I wonder if he extends his theory to the complexity of individual languages and if that reflects the biological complexity/ IQ level of certain ethnicities.
Is there much evidence that the complexity of a language correlates with the IQ of its speakers? Perhaps more intelligent people tend to try to make their language simpler? For example, a certain amount of the far right end of the bell curve of the vast Spanish speaking world have in recent centuries devoted their high intelligence to making Spanish simpler and more straightforward:
On the other hand, other high achieving nationalities have not felt as much impetus to streamline their languages as has the Hispanosphere. So, it's all very murky.
The Chomskyan view is that humans in general have a surprising knack as children for mastering complex language rules. I have no idea how to evaluate that assertion, but I'm not familiar with evidence falsifying it.
In general, English doesn't seem like a particularly rational language that is conquering the world on its own merits. It seems more like a kludgey language merging two fairly different European language families in an awkward embrace that happened to become the world's #1 language due to its native speakers conquering the world.
I have only ever heard that Asiatic languages are the most difficult to master, specifically Mandarin and Korean. Considering they also typically have higher IQs I assumed their languages relfects that reality. English is not my first language either however, and have come to experience (more so heard) it is also difficult to master, though more doable.
I've lived in Hong Kong for many years, and have had my struggles learning Chinese. My daughter attended local schools here, so I've also witnessed first-hand what learning Chinese looks like from a native speaker's point of view.
There's no doubt Chinese is tough to master. But it's also not quite obvious that it's because Chinese is 'complex' -- it all depends on what you mean by that word. Chinese grammar is almost ludicrously simple. There are no declensions of nouns or adjectives, no changes in verb forms to reflect tense, and no convoluted word orders. But learning its tones is a meatgrinder when you're studying Chinese and trying to put it into use. In this sense the local HK dialect, i.e. Cantonese, is much harder than Mandarin, as it's got nine tones instead of Mandarin's only four. Many non-Chinese speakers assume tones are a kind of 'nice to have' feature, i.e. they're like intonation in English. So if you say a word with a tone that's just slightly off, your listener will still get the idea. I can tell you, from hard experience, that this is not the case. Tones are *essential* to meaning.
Written Chinese is certainly complex, but that's because of its use of characters rather than an alphabet. Does it take more intelligent people to learn to read and write this way? Maybe . . . but from watching my daughter, much of learning to read and write Chinese is achieved via brute-force memorization, preferably gotten out of the way when you're young enough for it to stick.
Language complexity is a good topic. The Babel story is profound and consequential, but it's very brief, so it seems it's often overlooked in the vast scope of Biblical characters, themes, and stories.
A couple of observations.
First, I've always wondered -- as have many, I think, over the years -- why languages generally seem to move from higher to lower complexity. If you believe in the Tower of Babel story, then this makes sense. But, from what I've seen, if you ask contemporary linguists this question, they'll generally state that this common perception is wrong, i.e. languages that seem to be getting simpler in some ways will become more complicated in others. Or they'll admit that perhaps there may be some languages that are getting simpler, but that this is only a temporary swing in a cyclical process, and sooner or later they'll re-complexify. It's an interesting issue, and I'd love to learn more about it, if anyone here is an expert.
Second, Babel is important not just because of the language element, but because it represents humanity's ultimate expression of corporate arrogance. The builders of Babel assumed they could order and control the world to such a degree that they could equal -- or even usurp -- God. This impulse is still latent in human nature, and has been expressed again and again in human history. It's been waxing in recent centuries as the world has become better connected by transport and communication; its expressions range from 19th-century empire-building to 20th century utopian ideologies to 21st century techno-driven wokist world-saving. For the latter, whether it's climate change or racism or a lack of neocon-style 'democracy' that the world needs to be saved from hardly matters. All of those involved are suffused with arrogant presumption, and believe they can impose their vision of The Good over others who may not share their views -- i.e. they can 'save the world'.
the problem with "languages go from complex to simple" theory is "when to when"? It's inherent logically even in the framing of the question. For a language to become complex, didn't it have to first evolve complexity? The only alt-explanation is that all complex languages emerged fully formed from some primordial ooze, and slowly degraded over time.
