Rovers - He Or She? Options

[helvick]

Doug was my PhD advisor 

Oh help! Now I have to run away and hide.

That has to be the best one line response I've ever been slapped with in a discussion.

I just love this place.

[dvandorn]

I'm sorry, I guess I haven't stated my point of view about "irrationality" clearly.

I find the *requirement* of assigning a gender identity to each and every noun in a language an irrational approach to communication. There is simply no rationality that I can see to the requirement of assigning a male or female identity to a chair, a keyboard, a leg, a cloud, a window frame, etc., etc., etc., ad nauseum, when those objects do not have any intrinsic gender.

The Romance languages require such a set of assignations because of the way in which the *article* part of speech (in English, the words "a" and "the") is used. In every Romance language, you must use "la" as the definite article for feminine-assigned nouns, and "le" for masculine-assigned nouns. The indefinite article, "a" in English, varies a little more, but in French the masculine is "un" and the feminine is "une".

You cannot just say "the" and let it go at that. A proper English translation of a French phrase commonly translated as "The sky is blue" would have to be worded something like "The sky, she is blue." Because the word you use for the definite article "the" either has to call the sky he or she -- there are no other choices.

In what manner does this add to the amount of information conveyed, or the quality of that information? It conveys a cultural set of assumptions about the gender identities of inanimate objects, is all I can see that it does. And is it just me, or is there something a little *odd* about making cultural assumptions as to the gender attributes of inanimate objects which have no intrinsic gender? And not just a few objects -- every object for which the language has a noun.

As a French student in high school, the most absolutely *absurd* thing we tried to absorb was the whole issue of which nouns were feminine and which were masculine, since there is almost *never* an apparent rhyme or reason for the specific assignation.

If someone can explain to me in rational terms why it is in any way poetic *or* rational that a pencil *must* be referred to as a male object, while a chair *must* be referred to as a female object, I'll be happy to consider their arguments -- I generally have an open mind.

But, from the point of view of someone who grew up with a language that lets you use gender-neutral articles and pronouns for inanimate objects which *have* no intrinsic gender, the requirement for such assignments seems irrational.

And, by the way -- who sits around in Paris deciding what gender attribute get assigned to new nouns? I mean, is a personal computer male or female, and who decided which it was? And what genders are assigned to the individual components -- the keyboard, the monitor, the mouse, the CPU, etc.? And do the French make the same gender attributes for these new nouns as the Italians or the Spaniards, or are all of the new nouns for new things that never existed 100 years ago getting completely garbled between the various Romance languages these days?

-the other Doug

p.s. -- You'll remember that this thread began when someone asked which gender-related pronouns we should use for the rovers, and I chimed in with the feminine. Yes, that's sort of counter to my arguments above. But my feeling about the gender of the rovers is that there are traditions that govern certain things, and the naval tradition of giving ships (both of war and of exploration) the feminine gender attribute ought to apply here. I'll go along with tradition -- but I still think that languages whose very structure require giving every inanimate object in Creation a gender identity are at least *slightly* irrational...

[Guest_Richard Trigaux_*]

As a French student in high school, the most absolutely *absurd* thing we tried to absorb was the whole issue of which nouns were feminine and which were masculine, since there is almost *never* an apparent rhyme or reason for the specific assignation.

We Frenchs are at ease with our gendered pronouns, and there are very few people mistaking with this. But I understand that english people are not at ease: when I tried to learn german, I was completelly lost in the three genders (male, feminine, neutral). So each language has its difficulties, that we absorb easily when, child, we learn our first language. But when we learn a second language, it is much more difficult.

If someone can explain to me in rational terms why it is in any way poetic *or* rational that a pencil *must* be referred to as a male object, while a chair *must* be referred to as a female object, I'll be happy to consider their arguments -- I generally have an open mind.

It is simply not a matter of rationality. Poetry and rationality are simply two different domains. I think 99% of French would disagree to abandon our gendered pronouns, even for the sake of rationalizing our language. Simply we love it as it is.
As to explain "why" such thing is male or female, it is a complex matter of etymology, history, etc. I even not know who started this.

