Sokath, his eyes uncovered [1]

[cellio]

One of the things that's hard about learning English from the outside (and, I presume, hard about other languages) is how much of common usage is idiom and analogy. This thought came to mind during a meeting today with exchanges like the following (in fairly rapid succession):

Developer: What about $problem?
Tech Lead: We'll burn that bridge when we come to it.

Developer: Are you saying the build manager is God?
Developer 2: Watch out for the lightning bolts.
Developer: We'll burn that bush when we come to it.

Product Manager: Ok, we'll include your feature in the product but only as a secret alpha-release utility.
Developer: So it's in the product, but I can't fix bugs.
PM: Right.
Developer: I feel like the white trash with the half-built cars on the overgrown lawn.
PM: True, and you're in my neighborhood now. Maybe I should rethink that.

Maybe you had to be there.

[1]

Comments

[dragontdc.livejournal.com]

Interesting site on an interesting show.

[cellio]

I found myself thinking of the show (which I haven't seen since it originally aired) after this exchange. I didn't expect to find a thorough analysis when I went to Google; I was just looking for an episode title. :-)

[patsmor.livejournal.com]

Great reference; excellent transcript of the discussion, too!

[cellio]

I didn't expect to find anything like that when I went looking for the name of that TNG episode with Google. (I remembered just enough dialogue to find it.)

[patsmor.livejournal.com]

One of my absolutely favorite episodes. I remember going "OH, listen, it's a cultural reference to a moral lesson!" in about the first 10 minutes, and my friends watching it with me thought I was insane.

(OK, that's probably a paraphrase, but I loved the episode; it let my English-major side come out!)

[chaos-wrangler.livejournal.com]

2 thoughts:

1. Ever learned Mishlei? "Everyone" learns Tehilim but "no one" learns Mishlei, so my once-a-week Tanach group tried it... and discovered why: it's repetitive and gets rather dull rather fast, and there are these puzzling bits throughout which seem to refer to sayings / poetic language that were common knowledge at the time Mishlei was written but none of us has a clue about now.

2. I've disliked that episode since the first time I saw it because it didn't make sense to me linguistically: how would children learn that language? From what we saw, that language only made sense if one knew the stories that were being referred to, but those stories couldn't be told (e.g. to children) without using more words than they were using, etc.

[dvarin.livejournal.com]

Children would learn the language without the stories, presumably. Two generations down no one would even have any clue who any of them were.

[chaos-wrangler.livejournal.com]

Exactly: if children learned the language without the stories, then why can't the adults speak the language (instead of only being able to speak in specific references to the stories)? Or if you mean the language is made up of scene references and nothing else, then each scene reference should translate as a word rather than a phrase (e.g. "welcome" rather than *reference to scene of welcoming*).

[(Anonymous)]

It's that latter that I mean. The child wouldn't know that "Harasham at the ferry's landing" or whatever was a reference to any story--they'd just know it as a common term of welcoming. They might not even pick up any of the internal grammar of the phrases, because most of them are for practical purposes set and indivisible.

[dvarin.livejournal.com]

... the former anonymous poster being me.

[chaos-wrangler.livejournal.com]

Okay, but then (as I said) each phrase should have translated as a word or two without all the internal structure, since the speakers would have learned it that way. My problem was that the speakers seemed to know about the internal structure (so the translator picked it up) but were unable to use it or understand the humans' use of it.

[cellio]

Or if you mean the language is made up of scene references and nothing else, then each scene reference should translate as a word rather than a phrase (e.g. "welcome" rather than *reference to scene of welcoming*).

While a language made up only of these kinds of references seems intractable (and might be), we do have phrases in English that have long since lost their original meanings, or where the original meaning doesn't have to be taught to get the idea. This carries that idea to an extreme, but it's not absent in our language.

I'm no Jean Piaget, but let me step up to the plate and take a crack at it: even people who are a few bricks short of a load pick up on these kinds of references during childhood and eventually the lightbulb goes off, right?

[chaos-wrangler.livejournal.com]

I've got no problem with a language with a few (or even many) of these types of phrases - see my query/comment above re learning Mishlei. My problem is re how there could be a language composed of only these types of phrases. And if the language has regular phrases made up out of component words, how come the adults seemed to have no access to them?

You're right in that the idea seems based in a real phenomenon. My problem was that it was carried too far for it to be realistic to me. I'm perfectly willing to accept that for most people this would be a minor plot nitpick at most, but as someone who went on to get 2 degrees in linguistics I found it to be a bit too large for proper suspension of disbelief. (I'm also one of the people who both applauded and groaned at the idea of a linguist as part of the crew for Enterprise, because it made a lot of sense and because I was sure they'd get the science wrong, which they did.)

[cellio]

Fair enough -- it does strain credibility even to this non-linguist. The transporter is probably comparable for a physicist. :-) (This is why I treat Star Trek as fantasy, not science fiction -- it's easier to hand-wave around magic than science.)

[chaos-wrangler.livejournal.com]

Ah. For me, with my more limited knowledge of physics, I can tell myself that they're making stuff up beyond the border of what we now know (as long as they don't use a term that I recognize well enough to know when it's used correctly/incorrectly). With linguistics, I've got much more knowledge and anything used incorrectly tends to jump out at me and wave.

[cellio]

The more you know about a field, the easier it is to be dragged out of your suspension of disbelief, alas. For me, it's usually computer stuff. To continue with Trek and languages, consider the univeral translator. It's software; it ties into the ship's computer. How does this allow you to have a translated face-to-face conversation with an alien -- and even if you say that there's some sort of speaker involved but they don't show that step on-screen, what about when crew members are trying to covertly blend into lower-tech societies? Completely illogical as science, so I mentally reclassify it as a magic spell and move on.

[chaos-wrangler.livejournal.com]

*g* Yeah, that's about how I deal with the translator: it can't work, but we'll ignore that for the sake of the story. (For me this doesn't feel like a reclassification as "magic", but that's another story.)

I think the difference for me with this episode is that the translator usually isn't a major plot point, but in this episode language (and the translator being IMO inconsistent) is a very major plot point.