It seems some linguists believe one main way that a language becomes "simplified" from a complex start is when a lot of foreigners come in and learn it, as adults, as a trading pidging, and take local wives; some generations of this, and the children then inherit more and more the pidginized version from their fathers, and the mothers are content to smooth things over. I don't know what the technical term in linguistics for it is, but there are many examples across Asia where trade-networks were active.
Two points about the theology of the "Tower of Babel" story.
1) It was started in the aftermath of the Great Flood, in an attempt to be able to escape a future flood. Thus humanity's hubris had a rational impulse, even though it reflected a distrust of God's promise to never repeat the Flood.
2) Pentecost ("Tongues of Fire") is a reversal of the Tower of Babel story, in which the disciples could speak every language in existence, in order to spread the "Good News" and unite humanity.
The paragraph about Ireland: this would have been a good article to mention how Ireland has governmental incentives for restoring the Irish language which was prohibited by their colonizers. A good Irishman would want to tell you their version of the potato famine: it was a genocide by the British. There was plenty of food, but it was eaten and exported by the British colonizers. There is a famine museum in Dublin that explains this history. Most Americans do not know this version of history. For long lasting conquest, eliminate the language and starve the people. As Churchill (or maybe his father) said: “The only problem with the Irish is that they don’t want to be British.”
I’ve heard that Ireland speaking English has allowed to attract foreigners to their universities (an unclear benefit, although the universities benefit from the fees paid).
Your final sentence warrants an opaque grad school treatise or three.
Ten pounds of potatoes a day sounds like an awful lot. Did it absorb the beer? How much manual labor were the Irish actually doing back then, besides growing more potatoes?
"now we have the Internet to spread English and artificial intelligence to translate."
The lack of importance put on language-earning, implied by this idea, augurs nothing good.
It is a part of the wider Internet-driven idea that NO knowledge is worth knowing, because you can just 'Google' it, or ask a "chatbot" to give you the answers, supposedly reality-based, fair, total in scope (often none of these things, in practice). This is the very picture of a dumbing-down process envisioned by some sci-fi writers over the years.
"Why do we not have...strong laws for the protection of endangered languages?" -- physicist and futurist Freeman Dyson [White-British Protestant, 1923-2020], writing in the late 1970s ('Disturbing the Universe,' 1979)
By the same logic there would be laws for the protection of ethnicities.
In fact, the two (language and ethnicity) can overlap in direct ways. Language would not likely be protected by being preserved by some specialists and encased in bubble-wrap and stored away. It would have to exist in use among a certain population-stock, generally tied to a specific place. We are already at a working definition of ethnicity, there.
So Freeman Dyson's reasonable proposal on language-preservation already implies a proposal for ethnic preservation. Funny enough, but mainstream-Woke opinion in the USA favors all of this, --- IF it's framed strictly in terms of, say, some small Amerind or Alaska Native group with dwindling numbers of fluent speakers. There is even substantial funding, from the U.S. taxpayer at least, for th revitalization of Amerind languages. The U.S. government pays some Amerinds and Alaska Natives, etc., generous full-time salaries to study their own ancestral languages, with the explicit aim of ethnic preservation. Any of this, applied to White ethnic-groups, would get a very-negative reaction and would get some usual suspects ranting about gas chambers or slavery.
Different languages shape the perceptions of the world of the people speaking them.
A trivial example:
In English, the "go" traffic light is described as green; in Japanese, it is described as "aoi." But a common term Japanese have for White people is "aoi me," translated as "blue eye." So it would seem that to a Japanese the colors blue and green are identical. That's not exactly true, but neither is it exactly false.
I could go through small dictionary of similar examples that would reinforce the impression that a Japanese and an American standing side-by-side are living in different worlds, maybe I could say "literally" living in different worlds.
When I was learning hyōjungo (標準語), commonly translated as "Tokyo dialect," as a child living in Japan, I would sometimes get lost in the Japanese understanding of reality and have a hard time returning to the American, English-speaking reality. They are not so much different as..."off," you might say, just slightly out of phase. I can imagine that all non-Indo-European language-speaking peoples are out of phase with Indo-European-speaking peoples.
