The Grammar of Rock Singers and Dictators

I once asked a friend to translate Van Halen's Standing on Top of the World into Japanese, so I could sing it at a karaoke bar in Japantown, San Francisco. My friend said, "I don't know if you can really translate it." Glance briefly over the lyrics and you may understand her complaint:

Hey, baby, woo
I know you believe in me, that's all I ever need
No no, nothin's gonna stop it
Nothin' will discourage me, oh, no

Hey baby, uh, it's the only way out
Oh, little darlin'
Now come on, what's it all about?

Oh, I know you wanna touch
I got to have a little taste
I don't wanna sink my teeth in that fine piece of real estate, yeah

Hey baby, woo! make it nice 'n sweet, oh
Oh, little darlin'
Let's take a walk down easy street


If you're using the term for infant for "baby", or literally translating "I got to have a little taste", or goodness forbid actually trying to understand the meaning and direction of each phrase, you're probably not going to translate the important component of the song. Another friend once asked in frustration about this song, "What is this even about? This song is about nothing. It's just Sammy Hagar selling his personality."

It's becoming increasingly clear that the actual propositional content of human utterances is often secondary to other purposes those utterances may have - particularly, emotional or tribal afiliation purposes. This goes double for beliefs which are professed explicitly for tribal loyalty signaling. When your team wins an upset, and you hold up one index finger as you scream triumphantly into the camera, everyone (including you) knows that your team really isn't number one. Although "beliefs" are often thought of as propositional attitudes, the important part of these team cheers is not the actionable, semantic, propositional content. It's the visceral and emotional loyalty signals it sends. Sometimes, where the stakes aren't so high (as at a football game) you can jokingly point out to your friend that no, we're not really #1, and he'll say "I know, but you know what I mean. Don't ruin the moment." However, in more serious settings, you cannot directly address the emptiness of dogmatic statements ("God is great", "Hail Mary full of grace", and "From each according to ability...", etc.) without giving away the game - so people sometimes get confused, and start to take all their own utterances literally. More interesting perhaps are the gyrations people go through to avoid acting on things that they absolutely insist they believe - and indeed, most people are able to say these team cheers without thinking too much about them or why they don't seem to be able to meaningfully affect their actions in concrete ways.

Donald Trump is difficult to translate, and has frustrated translators the world over with his incoherent stream of narcissistic consciousness. A recent article points out that in fact translators have had this same difficulty with other twentieth century demagogues. Whether this is clever manipulation of crowds or merely the result of impoverished minds, I won't speculate. The important point is that somehow, they communicate something, even if it's semantically jumbled propositionally empty territorial barking. We can think of this as finally boiling off the pesky, pin-down-able, commitment-laden propositions from language and leaving behind a distilled tribal chant, empty of formal meaning but chock full of visceral power. Trying to translate Donald Trump or Van Halen lyrics exposes the vacuum of actual content in both cases, without bringing along the emotional tribal-identity impact that is really the only thing there. Consequently, those who look for inaccuracies and broken promises in Trump's words hoping to finally wake up his supporters are, unfortunately, playing checkers against a wrestling team.

The Effectiveness of States over Time, Measured by Language Death

On his Facebook page for Fooled by Randomness, Nicholas Nassim Taleb advances a theory that the rapid expansion of Islam (and Arabic-speakers) in North Africa in the seventh century was aided by a remnant population of Punic (Phoenician) speakers, whose language and culture would be more similar to Arabs than to their other neighbors. This, despite the fact that Carthage had been erased by the Romans in the second century BC, 800 years before; literally delenda, in the words of Scipio Aemilianus. Taleb says:

Many Greek Cypriots still speak the language called "Cypriot Maronite Arabic", that is, 12 centuries after their settlement and integration in the Greek side of the Island. Languages are stickier than we think (People tend to associate languages with states, when the correlation was low before 1917: around the Mediterranean, particularly in Asia Minor, languages had no link to the rule (Armenians spent thousands of years in the area between Cilicia to Aleppo, way past the lifetime of some "Armenian State";etc.).

There's more at the link, where I left a comment that I've expanded into this post. His argument is certainly an interesting parallel to the theory that Hellenistic Alexander unknowingly paved the way in the Near East for early Christianty. But what's really interesting about this is his observation that before the 20th century, state vs language correlation was very low. Something changed to allow states to become more effective at assimilating minorities, linguistic or otherwise, forcibly or otherwise. What was it?

For one thing, authoritarian states prior to the modern era didn't favor the development of patriotism. Why did it matter to autocrats if peasants liked being French or Chinese?   The autocrats and peasants were in different worlds, and the illiterate peasants would spend their entire lives within ten miles of where they were born all their lives, knowing the same hundred people.  In the same way, isolation of rulers from ruled as well as the fact that states didn't really transform the ruled's lives economically or socially, meant that languages and culture persist, despite swapping out rulers that look or talk differently.   Sure, today Spanish has a hard jota and some al- prefices, but that's not much to show for 750 years of Moorish occupation. And how many Mongol words are there in modern Russian? Hardly any, despite 250 years of rule.


Carthage. Ironically, the tourists walking around the ruins are actually walking around the re-built Disneyland-Carthage replacing the one leveled by the Romans - then re-built by the Romans, ironically in part for Roman tourists.

