Politeness theory

I’m sure I’ve answered this here already.

Positive politeness strategies are culturally approved ways of interacting with other people, that involve doing good things for them. They concentrate on eliminating distance between people.

Negative politeness strategies are culturally approved ways of interacting with other people, that involve not doing bad things to them. They concentrate on preserving distance between people.

Positive politeness strategies include:

• Being smiley and friendly
• Sharing things with people, without asking permission
• Doing people favours
• Speaking to people in a familiar tone
• Joking and bantering with randoms

Negative politeness strategies include:

• Having a neutral expression in public
• Using lots of “please” and “if you don’t mind” and “thank you”
• Not imposing on people
• Speaking to people in a respectful tone
• Keeping the hell out of randoms’ faces

Cultures have preferences for positive or negative politeness strategies. And cultures take the wrong politeness strategies very badly.

I’m sure you’ve recognised a stereotype or two in one column or the other; maybe even in both.

I understood the words and the phrases, but I had to be edified by some online links, and I’ve got an advantage in that I know why Jakobson said it the way he did.

• Roman Jakobson
• Metaphor Project
• Jacobson – Metaphor and Metonomy

Exec summary: there is one takeaway message for poets:

FORM MATTERS

The rest is of concern to linguists.

Selection and Combination

In structuralist linguistics, there are two structural mechanisms underlying how language works.

The syntagmatic relationship is about how words and phrases are combined to produce larger meanings. It’s syntax.

The paradigmatic relationship is about which words can be used in the slots of sentences. It’s the relationship between all nouns, or all verbs, or all adjectives. It’s lexicon.

Meaning in structural linguistics is tied up the paradigmatic relationship. Once you’ve worked out which words do the same syntactic job (nouns, verbs, pronouns), you can focus on the meaning differences between those words. In fact, the meaning of those words is defined by the available options in the paradigmatic relationship: dog = not a cat; me = not you.

That focusing on the meaning differences within an equivalence class (words doing the same job in a sentence) is the principle of equivalence.

Functions of language

Jakobson’s enduring contribution to linguistics is identifying the core functions of language. Communication is not the only function. Two functions that Jakobson pointed out, that needed pointing out, were the phatic function (keeping the channel open: “hello”, “how are you”, “ok?”), and the poetic function.

The poetic function is not just poetry: in fact, it’s not even just literature. A lot of humour is covered by the poetic function.

But the important thing about the poetic function is, that the form you use is a big part of the point of what you’re saying. It’s not just about the meaning of the words; it also about the fact that the words have metre, or rhyme, or punning similarities, or similar sounds. And so on.

The two axes

Remember: in structural linguistics, meaning is tied up with the choices of words: the paradigmatic relation. (The axis of selection.) If you use a choice of a different word, you’re expressing a different meaning. While there is also a component of meaning in the syntagmatic relation (how you put sentences together), it’s not felt to be as interesting: we’ve got nouns, we’ve got verbs, there’s a limited way of putting them together. (Remember, this is pre-Chomsky.)

Jakobson is a structuralist, and he wants to say that the poetic function of language cares about language form. So he says it in structuralist terms: We’ve been telling you that meaning is all about the axis of selection. But in poetic language, the syntagmatic relation (the axis of combination) is also a critical component of the meaning. The fact that you’ve put together words that rhyme, or that words that form a metre, or words that echo each other is just as important in the overall meaning as your initial choice of words (the strict meaning you intended to convey as a plain text communication).

We saw the principle of equivalence is how you work out the meaning of words: me = not you, dog = not cat. Different metres have different meanings too. So do different rhyming schemes. So there is a principle of equivalence at work in poetic structures as well. But it is a principle of equivalence that works on how words are put together, rather than just choices of words. So poetic language projects the principle of equivalence, from the axis of selection, to the axis of combination.

O RLY?

I have to say that, even without switching on Chomskian understandings of language, this is a specious way of thinking about language: different sentence structures also generate different meanings out of the combination of meaningful words, and there’s nothing intrinsically poetic about that. Semantics is propositional, not just lexical, and rhetorical, not just propositional.

But structuralist linguistics was the last time literature scholars and linguists were on speaking terms. So it was an important message for literature scholars to take in from structuralist linguistics, that poetic language is all about how you put words together, and that how you put words together separates poetic language from normal language.

