Hello!

Once again it’s too hot in Berlin, but not as bad as last time. Metropolcon/Eurocon was fun, and I got to meet some fellow Codexians in person for the first time, as well as a bunch of other folks. And some of us are now eyeing next year’s Eurocon in Lisbon, so I’ll see what my finances look like next spring.

I registered for Flights of Foundry, though I’m not available on Saturday (roller derby, what else). The Guest of Honor lineup is stacked, so the day and a few hours I’ll be able to be there will be great (I hope; time zones are annoying, and I usually miss the cool stuff because it’s at 2 am local).

There are a couple things that have been on my mind the last few weeks, so I’m going to talk about those.

Let’s start with something positive

I just read Cameron Reed’s What We Are Seeking for book club, and I was surprised to find discussions of language and linguistics in it. (I am really bad about reading cover copy of books; I go in with no preconceptions a lot of the time.)

The story is about John, a doctor who is dropped unwillingly onto a colony planet that has made contact with some local sapient species but doesn’t know how to communicate with them, and Sudharma, a translator who is supposed to figure out how to communicate with this species. There is a lot more explicit discussion and description of language at the beginning of the book, including a conversation between John and Sudharma in the specific dialect of John’s home town, and discussions of differences in language between the different colonies and the ships. Although, once Sudharma begins learning the local species’ language, the linguistics parts turn up again. I haven’t had capacity to go deeply into them, but none of it made me swear under my breath.

The book is rather more about the willingness of people to change and adapt and accept difference. It’s very queer, and the biology of the creatures on Scythia (the planet in question) is weird, though apparently based on or inspired by actual Earth biology. Nature is extremely weird.

The book just stops at the end, and I can’t tell if it’s deliberately ambiguous or if there’s supposed to be a part two in the future. Someone told me a book I was reading or planning to read was planned as a duology, and I think it might be this one. I’m not sure. But it does stop at the point where I’d expect part two to start, so that would make sense. However, I can’t find anything in my searching to confirm or deny.

I enjoyed it, and it’s very much in conversation with Cherryh and Le Guin, and if that sounds like your cup of tea, definitely check it out. But be aware that it … stops.

Now for the less positive

This isn’t so much about writing or books; it’s more about my lingering frustration with the department I got my linguistics degree in (which is related to my ongoing frustration with linguistics in the US). I was required to take Generative Syntax that was based on Chomsky’s X-bar theory and a bit of Minimalism. It was taken as given that this was the correct theory of how syntax works in the brain, and no other theories were taught or even named. I thought it made no sense, and because I was also interested in language learning and acquisition, I knew it didn’t mesh with any of the things we know about how human cognition develops, which includes how language is acquired and learned. I got an A in the class, because it was basically logic puzzles, and we were encouraged to do our homework assignments collaboratively, so if I couldn’t figure out one of the movements or projections we needed, someone else probably had. (Don’t worry about what that means.)

(The oversimplified difference between language acquisition and language learning is that children acquire languages, and adults learn them. This is an oversimplification; don’t @ me.)

But because no other theories were introduced, and I had no idea of where to start looking for other possibilities, all I had was a vague sense of dissatisfaction, because the theory is tautological. I couldn’t challenge it, because I didn’t have a theoretical background to argue from. (The one thing that I agree with the theory on is this: All humans have an innate ability to use and understand language, and every human is an expert in their own language.) 

When I wrote my thesis, I made a usage-based argument, and my advisor, despite being a Generativist, didn’t disapprove. I passed, and my grand-advisor said I should publish my findings. (I haven’t; I’m not in academia and I have no use for a PhD. But I wish I could, because I found something cool.)

This is the short version of my thesis argument I swear

First, we need a little bit of background. The Germanic languages (which includes English) have two types of verbs, strong (which your grammar teacher called “irregular,” and I will argue about this at length if prompted) and weak. Weak verbs form the past tense by whacking an -ed on the end, like walk - walked, kick - kicked. This type of verb represents the vast majority of verbs (let’s say 90% because I don’t feel like looking it up.) 

