#so i hope you like little fluffy blobs on stems?

[ignisxi]

Minato x Kakashi + ninken

For @anannua 💕

Idk if this was what you had in mind but it was so much fun to make asdskgakd

[meichenxi]

Hey! I hope you feel better soon

We haven't had a good long linguistics rant from you in a while!! How about you tell us about your favourite lingustical feature or occurrence in a language? Something like a weird grammatical feature or how a language changed

If this doesn't trigger any rant you have stored feel free to educate on any topic you can spontaneously think of, I'd love to hear it :D

ALRIGHT KARO, let's go!! This is a continuation of the other ask I answered recently, and is the second part in a series about linguistic complexity. I suggest you check that one out first for this to properly make sense! (I don't know how to link but uh. it's the post behind this on my blog)

Summary of previous points: the complexity of a language has nothing to do with the 'complexity' of the people that speak it; complexity is really bloody hard to measure; some linguists in an attempt to be not racist argue that 'all languages are equally complex', but this doesn't really seem to be the case, and also still equates cognitive ability with complexity of language which is just...not how things work; arguing languages have different amounts of complexity has literally nothing to do with the cognitive abilities of those who speak it.

Ok. Chinese.

Normally when we look at complexity we like to look at things like number of verb classes, noun classes, and so on. But Chinese doesn't really do any of this.

So what do Chinese and languages like Chinese do that is so challenging to the equicomplexity hypothesis, the idea that all languages are equally complex? I’ll start by talking about some of the common properties of isolating languages - and these properties are often actually used as examples of why these languages are as complex, just in different ways. Oh Melissa, I hear you ask in wide-eyed admiration/curiousity. What are they? By isolating languages, I mean languages that tend to have monosyllabic words, little to no conjugation, particles instead of verb or noun endings, and so on: so languages like Vietnamese, Chinese, Thai and many others in East and South East Asia.

Here’s a list of funky things in isolating languages that may or may not make a language more complex than linguists don't really know what to do with:

Classifiers

Chengyu and 4-word expressions

Verb reduplication, serialisation and resultative verbs

'Lexical verbosity' = complex compounding and word forming strategies

Pragmatics

Syntax

I'll talk about the first two briefly, but I don't have space for all. For clarity of signposting my argument: many linguists use these as explanations of why languages like Chinese are as complex, but I'm going to demonstrate afterwards why the situation is a bit more complicated than that. You could even say it's...complex.

1) Classifiers

You know about classifiers in Chinese, but what you may be interested to learn is that almost all isolating languages in South East Asia use them, and many in fact borrow from each other. The tonal, isolating languages in South East Asia have historically had a lot of contact through intense trade and migration, and as such share a lot of properties. Some classifiers just have to go with the noun: 一只狗，一条河 etc. First of all, if we're defining complexity as 'the added stuff you have to remember when you learn it' (my professors hate me), it's clear that these are added complexity in exactly the same way gender is. Why is it X, and not Y? Well, you can give vague answers ('it's sort of...ribbony' or 'it's kinda...flat'), but more often than not you choose the classifier based on the vibe. Which is something you just have to remember.

Secondly, many classifiers actually have the added ability to modify the type of noun they're describing. These are familiar too in languages like English: a herd of cattle versus a head of cattle. So we have 一枝花 which is a flower but on a stem ('a stem of flower'), but also 一朵花 which is a flower but without the stem (think like...'a blob of flower'). Similarly with clouds - you could have a 一朵云 'blob of cloud' (like a nice, fluffy cloud in a children's book), but you could also have 一片云 which is like a huge, straight flat cloud like the sea...and so on. These 'measure words' do more than measure: they add additional information that the noun itself does not give.

Already we're beginning to see the outline of the problem. Grammatical complexity is...well, grammatical. We count the stuff which languages require you to express, not the optional stuff - and that's grammar. The difference between better and best is clearly grammatical, as is go and went. But what about between 'a blob of cloud' versus 'a plain of cloud'? Is that grammatical? Well, maybe: you do have to include a measure word when you say there's one of it, and in many Chinese languages that are not Mandarin you have to include them every single time you use a possessive: my pair of shoes, my blob of flower etc. But you don't always have to include one specific classifier - there are multiple options, all of which are grammatical. So should we include classifiers as part of the grammar? Or part of the vocabulary (the 'lexicon')?

Err. Next?

