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polymathwannabe comments on Linguistic mechanisms for less wrong cognition - Less Wrong Discussion
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English sometimes relies too much on context to provide clues for meaning. The word "post" has 37 meanings as a noun, verb, or adverb. Poor context can't shoulder all the load.
Since English is an, ahem, successful language, it clearly can :-P
True. Let me qualify: for the benefit of the student of languages, context shouldn't shoulder all the load.
Should languages be designed for language students?
For natural languages it's a moot question, but conlangs are inescapably intended for the use of people who are already inclined to study languages.
Indeed they are, but the more serious kind of conlang is surely intended to be usable as an actual practical means of expression and communication. If some design decision makes things better for students one way and for actual users another way, it's surely better to choose the latter.
(Of course we don't know that the present situation is like that. It's entirely possible that the success of English hasn't been in any way helped by its heavy use of context for disambiguation, or by advantages that that somehow enables.)
The success of English, you ask?
(cough) British Empire (cough)
Even in English a person who has a 50,000 word active vocabulary can express himself better than person who has a 10,000 word active vocabulary.
True, but that's mostly a matter of having more things they can say in one word. Reducing ambiguity in a language by splitting the job of one word up among multiple words with fewer meanings increases the language's vocabulary size but doesn't increase the range of things there are words for. So the two aren't parallel.
Focusing on the numbers of words might miss my point. The average person who finishes speaks English on a higher level than the average person at high school. It takes effort to learn college level English.
If you make the language easier to learn than it will take less effort to learn college level English. People will reach the same level of proficiency in the language at an ealier age.
I am not convinced that a nontrivial fraction of the effort it takes a native anglophone to get from zero to college level English is caused by polysemies like that of "post". It certainly doesn't seem like that's the case for my daughter who's in some sense about half-way along that progression. Such things are (I think) more of an obstacle to people learning English as a foreign language. I am all in favour of making the lives of foreign language learners easier, but generally most people who speak a language speak it natively (English might actually be a counterexample, now I come to think of it) and, even more so, most use of a language is by native speakers (I bet English isn't a counterexample to that). So I think that in evaluating languages we should be considering how effective they are in actual use much more than how easy they are to learn for foreign learners.
Now, for sure, I have no very good reason to think that making prepositions less polysemic wouldn't be an improvement in actual use. But then I don't think you have any very good reason to think it would be an improvement for learners, either; it's just a guess, right?
It probably isn't if you only count spoken use, but it probably is if you also count written use.
How would you know if it would be the case? What do you think are the traits of the English language that prevents your daughter from learning it faster?
Let's take the example of the 'bottle of soda'. Without looking at the particular case it seems for me hard to tell if there such a thing as an "empty bottle of soda" or whether bottle of soda means that the bottle is actually filled with soda.
That is not a problem if you regularly speak about bottle's of soda that might not be a problem. There are empty soda bottles but no empty bottle's of soda. At the same time if I search for
empty bottle of sodain Google I get 37,900 results while I get 110,000 results forempty soda bottle. Google Ngram is a bit stronger in favoringempty soda bottlebut it still suggests that a sizable portion of people speak ofempty bottle of soda.In daily life you won't have much problems with that. Context will often be enough. If you however take a biochemistry book and try to understand what it's saying you often don't have the context to know sense of a preposition is meant. That means you need to spend cognitive resources to think through the possibilities that could be meant.
In English the polysemy of
orproduces problems when people get into mathmatical logic.The Polish language has polysemy whereby
rękameans bothhandandarm. Can you imagine how that makes live harder any subject that speaks about the body whether it's biology or even massage?The interesting thing is that the Polish culture had a lot of contact with languages that do have a proper word for hand that doesn't also mean arm. Why didn't they borrow
HandandArmfrom German or English? I suspect the reason is thatrękais too deeply imbedded in the Polish language. You can't just burrow a new word like you can add a new word forketchupwhen the concept enter into the language. I would suspect that basic prepositions are similar in the fact that it's very hard to borrow them from another language.As a learner it's okay when there are a limited amount of prepositions. What you don't want as a learner is special rules. Saying "in January" while saying "on Monday" is an unnecessary special rule. You want to have reliable rules that tell you whether there's a
empty bottle of soda.I don't know whether I would. All I know is that I don't recall ever seeing or hearing her have difficulty that seemed to relate in any way to such things. Perhaps I wouldn't expect to have done; I'm not claiming this as strong evidence; as I say, I think we're both basically guessing.
The rest of what you say still seems to me to be guessing that there "ought" to be a problem. I agree that you've presented some examples of ambiguity, and when something can mean X or Y and you want to say specifically X or specifically Y that can make your life more difficult. But when something can mean X or Y and you want to say "X or Y" the ambiguity is positively helpful (your hand really is part of your arm, and I bet there are cases where ręka is strictly better than either English word). And needing to learn fewer words is nice. And using less language-space means better robustness against errors. And ambiguity is often beneficial in poetry. Etc., etc., etc. Maybe these instances of ambiguity really do make English (and Polish) worse languages than they would be if they were patched up. But I don't think you're in a position to say that they do just on the basis that they are instances of ambiguity.