And, by the way -- who sits around in Paris deciding what gender attribute get assigned to new nouns?  I mean, is a personal computer male or female, and who decided which it was? And what genders are assigned to the individual components -- the keyboard, the monitor, the mouse, the CPU, etc.?  And do the French make the same gender attributes for these new nouns as the Italians or the Spaniards, or are all of the new nouns for new things that never existed 100 years ago getting completely garbled between the various Romance languages these days?

-"clavier" (keyboard) is an ancient word coming from organ churchs, I do not know why it is male, perhaps from some machism as it is a control device.

-"ecran" (monitor) is also an ancient word, we simply re-used it in place of just francizing the english word.

-"souris" (mouse) was already feminine.

-But words adapted from the english (email, microprocesseur...) are nearby alway masculine.

"The guy sitting in Paris" is in the same time a good help and a real pain for us. This started during the reign of LouisXIV where there were just too many iddle people in his court, who had nothing else good to do than to decide that the french spoken in the court was "correct french" and all the other variations and languages used in France where "bad french" spoken by "ignorants". This united the country, but was the cause of a tremendous cultural loss. Today there is still the "Academie Française", who by law decides what is good french language or not. And about the genders to be given to new words (such as "logiciel" for "software" ) they have their own idea: there are nearby only men into this assembly, and they create mostly masculine nouns, even loathing to "feminize" names of professions. So by their fault we are still compelled to say "un juge" (a judge) even if she is a woman.

[JRehling]

I'm sorry, I guess I haven't stated my point of view about "irrationality" clearly.

I find the *requirement* of assigning a gender identity to each and every noun in a language an irrational approach to communication.  There is simply no rationality that I can see to the requirement of assigning a male or female identity to a chair, a keyboard, a leg, a cloud, a window frame, etc., etc., etc., ad nauseum, when those objects do not have any intrinsic gender.

I think I explained it in excruciating detail in a previous post.

If you have gender, you can use pronouns a bit more often than if you don't have gender, in place of having to use lengthy noun phrases. Case closed -- there's a rational purpose for gender.

The mapping between objects and biological gender is a byproduct. Ignore that aspect. The important thing is that it is a mapping between WORDS and CLASSES of nouns. And to reap the stated benefit, the ideal is to have a random split down the middle, 50-50 in terms of number. It is not meant to convey a worldview. It is also not difficult for a first-language learner. It's only a noticeable effort if you try to rapidly pick up a second language.

If the mapping is arbitrary, so be it. It's rather like a hash function in computer science, except with only two values (it would be burdensome to have hundreds of noun classes). That doesn't keep the benefit from serving its purpose.

The Romance languages require such a set of assignations
[...]

You cannot just say "the" and let it go at that.
[...]

In what manner does this add to the amount of information conveyed, or the quality of that information?

Simple. If you refer to two nouns in one sentence, and they happen to have different gender, then you can simply use a one-syllable pronoun the second time you want to refer to that thing. And 50% of the time, the two genders will be different BECAUSE it's pretty much random.

If you only have one gender, a pronoun will likely be ambiguous, and you'll have to devote more words to saying what you're trying to say.

For example, if in English, you said, "I saw the sun from the hill. It's beautiful.",
you fail to convey what "it" refers to, the sun or the hill. You need to use more words to get that across. In Spanish, you could say, "Vi el sol desde la colina. Es bello." Or you could end with "Es bella." And with zero extra content needed, you can select which one you mean.

I hope this puts to bed the notion of whether or not a function is served. Count the syllables. Gender lets you sometimes save some syllables. You can argue about how much good that does you, but it should be perfectly clear to all readers that it does, sometimes, save you syllables.

The other use is when it provides redundancy. In a noisy busport, an English speaker says, "The sand is on my leg." Because of the noise, you can't hear if they said "sand" or "hand". The whole meaning of the sentence is on that one phoneme. You miss it because a bus squeaks its brakes for 0.05 seconds, and you miss the whole sentence. A Spanish-style article can provide an extra bit to help you overcome the bus noise. Someone says, "Las pechas son grandes," and the same bus noise strikes during the end of "pechas". If that's all you had to go on, you wouldn't know if the person was talking about peaches or chests. But "Las" to the rescue! The fact that they said "las" and not "los" gives you the answer. In the same situation, English's wasteful one-gender-for-all "the" is useless. You go to all the trouble of saying one syllable, and you get NO disambiguation information that could have helped someone out if they missed another phoneme later. It's a senseless waste!