Strong verbs form their past tense by changing the root vowel, like sing - sang - sung or eat - ate - eaten or see - saw - seen; in German those are singen - sang - gesungen, essen - aß - gegessen, and sehen - sah - gesehen. There is a pattern to the way they change; historically there are seven major patterns with a few subvarieties. (The Wikipedia entry is thorough.) You can see that, for those three verbs, the vowel changes are identical in English and German, though they are pronounced differently because of the Great Vowel Shift. There are under 200 strong verbs in modern English and German, but many of them occur a lot (like the three examples, and I’m sure you can think of others).

Human cognition is pattern based. We’re good at building (and recognizing) patterns. When you’re acquiring English as a child, the pattern you learn is that when something happened in the past, you put -ed on the end, because that’s the most prominent pattern. That’s where you get things like goed or eated. (Go is a weird verb, but it’s less weird in German.) However, some verbs that were historically strong are now weak, like bake - baked (German backen - buk - gebacken), and there are some verbs that are humorously strengthened, like freak out - fruck out. This pattern-matching is also where bring - brang - brung comes from, and “who’d’a thunk it?”

Usage-based linguistics posits that we learn language as a pattern/with rules but also that frequently used constructions (idioms, set phrases, and other things that Joan Bybee calls “prefabs”) are stored separately and accessed as needed.

OK, I think that’s enough background. On to the thesis

I picked a subset of the strong verbs to do corpus-based statistics on, and I compared Old High German, Middle High German, and Modern German. I picked class VII in part because it’s the smallest, so it was much more manageable for a semester’s worth of work, in part because it’s weird for historical reasons, and in part because it includes my favorite weird verb, hauen (to hew). I linked the reconstructed Proto-Germanic word so you can scroll through the descendants, because the ways the verb changed are just wild to me.

My hypothesis was that the least-frequent verbs would be most likely to become weak over time and that the likelihood of weakening decreased with increasing frequency (more frequent = more strong). That did, in fact, turn out to be the case.

The cool thing I found was that there’s some threshold frequency below which a strong verb isn’t frequently used enough to get put in the box with the prefabs but ALSO isn’t frequently used enough to trigger whatever pattern-building function our brains have. I found that by comparing strong verbs that have prefixes to the root, unprefixed verb (e.g., fangen vs. fangen plus anfangen, empfangen, verfangen…) because in my data collection, I noticed that for some verbs, none of the individual [prefix]-root verbs was particularly frequent, but if you added them together, they became so.

Why have I been thinking about this lately?

Aside from vaguely romantic notions of spending the next few years just collecting data and crunching numbers for the other 180 strong German verbs (plus the ones that are weak now)? So, YouTube dropped a video from LanguageJones in my feed last month I think. I personally find him a bit abrasive, but that’s a me problem. But when it’s titled provocatively and voices something I’ve felt for the last ten years, yeah, I’m gonna click it. Chomsky was wrong. They taught me a lie. He’s got a PhD, so he has the clout to make assertions like that.

Martin Hilpert, the author of a textbook on Construction Grammar, commented on the video, and LanguageJones replied that he’s making use of Hilpert’s videos where he teaches his textbook, which I naturally tracked down and am working through as well. If I’d known about this video series, let alone the textbook or that Construction Grammar existed, in 2018-19 when I was writing my thesis, I could have made a much better argument. The videos are from 2013. I could have used the book.

But the past is past, and I can’t afford to quit working and spend a few years crunching data. (I would also like to, idk, finish the [censored] novel I’ve been working on for years. Unfortunately, I have to do things like pay the rent.) So I will fill in the gaps in my education while I work on the far too many projects I always have going on. If anyone here wants to learn Construction Grammar with me, let me know. I set up a Discord server in 2020 that I’ve never used, so we could have ling learner chat there.

Until next time!