A review of Mark Newbrook's Strange Linguistics

A review of Strange Linguistics - a skeptical linguist looks at non-mainstream ideas about language. 

(This review is partially cross-posted from another blog of mine. The main difference between the two versions deal with his chapter on constructed languages.)

I have for a while tried writing a review of Strange Linguistics (Mark Newbrook with Jane Curtain and Alan Libert). As a relative newbie to writing reviews, this is somewhat of a challenge, especially as it is a somewhat difficult book to provide a summary of. It does not set out to prove or discuss any one specific hypothesis - it is rather an overview of a large number of pseudoscientific theories, complete with short explanations why these theories are pseudoscience in the first place. Thus, it is difficult to conclude whether it provides a sufficient argument in favor of some hypothesis - as no such intention is set out. This lack of focus does not detract from the work, but does make the life of the reviewer somewhat more difficult.

Newbrook et.al. do give the claims, in general, a fair hearing, and proceed to explain why these claims do not cut it. In the introductory chapter, he dutifully explains how some of these mistaken views probably are entirely harmless, but how others easily can be used to inflame ethnic conflict and just generally trick people - I especially find the claims made by David Oates to be likely to make people ruin other people's lives over badly justified claims:

Oates and his followers have applied the analysis of RS [reverse speech] in various practical domains, some o them involving matters of great sensitivity and potential harm. If RS is not genuine, this work is valueless at best and quite possibly extremely damaging. The areas in question include child psychology, alleged cases of child molestation, other alleged criminal offences (this includes the 'O.J Simpson' case) and the analysis and treatment of sexual and other personal problems more generally. [1, p. 168] 

As for the fairness Newbrook grants, it is well worth noting that he has led a research project into linguistic material provided by alleged alien abductees, with entirely inconclusive results, which he in some details elaborates on in the chapter on language from mysterious sources. (By 'inconclusive', take this to mean that Occam's razor justifies rejecting the claims of alien origin for these allegedly alien linguistic snippets.)

For some claims the authors investigate, there could be some justification in providing a somewhat more detailed explanation as to why they are wrong. If it had overviews of topics such as the statistical likelihood of chance resemblances between languages, the comparative method, and some other relevant parts of linguistics, it could be very useful indeed.

It is definitely a good book if you already have some background in linguistics. It would also be a worthwhile addition to the library of any scholar or journalist who is not well-versed in linguistics but on occasion has to evaluate the value of claims that deal with linguistics - if they are willing to do some extra research on their own, alternatively, accept the claims of a bona fide linguist without looking closer at the evidence in his favor. As for journalists, I would even say the relevant chapters of this book should be relevant reading before writing any article on linguistic matters whatsoever. Alas, the lack of clearer elaboration on linguistic methodology might make it a bit too inconclusive to those unfamiliar with the field.

Linguists themselves probably can figure out the problems with various claims such as those presented in this book - and doing so could be a good exercise for a course in skepticism for undergraduate linguists (and even more so students of philology, whose understanding of linguistics sometimes may leave some room for improvement). Ultimately though, the book presents little new for the linguist - except maybe as a convenient source to refer to when there is no time to devote to the proper debunkage of some claim, or as an overview of exactly what kinds of weird beliefs about language are being peddled on the marketplace of ideas (which can be a bit of a shock even to seasoned skeptics).

If the book ever is translated, local crackpot linguistic theories should probably be given a more in-depth treatment: Swedish or Finnish translations probably should include more detailed investigations into both Ior Bock and Paula Wilson's claims (quite distinct types of claim, even if both are wildly wrong; Ior Bock's claims are described and rejected for the same reasons any number of other claims are, Paula Wilson is not mentioned at all which for a non-Scandinavian audience is an entirely justified omission), any Indian edition should probably debunk the various notions regarding Sanskrit that are popular there, Hungarian editions need to elaborate on why it is unlikely that Hungarian is related to the Turkic languages, etc. How such supplementary chapters could be written and incorporated into the book would probably be a challenge though.

There is a certain morbid humor to reading it, the endless amount of bullshit that humans have come up with is as fascinating as any good supernatural thriller. Newbrook in a way comes off as the straight man in a comedy, granting much leeway to the strange antics of a weird coterie of peculiar thinkers and crackpots. The amount of leeway he grants may seem excessive at times, but many of these weird theories are so wrong that even the loosest criteria are enough to debunk them.