If someone can explain to me in rational terms why it is in any way poetic *or* rational that a pencil *must* be referred to as a male object, while a chair *must* be referred to as a female object, I'll be happy to consider their arguments -- I generally have an open mind.

The point of the system isn't to place just the right tag on each object. First of all, it's not about objects at ALL. It's about words. If there are two different words that you could use to refer to the same object, then you could have both genders. For example, a female dog could be "el animal" (masc.) and "la perra" (fem.). It's not about the object, it's about the word.

Secondly (and as that point should make clear), the purpose of the system is not to have delivered an appropriate labeling of objects regarding boy-girl gender. It's not. The system works just fine being arbitrary.

Consider phone numbers. Maybe Einstein, Hitler, and Hugh Hefner had phone numbers that started with the same digit, while Pam Anderson, Charles Manson, and you have phone numbers that start with the same other digit. The point is that nobody tried to assign phone numbers to suit your personality or station in life. It was arbitrary. It works just fine arbitrary. It's not irrational.

The only design feature is required of a noun class system are that all speakers of the language can instantly tell what class a given noun is. In principle, this would involve memorizing one bit per noun, but it's simpler than that if common ending always map onto the same noun class (Spanish -dad is always feminine, -o is almost always masculine). Sometimes semantic classes pertain to the noun class.

The fact that boy-girl gender is the basis of most Indo-European systems is a quirk -- languages around the world have noun class systems, but few map them onto literal human gender. But, as I mentioned before, this has a useful purpose because then you INSTANTLY derive the same benefit in sentences referring to two people (if, ~50% of the time, the genders are different).

It would be like if all policemen had phone numbers that started with 2. It would help you remember a policeman's phone number. No matter if some non-policeman also had a number that started with 2.

[Borek]

Just watching a BBC snippet on Cosmos-1 and they're referring to Cosmos-1 as "she", clearly just having a Russian launcher isn't sufficient to force a gender change.

The launcher is called "Volna" which is feminine noun meaning "wave" in English. BTW, gender is purely grammatical in English, but not in all Germanic languages. Think of German.

[dvandorn]

Very nice analysis, JRehling. I really enjoy the breadth of knowledge evinced by the contributors to this board.

I understand the argument that the Romance language use of gender is simply an arbitrary noun-classification system. And I admit that, when one sloppily uses multiple subjects and unclear sentence structures, such a classification system can help ease confusion.

I only have two remaining points.

One -- I was glad to hear you use the term "arbitrary," since that confirms my suspicion that there is, in fact, no rational basis for the assignation of gender identity in Romance languages.

Two -- I am a writer, and I have never had a problem crafting any message in English that avoids the issue of noun/pronoun confusion. You just have to keep your sentences simple -- it's not that difficult. Heck, sometimes you don't even have to keep your sentences simple, you just have to pay attention to your references. Now, if you want to say that an arbitrary set of noun classifications helps keep *poor* writers from descending into noun/pronoun confusion, I guess I would agree. But I would also say that, as a professional writer, I think poor writers should stick to other pursuits and allow us professionals (who know what we're doing) to craft important documents...

Finally, I want to thank Richard for his contribution to this discussion. It's good to hear from someone who grew up with French as a first language. It's especially informative to me to hear that the French themselves, while they find the structures and protocols of their language to be far more natural than I might, still find some of the irrationalities amusing and, well -- irrational. I, for one, readily admit the irrationalities of English -- especially the emotional loading of English structures in which some unseen "they" are responsible for just about everything that happens. It was refreshing to hear someone fondly admit to the craziness of his own language...

Overall -- good discussion!

-the other Doug

[JRehling]

Very nice analysis, JRehling.  I really enjoy the breadth of knowledge evinced by the contributors to this board.

I only have two remaining points.