Eutychius Kaimakkamis’ is the most complete answer; I’ll only add:

• The status of Standard Greek vs Cypriot Greek is a diglossia, and it’s a much more clear-cut instance of diglossia than what was going on in Greece in the 20th century.
• Cypriot Turkish (Cypriot Turkish, Kıbrıslıca) has some clear typological affinities with Cypriot Greek. For instance, they share VSO, as opposed to Standard Turkish’s SOV and Standard Greek’s SVO.
• According to Ibn Hazm again, and Cypriot Arabic , Cypriot Arabic is even harder to understand for a speaker of Levantine Arabic than Nigerian Arabic: “It’s pretty difficult to even read, perhaps on par with the basilect of some English-based creoles.” He thinks there is Aramaic influence there.
• The links in my 2009 blog article about Cypriot Arabic have expired; but the community is now using the Roman alphabet, with the main writer in the language (the local priest) reluctantly abandoning the Greek script.
• Leontios Machairas in his 15th century chronicle of Cyprus famously described the triglossia of his time: French, Syriac, and Greek. “And because in this world there are two natural masters, one temporal and the other spiritual, this little island had the patriarch of the great Antioch, before the Latins took it over. For it was useful to know universal Greek in order to send petitions to the king, and correct Syriac. And it was in this way that the children were taught until the Lusignans took the place, and since then we started learning French and have barbarised Greek as it is today, when we write both French and Greek so that no one in the world knows what we speak.”
• Romani languages are always left out, and until I popped over to Languages of Cyprus, I did not know about Kurbet language: a Para-Romani based on Cypriot Turkish.

Ethnologue lists 113 languages for Vanuatu, two extinct: Vanuatu

Vanuatu has the highest language density of any country on the planet: one language per 2,000 people.

When last I checked, Vanuatu was also the last frontier for a large number of undocumented or underdocumented languages. Ethnologue is compiled by SIL International, which coordinates missionary linguists. The SIL has done a lot of work in Papua New Guinea, and relatively few academic linguists have (although it is becoming a default destination for Australian linguists, now that they’ve run out of Aboriginal languages to document). But SIL missionaries have not been welcome in Vanuatu.

Originally Answered:

How does Quora combat duplicates of other questions and answers?

Dupes of answers: Quora does nothing to prevent us, and God preserve us from the day when it does. Bots unleashed to collapse answers left and right, muttering “this answer has three words in common with the next answer. Exterminate! Exterminate!”

Dupes of questions: Quora has conflated the search bar and the question bar, in the hope you’ll notice as you’re typing that similar questions have already been asked. Quora also displays similar questions in the sidebar, which triggers users to merge them. Both reasonable actions.

It has been de rigeur in Greece to take your shoes off when entering a house, as owner or guest. Indeed, Greek has borrowed the Turkish proverbial expression about it: to “hand someone their shoes” is to invite them to get the hell out of your house. (του ’δωσα τα παπούτσια στο χέρι/pabuçu eline vermek).

I will note that while it’s a norm I follow to this day as a householder, it’s not one I experienced as a guest in Greece: I don’t remember ever having to remove my shoes when a guest. In fact, it was only when I crashed at an uncle’s place for a few days that the spare slippers would surface.

Modern Greek:

Μια μπύρα [παρακαλώ] /mja ˈbira [parakaˈlo]/
“One beer [please]”

The “please” is really optional. In fact Greeks tend to get creeped out by such politeness. But as a foreigner you’d probably be expected to produce it.

Klingon:

DaH HIq HInob /ɖɑx xɪq xɪˈnob/
“Give me alcohol NOW”.

Any similarity of the word for alcohol and “hic!” is purely intentional.

Surely, there can be only one.

Ben Folds Five: Song For The Dumped

Quora’s answer to How do I share content from Quora?

It’s a tough one.

I know Klingon and not Elvish, like Brian Collins. I think I disagree with him: Tolkien gives slightly more opportunity.

• Elvish is a more complicated set of languages than the agglutinative Klingon.
• Elvish is much less well documented by Tolkien than Klingon is. That’s why people are very reluctant to use Elvish conversationally at all (and they put an asterisk next to the grammars done for the films). But that means you have to exercise a lot more linguistic and philological skill to get anything out of Elvish.
• Paramount only used Klingon for the Trek movies, and when they did, they asked the language inventor to do the job. TV Trek have either ignored Klingon, or used the “idiots with dictionaries” approach to language learning. (wIjjup for “my friend”. Where –wIj is a SUFFIX.) So even less chance of remuneration than for Elvish.

I think Elvish would be endlessly frustrating to work on, which is why I was never tempted. (That, and Tolkien’s mythology didn’t do anything for me.) But for that reason, it would be more of a mental challenge.