit. There is nothing wrong with African American Vernacular English. It's just not how you talk, does that make it bad?

Er...I didn't say anything about this. And, for the record, I know and absolutely agree with you.

Xeigrich

So just because something can communicate to another thing, doesn't mean it's using language. Although "language" is often loosely defined and no definite definition has been... defined (defdefdef argh), I'm pretty sure there's more to it than mere "communication." Otherwise, screaming/grunting/burping and other random bodily functions or gestures that communicate some sort of meaning can be classified as "language" beyond the mere metaphor of "body language." I'd like to see someone take bodily functions and make them into a sort of language, with grammar and stuff.

Ok...sure. What, then, are you defining language as? I said there seems to be something linguistic in the use of symbollic representation (which does go beyond body language, since that's subconscious). This would be the area of semantics. Sure, that isn't all of our language covered, but it's a necessary part of our language covered. Without symbollic representation, human language is no more.

You can choose to require grammar of some sort in your definition of a langauge - but, given that this thread was about breaking linguistic paradigms, that seems narrow to me.

Of course, until we've settled on just what is required for language, we don't know what paradigms we can break and which will render our result non-linguistic.

Xeigrich

It exists, because someone indeed sat down and said "This is correct English grammar." Just because REAL English doesn't adhere to that, doesn't mean that the concept of "correct grammar" along with a list of rules and exceptions don't exist. To say it doesn't exist is to say that English textbooks and whatnot are all figments of our imagination.

There exists a prescription that you can call 'correct grammar', if that is the name you want to give it. But it's a prescription for a dialect - standard English. If you try to apply it to a different dialect, the rules are simply false. And the standard dialect is still just a dialect - there's nothing inherently better about it. It is not a special core of English, of which all other Englishes are mutated variants.

Saying that 'correct grammar' exists in that sense is fine, but it does seem a little trivial, since it doesn't apply to all forms of English.  

[Layra-chan]

I suppose if you could integrate over linguistic objects then you could encode a continuously recursive system, although decoding would probably be an absolute b***h.
Of course, then you get into the question of topological grammar and creating a good set of local constraints would probably require a more generalized system than we currently have.  

[I Feel Toast]

'Correct' grammar.

Quote:

Language is how people speak it.

It seems that in this discussion, two correct points are being pitted against eachother as if they are contradicting, when really, they're just two seperate things.

Point One is: "Established grammatical rules do exist. Textbooks do exist. Systems for transmitting concepts accurately and unchanged from person to person do exist."

Point Two is: "The grammar of the idiolect is the ultimate correct grammar." Or, "the grammar of the mind is the ultimate correct grammar. Whatever comes naturally is the closest thing to a concept's germinal stage in the mind. Therefore, whatever comes naturally (the idiolect) is correct."

Now, how do Point One and Point Two clash? I see no way or reason for them to clash. Point One grammar is for preservation, for making sure people understand the things they are saying to one another by giving everyone the same set of conventions to use, or limits to operate within. Point Two grammar deals with translating thoughts into words--people's synapses don't operate according to the latest grammar textbook. People's mouths can't move like brain waves. So whatever you manage to sputter is the middle ground, and the closest you can get to the core of the idea. From what I can see, both are needed for effective communication.

Anyway...Whether or not I sound ridiculous...Stop arguing razz

As for the original topic...

The first thing that came to mind for me here was spaghetti. Communication through tossing spaghetti against a wall, and observing the patterns left behind by the noodles and sauce. The next thing that came to mind was silence. Communication through letting the rest of the world speak for you. The most "out of the box" thing I could think of was to rely on randomness and meaninglessness to take on meaning. Simply waiting for something to be mutually understood. Anything more makes too much sense for me to feel bewildered 3nodding
 

[Layra-chan]

I Feel Toast

As for the original topic...

The first thing that came to mind for me here was spaghetti. Communication through tossing spaghetti against a wall, and observing the patterns left behind by the noodles and sauce. The next thing that came to mind was silence. Communication through letting the rest of the world speak for you. The most "out of the box" thing I could think of was to rely on randomness and meaninglessness to take on meaning. Simply waiting for something to be mutually understood. Anything more makes too much sense for me to feel bewildered 3nodding

I think that here we're actually passing out of the boundaries of language and into something else. As much as I hate to sound paradigmatic, I personally think that communication, and indeed the signal itself, ought to be deliberate, or else then we come to the question of "who is speaking?" In the second case, certainly, it is the world speaking, and not yourself, and as such only becomes communication on the part of yourself if you necessarily see yourself as a you-shaped hole in the rest of the world.

The last option I would not consider to be communication at all; there is no action on anyone's part, nor is there any signal. No information transfer in the least, only a (somewhat blind) hope that false-belief and theory-of-mind act completely differently from how they're observed to. Considering that without pre-established rules for inference and a common set of presumptions, meaning becomes entirely subjective and arbitrary, to hope for two people to understand the same thing is nigh impossible.

Bewilderment is not always a good thing, especially when one does not stop to consider both why one is bewildered and what such a bewilderment might imply.  

[ange de la musique xx]

Right. It's so ridiculous how people get hung up on these ideas. Especially with slang, it's as though people expect their language to exist everywhere, just under different tones and sounds. That just isn't how it works: you'll have no idea how many times people try to force words out of a language teacher. Sometimes things just aren't there.  