One -- I was glad to hear you use the term "arbitrary," since that confirms my suspicion that there is, in fact, no rational basis for the assignation of gender identity in Romance languages.

In some languages, and some cases in some languages, noun classes are systematic in some way. Chinese and Japanese, for example, have semantic labels that make some sense. But they aren't used to label articles and adjectives the way IndoEuropean gender are.

There fact that the system is a hodgepodge can be seen in the fact that there is sometimes a semantic component, sometimes a word-ending component, sometimes an exception to a rule. One layer on all of this is that each of the Romance languages was descended from a language (Latin) with 3 genders, and has loan words from a different language (Greek). So, a number of Greek words ending with -ma are masculine in Spanish BECAUSE they were masculine in Greek. Spanish, in effect, had to choose whether to be true to the usual spelling rule (-a being feminine) or the word's history (its gender in Greek).

An arbitrary system is often one where definite rules clashed, and no matter what was chosen, one of the rules had to be violated.

Two -- I am a writer, and I have never had a problem crafting any message in English that avoids the issue of noun/pronoun confusion.  You just have to keep your sentences simple -- it's not that difficult.  Heck, sometimes you don't even have to keep your sentences simple, you just have to pay attention to your references.  Now, if you want to say that an arbitrary set of noun classifications helps keep *poor* writers from descending into noun/pronoun confusion, I guess I would agree.  But I would also say that, as a professional writer, I think poor writers should stick to other pursuits and allow us professionals (who know what we're doing) to craft important documents... 

A very important point here: Most of the evolution of language (the human capacity in general, and each current language specifically) took place with very little input from the written medium. Language is about speaking, with only some modern exceptions these past few thousand years. So, while a writer rarely has to worry about whether or not the reader can clearly make out all of the letters in the words, a speaker must seriously contend with the fact that a listener will not hear every phoneme in every word. In some cases, no information at all will come across. In other cases, a vowel can be swallowed and seem ambiguous. The Romance languages did not evolve to be clearly read -- they evolved to be clearly heard.

What I said about clarity goes for brevity, too. Brevity is often desirable, but the cost of something longer-written is less than the cost of something longer-said. A speech act puts two people into a time-constrained situation, and the speaker may be competing with the listener as to who will speak next; not to mention, whether or not the listener will pay attention! These considerations are very different in the writer-reader relationship.

In a nutshell, while writing is a nice new invention that has lofted our species to new heights, it *is* a new thing, and if you integrate over all people, I think visual transmission of language is still a very distant second behind auditory transmission of language, although for a few niche individuals, the opposite may be true.

Finally, I want to thank Richard for his contribution to this discussion. It's good to hear from someone who grew up with French as a first language. It's especially informative to me to hear that the French themselves, while they find the structures and protocols of their language to be far more natural than I might, still find some of the irrationalities amusing and, well -- irrational. I, for one, readily admit the irrationalities of English -- especially the emotional loading of English structures in which some unseen "they" are responsible for just about everything that happens. It was refreshing to hear someone fondly admit to the craziness of his own language...

The best quirks are the ones one hasn't noticed yet. I'll give you three I bet you haven't noticed.

"Japanese" can be used as a plural noun. What is the plural possessive?

You can say "I gave Ted a book" or "I gave a book to Ted". But you can't say, "I reported the police a crime", only "I reported a crime to the police." What is the rule that determines which verb you can use both ways?

Some adjectives shift to the comparative with -er (big:bigger, silly:sillier). But many can't do that, and take a preposed "more" (intelligent:more intelligent, golden:more golden). You presumably feel comfortable adjudicating which adjective is handled each way, and make that judgement very rapidly as you speak. Since it's so easy, tell me: What's the rule?

[dvandorn]

The best quirks are the ones one hasn't noticed yet. I'll give you three I bet you haven't noticed.

"Japanese" can be used as a plural noun. What is the plural possessive?

You can say "I gave Ted a book" or "I gave a book to Ted". But you can't say, "I reported the police a crime", only "I reported a crime to the police." What is the rule that determines which verb you can use both ways?