Regarding the homogenizing effect of a dominant language, also consider the homogenizing and controlling effect of written language. As Claude Lévi-Strauss has written, "Writing appears to be necessary for the centralized, stratified state to reproduce itself. Writing is a strange thing.... The one phenomenon which has invariably accompanied it is the formation of cities and empires: the integration into a political system of a considerable number of individuals into a hierarchy of castes and classes. It seems to favor the exploitation rather than the enlightenment of mankind."
And if that language is easy or hard to learn surely affects the way a society is organized and controlled.
James C. Scott would probably agree that a dominant language expressing itself in writing is a destroyer of freedom and independence. It facilitates empire and tyranny. He wrote:
“Not so very long ago, self-governing peoples were the majority of humankind. Today, they are seen from the valley kingdoms as living ancestors, what we were like before we discovered cultivation and civilization. But hill peoples — aborigines, savages, natives — are best understood as runaway fugitive communities that have, over the course of millennia, been fleeing the oppressions of state-making projects in the valleys — slavery, conscription, taxes, corvée labor, epidemics, and warfare.”
Well, Dyson's speculation that there was linguistic differentiation between small groups might sometimes create conditions for group-level selection. I'm skeptical of group-level selection in humans, but confess I haven't thought much about the question for many years. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Group_selection
More importantly, for Steve Sailer and anyone else reading these words, you must with haste read Ted Chiang's powerful novella, Tower of Babylon. Description at link, but warning, it contains many spoilers: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tower_of_Babylon_(story) It's more rewarding to be completely surprised by the marvelous tale as it unfolds.
"The Monoculture of English Menace" can be read to mean England is a dangerous world-actor but that this particular perfidious world-actor, England, has a boring one one-dimensional culture.
- The Menace of English-Monoculture
- The Menace of English-language Monoculture
- The Menace of the Monoculture of the English language
- The English-Monoculture Menace
- The Monoculture-of-English Menace
I think the liberal use of clarifying hyphens (or, "clarifying-hyphens," if you will, it being a noun phrase) is something useful, to be borrowed from other languages and used based on their example.
Everyone who's anyone knows that German coins new compound words (or, compound-words) all the time, and usefully so. Rendering these new phrases, ideas, turns-of-phrase as separate words or without hyphens can be confusing. Even the New York Times, in early years, called itself the "New-York Times," because strictly a hyphenless version COULD be read to be "York Times, new edition of" from some places called York.
It would make sense that babble the verb and Babel the noun would be etymologically related, but there is no evidence that they are. It turns out that Babel is derived from Babylon while babble is onomatopoeic.
The problem with a multiplicity of languages and especially of most populations' not learning a worldwide or universal language -- a role which English looks likely to take on -- is that billions of people are closed out from the language of technical (and largely of cultural and artistic) innovation. Many people who grow up without the opportunity to learn English would like to have have had the chance to take advantage of scientific papers, literature, and conversations (especially, now, online conversations) which are available or conducted only in English. These individuals can almost say they weren't allowed to exercise their right to a proper education (although many would say that education is not, at least, one of the basic human rights). And the rest of the world is unable to take advantage of advances that at least some of these individuals would have contributed to or even have created. AI -boosted translation tools are now ameliorating this situation to some extent, but there's still a huge gulf between these populations and those that produce work on the edge of the wedge. You can even see this to some extent in what's been called "the problem of Spanish", where the huge populations of people who grow up speaking only Spanish, lag behind English speakers (and to some extent speakers of a few other languages like Japanese or French) in innovative technical and cultural production -- for instance, as I think has been mentioned in Sailersphere posts and comments, the Spanish-speaking world has produced little or no work that's led to Nobel Prizes in scientific or technical fields.
I wonder if he extends his theory to the complexity of individual languages and if that reflects the biological complexity/ IQ level of certain ethnicities.
