Language is a badge of tribal membership
I dig linguistics, and I dig HBD, so how do you join them both? I've had this idea for some time now, but I hadn't written about it lest some guy stole it and wrote a book before I did.
It seems I'll have to give up on that, as science is fast catching up with my awesome blog (see, I just pulled a Half Sigma here). Razib Khan quotes a recent study in Northern Australia that documents how some Abo kids came up with a new language just for the kicks. It fast became cool, and now the young kids of the tribe have a different language from their elders. As it looks it's a fully new language, with some grammar changes too, not just a bunch of jargon to fool their parents so they can avoid being eaten. A smart guy in Razib's Twitter also linked to an experimental study where they put people to compete in a game, and prompted to develop their own secret speech, which they did.
When you ask a layman they'll tell you that languages are to communicate. But that's patently false, if we wanted to optimize communication we'd all speak the same language. And languages wouldn't change over time. What the common theory is lacking is just a simple modifier. Languages are to communicate within the group. In fact this little modifier explains most of the mysteries of human psychology. Happiness correlates with income within the group. People are naturally cooperative within the group. Take the modifier away and you get the Cathedral.
Many academic theories about language posit that language evolve to aid better coordination, say for hunters. You go left, I go right, I throw the first spear, etc. Chimps seem to be able to coordinate without speaking, but it sounds reasonable that talking does help coordinate better. But if the idea is to be able to coordinate hunters, then why are men worse at language than women? Women do 70% of the talking, and it's mostly inane gossip. It has extremely little information density. Woman conversation is most of the time a status confirmation task, all they do is say get a group, say something and listen carefully to the tone of voice of all the participants, to check what everyone thinks of each other. If the mother hen suddenly is rude to you, well you know you're in trouble. You better find ways to raise your status or undermine hers. I taught a girlfriend that all her speech was an unconscious status confirmation task, and that she should stop caring as she will always be high status in my eyes. She never nagged me again.
For all I know language did start as a way for men to coordinate hunts better, but over time it's obvious that it evolution found other uses for it. Language itself is a big, a huge shibboleth, a simple way of knowing which tribe people belong to. Babies stop telling apart sounds not used in their native language by 10 months, before they even start talking themselves. And the ability to properly learn new phonemes dies permanently after age 10. With years of effort you can learn to communicate in a foreign language, but your accent will always give you away. And that's being lucky, most people just don't have the capability. And of those who do, a big majority are women, whose tribal membership is always tenuous. After all they never knew when they would be exchanged to a different tribe, or kidnapped and taken away.
A big puzzle of linguistics has always been the relationship between languages. Why are some language families so big, and others so small. One big language family extends from Ireland to Bengal. Yet dozens of different languages of 4 unrelated language families linger in close proximity in Southwest China. 
, with hundreds of languages of a dozen families. And those in the know say that most family groupings are very suspect.
Why don't the Papuans get their shit together and talk the same language? Because they don't want to. For thousands of years they have had no need of talking with the neighboring tribe. The neighbors were there to raid, kill, and occasional cannibalistic feast. Austronesian languages are famously extensive, from Hawaii to Madagascar. Yet the Philippines or Borneo are a patchwork of small tribal languages which are not intelligible by the nearby villages. It surely has something to do with the fact that every year, the able bodied males of a given village would raid the neighboring tribe, cut their heads off and bring them home as a trophy.
Farming changed the normal dynamics of tribal speech, with cooperation forced top down to vast masses of people engaged in farming and trading. First you had tens of thousands of people speaking the same language. Then millions. But massive, empire-wide koinés are tied to their empires, and always die and fragment. Ancient Greek died, Latin fragmented, as did Tang Chinese. The Middle Ages brought regional dialects, mostly sharing local market areas, the Enlightenment chose one dialect and artificially transformed it in the national tongue.
