Animals and language

Over the past several years I’ve read quite a few items about about primates using American Sign Language, and other forms of animal-to-human communication. If you follow this blog, you know I’m reading Spencer Wells’ The Journey of Man. Here’s a passage about animal language that I had not seen, and it clarifies some things for me, so I thought I’d share. The whole book is worth a read, and if your library doesn’t have it, put in a book request.

… It is at this age that most children begin to put together three words into complex sentences – ‘Margot kiss Daddy’, rather than simply ‘Margot kiss’ or ‘Kiss Daddy’ – with the subject-verb-object (SVO) structure, or syntax, that characterizes English and most other human languages. The structure SOV (‘Margot Daddy kiss’) is used by a few languages (Japanese, Korean, and Tibetan among others), while VSO and VOS structures are used by around 15% of languages (Welsh is an example of the former and Malagasy of the latter). The rarest structure of all is OSV, perhaps best known from the film The Empire Strikes Back as the language of Yoda the Jedi master: ‘Sick have I become’ and so on, used by only a handful of languages spoken in the Brazilian Amazon.

The important thing to glean from this syntactic diversity is that word order plays a crucial role in our understanding of a sentence. …

So, the explosion of linguistic complexity in a two-year-old is a result of the mastery of syntax, and from then on it is a never-ending barrage of ever more complex sentences. The great leap forward in understanding, however, involves crossing the syntax barrier… This is what we see with chimpanzees taught to use American Sign Language … The significant difference in human vs. ape communication seems to have been the creation of brain structures that allowed an understanding of syntax, and thus the communication of complex meaning.

Gorillas can do ASL, too

This is a more extended passage than I usually quote, but the remarks about chimps and syntax don’t make a lot of sense without the examples of syntax. The whole section is good. (Pages 86 and 87 if you look it up.) I had been wondering if there was a qualitative difference between ape and human language ability beyond anatomical hindrances in the chimp. Now I see there is.

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It’s called EditMinion, and it’s a website. You copy some of your deathless prose into it, click Edit, and it displays a “report card,” including a markup of your text.

Now I’m a firm advocate of thinking about what you write, and of having other humans look at your writing as well. But I put some of this humble blog into EditMinion, and I got a high grade, so I have to like it at least a little. Just as with Microsoft’s grammar checker, running your creation through one of these things can be a good source of ideas, though you will most likely disagree with a lot of the program’s judgement calls. I don’t think they’ve invented software that can evaluate poetic license yet.  Automated editors tend to find things that share two characteristics: they find simple solecisms, and things that are so common you don’t notice them. That’s worth something. Here’s what the site looks like:

Here's the link. Give it a try!

I’m not sure what approach to take on today’s topic.

Last week my brother (whom I hadn’t seen for maybe five years) and I visited the museum on the campus of the US Naval Academy. I was embarrassed at the poor quality of the writing  on many of the labels, but that’s a story for another post. One of the displays showed an instruction book for building a sailing ship. Here is a single sentence from the open page:

Some say the general method, which has been pitch’d upon by the greater number of shipwrights and others, and may be term’d shipwrights Hall Rule, is to take the length of the keel, measured from the back of the main post, to the fore-side of the stem, at the upper edge of the lower harping, by a perpendicular made from thence to the upper or lower edge of the keel, only 3/8 of the main breadth, from the outside of the plank of one side to the outside of the plank of the other side, at the broadest place of the ship, being set backward of aftward from the right angle made by such a perpendicular and base.

The intended readership was people in a skilled trade: shipwrights. No people with doctorates or fancy academic backgrounds here. The book contained illustrations, but not for this particular sentence. Think you could handle a whole book of this kind of writing? We built some pretty good sailing ships back then, too. Someone told me that the readership for The Federalist Papers, heavy reading forced on a few high school and college students, was New England farmers. I’m a bit concerned about the typical person’s reading and comprehension skills nowadays.

On the other hand, I celebrate that the technical writing trade has advanced to make even complex instructions (fairly) easy to understand, allowing people to concentrate on the task without having to spend a lot of effort deciphering the instructions. (One of my guidelines is that bad writing must not be justified with the excuse that the reader will figure it out.) After all, we build some pretty good spaceships and computers.

