BREAKING NEWS

So I was searching the Yale library system today out of curiosty, just to see whether we might have an original copy of Samuel Johnson's Dictionary of the English Language.  It turns out we do have some incomplete sections of the first edition in Beinecke, our rare books and manuscripts library.  But more surprisingly, it turns out we have a complete of the dictionary's second edition (1755) just sitting in the stacks of our main lending library!   This is a very big deal, because this book is worth thousands of dollars.  Naturally, I went to go check it out.  It's a beautiful book printed in two folio-sized volumes--in remarkably good condition for its age.  Apparently Yale doesn't even know they just have it sitting it in the stacks, waiting to be perused by students.  Anyway, this is great news for amateur lexicographers and general lovers of old books with access to the Yale library system, because it means we can go in and commune with Johnson's tome in the deep recesses of Sterling Memorial Library stacks whenever we want.  Here are some pictures of me doing just that!

The last image is of the entry for the letter "X."  As I mentioned before, Johnson included no words in his dictionary that began with the letter.  The text reads: "X is a letter which, though found in Saxon words, begins no word in the English language."

So I've transcribed some of the Dictionary's preface that I thought was particularly interesting (Remember when McKean told us to read the frontmatter?  It turns out she was right!).  It gives us some insight into Johnson's worldview, as well as his philosophy of lexicography (prescriptivism):

"In adjusting the ORTHOGRAPHY, which has been to this time unsettled and fortuitous, I found it necessary to distinguish those irregularities that are inherent in our tongue, and perhaps coeval with it, from others which the ignorance or negligence of later writers has produced.  Every language has its anomalies, which, though inconvenient, and in themselves at once necessary, must be tolerated among the imperfections of human things, and which require only to be registered, that they may not be increased, and ascertained, that they may not be confounded: but every language has likewise its improprieties and absurdities, which it is the duty of the lexicographer to correct or proscribe.

As language was at its beginning merely oral, all words of necessary or common use were spoken before they were written; and while they were unfixed by any visible signs, must have been spoken with great diversity, as we now observe those that cannot read catch sounds imperfectly and utter them negligently.  When this wild and barbarous jargon was first reduced to an alphabet, every penman endeavored to express, as he could, the sounds which he was accustomed to pronounce or to receive, and vitiated in writing such words as were already vitiated in speech.  The powers of letters, when they were applied to a new language, must have been vague and unsettled, and therefore different hands would exhibit the same sound by different combinations."

 

Judging by the second paragraph, it seems to me Johnson is one of the first scholars to identify the phenomenon of the eggcorn!  As he says: "those that cannot read catch sounds imperfectly and utter them negligently."  He cites illiteracy as the root of this problem, since our only knowledge of a word, then, is what we hear, which can often be wrong--either we mishear or the person we hear the word from has misheard and repeated what he thought to be correct.  My third graders are familiar with this problem; it's the crux of the playground game "Telephone."  Naturally, with widespread illiteracy, Johnson's lifetime is the heyday of the eggcorn!  Anyway, even in this short passage, Johnson's description takes on a literary tone.  I just love how he calls our language before writing and standardization "wild and barbarous jargon."  If you can get your hands on a copy--even a later edition--it really is worth a look!

--Amy

End of summer musings

Hey, guys!  As we're transitioning from summer to fall and high school to college, thought I might take this opportunity to look back and forward—that is, to recap some things I've been thinking about in August and the direction those thoughts are leading me in for school, maybe.  So as I've mentioned, I took Spanish conversation classes at Berlitz this summer.  They kind of shuffled me through instructors, but I guess I didn't mind too much because it meant I got to see four or five different perspectives on the Spanish language.  

I noticed there were more or less two types of instructors—those who were concerned with the purity of the Spanish they spoke, taught, and demanded of students, and those who were content to speak somewhat Anglicized Spanish after having lived in the States for a while (“tenemos un picnic” and “es muy nice”).  To me, this Anglicized Spanish was a wonderful example of language change, and it was easy and interesting to see how and wear English had left its mark.  Yet other instructors saw this as wholly negative—a contamination of language rather than a natural change.  I almost got into a terrible argument with one instructor who was hell-bent on teaching me “lo mas puro” when she told me that despite variations from country to country, "solo hay un espanol"—there’s only one "Spanish."  Well, I would have fought her had I been able to express myself properly in not-English.

But above all, each instructor said to me that I'd know that I'd have achieved some kind of fluency if I dreamed "in Spanish."  I've heard that before about learning a language, as I'm sure you guys have.  I'm wondering to what extent there's any scientific backing to that claim, especially because there's reason to doubt that we think (or dream, in this case) in any particular language at all!  We've talked about Chapter 3 of Pinker's The Language Instinct, in which Pinker tells us that we do not think in words, or even in images.  The "language" of our minds, he says, is "mentalese"--an idea pioneered by American cognitive scientist Jerry Fodor.  (If you Google "mentalese," there are a few good links... look into it!)

Tangentially, this also came up when my dad and I were talking about translated texts, and lamenting their inadequacy in precisely expressing the idea communicated in the original language.  We were reading something that had been written in Spanish but translated into English by the author himself.  I said I thought this might be better than having a third party translator do the job, because the author knew best what he wanted to express with each particular word/phrase in Spanish, and could therefore carry it over into English.  But does this actually fix our “lost in translation” problem?  Or, does it still matter that the idea was originally expressed in Spanish?  How does this affect the outcome of the translation?  Is the translation true to the way the idea was conceived? What if there is no real way of translating a particular idea or concept wholly and precisely?  What if, in the language of translation, there were no good words?  One language could be better to express a particular idea than another.  This got me wondering about whether we conceive of thoughts in a particular language, and how and why some languages communicate certain concepts better than others.

Anyway, these questions are part of a larger one: Can thoughts exist outside language?  Or, what is the relationship between language and cognition?

A second fundamental question for me is the extent to which culture affects language (and perhaps vice versa?), especially if language is a pre-programmed human capacity.  In other words, do grammar and culture in fact mesh?  I understand how culture could affect language on a lexical level; however apocryphal the story that the Inuit have dozens of words for snow may be, it certainly proves the point.  Yet I wonder whether culture impacts language on other levels?  For example, what about syntax?  Is the fact that verbs come at the very end of a sentence in an SVO language like Latin just pure coincidence?  Random?  Chance?  Or is it affected by an external factor, like the culture, biology, or even geography (Jared Diamond style) of the people and place that develop a language?   These are the kinds of questions that I want to be able to answer in college—through the study of linguistics, anthropology, cognitive science, etc., and through spending time abroad observing the relationship between the culture and language of a particular place.  I’m ready.

--Amy