Minisode - The Limits of Language

Written and Performed by Dan Olson

[glilimith]

So, when I was learning Japanese in school, we learned a pair of words that had one english translation: "muzukashii" and "taihen", both meaning "difficult". The difference between the words is not one we have in english: "muzukashii" refers to difficulty from complexity (think of a calculus problem), whereas "taihen" gets its difficulty from an overwhelming scale (think of a thousand addition problems). As the teacher explained the words to us and gave examples, it was easy to group things into one category or the other, and as I continued my day-to-day life I found it hard to stop grouping difficult things this way. They'd always been the same thing to me, but I had different feelings about the two groups and different ways of dealing with them.

I think it's important to recognize how much our language limits our scope of understanding, since it's hard to comprehend concepts we don't have words to describe, and since, when we do have words for something, how we are capable of describing it is shaped by the words we have at our disposal. This is why I think it's so crucial for every person to learn multiple languages (and also why I get so angry about people complaining about "made up words"). Sorry for the tangent, but this is what your video made me think about.

[drevyek]

In linguistics, the term is "accommodation". It is where distinctive speech patterns and accent features are adapted by one or both speakers, as a conciliatory practice in conversation. You can see that two participants with different accents will have their vowels drift closer to each other throughout a conversation, markedly and measurably.
It can cause awkward hypercorrection, as it is the wholescale adoption of some specific, distinctive features (like dropping the final r in british english), while not always accounting for overlapping or contradicting rules (maintaining that final r before a word starting with a vowel).

[madelinevandongen]

"Erotic, Hydrophilic and Pragmatic" sounds like an advertisement for lube.

[jmalmsten]

huh. This made me think about a series of Monty Python products (books and dvd's and such) that had blurbs on the backside packaging that would end with "... sincerly, the voice you hear in your head when you read things".

[deathwilldie]

The limits of language has been a common philosophical problem for hundreds of years. As a physicist, I run into limitation of language all the time (which is why we use mathematics as the language of physics). To anyone interested I would highly recommend the book "Thinking Socratically: critical thinking about everyday issues". Technically it is a textbook, but it reads almost like a novel.

[KKenzieVideo]

Another reason it's difficult to make up words in because of the backlash. I have heard people constantly deriding the use of new words as silly or pointless and the phrases "does that really need to be so specific" or "do we really need to define that" pop up a lot. It's confusing for me to understand that argument however, having more words just makes things so much more precise and understandable.

[theleeryone]

like how you just. breezed past the implication that tacos are sandwiches. very brave.

[jessecaalvarez-kuykendall]

I love this channel and its viewership. There's no wall of "BUT A TACO IS A TACO, NOT A comments, just real discussion about the content of the video. ❤️

[Tobbence]

I just recently found this channel and by (lucky?) happenstance this video is the last one I watched after binge watching everything else. So now I have your voice (both versions) in my head. You have taken over my inner voice. An Idnapping you might say...

[juditpapp]

I've been studying English as a second language for more than 15 years and what you said in your video is really exciting for me. I always thought that English is a fairly easy language to learn. After watching this and reading some of the comments from cultured native speakers I'm starting to think English is just not expressive enough in the form the Avarage Joe uses it.

My own mother tongue is Hungarian which has been inventing new words for more than a thousand year simply by using other language's words for things which couldn't be described before. For a recent exaple in relation of English: we have the Hungarian verb 'vásárolni' wich means 'shopping' in English and now we use the Hungarianized verb 'shopping' as well for window shopping.

Apart from borrowing words from others Hungarian language just smashes existing Hungarian words together to create new meaning as in the case of the meanings of VOICE you talked about. We have the word HANG which means both 'sound' and 'voice' in English we also have HANGVÉTEL and HANGNEM to describe the writer's voice and with what feeling something is said or written is heard. (wow that sounds way more complicated than I intented). Both 'hangvétel' and 'hangnem' is more than their parts together.
voice'
HANGNEM='sound' + 'gender'='the feel something is said or written with'

This differentiation is thanks to a movement in the 19th century. At this time Hungarian scholars were taught Latin, French and German and interacted with eachother in these languages on a daily basis. The words from these languages were also widely used by aristocracy and by 'the people'. What happened is the literacy scholars started a movement to 'Hungarianize' the Hungarian language. They came up with hundreds of unusable words and even more hundreds of words we use today in everyday language instead of their Latin, French or German counterparts and run into the same problems as an English person using the word 'boketta'.