The ideology behind national tongues, nationalism, is dead, but national tongues are still around. Of course they are far too useful, and they are too strongly linked to the nation states who created them. But in the same way that the nation state is slowly losing relevance, so national languages are fading too. 50 years ago you would never have listened a regional accent on national TV, today the BBC makes a point of casting Scottish scientists for their documentaries. Italian dialects are making a comeback. Even in Japan a big part of movies are voiced in regional dialects, some quite obscure. All while every country on earth is putting ever more resources into English education.
If languages were to communicate, we would have an English speaking world in no time. Instead what we will have is a global English speaking elite, lording over masses speaking bad English to their masters, and revived regional dialects to themselves. Given Google Translate and PRISM, it wouldn't surprise me if vernacular writing dies out, with most speech being done in untranslatable dialect, and writing done in English. A massive Hong Kong style diglossia. It might be the only feasible resistance against what's coming.
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Zimmerman went to sleep one day and woke up to find out he's a giant white cockroach.A.S.
Being white is a necessary but not sufficient condition for nationalism.
Nationalism has shown to be unable to survive state disapproval.
Nothing survives state disapproval that the state disapproves of. I'm working on that.
False. See: heroin, encryption, gold, religion and "unconscious racism". Plenty of things survive state disapproval. Nationalism is not one of them. It can only exist as a dominant ideology, never a subversive ideology without some major state power behind it.
Not to mention that nationalism has historically stood towards genuine organic and historical communities, identities, traditions, and institutions in a relation very similar to that in which the liberal globalism nowadays stands towards any particular identities (nationalist or otherwise).
Nationalism has been shown to be unable to survive *popular* disapproval after two hugely destructive world wars. When reality shows the alternative to be much, much worse then popular opinion will shift back - it already would have if the media didn't censor the news. The only question is whether it will be too late or not.
I find the very concept of popular disapproval very hard to believe. If you pushed the megaphones hard enough you could have made the people enlist for WW3 in 1950.
Sure, it wasn't universal but there was a distinct anti-nationalist reaction among significant chunks of the white population after WWI which merged with more specifically racial aspects after WWII. The promoters of the EU use this "nationalism is dangerous" line all the time and it works because it's true - nationalism is so dangerous because nationalism creates immense amounts of synergy. I don't think that anti-nationalist reaction caused what has happened since i think it provided the seed-bed for the cultural marxists and globalists to do their thing - like a cut in the skin.
It is true, but it works because they understand Goebbels, not because it's true. You're describing how the elite came to be anti-nationalist, not the people. The people just follow. FWIW there's plenty of rabid, irredentist nationalism in Europe, but today it's restricted to regionalist movements. Padania, Catalonia, etc. Somehow the people there didn't get the memo that nationalism is dangerous.
"You’re describing how the elite came to be anti-nationalist, not the people. The people just follow." The gowth of the Communist party after WWI was part of the anti-nationalist reaction. "FWIW there’s plenty of rabid, irredentist nationalism in Europe, but today it’s restricted to regionalist movements. Padania, Catalonia, etc. Somehow the people there didn’t get the memo that nationalism is dangerous." There's plenty of irredentist nationalism in the larger states as well but it's more suppressed. Regional nationalism is more tolerated by the left-liberal hegemony because it is anti-nationalist on a larger scale i.e. they are less hostile to Breton nationalism than French nationalism because Breton nationalism undermines French nationalism so i'd say the only difference in regional nationalism is the balance between the forces, pro and con - which is also why some of the regional nationalisms are partly left-wing movements.
Surely Yugoslavia? Nationalism seemed alive and kicking by 1992.
Only to disolve themselves without a fight by joining the EU. Funny how that works.
