In his text on the hardest language in the world Jeroen gave a hint to an important aspect of language. In this discussion he meticulously worked out the differentiation between difficulty and complexity. But he also drew upon another distinction, elegantly questioning ideology and cultural narcissism, namely the distinction between complexity and superiority between languages.
As a German I am oddly used to students in linguistics stating that “German is a really hard language” but that this difficulty goes along with the virtue of “being a lot more expressive than English, because the case system allows you to establish much more precise relations between substantives”. And also the political German right wing likes to pretend that the German language and its difficulty bares an element of superiority, only in its pure form of course, whilst anglicisms and other influences stain our linguistic heritage. Well, there are many good reasons to argue why these reasons are not linguistic arguments, but mere ideological or political matters. In this text I want to further elaborate on Jeroen’s distinction between complexity and superiority.
For this sake I would like to elaborate on the Axiom of Economy, formulated by Achim Eschbach. This axiom stems from what we called traditional semiotics in the very first blog entry of Fuzzy Grammar. In its core it says nothing more and nothing less than: “No semiotic element is ever superfluous in a semiotic system”. This seems quite fuzzy to work with, even for a blog called Fuzzy Grammar. But this axiom relates to what we mean when we say that one language is better than another one, and why we have the impression that better is equivalent to more complex. As I told earlier it is quite common among German linguistic students to think that German is more complex than, say, English and moreover draw a certain arrogance from this. That arrogance stems from the feeling that the alleged complexity allows to express more things. This is where the Axiom of Economy rules against the comparison of expressiveness of semiotic systems. If every semiotic system has the exactly correct means to expressing whatever is necessary to be expressed (since no sign is superfluous), then how can some language express more things than another language? A language can always express exactly what its user wants it or needs it to express.
This entails two more notions. The notion of necessity on the one hand and the notion of usage on the other hand. These notions are (in a way) two sides of the same coin, since as humans we use what we need and we need what we use. This is not meant as a normative statement. If a person wants to create poetry, this may not fulfil evolutionary “needs” in the way techniques to feeding your progeny do, but the poetry will respond to whatever the poet’s need of expression is. And I take one step further in saying that upon the necessity of meaning, the use of a semiotic system will create the means to access this meaning.
Well this could of course be disqualified as a mere opinion and as belief in an axiomatic expression that matches my ideological background. This is of course true, since an axiom proclaims itself to be self-evident and does not care to provide logical proof. I will still try to state a case, giving some semiotic and linguistic examples of how necessity shapes the quality of economical expression, which makes complexity per se not superior to simplicity.
German writer and publicist Erik Spiekermann (2016) for instance stated in a contribution for Deutschland Radio Kultur that the use of emoticons in internet mediated communication – especially in the case of younger audiences – is a cultural drawback. He claims that it affects not only the communicative capacities of adolescents, but also negates our cultural evolution towards a highly abstract phonetic alphabet. He moreover states that the use of iconic representations of gestures and facial expressions is a threat to highly developed culture, because it antagonises rationality in communication.
First of all, it is clear that written communication does not dispose of the vast array of channels people are used to in oral communication (i.e. facial expressions and gesturing) and that emoticons actually work as placeholders to fill in the void that these missing channels leave in written communication. Writing systems in social media thus aren’t written systems. The distinction between medial orality (vs. scripture) and conceptual orality (vs. scripture) by Koch & Oesterreicher (1985) is of vital utility here. This means that medially written communication in social media is technically a written system, but its underlying structure (if not purpose) is to imitate oral registers of language. And since it is clear that people do not speak the same in every sort of situation, it is also clear that writing has evolved (through its synchronic display via the internet) into an array of communicative situations rather than being one communicative situation in itself. In conclusion: Blaming adolescents of making wrong use of scripture through emoticons is a short sighted view on linguistic diversity and the appreciation of different ways to express oneself. Spiekermann could just as well say that Americans make bad use of the English language, because they have a different dialect from the British or (by extension) that Frenchmen make bad use of German because they speak French, for that matter. This is however a text and socio linguistic argument. In this article I want to tackle Spiekermann’s prejudices and misconceptions on language at a semiotic level.
Other than hostility towards young adults, Spiekermann proves to hold another misconception. Namely that the phonetic alphabet is the most efficient way of communicating through scripture. While I admit to have argued somewhat polemically against points that Spiekermann would probably not defend in such harsh ways, he does explicitly state that the alphabetic writing system is efficient to the extent that the Chinese and Japanese would actually envy European writing culture for it. But in Japan reforms of abolishing characters in their scripture have actually been discussed in certain public environments. The idea was quite what Spiekermann says in that: “’the abolition of kanji [characters] would clear away the remaining feudal mentality and enable Japan to achieve American-style efficiency’; ‘[by] using the Western alphabet instead of […] characters, there would be an increase in national intellectual standards which would lead to maturity as a democratic government and a civilized nation.’” (Fujii 1999) But the artistic appreciation and cultural identity of character writing were hold in such high esteem by scientists, writers and the broad public that the ministry of culture ruled against it – pride might be in order rather than envy. But also the conception of superiority through efficiency is a rather flimsy fallacy. Efficiency is largely dependent on the notion of necessity, for which the Chinese scripture is a perfect example. A comparison might be interesting here.