Is there much evidence that the complexity of a language correlates with the IQ of its speakers? Perhaps more intelligent people tend to try to make their language simpler? For example, a certain amount of the far right end of the bell curve of the vast Spanish speaking world have in recent centuries devoted their high intelligence to making Spanish simpler and more straightforward:
http://www.valerieyule.com.au/wspanref.htm
On the other hand, other high achieving nationalities have not felt as much impetus to streamline their languages as has the Hispanosphere. So, it's all very murky.
The Chomskyan view is that humans in general have a surprising knack as children for mastering complex language rules. I have no idea how to evaluate that assertion, but I'm not familiar with evidence falsifying it.
In general, English doesn't seem like a particularly rational language that is conquering the world on its own merits. It seems more like a kludgey language merging two fairly different European language families in an awkward embrace that happened to become the world's #1 language due to its native speakers conquering the world.
I have only ever heard that Asiatic languages are the most difficult to master, specifically Mandarin and Korean. Considering they also typically have higher IQs I assumed their languages relfects that reality. English is not my first language either however, and have come to experience (more so heard) it is also difficult to master, though more doable.
I've lived in Hong Kong for many years, and have had my struggles learning Chinese. My daughter attended local schools here, so I've also witnessed first-hand what learning Chinese looks like from a native speaker's point of view.
There's no doubt Chinese is tough to master. But it's also not quite obvious that it's because Chinese is 'complex' -- it all depends on what you mean by that word. Chinese grammar is almost ludicrously simple. There are no declensions of nouns or adjectives, no changes in verb forms to reflect tense, and no convoluted word orders. But learning its tones is a meatgrinder when you're studying Chinese and trying to put it into use. In this sense the local HK dialect, i.e. Cantonese, is much harder than Mandarin, as it's got nine tones instead of Mandarin's only four. Many non-Chinese speakers assume tones are a kind of 'nice to have' feature, i.e. they're like intonation in English. So if you say a word with a tone that's just slightly off, your listener will still get the idea. I can tell you, from hard experience, that this is not the case. Tones are *essential* to meaning.
Written Chinese is certainly complex, but that's because of its use of characters rather than an alphabet. Does it take more intelligent people to learn to read and write this way? Maybe . . . but from watching my daughter, much of learning to read and write Chinese is achieved via brute-force memorization, preferably gotten out of the way when you're young enough for it to stick.
Language complexity is a good topic. The Babel story is profound and consequential, but it's very brief, so it seems it's often overlooked in the vast scope of Biblical characters, themes, and stories.
A couple of observations.
First, I've always wondered -- as have many, I think, over the years -- why languages generally seem to move from higher to lower complexity. If you believe in the Tower of Babel story, then this makes sense. But, from what I've seen, if you ask contemporary linguists this question, they'll generally state that this common perception is wrong, i.e. languages that seem to be getting simpler in some ways will become more complicated in others. Or they'll admit that perhaps there may be some languages that are getting simpler, but that this is only a temporary swing in a cyclical process, and sooner or later they'll re-complexify. It's an interesting issue, and I'd love to learn more about it, if anyone here is an expert.
Second, Babel is important not just because of the language element, but because it represents humanity's ultimate expression of corporate arrogance. The builders of Babel assumed they could order and control the world to such a degree that they could equal -- or even usurp -- God. This impulse is still latent in human nature, and has been expressed again and again in human history. It's been waxing in recent centuries as the world has become better connected by transport and communication; its expressions range from 19th-century empire-building to 20th century utopian ideologies to 21st century techno-driven wokist world-saving. For the latter, whether it's climate change or racism or a lack of neocon-style 'democracy' that the world needs to be saved from hardly matters. All of those involved are suffused with arrogant presumption, and believe they can impose their vision of The Good over others who may not share their views -- i.e. they can 'save the world'.
the problem with "languages go from complex to simple" theory is "when to when"? It's inherent logically even in the framing of the question. For a language to become complex, didn't it have to first evolve complexity? The only alt-explanation is that all complex languages emerged fully formed from some primordial ooze, and slowly degraded over time.