Whites are a minority of the Trayvon Martin protestors and supporters. The majority of the protestors and supporters are black, with some Hispanics and whites. Whites overwhelmingly believe Zimmerman is innocent: http://newsone.com/2001237/trayvon-martin-zimmerman-guilty/
Aside from media elites and brainwashed status whoring urban SWPLs, white people have been much more reasonable than black people with regard to this story. After all, a jury of five white women and one hispanic had the courage to vote not guilty. Would Z be free if there had been five black women on the jury? His chances would be a whole lot worse. I can't find a recent poll, but the Gallup Poll from April 2012 showed that only 10 percent of whites saw Zimmerman as definitely guilty, while 51 percent of blacks saw him as definitely guilty. An additional 20% of both racial groups said that he was "probably guilty". This poll was conducted during the media hype but before the trial where it became apparent that the state had no case and that Z could not reasonably be found guilty. What would those numbers be today? Let's hope they conduct a follow up poll. My impression is that white attitudes would remain vastly, vastly more reasonable than black attitudes on this issue. My impression is that even a significant percentage of white democrats either know what is going on or could be made to understand what is going on, if they were forced to actually watch the trial. If anything this case seems to highlight the need for separation from black people. At this point I don't think that I could get fair justice from a black jury
p.s. Rachel Jeantel exists.
And that is just about all that she does, exist.
That's not saying much, is it?
The fact that you just noticed this after living some decades in this earth says a lot.
I was aware of it before, but I live far away from black people and I try not to think about them. It wasn't a dawning realization that I'd never get a fair trial, but a horrifying reminder that I'd never get a fair trial.
Observe that each sign is supposedly of a different organization, but all signs were obviously made by the same equipment and made in the same style, thus in fact made by a single artist. This is characteristic of organized entryism and astroturf - each of those organizations will be found to have the same postal address, probably the Justice Department, and these whites are probably direct full time employees of the organizations located at that address. In short. Totally Fake. The state speaks, and calls itself the people.
No justice, no peace! -USG
If this is not the foretelling of the West, I don't know what is. Fast forward thirty years, Our laws in practice will follows the balkanization of the country. The major tribes will draw up boundaries that the others may not cross. Just like they did in Prison. The government will be subverted by those who has the most numbers working for it, the same people who survive only due to transfer of payment from the productive to the leech. The media subverts the will of the people to tell the narrative that the ones in charge wanted to tell. The government, using the unlimited tax payer money, subverts the will of the people by infiltrating the people, no doubt using the mechanisms laid out by our esteemed Mr. Snowden. By the time this whole thing runs it course, we are talking about Brazil will nuclear weapons and the biggest military in the world. I am not a religious person at all, but I pray for my kids and the world that they will live in.
Balkanization would be an improvement. The government won't allow it though. They'll force you to mingle and when crime happens they will blame and prosecute the victim. Brazilians are quite segregated regionally. That's why it kinda works.
When I say balkanization, I wasn't just referring to physical boundaries. In the office, in public places, you treat one group of people very different from the other. The physical boundaries also need not be contiguous. e.g., In the prosperous Bay Area, you have East Palo Alto and Oakland, both fairly desirable locations that are currently cesspools. If you live in these two areas, you will follow different rules compared to the rest of the Bay Area. Diddo New Orleans and Detroit. My wife and I went to Watts in L.A. a few years back. After a full ten years of the L.A. riot, the whole neighborhood still has many boarded up store fronts. After the Koreans left, no one wanted to go in there to set up shops anymore.
The problem is demographics. The Serbians in Kosovo surely were annoyed when the first Albanians moved in, but then again they still had their own neighborhoods. Fast forward 2008...
Agreed. Demographics is why I said things will look much worse in thirty years.
The Serbians would have won without USG intervention.
And whites would win in the US without USG intervention against them. Alas...
White co-operation is required for USG to be effective.
Balkanization of the language happened in the old days because travel was limited. Language is dynamic. Given the same starting point, and if the groups are sufficiently isolated, different accents, dialects and eventually different but related languages will evolve. U.S. underwent a consolidation of accents since the advent of TV. Dan Rather did more to standardize accent then just about all the government edicts. While there are backlashes as you pointed out, I am not sure as a whole for China and U.S. they are going the way of further balkanization as you said. Certain groups who wanted to did so. Ebonics is an example, but by large, different groups like the Mexicans coming to the states and adopt the standard language as their own.
Yet most people in Hong Kong still can't speak proper English or Mandarin.