There are two chapters whose inclusion at first may seem odd - one chapter on skepticism of mainstream linguistics, which does present some reasonable objections to Chomskyan (and related) linguistics, and another chapter on constructed languages. Some people that have constructed languages indeed base their hobby on pseudo-scientific notions of how language works - this is especially prevalent among those who wish their languages to have an actual population of speakers. However, whether that is just applied bad linguistics or relates to actual linguistic claims is hard to tell. At least trying to make a constructed language that utilizes some hypotheses about language might open up a door to falsifying the involved hypothesis.

However, an inclusion of languages that are framed as fiction or part of fictional worlds would be decidedly odd if it were not for the fact that non-practitioners of that particular hobby may misunderstand the practitioners as participating in some weird pseudoscientific behavior or beliefs. Here, the treatment could have made it clearer that hobbyists often do not see their hobby as any kind of scientific statement or claim, but rather as works of 'art' or similar. That chapter could have done with somewhat better research, but at the same time it might be the least important chapter, and therefore, not investing that much on getting a detailed picture of the constructed languages-scene is very justified.

The main drawback as far as I can tell is the lack of an index, making it difficult to find things quickly. An index would improve its usability especially for journalists, who often write with very strict deadlines looming. Some of the particular claims listed could fit in several different chapters according to the classification (and some are, indeed, mentioned in several places, often with a mention of where the main treatment of the claims occurs). I imagine a more lexicon-like layout could have fit, and would have provided an easy way of expanding the book in the future, but on the other hand that would separate the description of individual claims from the description of the main types of problems that mainly accompany specific kinds of claims.

In conclusion, it is a book that should probably be consulted by any number of people - especially non-linguists and journalists whose work at times intersect linguistics, but there is some room for improvement. On the other hand, it is possible an edition incorporating the improvements I would suggest would get unwieldy in size, and thus a complementary volume could maybe be justified. However, to some extent such a volume would be your basic introduction to linguistics anyway, the contents of (the relevant parts of) which should probably be learned by anyone before consulting this book anyway.

As for conlangers, the book may offer some insight into the kinds of weird notions that are peddled both on- and offline by pseudo-linguists. Since conlangers are, pretty much by default, interested in linguistics, we may be more prone to fall for pseudo-linguist claims - but on the other hand, we're also more likely to have built up the kind of knowledge base for rejecting such claims.

[1] Mark Newbrook with Jane Curtain and Alan Libert. Strange Linguistics - a skeptical linguist looks at non-mainstream ideas about language. Lincom Europa, 2013.

The isolating language, post #3:

I guess it is time to attempt some kind of phonology - and violate the guiding principle of avoiding phonologies here. Writing this post has felt quite unappealing, as I've just abhorred the idea of having a phonology here. It's necessary though, for the further development of the language. Just think of it as me writing this post so I can write future posts.

Stops:
The main distinctions are

	Bilabial	Lab-dnt	Dental	Alveolar	Palatal	Velar	Uvular	Glottal
Stops	ph p' b		- - ð	th t'	ch c' ɟ	kh k'	qh q
Fricative			ð	s z	ç ʝ	x h	R	x h
Lateral glide				l	λ
Trills and glides	w			r	j		R
Nasal	m			n	ɲ̟	ŋ

Historically, /g/ has become dž in most contexts, and h in some. /x/ and /h/ are only marginally distinct, as are /c/ and /j/. /w/ mostly appears in complementary distribution with /b/. /d/ is now /ð/, and strictly speaking a fricative, but patterns more like a stop. The uvular trill/fricative patterns like both trills and fricatives.

The stops also sometimes appear allophonically as affricates, e.g. syllable-finally after closed vowels or r.

The syllable structure is CCVCC the main restrictions being:

• no two homorganic stops in a sequence except over a syllable boundary
• no uvular and velar stops in a sequence except over a syllable boundary
• the syllable coda has quite a few restrictions on it, unlike the syllable onset

Vowels:

i			u
e	ə
	ɛ		o
			ɑ

In stressed, open syllables, these tend to diphthongize: /i/ tends towards [ij], /u/ towards [uw], /e/ towards [ei], /ə/ towards [eə], /ɛ/ towards [ɛa], /o/ towards [oi] and /ɑ/ towards [ou].