Some adjectives shift to the comparative with -er (big:bigger, silly:sillier). But many can't do that, and take a preposed "more" (intelligent:more intelligent, golden:more golden). You presumably feel comfortable adjudicating which adjective is handled each way, and make that judgement very rapidly as you speak. Since it's so easy, tell me: What's the rule?

On the first point, I have what I *think* is the right answer -- as with any plural noun that ends with an "s" sound, the proper way to indicate a possessive is to simply add the possessive apostrophe -- for example, "The Japanese' city planning now takes earthquake survival into account." Unlike the way it is written, this would be pronounced with a subtle but still stated double-s at the end. Either that, or you would modify the statement to remove the problem, i.e., "The Japanese building industry now plans for earthquake survival."

As for the second and third points, I can't cite rules. Rummaging through my usage of a variety of verb forms and adjective forms, I'm pretty certain the usage is arbitrary in each case. In the case of the verb form, though, I think the "reported" case is the rule, and the "gave" case is the exception. By far, more verbs which require you to specify the "target" of the action use the prepositional format ("I gave the book to Ted"). Only a few verbs, including "gave," allow an "understood target pointer" structure ("I gave Ted the book").

In re the adjective comparative forms, I will disagree that most of us make the "right" judgment when speaking -- I've heard people use terms like "He's the intelligentest guy I know" or "That color is goldener than the other one." I think it's a matter of the size of your vocabulary -- the larger your vocabulary and the more forms you've heard used correctly, the more of the arbitrary assignations you memorize. I'm sure that's how it works in my own head.

-the other Doug

[tty]

Be glad you don't have to learn Swedish. The use of male and female gender is quite sensible - only things that really are male or female have them. However for absolutely no discernable reason there are two neuters with different pronouns (den, det) and different definite articles (-en, -et). There are NO rules which words use which, so You have to learn which to use for literally every neutral noun in the language

tty

[Guest_Richard Trigaux_*]

what I think is that languages are historical buildings, this meaning that there was no guideline into the building of a language over history. There are some slow evolutions over length of time, and some faster events, at the occasion of conquests, or at the occasion of some attempts to reform the language. So there is no rational line tying the whole thing, only parts of rationals about certain structures, which can eventually clash with others.

In French, of course the latin and greek sources are sensitive, but many ancient words come from the Francs, a germanic tribe which was at the origin of the name "france" and of the early french kings (Merovingians). The other "barbarian" tribes influenced other regions, for instance the Wisigoth language has discernable influences in Occitan and Catalan and Castillan (spanish). But there are also a bunch or former gaelic words still used today. The funniest of all is that all this non-latin words received a gender!

We have gendered words, but you should know that other languages have also their own difficulties. For instance Chinese language has music notes, and a simple word like "chang" can have very different meanings, if it is sung with ascending two notes, or descending two notes, or equal. Chineses, in order to speak, have to develop the regions of the brain normally devoted to musical sensitivity! Not to speak of, when learning chinese as a second language, to learn that thousands of ideograms! However Chinese manage to understand each other and to be a brillant country.

In Tibetan there is simply no gender at all, and even no pronouns. You can even not guess the gender of a person from her name, as even many personal names are genderless. The ortography is dreadful, with no separation between words and letters superposed by two or three, which makes difficult to computerize tibetan texts. However this does not forbid the Tibetans to also have developped a brillant civilization.

So languages are arbitrary and haphazardous constructions over history. I wondered if it really was possible to create a completely artificial hyper-rationalized language, free of any complex ad arbitrarian rules. It is even not obvious that such an ultra-simplified language would be really simpler to learn and to use, it could even contain many confusions. Attempts to build such a language existed, such as the Esperanto, but it simply copied existing european languages, borrowing etymologies from the various european languages in a very arbitrarian way, even the "quotas" are arbitrary.

I tried to simply build a rationalized alphabet. Such an alphabet would be based on an analysis of the relations between the various consonants. But I stepped on two issues:
-even for simple sounds like "t" or "d" there are strong variations between languages and cultures. For istance the english "t" sounds somewhat "tch" for a french ear, and the german "d" sounds as a "t" to a french ear.
-we can build several different and contradictory classifications of letters. Say in a mathematical way, all the letters are linear combinations of a subset of letters, but we can do this with many other subsets. In an axiomatic way, any subset of letters can be the "axioms" for building all the others. So, at any moment, when designing a lettering system, there will be some arbitrarions classification. So learning such a system may be complex, or there may be one hundred letters.