While language evolves over longer periods of time, in the short run it is resistant to change. What is more, the direction and speed of the change is need based. Surely inside China, you see the moderation of the local dialects in favor of the standard mandarin. In Hong Kong, the will of the people do want a separation as they feel that they are not a part of the main land for a long time. I think it could go both ways but the big trend I see is integration.
Integration only happens under massive, strenuous state coercion. When China goes postmodern like everyone else, dialects will spring back again.
"Balkanization of the language happened in the old days because travel was limited." Pre-immigration, working class accents in London changed (slightly) every mile or so. It was a group identity thing.
You'd have to go back to the Greeks (or something) to find a point made this well. Awesome.
Despite the opening sentence, you haven't joined linguistics with HBD in any way with this discussion. As far as I know, nobody has yet discovered a case where kids of some particular ancestry would be unable to acquire a given language as perfect native speakers. So linguistic identity merely proves that you grew up in tribe, not shared ancestry.
I'm not claiming that. HBD is not only about group differences. And I still think a Papuan kid might have trouble acquiring proper English.
I can't support white supremacy because it's the white elites that are foisting Jews and blacks on middle and lower class whites. The elites need to be removed from power, not converted.
Of course, given the unintelligibility of the concept of meaning (in the pomo-sense I'm afraid), words can only stand in for a chain of references, ending with an X to which both speaker and hearer must have some form of non-verbal access (whether it be through memory, personal or collective, sensory perception or something else). Given that, the phenomenon at the end of the chain is likely to be something tribal, or at least local. Linguistics is not that enigmatic for those who never bought the psychotic (judaic) chomskyan idea of universal grammar. Why does some intangible concept always have to be dragged into it? Why this hysterical craving for the invisible? Neither Wittgenstein, nor Derrida nor, for that matter, Dan Everett can come as a real shock to someone who has a sober, hands-on view of language. In essence, it's clever monkeys making sound (and later ink blots).
The best explanation of language I've seen invokes "HBD". It is in "The Mating Mind" by Geoffrey Miller, which is one of the best books I've read and superior to the oft-compared "The Red Queen". Along with other exceptional human traits, Miller explains language as a sexually selected adaptation. Like the peacock's tail, male humans' verbal ability evolved at least in part as a survival handicap to impress the opposite sex. An item of evidence in favour of this hypothesis is that all natural languages have a vocabulary far in excess of utilitarian necessity. "Basic English", which has just 850 words, is only slightly less efficient than the full 60,000 word English vocabulary. Another interesting hypothesis is due to Robin Dunbar; he suggests that language evolved because it's an efficient form of grooming in humanity's relatively large social groups. Both these explanations probably have merit. Geoffrey Miller concludes: "For males, verbal self-advertisement appears to be a fairly constant function of speech, while for females, it may be an occasional function, more limited to one-on-one conversations with desired mates. A complete theory of the evolution of language will probably have to combine sexual selection and social selection, integrating the gossip-as-courtship theory with the gossip-as-grooming theory."
Here is Miller's discussion, in terms of his sexual selection hypothesis: "Most tests of human verbal abilities are tests of language comprehension, not tests of language production. Given a strict male-display, female-choice mating system, we should expect female superiority in language comprehension and male superiority in language production. For example, females should recognize more words, but males should use a larger proportion of their vocabulary in courtship, biasing their speech towards rarer, more exotic words. In this simple picture, more women might understand what "azure" really means (so they can accurately judge male word use), but more men might actually speak the word "azure" in conversation (even if they think it means vermilion). Standard vocabulary tests measure only comprehension of word meaning, not the ability to produce impressive synonyms during courtship. Reading comprehension questions are more common than creative writing tests. Women are faster readers and buy more books, but most books are written by men." The relationship between language, tribal interactions and politics is a separate matter that takes us outside HBD. However, I criticised "tribalism" as a frame of analysis here. In short, what I've learned about tribes doesn't support the popular notion that various factional phenomena are "tribal". This word lacks explanatory power. I could add to that essay an insight from Miller, which in that in the Paleolithic era, instead of tribes of nuclear families, an alternative depiction of human social organisation is that women were self-sufficient gatherers, and men hunted animals mainly to impress women. Leks of young men would attempt to monopolise groups of women, and male instincts related to this type of sexually homogeneous faction, which one would not call a tribe, may contribute in an important (but incomplete) way to phenomena that are called "tribal".