Basically, an isolating language is boring in the way that you do not get any morphophonology to work with. One can still create some interesting things over word boundaries - certain sounds get deleted in the presence or absence of other sounds, mutations, assimilation, etc. I think stress shifts might also be caused by stressed syllables getting too close. So that should basically provide sufficient pseudomorphophonology for there to be some interesting stuff.

Detail #65: An idea regarding Wackernagel adpositions

In some languages, numbers take singular nouns even though plural forms exist. In some languages, the situation is even more complicated - in Finnish, nouns that lack singular forms exist, and those nouns take the number inflected for the plural. In addition, some syntactic positions can permit or even require the nominative-accusative plural to be marked on both the number and the noun.

Now, in a language where some adpositions are wackernagel adpositions, maybe they could cause some havoc with regards to such congruence:

NUM NOUN.sg
PREP NUM NOUN.sg
NUM PREP NOUN.pl*

*optional plural?

How about eventual other markers - classifiers or count morphemes - bleeding over to the preposition?

Detail #64: An idea regarding serial verbs

In many languages, serial verb constructions serve a function not entirely unlike prepositions in other languages, e.g.

I take knife cut meat →I cut meat with knife

 A thing few conlangers realize is we can do some interesting things with this kind of construction. However, the following seems unlikely, since SVCs generally tend to either only mark TAM on one verb or have the same markings on both, cross-linguistically speaking.

I take.imperfect knife cut meat → I cut meat with a knife

I take.perfect knife cut meat →I cut meat with the knife

 The notional difference here being that there's a greater likelihood for the object of perfects and perfectives to be definite than for imperfect and imperfective verbs' objects. However, we can go about this differently, and maybe do a lexical, rather than TAM-related distinction:

I take knife cut meat → I cut meat with a knife

I wield knife cut meat → I cut meat with the knife

I cook banana give friend → I prepare a banana for a friend

I sautee banana provide friend →I prepare the banana for the/my friend

The notion being that a more specific kind of verb is more likely to have an object that is definite than a more generic kind of verb. Specificness of a verb would basically amount to whether it basically semantically covers a smaller set of possible actions than the other. Sauteeing something implies cooking it, hence cooking is less specific.

For non-SVCs, this lexical way of marking definiteness would not apply.

Detail #63: 'to have' in Ćwarmin

As described in the previous post, Ćwarmin has a special accusative for reflexively possessed objects. This combines with some normally intransitive verbs - to be, to stand guard, to become, to go - to create predicative possession.

The simplest construction is along these lines:

SUBJECT.nominative is[inflected for tense, aspect, person] OBJECT.refl.poss.acc

 ~subject has object

The owner can sometimes also be in the dative, in which case the verb omits agreement.

More complicated things appear with various voices. The language has two passives - one that promotes the direct object to subject, and one that promotes the indirect object. Sometimes, the indirect object passive (henceforth passive II) is used for predicative possession as well:

SUBJECT.nom is.passII.[tense,aspect,person] OBJ.refl.poss.acc

The third person passive II is used when having in general is discussed, or when no object is supplied:

be.passiveII.participle = those who have

be.passiveII money.refl.poss.acc is nice = to have money is nice 

Further, usually, to stand guard, takes a locative complement. The ablative can be used to mark guarding against something. It being used to denote possession often relates to certain objects that often are guarded  in the Ćwarmin culture - homes, flocks, individual animals, slaves, daughters, but also honor, titles and duties and by extension any noun of which one is especially proud. To stand mainly is used when the object is land, resources, ships, a shed or otherwise work-related building, rights and equals or above in status (brothers, friends, owners, masters, etc). To go is used in a possessive sense whenever the object actively obtained, to become when it is bestowed upon the subject.

Detail #62: That case system

The case system I made up as an example case system to describe some possible adverbial quirks was, imho, surprisingly good, so I figure I might take and develop it a bit further. I have generally avoided large case systems in my conlanging, settling for at most eight or so standard cases (although the Bryatesle case system arguably consists of more, but that is due to how they stack). To make it easier to speak of this language, I've given it a tentative name, Ćwarmin.