Baseline is MAKING UP NEW WORDS IS EASY. You just have to make the people use the new worlds.

[swanscream]

"She was engaged in boketto" ain't bad, IMO. Also, I wanted to say I love your videos! You're superbly concise and thoughtful and dedicated.

[Owlpunk]

The German composite word would be "Stimmenadoption", or "Stimmenübernahme", in case anyone was wondering. Or at least the _literal_ version, because the German word for certain meanings of "voice" is "Ton" (sound) ; while in regards to writing, the only actual term is "Schreibstil" - "writing style". So the *actual* composite word for "voice adoption" would be "Stilübernahme"... which is in fact a common (or at least not unheard-of) term used in German literary critique. So yes, language does most definitely shape the way we think :D
Which includes not only the existence, meaning and (of course) gender of words, but even their actual _sounds_. Because the sound of the word "voice" very probably evokes an at least somewhat different mental impression than the word "Stimme".

[Lionfrog]

As an artist I think it’s interesting because, to my knowledge, few artists call cyan blue or vice versa. Green is probably the better example but we use cool and warm to denote types of green. This concept plays into how there are multiple levels of language. Academic writing has access to words that can describe more precisely than everyday speech but slang is able to create words for concepts that are new to the culture.

[ookazi]

So two terms ago, I was in a college level poetry workshop, and we got onto the topic of the second person and how it relates to and changes the meaning of a poem when it is introduced in different ways: but the discussion ground to a halt when we all collectively realized that we don't really have terms for the various second-persons the way we have first-person speakers (reliable, unreliable, speaking subject, etc) and third-person subjects (beloved, antagonist, speaker's-foil, etc). Not having these delineated constructions made it really difficult to talk about the second person with any degree of certainty, and it doesn't help that poetry as a habit consistently conflates its constructions to create layers of meaning, that interweave as you read different meanings into a poem ( Poetry is especially fond of conflating persons to create admissions and accusations of guilt: When "you" becomes a stand in for "I" and "y'all" and "they" it gets difficult to talk about what the word is actually doing).

So, naturally, I found the inability to talk about something annoying, and I spent the next fortnight and a half back-and-forthing with myself to come up with (if not a complete list) as complete a list as I could of the different types of second persons, naming each one. I wound up with thirty-one terms spread over four broader categories, with a length clocking at about four pages. Some were easy and others were hard, and one of them was the hardest motherfucker of all to pin down: It was one of the first terms I knew was there, but finding the one right term for it was so gods damn difficult.

And after doing this, I found I had a metric ass-ton more incite into how the second person worked within poetry to create meaning, and how many of the various types of addressed (speaker:first-person :: addressed:second-person) interact with each other when they conflate. It might be that I got the insight by sitting down and naming everything, but mostly I think it came from how everything now had a name.

[florencebjorkkummer]

I suggest the existing word "Echolalia" for voice adoption.

[kalmar]

"Oh, what an interesting vide- OH MY GOD I FORGOT TO PRACTICE LATIN I AM SCREWED!" The next semester will be rough.

[tragicallyhypno]

It's really hard to make a new word.
Brian David Gilbert: hold my zjierbness

[calebmullan]

This idea of "voice adoption" feels like a component of a psychological concept, "introspection". This is the inverse of projection, where rather than observe parts of yourself as being in the external world, you perceive things in the world as part of yourself. I get this a lot with characters in film, where I take on the general attitude of one for the rest of the day.

[GeorgMir]

Boketto in Austrian German: "in's Narrenkastl schaun" (staring into the jester's box)

[vacantvisionary]

the word for "the way a specific person uses language" is idiolect!