I have to say that I find sexual selection theories quite unconvincing in general. And very circular. Males do something because women like it. But why would they like it? They didn't like it for millions of years. Nobody thought it important. Women on average speak more and have better vocabularies. I am very skeptical that most mating by primitive people is done through verbal seduction, but if you have some data I'll be glad. The best seducers I know don't have better vocabularies than I do, nor than the women they seduce. I mean, something is surely wrong when you conclude that men hunt animals to impress women. Surely men hunt animals to eat meat which is the most nutritious food on earth. That women are impressed is just a byproduct of their wanting to eat it. As for "tribal", shibboleths are tribal. The ability to pronounce the word depends on the tribe you belong to. If that's not a useful concept you can tell the Ephraimites.
Verbal ability is really, really handy for manipulating the people around you, getting them to do stuff for you, tricking them into accepting moderately lopsided deals, convincing them that you have high status and convincing them that they don't want to kill you when they do figure out that they've gotten a bum deal. It still works rather well today. Humans are cooperative animals, but some people profit from that cooperation a lot more than others. All else being equal, those people would have had higher reproductive fitness, up until birth control changed everything. Women have better verbal skills because they are / were more dependent on manipulating the people around them.
That (if you can't count on your muscles to elbow your way through the hardships of life, you'll reply on deception more), but also women have a more emotional mind and, at least till short ago, verbal language was the vehicle of expression for emotions. Conversely, men developed an higher general intelligence because their superior physical strength put them in front of more problems requiring to be solved.
Language evolved among small populations, in non-cosmopolitan environments where the coefficients of relatedness are high enough for altruism to arise and for communication to take place. The evolution of communication -- as opposed to manipulation -- is very much akin to the evolution of altruism. It is subject to the same exploits in a cosmopolitan environment. So manipulation via signaling taking on the appearance of communication is far more common in the present environment (of greater cosmopolitanism) than in the environment in which communication evolved. We're in an evolutionary arms race to defect faster than the other guy while maintaining keeping active his obsolete instincts to think communication is still viable. The end result of civilization is a bifurcation: 1) communication terminates as a genetic capacity and/or 2) communication takes a form similar to that in eusocial species (e.g. pheromone manipulation) even as civilization takes that form.
Zimmerman would appear to be no more white than the pResident.
As Dan Sperber points out, the function of language is to manipulate other peope's internal states. Clearly, over time, some of us have grown to be relatively immune to such manipulation. There will still be many who can be manipulated, of course. If those people do not know your mother tongue, they will not be very effective at manipulating you.
It's quite natural for someone from a cosmopolitan background like Dan Sperber to view that language is about manipulation. It's certainly the case that in more cosmopolitan environments, language will increasingly take on the character of manipulation, rather than communication. The inherent genetic costs and benefits of diverse environments inhibit communication, just as they inhibit altruism more generally, and favor manipulation and exploitation. But cosmopolitan environments are evolutionarily novel. Civilization and cities only 10,000 years old. The modern, extremely cosmopolitan environments have only arisen over the past century with modern transport and communication technologies. Language arose among much smaller, more homogeneous populations where the cost and benefits would have been much less skewed towards favoring manipulation over communication.
Do you consider WN to be undesirable, or unfeasible?
Unfeasible.
For what reasons? Nearly every non-white country is a racial nationalist country, from Israel to Japan. Racial nationalism is natural. Massive resistance and tricky obstacles to a movement doesn't mean they're insurmountable.
It is always a state led movement. Absent active state support nationalism just fizzles. Even Japanese nationalism. Take my word on it, I know.
The solution: supplant the state.
Good luck with that.
Perhaps I should just dance the minuet in my periwig, abhor the masses, and read mouldering books of Victorian political theory. Meanwhile, the left marches on.
You know, vitalism and hero worship are also old as sin. Also not very effective. If you have a good idea which is not "be awesome" I'm all ears.