There are however attempts to build such lettering systems:
-the elvish alphabets designed by Tolkien, which could be a good example of a rationalized lettering system. They howeved show many abusive simplifications, which are relevant only for the peculiar language they have to convey. And they even evolved in time, like real languages...
-We can too trace the creation of the tibetan alphabet in the 8th century. It is still some rationalized creation, but adapted from the sanscript and simplified to fit tibetan language, its structures and rules. And this rationalization led, in many cases, to a complex orthography.

With all this we still not have answered the question "he" or "she".
I think there is no answer. In French, it is "he". In English, it is "she", derived from the sailor's ancient habit to say "she" for their old wooden ships. Where does this habit comes from?

[JRehling]

So languages are arbitrary and haphazardous constructions over history. I wondered if it really was possible to create a completely artificial hyper-rationalized language, free of any complex ad arbitrarian rules. It is even not obvious that such an ultra-simplified language would be really simpler to learn and to use, it could even contain many confusions. Attempts to build such a language existed, such as the Esperanto, but it simply copied existing european languages, borrowing etymologies from the various european languages in a very arbitrarian way, even the "quotas" are arbitrary.

Very good points and information, Richard.

I'd like to say of language that it is, importantly, designed for human beings to use it, not vintage 1985 AI programs. Where it is arbitrary, some human capacity or other allows it to be arbitrary.

Of course, the very words for things, in every language, are almost always arbitrary. (An example of an exception: sound-words like "pop".) Why "dog" and not "chien" or "popo"? This is not irrationality, but almost surely a useful design feature, enabling people to create new terms in response to varied environments (of what use would a standard term for "dog" be to a people that lived on an island with emus, but no dogs?). Some interesting work has been done by a professor of mine, Mike Gasser, showing how important it is to have word-naming be arbitrary.

So take, for example, Allen Newell's "Model Human Processor" and remember that human short term memory is very limited (in capacity as well as time span) whereas human long term memory is almost unlimited in capacity (given enough rehearsals/item). Take Zipf's "Law" as the distribution of term frequencies. Consider that content/time is a goal, but redundancy is useful to eliminate acoustical ambiguities. And, the fact that human "common sense" disambiguates many logical ambiguities -- to an extent.

At the end, I think you'll find that language is a good solution to the constraints and abilities of human speakers and listeners. Where it is arbitrary, don't confuse what is arbitrary with madness or mistaken design. Finally, note that even ambiguity serves its purpose, as a coquette, a politician, or an author like James Joyce knows well.

With all this we still not have answered the question "he" or "she".
I think there is no answer. In French, it is "he". In English, it is "she", derived from the sailor's ancient habit to say "she" for their old wooden ships. Where does this habit comes from?

Sociologically, I note that in male-dominated enterprises, particularly ones like war or sea voyages that isolated men from women, men could choose to put female labels on objects as a way of (humorously?) putting a salve on the fact that no women would be present. For example, in the movie Full Metal Jacket, US Marines (in a relatively genderless language) are told to give their rifle a female name. This is not primarily a language issue, although it becomes one.

In French (German, Russian, and other IndoEuropean languages), gender based on words rather than objects can step in. If a language has a masculine noun for an object, then masculine pronouns are used, sometimes even if the noun is never actually articulated. Of course, a language like French may have more than one word for "ship". Whichever gender is used for a ship, I would suspect that it is either the grammatical gender of the current primary noun for ship, or the grammatical gender of a formerly-popular noun for ship.

To go back to my puzzles from before, I don't know if there is a right answer to the "Japanese" problem.

The use of indirect objects before verbs seems to be arbitrary, but almost all verbs that permit it are of Anglo-Saxon, and not French origin! This reflects the fact that Anglo-Saxon had such a grammatical structure for all verbs (as German does today), whereas French does not (when the noun, instead of the pronoun, is used).