It seems some linguists believe one main way that a language becomes "simplified" from a complex start is when a lot of foreigners come in and learn it, as adults, as a trading pidging, and take local wives; some generations of this, and the children then inherit more and more the pidginized version from their fathers, and the mothers are content to smooth things over. I don't know what the technical term in linguistics for it is, but there are many examples across Asia where trade-networks were active.
Two points about the theology of the "Tower of Babel" story.
1) It was started in the aftermath of the Great Flood, in an attempt to be able to escape a future flood. Thus humanity's hubris had a rational impulse, even though it reflected a distrust of God's promise to never repeat the Flood.
2) Pentecost ("Tongues of Fire") is a reversal of the Tower of Babel story, in which the disciples could speak every language in existence, in order to spread the "Good News" and unite humanity.
The paragraph about Ireland: this would have been a good article to mention how Ireland has governmental incentives for restoring the Irish language which was prohibited by their colonizers. A good Irishman would want to tell you their version of the potato famine: it was a genocide by the British. There was plenty of food, but it was eaten and exported by the British colonizers. There is a famine museum in Dublin that explains this history. Most Americans do not know this version of history. For long lasting conquest, eliminate the language and starve the people. As Churchill (or maybe his father) said: “The only problem with the Irish is that they don’t want to be British.”
I’ve heard that Ireland speaking English has allowed to attract foreigners to their universities (an unclear benefit, although the universities benefit from the fees paid).
Your final sentence warrants an opaque grad school treatise or three.
Ten pounds of potatoes a day sounds like an awful lot. Did it absorb the beer? How much manual labor were the Irish actually doing back then, besides growing more potatoes?
I had hope for Japan and Germany until they, too, rapidly implemented the clot shots.
"now we have the Internet to spread English and artificial intelligence to translate."
The lack of importance put on language-earning, implied by this idea, augurs nothing good.
It is a part of the wider Internet-driven idea that NO knowledge is worth knowing, because you can just 'Google' it, or ask a "chatbot" to give you the answers, supposedly reality-based, fair, total in scope (often none of these things, in practice). This is the very picture of a dumbing-down process envisioned by some sci-fi writers over the years.
"Why do we not have...strong laws for the protection of endangered languages?" -- physicist and futurist Freeman Dyson [White-British Protestant, 1923-2020], writing in the late 1970s ('Disturbing the Universe,' 1979)
By the same logic there would be laws for the protection of ethnicities.
In fact, the two (language and ethnicity) can overlap in direct ways. Language would not likely be protected by being preserved by some specialists and encased in bubble-wrap and stored away. It would have to exist in use among a certain population-stock, generally tied to a specific place. We are already at a working definition of ethnicity, there.
So Freeman Dyson's reasonable proposal on language-preservation already implies a proposal for ethnic preservation. Funny enough, but mainstream-Woke opinion in the USA favors all of this, --- IF it's framed strictly in terms of, say, some small Amerind or Alaska Native group with dwindling numbers of fluent speakers. There is even substantial funding, from the U.S. taxpayer at least, for th revitalization of Amerind languages. The U.S. government pays some Amerinds and Alaska Natives, etc., generous full-time salaries to study their own ancestral languages, with the explicit aim of ethnic preservation. Any of this, applied to White ethnic-groups, would get a very-negative reaction and would get some usual suspects ranting about gas chambers or slavery.
"The typical Irish workingman ate ten to twenty pounds of potatoes per day"
Whoa. I eat several baked potatoes a day, not sure if I could do 6 pounds in a day.
Different languages shape the perceptions of the world of the people speaking them.
A trivial example:
In English, the "go" traffic light is described as green; in Japanese, it is described as "aoi." But a common term Japanese have for White people is "aoi me," translated as "blue eye." So it would seem that to a Japanese the colors blue and green are identical. That's not exactly true, but neither is it exactly false.
I could go through small dictionary of similar examples that would reinforce the impression that a Japanese and an American standing side-by-side are living in different worlds, maybe I could say "literally" living in different worlds.
When I was learning hyōjungo (標準語), commonly translated as "Tokyo dialect," as a child living in Japan, I would sometimes get lost in the Japanese understanding of reality and have a hard time returning to the American, English-speaking reality. They are not so much different as..."off," you might say, just slightly out of phase. I can imagine that all non-Indo-European language-speaking peoples are out of phase with Indo-European-speaking peoples.