Here's the basic set of cases, given in set theoretical notation:

{nominative, accusative, reflexively possessed accusative, nominative complement, accusative complement, genitive, dative, {{towards, from, at}×{on, in, by}}/{towards,by}, general ablative, instrumental, comitative-with, comitative-to, negative}

Nominative is same-oldy, as is accusative. Reflexively possessed accusative is a special version of the accusative (but also takes on dative functions). The nominative and accusative complements are used both for copula-like and causative-like constructions. The nominative complement is a reduced copula-like particle. The genitive does its usual things but also partitive-like stuff, the dative does its usual things (but also some more classical object-like things). The locative cases, of course, by and large, do their usual things (and some other stuff, which I may design and describe later).

The Locatives

towards-on	towards-in
from-on	from-in	from-by
at-on	at-in	at-by

Towards-by is not distinguished from at-by.

General ablative

This case expresses a few different notions, some not necessarily locative in nature - avoided things, objects of reference (three miles from X), objects of comparison, a variety of uses with nominalized verbs, the onset of durations.

The Comitatives

The two comitatives and the instrumental form a sort of forked towards/at-like structure. The towards-comitative sometimes does duty as a towards-instrumental, but giving it the designation of towards-comitative is more justified as it covers that kind of 'abstract, ideal case-space' for this language more perfectly. The lack of a from-instrumental/from-comitative is in part a result of the way comitatives and instrumentals are conceived of in Ćwarmin. To the extent such cases would be called for, they are somewhat haphazardly distributed over the different from-cases, including the general ablative.

An example of the comitative-to would be most notions of joining, marrying or setting out to visit, whereas comitative-with express the usual comitative notions as well as staying at someone or a group, being married to someone or being a member of some group.

The Negative

A case by such a name may sound a bit unjustified, but as it covers several somewhat negation-related functions, the name is better than abessive or negative concord or any such. It covers the following roles:

• absent existential arguments (subjects of negative existential statements, objects of negative existential statements)
• that which is lacked (without X).
• frequent with nominalized verbs (not having Xed, without Xing, not intending to X)
• frequent with negative objects when an indirect object is present (X didn't give Y Z.neg)
• frequent with negative, definite singular objects (didn't verb X)
• in the plural, negative indefinite for intransitive subjects or objects ('no X'). Negative, indefinite transitive subjects and other noun phrases are formed using a negative determiner instead.
• sometimes for 'instead of'. In these cases, it is generally preceded by a conjunction. 

More on these and how they interact with some verb system later.

Detail #61: Some adverb quirks

Adverbs are a part of languages where conlangers seem not to go into any huge amount of detail. There probably is a bunch of reasons for this, e.g.

• English having a rather boringly simple system for most adverbs that are formed from adjectives (-ly not giving a lot of potential for interest). This relatively straightforward lack of detail seems to be par for the course in Germanic though (e.g. German and some Scandinavian languages basically having uninflected adjectives double for adverbs, Swedish having adjectives with the neuter marker.) English does do some interesting things, even then: good → well, where well also is partially an adjective (but slightly unusual in that it cannot be an attribute, but can be a complement - *"the well man", but "the man is well"). Another exception is hard, where hardly, of course, is a mostly separate lexeme. This kind of exception can of course be interesting, but I will leave it at that. Coming up with different details than those present in English but of the same kind is left as an exercise for the reader.
• Adverbs often being subsumed into other existing word classes and phrase classes, e.g. adpositional phrases, adjectives, nouns in different cases. Making verb-like adverbs does not seem to be very common among conlangers, possibly because of them being relatively uncommon in Standard Average European.
• Adverbs seem to be slightly too far into the bits of a grammar where people

• don't know what to do with them? 

• just don't care to do cool things with them? 

•  don't have an idea that it's possible to do cool things with them? 

•  Get bored of going into deeper detail or assume no one's going to read that far

So, let's consider adverbs. For now, I will not consider any semantic or pragmatic uses for them - there are ideas I have in those regards that may appear later. What other things can we do to adverbs except something like English does?:

I run quickly

There are two main sources of behaviors I am going to look at, and try to apply their traits to adverbs. These are, (un-?)surprisingly enough, verbs and nouns. I will present a draft of a language's verbal and nominal morphology, and then go on to apply this in different ways to the adverbs.