Work towards becoming rich and powerful. Go find a skill that is in demand, and become very good at it. Network with like minded people (and those who aren't, if they're useful towards the end goal). Read Machiavelli (who advises the prince to have a role model - is that hero worship?) and Thucydides.
I'll be the first to ask for money if you become rich and powerful. かお
> But if the idea is to be able to coordinate hunters, then why are men worse at language than women? Women do 70% of the talking, and it’s mostly inane gossip. It has extremely little information density. Woman conversation is most of the time a status confirmation task, all they do is say get a group, say something and listen carefully to the tone of voice of all the participants, to check what everyone thinks of each other. Women talking more is not women being better at language. You probably don't really think that since you immediately follow it up saying women talks are bad for expressing information (or in some case, incapable of expressing information) and serve different purposes.
[…] post was inspired by Spandrell’s nod toward “neoreactionary linguistics.” Spandrell’s basic (and correct) point is that language is primarily a way to signal in-group […]
I'd wager that part of the reason the Chinese languages diverged so much in spite of the long literary tradition is because Chinese characters aren't tied to phonetics at all.
I wouldn't say "at all". There was this research by Zhao Yuanren on villages where 破绽 was read as po-zhan and others as po-ding.
Fair enough, I exaggerated there. I asked my mother why this discrepancy could be, since I'm illiterate in Chinese. Apparently it's a misreading, as ding4 (定) is a similar character to zhan4 (绽), except without the radical. Perhaps that's the source of confusion?
Exactly. Which means that the phonetic information in the character won over the oral transmission. And that's for a very basic word which means a split seam. Given the huge amount of barbarians and their languages that the Chinese had to assimilate, it's a wonder that Chinese dialects are as similar as they are. Cantonese character readings are almost perfectly consistent with Mandarin once you remember a set of rules. The languages are way closer than the genotype.
Fascinating. Though Chinese characters are largely not phonological, it seems to me that the strong tradition of rime dictionaries (such as Qieyun) helped stabilise varieties of spoken Chinese and resisted huge changes. It's also noteworthy that, to my knowledge, there have historically been no massive external migrations into areas already established as Chinese.
I forgot to mention that various southbound internal migrations probably helped, too.
90% of characters are 形声, and even though some are misleading like the po-zhan example above, most are a good guide to how a certain word should be pronounced. I guess in each village there was always some literate elder who people could ask when necessary. Southbound emigration was almost invariably triggered by barbarian invasions in the northern plains. Invaders were never enough to replace the locals, but it's recorded on history that they were there for centuries, and they surely left their mark in the local dialects. People look different the further north you go; the purest Henan people can be quite dark in the villages.
I speak decent German, and during a recent trip to Germany, I got into a conversation with a couple Swiss girls who were also on vacation. Although we conducted the entire conversation in Hochdeutsch (Standard German), I was surprised to hear them tell me that Hochdeutsch was not their second language, but their third. The Swiss German dialect was of course their first language and what came the most natural to them, but they both admitted that English came far more easily and naturally to them than Standard German. Although they needed Hochdeutsch to communicate with Germans and Austrians, as well as to understand broadcast media and written German (as Swiss German is not generally used for writing, outside of chatspeak), the importance of English obviously superseded that to the point that it became easier to use than the national language of their northern neighbors, in spite the fact that Hochdeutsch is linguistically far closer related to the Swiss German dialect than English is.
Interesting anecdote. I wonder how good was their English really is. It's one thing for them to think of English as their second language, a different thing that their English is actually better than their Hochdeutsch. Even if they're watching CNN every waking hour, their exposure to Hochdeustch surely is 50x bigger than to English.
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The ideology behind national tongues, nationalism, is dead, but national tongues are still around. Is that ideology as gone as you say? It may be dead in dead nations, nations whose majority ethnicity culture is expiring. Why extend this to the whole world. http://www.vdare.com/articles/the-utter-normality-of-ethnonationalism-except-for-whites "It might be the only feasible resistance against what’s coming." ? How is your crystal ball?