The Latin (and also Arabic and Cyril) alphabet enables speakers of a language to give an image to their speech, by representing sounds pronounced in their language. That is, the phonetic chain of Arabic, Dutch, English, French, German, Greek, Portuguese, Russian, Spanish, Slovenian and so forth can be conveniently plotted onto a line from one side to the other (space representing the time it takes for one to pronounce the phrase) imitating the phonetic chain sound by sound (with more or less synchronic accuracy – Spanish being very accurate and Danish little accurate in phonetic representation. Since languages tend to have a relatively small array of sounds (few exceed the 100 sounds mark) but almost infinite thoughts and meanings to express, the system is efficient in the representation of sounds. A stock of 26 basic signs – in the case of the Latin alphabet – are more than enough to cover the expenses of the endeavour of written meaning making. In the reading of the text what we are actually reading, is a representation of spoken sounds, which in a second step has to be translated into meaning (Figure 1). For a skilled reader this cognitive effort of translating sound back into meaning is of course a matter of shallow processing and people are typically not aware of this process. But one can see in children who barely started reading, how an error in phonetic scripture makes the sense of scripture practically inaccessible, for the child has to read the text out loud to itself, before understanding what is being said.
Chinese scripture on the other hand displays a completely different way of functioning. In the Chinese language a character is not linked to its pronunciation but rather directly to the concept which it is a representation of. The Japanese (lend from Chinese) character for “sun” or “day” might enlighten this process. “日”is an iconic, that is visual, representation of the sun. Although it seems quite rudimentary, it is a squared representation of a round shine of light around a centre This character can be pronounced in different ways ni, hi or nichi and even more, depending on the context it stands in. So Chinese (and Japanese for that matter, even though Japan does also have a syllabic system on top) do not link scripture to sound, which then leads to conceptual meaning. It links scripture to conceptual meaning and then leads to sound in its last interpretation (Figure 2), namely while reading aloud[1]. Consequently the array of characters has to be a lot more finely grained than in phonetic alphabets, since the human languages uses few sounds to access a lot (everything a human being can think of) of meanings. Also combination and derivation do not really alleviate this issue, resulting in Chinese requiring to know about 5000 signs to practically communicate (over 80.000 attested) and Japanese to requiring 2136 standardised kanji (loaned Chinese characters) upon finishing high school, plus 52 hiragana (these are alphabetic, used for morphology or to replace a forgotten kanji) plus 52 katakana (also alphabetic but used only for loan words). Spiekermann has reason to argue that this is a very inefficient writing system when it comes to learning them, but the argument does only hold true when learning efficiency is the standard or necessity that you are measuring the writing system against.
The Chinese writing system is from its perspective superior to the Latin writing system in that it fits a need that is historically not an issue for European languages, thus easily overseen in the judgement of efficiency. Empires in Europe where for a long time relatively consolidated linguistically. There were of course empires in which different languages were spoken at the same time like the Holy Roman Empire, but they consolidated its language (on an administrative level) through Latin as the written lingua franca. During the Shang Dynasty (around 1700-1000 BC), which is the time span since when Chinese scripture is uninterruptedly attested, it evolved to a highly functional system for administrative purposes however. China was a vast empire in both size and cultural diversity. Many languages were to be covered by an administrative apparatus that would need to convey messages through all of China. The solution to this problem was as simple as the Latin solution seems to us. The scripture in use had to be a direct representation of meanings, so pictograms (arguably also the predecessor of current writing systems in Europe) did not evolve away from iconic concepts, towards phonology as a baseline, but kept the iconic representation as its main underlying principle. They then developed into a highly differentiated and at first glance unnecessarily complex writing system. Subsequently, Chinese scripture could be read throughout the Chinese Empire, each province’s administration pronouncing the signs in their respective dialect. The actual meaning however was centralized and kept perfectly well, even without actual speech as a foundation. Still today the Han- Scripture (漢字) can be used to write in eight different languages.
The Chinese scripture is the perfect example of showing how a communicative need can shape an entire communicative system. In this context we can also claim that the often judged and criticised use of emoji does arguably fulfil a communicative need that Spiekermann fails to acknowledge – for example filling in missing communicative channels. Our culture typically connotes scripture with high culture, which is historically motivated, but does not match the informational reality of our world anymore, in which (medial) scripture is also used for profane sorts of daily (conceptually verbal) communication. In this specific context our highly conventionalized writing system just falls short to express emotive aspects of communication, which is then filled through emoticons (and other means of representation). But to question this is quite the same as to tell people to stop chit chatting at all.
The important theoretical point of this short discussion to be kept in mind is that the performance of any given system can never be described in absolute terms to be good or bad. The only way of measuring communicative efficiency (or even success) is against the necessity that it is supposed to cover. Practically speaking, you might retain from this text that language, just like any other cultural fashion, is affected over the generations. And you might want to observe that there is no harm in noticing, that twenty years of difference in a linguistic environment change the needs in communication to such an extent that some forms of speech are irrecognizable to the elder. This does however not mean that communication is impossible. If need be, the system will adjust.
[1] I don’t personally know how the allocation of meaning in the human mind differs between Chinese/Japanese and European native speakers. One might think that actually scripture affects the way meaning and vocabulary are stored in an Asian speaker’s mind/brain. A scripture bias has been confirmed for Arabic vs. European people, who do display different habits of looking at visual stimuli, according to the direction in which Arabic and European scripture is written.
Fujii, S. (1999). Review on Nanette Gottlieb: Kanji Politics: Language Policy and Japanese Script. New York: Kegan Paul International Limited/Colubia University Press, 1996. Pp. ix+ 245. Price (cloth) $76.50. ISBN 0-7103-0512-5. Studies in the Linguistic Sciences, 29(1), 167-175. Recuperado el 23th de August de 2016, de http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.188.4358&rep=rep1&type=pdf
Koch, P., & Oesterreicher, W. (1985). Sprache der Nähe – Sprache der Distanz: Mündlichkeit und Schriftlichkeit im Spannungsfeld von Sprachtheorie und Sprachgeschichte. Romanistisches Jahrbuch(36), 15-43.
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