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So, the language Peterson is using isn’t scientific, it’s an act of cultural interpretation. Which is, of course, fine, and a great reminder that linguistics is a subject that connects many different fields of knowledge. But when I see an advertisement for Game of Thrones, I see a cultural vision that is inaccurate, distorting, and bears a very specific relationship to the European past. It isn’t an innocent one. I see a Tolkien-inflected vision of the Middle Ages, with the sexual violence and warfare and ethnic stereotyping amped up to a pitch so cartoonishly horrendous that I can’t look at it.
PC crap in an otherwise really interesting article.
It's not amped up actually. The degree of butchery that goes on in historical outbreaks of violence is astonishing to the post-19th century mind. Mass executions of enemies and conquered cities (and accompanying rape and pillage) happened with regularity in some parts of history.
One of the noted advancements of the Mongol warfare style in the middle ages, especially under Genghis Khan, was development of efficient mass execution tactics. Sexual violence and warfare happened at a cartoonishly horrendous pitch. Dan Carlin's Hardcore History podcast has an amazing series on the Mongol conquests, "Wrath of the Khans" if you wanna know more.
> It's not amped up actually. The degree of butchery that goes on in historical outbreaks of violence is astonishing to the post-19th century mind. Mass executions of enemies and conquered cities (and accompanying rape and pillage) happened with regularity in some parts of history.
"... in some parts of history"? Atrocities like that have never ended - human nature doesn't change. In the civil wars in western and southern Africa, rape is regularly used as a weapon of war. We all know the kind of massacres IS has been committing. I don't know an awful lot about Genghis Khan, but I'm pretty sure the machete-wielding executioners of the Rwandan genocide must have been just as effective. That kind of violence has nothing to do with the time period in which you live, there's nothing magic about the post-19th century world/mind. It's about humans being, well, inhuman. And that, unfortunately, can include pretty much everybody.
Your comment is absolutely unrelated to your quote. The fact that Mongol warfare was quite, uh, violent (which is obviously true) has nothing to do with the fact that Martin's books and especially the TV show have "a cultural vision that is inaccurate, distorting, and bears a very specific relationship to the European past" (which is also obviously true).
In fact, I'm even harsher in my opinion, angrily denying all attempts to mark "Game of Thrones" (or even SoIaF) as "historically accurate", because it could be viewed as that only in the most primitive sense, and any somewhat educated audience would be continuously annoyed by the contrary. That is because Martin borrows quite large pieces of historical motives, but unlike Tolkien is unable to elegantly glue them together. And as the devil is in the details the resulting picture makes simply no sense. Calling it grotesque would be even an understatement.
I wish that conlangs were more popular. There are many bad natural languages that could need replacement. I live in Europe, and the languages is one of the things that annoys me the most about this continent. For example, languages like Dutch, German and Spanish use guttural sounds. Normally, when you try get rid of slime from your throat, you make guttural sounds - why on earth do people use that to communicate with? It's ugly. Or take some of the grammar of natural languages, like the das, der and die in German. I think "the ticket" in German can be called der Farhschein, die Fahrkarte or das Ticket - it makes no sense.
Maybe I should put my feet where my mouth is, and start learning Esperanto or something...
While I second your wish that conlangs were more popular (I learnt Toki Pona some time back), I would ask you to refrain from such subjective language criticisms as "it's ugly". I speak English and German natively, and I can't stand it when people criticize the other language on such personal grounds.
As for your take on the redundancy of natural languages, I would point out that it is perfectly natural and can probably be found in just about any language. (Otherwise, there would be no such thing as a thesaurus...) To stick with your example, you could also talk about "the boarding pass" instead of "the ticket" in English.
Indeed, the redundancy of words and vocabulary forms much of the beauty of a language. Especially in English much of poetry is the art of choosing the right word. I love the way T.S. Eliot puts it towards the end of his poem "Little Gidding":
And every phrase
And sentence that is right (where every word is at home,
Taking its place to support the others,
The word neither diffident nor ostentatious,
An easy commerce of the old and the new,
The common word exact without vulgarity,
The formal word precise but not pedantic,
The complete consort dancing together)
Actually, I don't mind redundancy. I meant to criticize the lack of logic and consistency. If it was logical and consistent, it should have been das Farhschein, das Fahrkarte and das Ticket :-)
It isn't illogical or inconsistent. The notion that grammatical gender is illogical comes from a misunderstanding of the purpose of grammatical gender. We learn in schools that words are either masculine, feminine, or neuter.
Gender is useful for several things: think of it as a technology with multiple applications, some more obvious than others. The most obvious would be to indicate whether a pronoun is male, female, or inanimate.
One of the more important uses for gender is for agreement. Agreement in gender helps to denote which noun an adjective belongs to. Of course, it's not foolproof, but it's good enough. In addition to agreement, genders increase the information redundancy of words, which is useful when communicating in a noisy, lossy medium.
Admittedly, genders that actually correspond to the natural gender of the things they refer to may not detract from the purpose of information redundancy and of agreement, but as with many things in life, good enough is sufficient cause to adopt the status quo.
What I'm trying to say is, under the supposition that genders should reflect natural gender, they do indeed appear illogical and inconsistent. But genders do indeed have practical purposes and do indeed develop according to certain rules, and if we judge genders by these criteria instead, their development does indeed follow rules and is consistent.
I understand where you're coming from, but your solution wouldn't actually be logical and consistent either. "Fahrschein" comes from the root "Schein" (engl. "slip (of paper)"), which is masculine ("der Schein"); "Fahrkarte" comes from "Karte" (engl. "card"/"map"), which is feminine ("die Karte"), and "Ticket" is, afaik, an anglicism (which are often designated as neuter)...
So in order to achieve consistency across these three words, one would have to break consistency with their roots - a bit of a catch 22...
The way I see it, the "natural" languages don't make sense because they aren't planned. But as with other things, I find that the perceived weirdness of other languages often comes from what we're used to. You might, for instance, make a similar argument regarding normal use of the sound for the alveolar trill [0].
As for the German grammar you mention, English is really the odd one out here - grammatical gender is fairly common. German is a weird language, though:P I think what really makes German weird is the [0] grammatical case.
Anyone interested in this subject would do well to read "In the Land of Invented Languages".[1]
[1] - http://www.amazon.com/Land-Invented-Languages-Adventures-Lin...