2) Chengyu and 4-character expressions + 4) Lexical verbosity

This might seem a bit weird: these are obviously parts of the vocab! What's weirder, though, is that many isolating languages have chengyu, not just Chinese. And if you don't use them, many native speakers surveys suggest you don't sound native. This links to point number 4, which is lexical verbosity. 'Lexical verbosity' means a language has the ability to express things creativity, in many different manners, all of which may have a slightly different nuance. The kind of thing you love to read and analyse and hate to translate.

But it is important. If we look at the systems that make up the grand total of a language, vocabulary is obviously one of them: a language with 1 million root forms is clearly more 'complex', if all else is exactly the same, than a language with 500,000. Without even getting into the whole debacle about 'what even is a word', a language that has multiple registers (dialect, regional, literary, official etc) that all interact is always going to be more complex than one that doesn't, just because there's more of it. More rules, more words, more stuff.

Similarly, something that is the backbone of modern Chinese 'grammar' and yet you may never have thought of as such is is compound words. We don't tend to traditionally teach this as grammar, and I don't have time to give a masterclass on it now, but let me assure you that compounding - across the world's language - is hugely varied. Some languages let you make anything a compound; some only allow noun+noun compounds (so no 'blackbird', as black is an adjective); some only allow head+head compound (so no 'sabretooth', because a sabretooth is a type of tiger, not tooth); some only allow compounds one way ('ring finger' but not 'finger ring': though English does allow the other way around in some other words), and so on.

You'll have heard time and time again that 'Chinese is an isolating language, and isolating languages like monosyllabic words'. Well. Sort of. You will also have noticed yourself that actually most modern Chinese words are disyllabic: 学习，工作，休息，吃饭 and so on. This is radically different to Classical Chinese, where the majority were genuinely one syllable. But many Chinese speakers still have access to the words in the compounds, and so they can be manipulated on a character-by-character basis: most adults will be able to look at 学习 and understand that 学 and 习 both exist as separate words: 开学，学生，复习，练习 and so on.

I'm going to sort of have to ask you to take my word on it as I don't have time to prove how unique it is, but the ability that Chinese has to turn literally anything into a compound is staggering. It's insane. It's...oh god I'm tearing up slightly it's just a LOT guys ok. It's a lot. There are 20000000 synonyms for anything you could ever want, all with slightly different nuances, because unlike many other languages, Chinese allows compounds where the two bits of the compound mean, largely speaking, very similar things. So yes, you have compounds like 开学 which is the shortened version of 开始学习, or ones with an object like 吃饭 or 睡觉, but you also have compounds like 工作 where both 工 and 作 kind of...mean 'to work'...and 休息 where both 休 and 息 mean 'to rest'...and so on. So you can have 感 and 情 and 爱 and 心 but also 感情 and 情感 and 爱情 and 情爱 and 心情 and 心爱 and 爱心 and so on, and they all mean different things. And don't even get me started on resultative verbs: 学到，学会，学好，学完， and so on...

What is all of this, if not complex? It's not grammatical - except that the process of compound forming, that allows for so many different compounds, is grammatical. We can't make the difference between学会，学好 and 学完 anywhere near as easily in English, and in Chinese you do sort of have to add the end bit. So...do we count this under complexity? And if not, we should probably count it elsewhere? Because it's kind of insane. And learners have to use it, much like the example I gave of English prepositions, and it takes them a bloody long time. But then where?

Ok. I haven't had a chance to talk about everything, but you get the picture: there are things in Chinese that, unlike European languages, do not neatly fit into the 'grammar' versus 'vocabulary' boxes we have built for ourselves, because as a language it just works very differently to the ones we've used as models. (Though some of the problems, in fact, are similar: German is also very adept at compounding.) But as interesting as that difference is, the goal of typology as a sub-discipline of linguistics is to talk about and research the types of linguistic diversity around the world, so we can't stop there by acknowledging our models don't fit. We have to go further. We have to stop, and think: What does this mean for the models that we have built?

This is where we get into theoretically rather boggy ground. We weren't before?? No, like marsh of the dead boggy. Linguists don't know it...they go round, for miles and miles and miles....

Because unfortunately there isn't a clear answer. If we dismiss these things as 'lexical' and therefore irrelevant to the grammar, that is a) ignoring their grammatical function, b) ignoring the fact that the lexicon is also a system that needs to be learnt, and has often very clear rules on word-building that are also 'grammatical', and c) essentially playing a game of theoretical pass-the-parcel. It's your problem, not mine: it's in the lexicon, not the grammar. Blah blah blah. Because whoever's problem it is, we still have to account for this complexity somehow when we want to compare literally any languages that are substantially different at all.