Nouns

The nouns have three accidents: number, case and definiteness. Not all combinations occur. There are three numbers - singular, plural and partitive. Partitive is always indefinite. Definiteness comes in three forms too - indefinite, known to speaker, known to listener. For this language, the case list will amount to something along the lines of Finnish or Hungarian: 

{nominative, accusative, reflexively possessed accusative, nominative complement, accusative complement, genitive, dative, {{towards, from, at}×{on, in, by}}/{towards,by}, generally away from, instrumental, comitative-with, comitative-to, negative}

As a note, comitative-1, comitative-2 and the instrumental have morphological similarities to the three {towards, to, from, at}-series. The instrumental corresponds to from, and the two others to towards and at. The case I label 'generally away from' also has similarities to the instrumental in form. The negative case takes several rather different roles, but only appears with the partitive number - subjects of negated atelic verbs, non-existing subjects of existential verbs, objects of negative telic verbs, without.

The system is not entirely agglutinating. Although each accident has a default value that is normally expressed by no exponent - e.g. nominative, singular, indefinite - these sometimes do take an exponent - partitive nominative has an explicit nominative marker, as does indefinite comitatives, instrumentals, datives and genitives. Reflexively possessed objects cannot be known to speaker, and are either indefinite or known to listener.

The plural for a rather large group of words is formed by partial reduplication. This partial reduplication also occurs in the partitive for the same nouns. The partitive can signify both plural and singular referents, and this can be shown using verb congruence.

Verbs

The verb has congruence for subjects and direct objects. The congruence is somewhat defective. Partitive-case objects are more likely than others not to be marked on the verb. Some intransitive verbs have object-congruence rather than subject-congruence markers appear for their subjects. Passives entirely lack congruence. Subject congruence distinguishes the three definiteness levels, object congruence merges the two definite kinds.

The verb also marks some kind of TAM-complex. The more complex the set of exponents present (mainly formed agglutinatingly), the greater the likelihood that the verb congruence and/or the tense being deficient. Certain moods lack tense differentiation (although aspect tends to be marked for most of them). Some moods have non-nominative subjects, and for those, the subject congruence invariably settles for zero marking.

As for voices, there are three basic voices: active, passive and oblique. Passive has little to no congruence, and lacks a bunch of moods. Its tense-aspect matrix basically consists of {{past, nonpast} × {perfect, imperfect}}.

The oblique voice rather seems to promote non-agent, non-object arguments to subject status. It has {nonpast, past} ×  {imperfect}, thus lacking all perfect meanings. 

On to the adverbs

So, let us have adverbs as somewhat of a wastebasket for words specifying qualities of the VP. To make it interesting, let's make them have properties that make them look like deficient verbs and nouns at the same time. I would probably have two subfamilies of adverbs - the verb-like ones and the noun-like ones, but a clever design could merge these. Probably, some adverbs would be less deficient than others. 

Let's consider a few individual adverbs:

slowly - in this language, this is verb-like, and it takes congruence either with the object or subject (but not both), depending on whether the action is performed slowly on the object, or the agent is performing the action slowly. Essentially, intentional slowness →object congruence, unintentional slowness → subject congruence. The only mood it can mark for is 'intensive', which does not cooccur with subject congruence. With an intransitive verb, object congruence is simply omitted.

harshly - in this language, harshly is noun-like. It is normally partitive instrumental definite (and sometimes in the complement cases), but also can take modal and subj/obj congruence.

weirdly - noun like, but takes object or subject morphology (and the oblique voice). If subject congruence, the "weird" thing is that the subject acted on the object (instead of on something else), if object congruence, the weird thing is that the subject acted, and not that someone else did, and if oblique, the weird thing is some other participant or fact. 

 heavily - noun-like, with no verbal congruence. Partitive instrumental indefinite (and sometimes in the complement cases). 

The complement cases often are used if the adverb describes a subordinate verb or infinite, and then agrees with the subject of that verb (i.e. is it subject or non-subject) 

This is a somewhat unclear description, but I hope it offers some ideas for how to create more complication in the adverbs.