There are rules for which adjectives can take -er, and once you have those three rules, I know of only one exception. Monosyllables and bisyllabic adjectives ending in -y can take -er. Trisyllabic adjectives and bisyllabics not ending in -y should take "more". The exception is "fun". And, yes, I'm sure that not all people perform according to these rules, but they come pretty close!

[dvandorn]

...Of course, the very words for things, in every language, are almost always arbitrary. (An example of an exception: sound-words like "pop".) Why "dog" and not "chien" or "popo"? This is not irrationality, but almost surely a useful design feature, enabling people to create new terms in response to varied environments (of what use would a standard term for "dog" be to a people that lived on an island with emus, but no dogs?). Some interesting work has been done by a professor of mine, Mike Gasser, showing how important it is to have word-naming be arbitrary.

I think the great human adventure of "naming the nameless things" goes on every moment of every day, and it is at least *partially* arbitrary. But there are non-arbitrary pressures to it -- many "new" nouns are built upon existing nouns for things that are already named. Many others are named for people or places associated with the "discovery" of the new object (or concept) -- for example, we speak of the differences between a Newtonian world and an Einsteinian world. Granted, these are adjectives, but the process is similar (although rather more robust for adjectives).

We make words as we need them, though, you're both absolutely right. The Inuit natives of Alaska have more than 50 words for various types of ice, after all, and only one or two words for "flower."

There are rules for which adjectives can take -er, and once you have those three rules, I know of only one exception. Monosyllables and bisyllabic adjectives ending in -y can take -er. Trisyllabic adjectives and bisyllabics not ending in -y should take "more". The exception is "fun". And, yes, I'm sure that not all people perform according to these rules, but they come pretty close!

Interesting -- I had never really come across that as a "rule" before. I just use the form that "sounds right" in my head.

I'm somewhat amazed by the process of creating speech (or writing), because while I know most of the rules (and can even state some of them... ), I don't consciously *think* of the rules as I write or as I speak. I just know what sounds right, or reads right, and that's what I do. (I also deliberately break certain rules, for effect. Like sentence fragments. Things like that... *grin*...)

When people ask me how I can write like I do, I ask them if they can read. They always say yes, of course. Then I ask them why they can't just copy the forms of what they read, and they say that just doesn't work -- they can *see* the correct forms and understand them, but they can't *create* using those same forms. And that always makes me confused -- if you can read and understand something, why can't you use that same form yourself?

And then I think of a painter -- if I tell a painter that I just can't see how she takes her paints and brushes and makes something that looks like what she's portraying, she'll ask me if I can see what she's painting. I'll say yes, I can see it. She'll then ask, if I can see it, why can't I paint it? And I say that just doesn't work; I can see it, but I can't paint it.

So, that's the rational answer to my amazement. It's not a matter of copying forms, there is a process that must occur somewhere below the conscious level, in both the painter and the writer, that allows each to manipulate their raw materials and create something that many others simply can't. Or can't nearly as easily, or as well.

But I still wonder why so many people for whom English is their first language simply cannot manage to effectively express themselves, either verbally or in written form. I understand why on a rational level, but on the emotional level, I continue to be amazed...

-the other Doug

[JRehling]

The Inuit natives of Alaska have more than 50 words for various types of ice, after all

This is not true. It is one of the most persistent myths in intellectual tradition. People here it and repeat it, but it has no basis in fact. See the fascinating essay by Geoff Pullum, included in his book, The Great Eskimo Vocabulary Hoax. Which every scientist should read, because it's not so much about Eskimo language as it is about scientific hearsay.

Eskimo languages have roughly the same number of words for snow that English-speaking skiiers do, about 10. The tempting desire to hear this stat and exaggerate it has lead to a pernicious belief to the contrary.

[Pavel]

I don't know about Eskimo, but English has lots of words to describe dynamic of the stock market. Off the top of my head, stocks can grow, surge, rally, tumble, fall, plummet, drop, swing up, recuperate, forge ahead, lag behind, grind lower, go through the roof etc. I doubt Eskimo have that many words to describe stocks.