On the other side of things, however, if we argue that 'Chinese is as complex as Abkhaz, because it makes up for a lack of complexity in Y by all this complexity in X' (and therefore all languages = equally complex), this ignores the fact that compounding and irregular verbs belong to two very different systems. The kind of mistake you make when you use the wrong classifier intuitively seems to be on another level of 'wrongness' to the kind where you conjugate a verb in the wrong way. One is 'wrong'. The other is just 'not what we say'. It's the same as the use of prepositions in English: some are obviously wrong (I don't sleep 'at my bed') but some are just weird, and for many there are multiple options ('at the weekend', 'on the weekend'). Is saying 'I am on the town' the same level of wrongness as saying 'I goed to the shops'? Intuitively we might want to say the second is a 'worse' mistake. In which case, what are they exactly? They're both 'grammar', but totally different systems. And where do you draw the line?

Here's the thing about the equicomplexity argument. As established, it stems from a nice ideological background that nevertheless conflates cognition and linguistic complexity. Once you realise that no, the two are completely separate, you're under no theoretical or ideological compulsion to have languages be equally complex at all. Why should they be at all? Some languages just have more stuff in them: some have loads of vowels, and loads of consonants, and some have loads of grammar. Others have less. They all do basically the same job. Why is that a big deal?

Where the argument comes into its biggest problem, though, is that if a language like Chinese is already as complex as a language like Abkhaz...what happens when we meet Classical Chinese?

Classical Chinese. An eldritch behemoth lurking with tendrils of grass-style calligraphy belching perfect prose just behind the horizon.

Let's look at Modern Chinese for a moment. It has some particles: six or so, depending on how you count them. You could include these as being critical to the grammar, and they are.

A common dictionary of Classical Chinese particles lists 694.

To be fair, a lot of these survive as verbs, nouns and so on. Classical Chinese was very verb-schmerb when it came to functional categories, and most nouns can be verbs, and vice versa. It's all just about the vibe. But still. Six hundred and ninety four.

Some of these are optional - they're the nice 'omggg' equivalent of the modern tone particles at the end of a sentence. Some of them are smushed versions of two different particles, like 啦. Some of these, however, really do seem to have very grammatical features. Of these 694, 17 are listed as meaning ‘subsequent to and later than X’, and 8 indicate imposition of a stress upon the word they precede or follow. Some are syntactic: there are, for instance, 8 different particles solely for the purpose of fronting information: 'the man saw he'. That is very much a grammatical role, in every sense of the word.

The copula system ('to be') is also huuuuuuugely complex. I could write a whole other post about this, but I'll just say for now that the copula in Classical Chinese could be specific to degrees of logical preciseness that would make the biggest Lojban-loving computer programmer weep into his Star Trek blanket. As in, the system of positive copulas distinguishes between 6 different polar-positive copulas (A is B), 2 insistent positive (A is B), 19 restricted positive (A is only B), and 15 of common inclusion (A is like B). Some other copulas can make such distinctions as ‘A becomes or acts as B’, ‘A would be B’, ‘may A not be B?’ and so on. Copulas may also be used in a sort of causal way (not 'casual'), creating very specific relationships like ‘A does not merely because of B’ or ‘A is not Y such that B is X’.

WHEW. And all we have in modern Chinese is 是。

I think we can see that this is a little more complex. So saying 'Modern Chinese is as complex as Abkhaz, just in a different way' leaves no space for Classical Chinese to be even more complex...so....where does that leave us?

Uhhhhhh. Errrrrr.

(Don't worry, that's basically where the entire linguistics community is at too.)

The thing is, all these weird and wacky things that Classical Chinese is able to do are all optional. This is where the problem is. Our understanding of complexity, if you hark back to my last post so many moons ago, is that it's the description of what a language requires you to do. We equate that with grammar because in most of the languages we're familiar with, you can't just pick and choose whether to conjugate a verb or use a tense. If you are talking in third person, the verb has to change. It just...does. You can't not do it if you feel like it. There's not such thing as 'poetic license' - except in languages like Classical Chinese, well. There sort of is.

