@NathanHarvey I love the #NativLang videos generally, but the last 2 have had a special place for me because of an opportunity I had to teach some kids the “controversies of zero” and Joshua describes in these videos how much the linguistic null debate is the exact same debate, and I could see points the kids brought up as the videos went on.

https://youtu.be/woDllcnCbTw

https://youtu.be/I9gMwWK_Zko

We began with counting games, typically identifying objects being counted and labeling stages of counting game execution with numbers. You start counting with 1, the first object identified, and numbers generally match objects identified. If you have no objects, you have no number.

But immediately they were drawn to the linguistic dyad - the relation between signifier and signified, the symbol and the referent, the syntax and the semantics.

What does it mean to give nothing a symbol?

Why would people talk about nothing?

Then as numbers moved from expressing collection (like ancient Egyptian numeric systems) to expressing place (as the Babylonian system did), some visual difficulties arose. If you had no 60s, but had a 3600 or two, the Babylonian had to make sure it was clear that there was nothing in the 60s place. You had to space it out in an obvious way, or possibly get it confused for the wrong number where the 3600s place was read as a 60s. A mark became a place holder for no place eventually to help.

Then, bringing in some Brahmagupta, more reasons arise. What if you have to take away all of the objects you have? If all of the other taking aways were numbers, why isn’t this? Can a number be more than counting if it’s useful? We want to tell people when we don’t have any more.

And that’s the same place debate in linguistics. Do we signify nothing? Just when it is lost (taken away), or absent in any structural pattern?

Most abstractly, the null is a potential symbolic player in all formal languages over compositional structures with queries on substructures. It’s used in set theory, for example, with various subset queries (like those built from disjunction). Models of syntax in linguistic analysis are not fundamentally different from the simple successor sequence of counting in this respect.

I think it’s interesting that this is really a syntactic debate, much like coders with the tabs v spaces debate, and that in the cases of the linguistic zero you have clear implication that shows the syntax can be parsed in exactly the same way without any symbol as with the symbol - the linguistic examples are natural languages where the absence is parsed across the culture just fine.

Anyway, was just reminded of cool discussions with middle school learners while catching up on some #linguistics vids from #NativLang. I think the controversies of nothing are a great way to introduce the syntax ‘ semantic distinction, and really start to peel apart what interpretation is really doing.

#NewGuinea - lessons from a cradle of agriculture and languages https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QWLOCDYtVbQ

#Linguistics #Agriculture #Langriculture #NativLang