First off, I used this title since I found the title for this first link to sound so wonderfully poetic…unfortunately, this simple blog post should be better called ‘thoughts about language’. It is a pretty conceit though…
This post is really just a compendium of links about some of Steven Pinker’s thoughts about some of the pieces and parts of language.
Verbs – Verbs – Verbs: The Language of Thought (Veiled Language)
http://profesorbaker.wordpress.com/2011/04/03/verbs-verbs-verbs-the-language-of-thought-veiled-language
Why Has Steven Pinker Studied Verbs for 20 Years?
http://discovermagazine.com/2007/sep/the-discover-interview
In your latest book, The Stuff of Thought, you discuss cursing and note that, in America, “the seven words you can’t say on television” have to do with sex and excretion. In other parts of the world, other types of words are more powerful, such as ones drawn from religion.
Yes, it’s particularly noticeable to someone like me who comes from Quebec, where the worst thing that you can say to someone is “Goddamn chalice.” That really brings it home for me. We do have a trace of that in swear words like “hell” and “damn” and “Goddamn,” but they’ve really lost their sting, and it has to be related to the fact that religion has lost its power over many people.
I think the reason that swearing is both so offensive and so attractive is that it is a way to push people’s emotional buttons, and especially their negative emotional buttons. Because words soak up emotional connotations and are processed involuntarily by the listener, you can’t will yourself not to treat the word in terms of what it means. You can’t hear a word and just hear it as raw sound; it always evokes an associated meaning and emotion in the brain. So I think that words give us a little probe into other people’s brains. We can press someone’s emotional buttons anytime we want.
And there’s an additional layer, which would account for the fact that the content of swearing varies across history and from culture to culture. The common denominator is some kind of negative emotion, but the culture and time will determine which negative emotion is commonly provoked, whether it’s disgust at bodily secretions, or dread of deities, or repugnance at sexual perversions. The second, additional layer is that you recognize that the other person is evoking—and is intentionally evoking—that negative emotion, and you know that he knows that you know that he is trying to evoke it. That’s part of why it offends you. And that’s why the choice of word matters, as well as what the word refers to—why “the F word” is obscene, but “copulate” is not, even though they refer to the same thing. But you know when someone uses “copulate,” they’re referring to copulation, whereas when they use the F word, they are trying to get a rise out of you. So there again you get to the pragmatics as well as the semantics.
The Irregular Verbs
http://pinker.wjh.harvard.edu/articles/media/2000_03_landfall.html
The irregulars are defiantly quirky. Thousands of verbs monotonously take the -ed suffix for their past tense forms, but ring mutates to rang, not ringed, catch becomes caught, hit doesn’t do anything, and go is replaced by an entirely different word, went (a usurping of the old past tense of to wend, which itself once followed the pattern we see in send-sent and bend-bent). No wonder irregular verbs are banned in "rationally designed" languages like Esperanto and Orwell’s Newspeak — and why recently a woman in search of a nonconformist soul-mate wrote a personal ad that began, "Are you an irregular verb?"
Since irregulars are unpredictable, people can’t derive them on the fly as they talk, but have to have memorized them beforehand one by one, just like simple unconjugated words, which are also unpredictable. (The word duck does not look like a duck, walk like a duck, or quack like a duck.) Indeed, the irregulars are all good, basic, English words: Anglo-Saxon monosyllables. (The seeming exceptions are just monosyllables disguised by a prefix: became is be- + came; understood is under- + stood; forgot is for- + got).
There are tantalizing patterns among the irregulars: ring-rang, sing-sang, spring-sprang, drink-drank, shrink-shrank, sink-sank, stink-stank; blow-blew grow-grew, know-knew, throw-threw, draw-drew, fly-flew, slay-slew; swear-swore, wear-wore, bear-bore, tear-tore. But they still resist being captured by a rule. Next to sing-sang we find not cling-clang but cling-clung, not think-thank but think-thought, not blink-blank but blink-blinked. In between blow-blew and grow-grew sits glow-glowed. Wear-wore may inspire swear-swore, but tear-tore does not inspire stare-store. This chaos is a legacy of the Indo-Europeans, the remarkable prehistoric tribe whose language took over most of Europe and southwestern Asia. Their language formed tenses using rules that regularly replaced one vowel with another. But as pronunciation habits changed in their descendant tribes, the rules became opaque to children and eventually died; the irregular past tense forms are their fossils. So every time we use an irregular verb, we are continuing a game of Broken Telephone that has gone on for more than five thousand years.