The problem both modern Chinese and Classical Chinese shows us to a different extent is that some languages are capable of highly grammatical things, but with a degree of optionality we would not expect. Classical Chinese can accurately stipulate to the Nth degree what, exactly, the grammatical relationship between two agents are in a way that is undoubtedly and even aggressively logical. But...it doesn't have to. As anybody who has tried anything with Classical Chinese knows, reading things without context is an absolute fucking nightmare. As a language it has the ability to also say something like 臣臣 which in context means 'when a minister acts as a minister'...but literally just means...minister minister. Go figure. It doesn't have to do any of these myriad complex things it's capable of at all.

So...what does this mean? What does all of this mean, for the question of whether all languages are equally complex?

Whilst I agree that the situation with Classical Chinese is fully batshit insane, the fact is most isolating languages are more like Modern Chinese: they don't do all of this stuff. And whilst classifiers and compounds are challenging, they're not quite the same as the strict binary correct/incorrect of many systems. I'm also just not convinced that languages need to be equally complex. However.

HOWEVER. In this essay/rant/lecture (?), I've raised more questions than I've answered. That's deliberate. I both think that a) the type of complexity Chinese shows is not 'enough' to work as a 'trade off' compared to languages like Abkhaz, and b) that this 'grammatical verbosity' and optionality of grammatical structures is something we don't know how to deal with at all. These are two beliefs that can co-exist. Classical Chinese especially is a huge challenge to current understandings of complexity, whichever side of the equicomplexity argument you stand on.

Because where do you place optionality in all of this? Choice? If a certain structure can express something grammatical, but you don't have to include it - is that more complex, or less so? Where do we rank optional features in our understanding of grammar? It's a totally new dimension, and adds a richness to our understanding that we simply wouldn't have got if we hadn't looked at isolating languages. This, right here, is the point of typology: to inform theory, and challenge it.

What do we do with this sort of complexity at all?

I don't know. And I don't think many professional linguists do either.

- meichenxi out

[xxkagomexx]

Inukag Week Day 1

Theme: Team

Title: Study Buddy 

Words: 1445

AN: Hey this is my first year for inukag week and im super excited to participate in it. Not sure how many days ill be able to do but I’m going to try my best! I hope you guys like my fluffy one shot. 

Kagome never thought that the path of training to be a miko would be easy, but she also didn’t expect it to be this challenging. There were so many things to memorize that it was hard to keep track of it all in her head. First she had to differentiate between each plant and what their name was. She would sit on the floor of her small hut she shared with Inuyasha and spread all the little herbs across the wooden panels and stare at them until all she could see her green blobs in her vision. Then once she mastered telling them apart she had to learn which herb did what and how she could use them to treat certain ailments.

At least she would be able to learn the more difficult parts if she could memorize all these stupid little plants! Some were easy to distinguish from the rest due to unique characteristics but the majority of them looked practically identical.

Currently she was trying to get her herbs straight so that she could identify them quickly. Kaede was going to test her on them the next morning and she wanted to get a good grade. Or at least, tested, it’s not like if she received a failing grade she would have to take the course again. Still she wanted to do her best. The old woman was spending so much time taking her under her wing and she wanted to show her appreciation by understanding the material.

“Is this sage or clary sage? Oh no, I don’t remember which is which. I had them done pat yesterday. I’m never going to be able to do this…” Kagome mumbled miserably in defeat, dropping the plant on the table to bury her head in her hands. It was hopeless. There was no way in hell that she could memorize all the herbs in time. If she couldn’t even memorize all the different herbs how would she ever be able to use them to treat people’s illnesses?

“I don’t think I’m cut out to be a miko,” the black haired woman sighed into her hands. No sooner did the words leave her mouth, she felt a familiar hand resting on the top of her head.

“Oi, what’s this stupid talk about not being able to be a miko?” a gruff voice pulled her out of her thoughts, and tentatively she raised her head to meet the golden gaze of her hanyou, unshed tears of frustration shimmering in her stormy eyes.

“Inuyasha, I can’t remember all of these herbs. I learn a new one and I forget the one I learned right before,” she explained in exasperation, her teeth coming down to chew on her bottom lip. “Kaede taught me a few new ones yesterday but I forgot to write their names down so I have no idea what they are.”

“Is that all, wench?” Inuyasha rose a thick black brow at her, a smirk twitching at the corners of his lips. Removing his fingers from her raven locks, he sat back on his haunches, turning his head towards the pile of greenery that covered the table. “What ones did you not get the names of?” he asked her curiously.

