The Conversational Maxims by #Grice

Of the four categories, the maxims of Quality are the most essential for me:

Supermaxim: Try to make your contribution one that is true.

- Do not say what you believe to be false.
- Do not say that, for which you lack adequate evidence (Grice 1975, Logic and Conversation, p. 46).

If insecurity cannot be resolved by conversational #implicatures, if there remains the suspicion of dishonesty, then communication fails - in #Politics and elsewhere.

@aparrish

It's an interesting paper for sure. Thanks for socializing it.

I'm not sure I agree with some of its conclusions, or maybe some of its premises, I'm not sure. It seems to come at English from all sides as if the ubiquity of English is offered as a principled claim that English is good for all things, and I think that's a bit much.

From the paper: "Sometimes language is taken as a proxy for culture and other times as a proxy for thought, making it challenging to ask how each affects the other."

The paper itself only barely manages to identify when it's talking about the global influence, whether colonial or diplomatic, of the US and perhaps the British realm before it. It doesn't discuss really the difference between how English came to be used and why English has caught on.

The late Bill Martin, a professor who taught a computational linguistics course I took at MIT, made some remark at one point about the idea that any time you encode something in language, it will be accidentally overly concrete, in that there are things you want to say and then there are things that come along as an artifact of whatever language you choose. So yes, English creates some assumptions and confusions, as ANY language would if it were the canonical language. So that just leaves one wondering: Should there be a common language?

There is a really substantial value in having a common language in that a lot of commerce and travel and diplomacy can result from that. So then the question is only which language will be that, or will some artificial language be chosen, which seems kind of useless.

The virtue of English I had always heard cited was that it's very malleable. It tolerates differences in accent. It has few tenses to learn, and not knowing about the irregularities doesn't mean you can't be understood. No one has to know the gender of a dishwasher or a carpet. It's not fussy about subjunctive. It doesn't force speakers to risk improper class judgments among different kinds of "you" and "I". So while it may have been pushed on people for political reasons, there are good reasons it's been popular.

Yes, the spelling is crappy but that could be reformed over time, plus with modern tech it's easy to get decent spelling correction. Search engines thankfully are quite tolerant of misspellings.

And most of us could easily be a lot more tolerant of misspellings, perhaps even creating a phonetic variant spelling that was a step to the common language being English-like, but not English.
(Personally, when used internationally I prefer to refer to it as Federation Standard anyway.)

For all the criticisms of English in this paper, I don't imagine the paper would be much shorter if any existing human language were the dominant language. Any single language would have issues of not generalizing, even though there seems to be some weird undercurrent of the paper that hints that a better single language could have been chosen. It's not obvious what language that might be. for some languages, a survey of similar problems created by it, as in this paper, would run longer than this does now. That doesn't make English better, but it shows the difficulty of the problem.

There are also places in the paper where social issues are discussed in the guise of language, but social issues are not linguistic issues, and are possible to handle in a venue-specific way. So while the paper admits this happens, it also commits this sin in a few places, and I think that weakens the paper.

(I'm a big fan of Grice, so I found that part of the paper fascinating. I will have to ponder whether I think that's a linguistic or cultural criticism, though.)

And then there's the other big point, which is that if there is a common language, is there a danger it will creep over and destroy other culture by accident. Once everyone in country X speaks both X-ese and English, why won't they just phase out X-ese. It's a risk. I was most worried about this before Unicode and international keyboards, but increasingly I see other languages being used, and I myself try to involve other languages.

There is no plot I'm aware of for English to simply take over. Netflix is doing a nice job, for example, of promoting native content from many parts of the world and dealing with translation tools for those who want to watch in other common languages. As tech improves, it will be possible to do more of this, I think. But for a while we've done substandard things so people globally could be involved at all. Tech is improving.

In spite of all this, it's an interesting set of topics and well worth reading. But it would be stronger if its point were clearer and it wasn't such a sprawling thing. It's hard to agree or disagree with so many topics at once. I think some followups on more specific topics or with more pointed conclusion or set of suggestions would help.

#language #English #colonialism #society #i18n #linguistics #Grice #translation #spelling

Hailey Grice si abbassa e manda tutti in tilt: che bocce - VIDEO #hailey #grice #abbassa #manda #tilt #bocce #video #11giugno https://parliamodi.news/article/aHR0cHM6Ly93d3cuYmxvZ2xpdmUuaXQvMjAyMi8wNi8wOS9oYWlsZXktZ3JpY2Utc2NvbGxhdHVyYS12aWRlby8=

Hailey Grice si abbassa e manda tutti in tilt: che bocce - VIDEO #hailey #grice #abbassa #manda #tilt #bocce #video #9giugno https://parliamodi.news/article/aHR0cHM6Ly93d3cuYmxvZ2xpdmUuaXQvMjAyMi8wNi8wOS9oYWlsZXktZ3JpY2Utc2NvbGxhdHVyYS12aWRlby8=