I’m not sayin’, I’m just sayin’.

It is said that one of the greatest barriers between the British and us Americans is our common language. Everybody knows about the British napkin being an American diaper, and a car’s bonnet being the car’s hood, and the WC is the bathroom. But what about longer expressions such as idioms? Some time ago I ran into a chart that compares several expressions. I don’t know the source, but if you know, or are the source, step forward and I’ll give  credit. The original I got was a fuzzy jpg, so I retyped it.

In the interests of international harmony, I include it here.  (Jim, maybe you could comment?)

I have been accused of superficiality occasionally because I advocate careful proofreading and making sure spelling and punctuation are correct. Regular readers know I subscribe to (and recommend) A Word A Day, which is 18 years old this week. Each day’s post ends with a quote, and today’s was from John Dryden’s writings:

Errors like straws upon the surface flow:
Who would search for pearls must dive below. -John Dryden, poet and dramatist (1631-1700)

John Dryden. (I'm afraid to post a picture of the example at the and of this post.)

To which I presumed to add a couplet:

But straw obscures the view below, my dear:
To plumb the depths, the surface must be clear.

On the surface, as it were, Dryden appears to advocate the position that we should look past superficial mistakes and go for the true intent of the writing. That might be true as far as it goes, but it’s still better not to have that straw interfering with your ability to plumb the depths. And John Dryden was no slouch at getting his grammar and spelling correct.

Two thoughts:

• Why would you want to distract someone from your pearls of wisdom with something so easily fixed? (Here’s an article I wrote on this subject a while back: Improve your Writing in One Step.)
• Carelessness advertises bad things about you. True or false, it reduces your credibility. To be blunt, if you are indifferent to mistakes in your writing, you look like a doofus.

I participate in Google+, and I have a circle that contains more than 500 fellow writers. Sometimes one of these folks will offer samples of their work for free on Amazon, and I always download these when I find them. One was so good I must mention it. The title is Ravenwood, and it’s by Nathan Lowell. I don’t know if it’s still free, but it’s worth whatever the price is. The protagonist is a middle-aged woman on her way to find a teacher, who is delayed on her journey by the needs of a small village. The setting is a non-technological kingdom with hints of magic. The story is vivid, exciting, and touching. I’d recommend it to anyone.

Another one of these freebies was so bad, it made me understand the difference between eroticism and pornography. (Joe: “Hey Moe—Do you have any pornography?” Moe: “Nah, I don’t even have a pornograph”) Erotic writing is well written. Pornography is badly written. I think porn merely describes the fantasies of the semi-literate writer, or follows a standard plot line to titillate a frustrated psychological appetite. The writer of this second freebie doesn’t appear to be very literate. Believe it or not, I’m going to quote some of it, a bit sanitized, all from within the space of a couple pages. (This is, after all, a family website.)

I won’t embarrass the author by repeating the pseudonym or the name of the short story:

Sabrina was Master’s protégé, he’d taken her on to teach her how to be a proper Dominatrix. [Comma splice. Should be two sentences. Don't capitalize "dominatrix." They got the spelling of "protégé" right, though.]

When we got to the living room, my heart sunk. [sunk? It's "sank." Fifth grade English]

I start taking off my clothes before she could even say a word. [It's "started," not "start." I'm pretty sure this is a careless typo, because the rest of the story is set in the past—and I'm glad it's over.]

Then the flogger hit me. I must of instinctively heard it, because I didn’t flicker so much as a muscle. ["must of"??? Stop torturing me! And you twitch muscles, not flicker them]

And this doesn’t cover lapses in characterization, logic, or flow.

I’ve never participated in the sort of stuff described in the story but it didn’t seem realistic to me. But then, I’m an innocent. And it’s probably pretty formulaic. I’m tempted to punish the writer, though.

Actually, if the writer of that story reads this, I’m sorry to have hurt your feelings. Unless you enjoy this sort of thing.