Kagome sighed again, propping her chin up on her hand while using the other to limply pick up a long green stemmed plant with purple leaves. The hanyou turned his hands over so that his palms faced upwards so she dropped it in his hand. She watched as he picked up the herb between his thumb and index finger, bringing it up to his face. His nose twitched as he inhaled deeply, his eyes scrunching as he took in the scent. “Betony.”

The miko in training blinked, almost missing what he said. “What?”

“Betony. That’s what this is called,” Inuyasha dropped the plant back in its spot before sitting down cross legged on the floor, tucking his arms into his sleeves.

Kagome stared at him in amazement, shocked that he knew it. “How did you know that.”

She received a shrug in response. “I remember the smell of it.”

“Well do you know this one?”

Another sniff. “Hyssop.”

“This?”

“Rue…sage…wait...clary sage”

This continued on, Kagome even having him smell ones she thought she knew to see if she was right, growing giddy every time she was right. “This is what you were so worried about, Kagome? You worry about the weirdest stuff,” Inuyasha snorted, helping her neatly put away the herbs into a large reed woven basket.

“It’s not weird to be worried about not being able to be a miko!” the woman at his side protested, giving him a half hearted glare as she took the basket from him to set aside to the corner of the room. Tucking it away safely, she stood up, dusting her hands on her red miko garments.

The silver haired man, watching her in amusement, chuckled softly. “Keh. You just started learning. It’s gonna take you a while to learn them all. You had only that weird shit in your time as medicine.”

“You mean pills?”

“Yeah, that’s what I said. Weird shit.”

A giggle came from Kagome and she realized that her mood had gotten better the moment he came over to help her. He ended up being her study buddy, not that she’d ever say those terms aloud to him. If she did she was sure to get a confused look from him or another crass comment. “Thank you for helping me, Inuyasha,” she settled for instead, walking over to him and taking his hands in her owns. Tilting her head up she smiled brightly at him and she noticed the faintest blush on his cheeks.

“What are you thanking me for, I didn’t do much,” the hanyou tried to pass off, slightly embarrassed for some reason she didn’t know.

“You helped me study and encouraged me. That’s why silly,” Kagome shifted her weight to the balls of her feet to go on to her tip toes, wrapping her arms loosely around his shoulders to plant a firm kiss on his lips.

When they pulled away, Inuyasha was smirking down at her, his eyes lighting up. “If I had known smelling your plants would get me that I would have started a long time ago,” he couldn’t help but say cockily. Kagome laughed, feeling his hands slide lower on her back as he pulled her close to him.

“Well if you keep helping me there’s plenty more of where that came from,” she wiggled her eyebrows at him suggestively, running her fingers through the hair at the nape of his neck and feeling him shiver under her touch.

Inuyasha snorted softly, leaning down to rest his forehead against hers. “I’d still help you. With or without my reward.”

A content hum came from Kagome, her eyes falling shut under his close touch. “I know you would.”

A blanket of silence enveloped over the both of them as they stood close together like that. Despite having returned to this era several weeks ago, the couple was still inseparable and could barely keep their paws off of each other. Only this time it wasn’t out of lust or desperation or making up for lost time. It was them enjoying the moment of having each other in their lives. The scene was calm, peaceful and filled with undying love.

“You’re going to be an amazing miko, Kagome,” Inuyasha surprisingly was the one to break the silence, his eyes remaining closed as he kept holding her flush against him.

Cracking a blue eye open, Kagome looked up at him from where her head rested against his chest. “How do you know that.”

“You’ve always been good at helping people.”

“So are you,” she pointed out, reminding him silently of all the people he helped along their journey of the shikon no tama.

“With my sword. You help people without even trying to,” he told her honestly, his thumb moving back and forth across her back slowly.

“I think you do too,” the girl from the future added, pulling away just enough to be able to properly look him in the eye. “But really, thank you for helping me. I feel much better than I did earlier.”

“Like I said, no need to thank me. We’re a team so if you wanna be a miko I’m gonna do my fucking best to make sure you are the best miko you can be.

Although his words were few and blunt, they warmed her down to her toes, making her feel lighter than air. “The best team there is.”

“You’re fucking right we are.”

[kellye287619-blog]

Ambience Blocks Several Little Stony Asteroids. (Protective Blanket).

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