Regarding the homogenizing effect of a dominant language, also consider the homogenizing and controlling effect of written language. As Claude Lévi-Strauss has written, "Writing appears to be necessary for the centralized, stratified state to reproduce itself. Writing is a strange thing.... The one phenomenon which has invariably accompanied it is the formation of cities and empires: the integration into a political system of a considerable number of individuals into a hierarchy of castes and classes. It seems to favor the exploitation rather than the enlightenment of mankind."
And if that language is easy or hard to learn surely affects the way a society is organized and controlled.
James C. Scott would probably agree that a dominant language expressing itself in writing is a destroyer of freedom and independence. It facilitates empire and tyranny. He wrote:
“Not so very long ago, self-governing peoples were the majority of humankind. Today, they are seen from the valley kingdoms as living ancestors, what we were like before we discovered cultivation and civilization. But hill peoples — aborigines, savages, natives — are best understood as runaway fugitive communities that have, over the course of millennia, been fleeing the oppressions of state-making projects in the valleys — slavery, conscription, taxes, corvée labor, epidemics, and warfare.”
Well, Dyson's speculation that there was linguistic differentiation between small groups might sometimes create conditions for group-level selection. I'm skeptical of group-level selection in humans, but confess I haven't thought much about the question for many years. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Group_selection
More importantly, for Steve Sailer and anyone else reading these words, you must with haste read Ted Chiang's powerful novella, Tower of Babylon. Description at link, but warning, it contains many spoilers: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tower_of_Babylon_(story) It's more rewarding to be completely surprised by the marvelous tale as it unfolds.
"The Monoculture of English Menace" can be read to mean England is a dangerous world-actor but that this particular perfidious world-actor, England, has a boring one one-dimensional culture.
- The Menace of English-Monoculture
- The Menace of English-language Monoculture
- The Menace of the Monoculture of the English language
- The English-Monoculture Menace
- The Monoculture-of-English Menace
I think the liberal use of clarifying hyphens (or, "clarifying-hyphens," if you will, it being a noun phrase) is something useful, to be borrowed from other languages and used based on their example.
Everyone who's anyone knows that German coins new compound words (or, compound-words) all the time, and usefully so. Rendering these new phrases, ideas, turns-of-phrase as separate words or without hyphens can be confusing. Even the New York Times, in early years, called itself the "New-York Times," because strictly a hyphenless version COULD be read to be "York Times, new edition of" from some places called York.
It would make sense that babble the verb and Babel the noun would be etymologically related, but there is no evidence that they are. It turns out that Babel is derived from Babylon while babble is onomatopoeic.
The problem with a multiplicity of languages and especially of most populations' not learning a worldwide or universal language -- a role which English looks likely to take on -- is that billions of people are closed out from the language of technical (and largely of cultural and artistic) innovation. Many people who grow up without the opportunity to learn English would like to have have had the chance to take advantage of scientific papers, literature, and conversations (especially, now, online conversations) which are available or conducted only in English. These individuals can almost say they weren't allowed to exercise their right to a proper education (although many would say that education is not, at least, one of the basic human rights). And the rest of the world is unable to take advantage of advances that at least some of these individuals would have contributed to or even have created. AI -boosted translation tools are now ameliorating this situation to some extent, but there's still a huge gulf between these populations and those that produce work on the edge of the wedge. You can even see this to some extent in what's been called "the problem of Spanish", where the huge populations of people who grow up speaking only Spanish, lag behind English speakers (and to some extent speakers of a few other languages like Japanese or French) in innovative technical and cultural production -- for instance, as I think has been mentioned in Sailersphere posts and comments, the Spanish-speaking world has produced little or no work that's led to Nobel Prizes in scientific or technical fields.
Athanasius Kircher's diagram of the Tower of Babel built to King Nimrod's specifications in the Book of Genesis
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turris_Babel#/media/File:Illustration_'Coelum_Lunea'_depicting_the_Tower_of_Babel_Wellcome_L0073549.jpg