[Shen Trey]

I have created many languages that do not have the need for a mouth or vocals at all, but of course I doubt many people can make specific noises with that part of the body...  

[Layra-chan]

Having realized that most of my ideas are built with the idea of being roughly translatable into a linear language, or at least a tree-shaped language, I wonder how much of that is actually necessary.

For example, I've been assuming that adjectives are applied to single nouns. In "green cat" the word "green" modifies the word "cat". In "the green cat and the brown dog" we apply "green" to "cat" and "brown" to "dog" but I wonder if that's really necessary; rather, what would it mean if we just tossed in the adjectives without actually attaching them to nouns, the way nouns don't have to be attached to things.

In a sense, it would end up being a "bag of words" language; I'm not sure how one would translate such a bag of words into reality, but that might be because I'm stuck in the "modifier-modifiee" paradigm.
Note that we'd still have clausal recursion, as one could make a bag of bags.

There need to be more mixed-media languages, for example one where the lexical units are given verbally but the grammatical structure is indicated via hand gestures, or one where evidentiality is indicated by whether you use spoken words or hand gestures or brightly colored flags to deliver the word (or phrase) in question.
In fact, I'm going to create a language where the lexical units are given via hand movements and the grammar via footwork, so you end up twirling around (possibly like an idiot) when you speak; rhetorical aesthetic will be measured by how dance-like your movements are.  

[Eccentric Iconoclast]

I'm currently working on a sign language that uses clicks. The idea isn't that hard to deal with. razz

Adjectives really aren't always applied to nouns, even within Indo-European languages. Take a look at Spanish or French. wink  

[Forgedawn]

I've drifted away and lost the flow of conversation a bit...

But something that always bugs me is the future tense. In any language.
I plan to give lïtihla about a thousand [exaggerating here] variations on what might be called the subjunctive for the sake of saying ANYTHING in the future.

People ask me, "Are you going out tonight?"
...and I kind of stare and mumble, "I don't know." Just because I'm contemplating doing something doesn't mean it will happen! The future is written in the finest sand and there might've been an earthquake just off shore! evil

I'm too specific for my own good. sweatdrop

But I don't actually know (and my knowledge is limited, I admit) of any languages that have much in the future tense to deal with uncertainty. Yeah, in Spanish the future tense tends to be less certain than "ir a" constructions, but it's still not like this:
-I hope, but have no xlemfphrogging clue.
-I plan to, but there are always potential obstacles.
-It is likely.
-I am as close to 100% certain as I can be until it happens that this will happen.

I would actually have FOUR FUTURE TENSES at MINIMUM.

Which of course means I'll want terms for subjunctives... but I want more than just "subjunctive." Sigh rolleyes I want a way to express so many degrees of certainty...

But as for a language without words? Skip back to the poem. (No, I don't remember the poem. I'll have to get to my old computer, which has no monitor hooked up because I ganked it to use as a temporary dual monitor for my current machine... Something about nuh-ay-tyurrr. That thing that's outside. With the sun. And the bears.)  

[5ives]

Someone said it earlier but didn't really stress it. Body Language is exactly what you described. Despite not consciously conversing, we all give off signals. We each pick up these signals and most can decipher what they mean. Think about it, Body Language has no tense. It's all in the present. Something 10 minutes ago could've pissed you off, but you're describing the effect of what happened, by slouching in your chair and having a nasty look on your face.

Dance is another non-verbal communication that has no structure other than a rhythm. And to that rhythm, people can tell so many exuberant stories. And the audience is able to follow and decipher the story.

Actions are yet another non-verbal communication with no structure. A punch does not need a specific path in order for us to execute it. It just happens.

What we do with our body speaks much louder than what we say with our words.

We use this kind of communication in everyday life, whether we realize it or not. Even a kindergarten student breaks the paradigm, once in a while.  

[Xeigrich]

@ Forgedawn: Holy cow! I've just worked out a tense system with a Future setup kind of like what you're describing. I based it somewhat off of English's ability to specify when in the future something happens (or in the past, blah), but is meant to be used without a modal verb or temporal adverb.

Xeigrich's new verb system

Past

Past Permanent: Something happened once "George ate five pies" (Occurred completely within MoM)
Past Dynamic: Something was happening "George was eating five pies" (Occurred before, during, and after MoM)
Past Commencing: Something started happening "George had eaten five pies" (Occurred before, then stops during MoM)
Past Recurring: Something kept happening "George had been eating five pies" (Occurred before and during, then stops at or after MoM)

Present

Present Static: "This book is blue" "He looks like a cool guy" (Occurs at or completely within MoM)
Present Happening: "George is eating five pies" (Occurs before, during, and possibly after MoM)


Future

Future Unlikely: "I will (probably not) eat pie tonight (but it is possible)
Future Possibility: "I will (maybe) eat pie tonight (or not)" (I'd like to, and it could happen)
Future Assumptive: "I will (probably) eat pie tonight" (provided nothing prevents this or changes)
Future Certain: "I will (definitely) eat pie tonight" (will happen unless something extremely rare happens)
Future Inevitable: "I will die someday" (will definitely happen regardless of any realistic occurences)

NOTE: "MoM" means "Moment of Mention" and is a term I use to describe the frame of time mentioned in a sentence. It can either be the time implied by the verb's tense, or it can be a specific time like "yesterday" or "5 o'clock." Future tense does not include MoM reference, because it has to be stated implicitly for it to be of any use in Future tense.