That is not how it works today.  To put it bluntly, Yiddish has largely disappeared from Europe, for obvious reasons.  Why were the Nazis so much faster than than the Moors and the Mongols?  What changed is that in the 20th century, states starting putting in place the tools of the industrial age; not just weapons, but systematic organization and instruction. In the U.S., Native American children were shipped to Catholic schools that methodically removed their native languages from them (this idea in broad outline dates to Jefferson, who like Luther ministering to the Jews, found his disappointment in Indian disinterest in cultural conversion turn to full-on anger). Mass exterminations began, sometimes actually triggered by a spasmodic lurch toward modernity by a centralized authority, as in Turkey and Cambodia, although the latter didn't "disappear" an ethnic minority, but rather a socioeconomic class. Today the Chinese government is quite deliberately overrunning Tibetans and Uighurs with Han families. The power of the state has become much more transformative.  If you're American, ask how many conversations in native languages you've ever heard.  Just over four centuries ago those are the only languages you would have heard.

Whether Taleb's thesis about Punic-speakers' facilitation of Islam is correct, his observation about the relative persistence of culture in the ancient and modern worlds is well-taken. The effectiveness of states - that is, the amplification of ruling classes' ambitions that the technology of modern statehood allows - is not all positive. The Romans may have erased Cartharge but they didn't have the technology or ideas that allowed them to erase their culture. But the social engineers reporting today to Beijing that Lhasa delenda est don't need to signify their subtle conquest with a plow over the city's fallen walls, because success is clear in the measurable dilution of Tibetan culture with modern tools.

Cultures Cannot Suffer

Cultures cannot suffer. Therefore it is senseless and even harmful to talk about actions that result in harm to or destruction of cultures as immoral. This places a higher value on protecting perceived qualities of an inanimate entity than on preventing the suffering of conscious human beings. There is and can be no innate tragedy in the death of a culture or language apart from the suffering it causes to individual human beings.

The suffering caused by a culture's death or change can happen for various reasons. At the most basic level, adult humans don't appreciate the disruption involved with learning new social norms; it's just a pain. But there are additional and unnecessary causes of suffering that are built into the values of some cultures: namely, an explicit and conscious value that preserving the culture is itself innately good; and that if the culture were to change or disappear, it would be a moral disaster.

What prompted this post was Katja Grace's discussion regarding deliberately bringing up children to speak minority languages, thereby limiting their social contact with the rest of the world, "Agreeable Ways to Disable Your Children". (There are links to far more controversial proposals that have actually occurred in the real world.) By teaching children to be monolingual in an obscure language within a broader nation-state, parents are preserving their language, but limiting (disabling?) their children. Humans do indeed sometimes keep their children isolated in ingroups and one of the best insulation methods is by teaching them only the ingroup's language. This is one example where a moral value about preserving culture is inconsistent with preventing individual suffering. The language doesn't care that you preserved it; if you force yourself to perpetuate, you're just making it harder on yourself, and your children.

There is a more general argument to be made here, that more conservative, less open cultures which most strongly harbor an explicit value of preserving themselves for their own sake are doing something similar to their members by limiting them and making them suffer unnecessarily.

To make this slightly more concrete, imagine two cultures which differ in cultural conservatism. Culture A is a mercantile civilization that is frequently changed by its people's contact with foreign lands; they shrug and adopt the food and ideas of the people they meet. Culture B on the other side of the river is more conservative, with an explicit and conscious moral sense that their culture is intrinsically valuable, and that if it were ever lost, it would be the end of the world. Culture B constantly fights the advance of the new and its people wring their hands and gnash their teeth at the strange food and ideas polluting the next generation. In the end the material conditions of both places are the same, but the people in Culture B have suffered more, and unnecessarily. (If nation-states are cultures, then I would put the U.S. in Culture A's category. We've changed far more than we realize due to contact with other cultures, and I expect in 50-100 years we'll be, for example, far more Asian than we are now. And because we're an A-Culture, it fortunately won't bother us that much.)

On the other hand, culture is not just noise; cultural values can be better or worse in their impact on material well-being, so there is potentially still bad news in culture change beyond just the degree to which the culture causes its members to consciously decry change. But again the change or loss of these values must be evaluated only with regard to the effect on individual humans. It's tempting to object that we're still assuming values here in order to evaluate their worth. But there is a baseline that exists independent of acculturation, and it's composed of animal essentials - food, shelter, sex, and status.

[Added later: The Wall Street Journal publishes this article about an Eyak language preservation enthusiast. To put it bluntly: what is the value of this work, to Eyak-descendants or anyone else? Thanks to Thurston for the pointer.]

Kublai Khan Followed One of My Suggestions

Earlier I'd proposed that it would be of benefit to the whole world if every written language adopted a modified Roman alphabet for its writing system, particularly kanji-based and Arabic scripts. The idea is not so much to make everybody write using the Roman alphabet, but to use any phonetic writing system, of which alphabets are the most compressed and therefore the easiest to learn. In fact in one country with an Arabic-script language this already happened - Turkey - though I don't know if anyone has ever calculated the economic benefits to Turkey of this change. (It's been recently discussed with the Turkish government by the Kazakh government, another Turkic-language nation that seems to be considering such a change.)

As it turns out this has been tried for what is now the single biggest block of people using non-Roman characters. Interestingly it was centrally imposed by the rulers of China, but not by the Han. Kublai Khan (a Mongol) commissioned a writing system from a Tibetan officer in his empire, an orthography for all languages contained in China during the Yuan Dynasty. And indeed, it achieved some level of use - oddly, persevering longest as a liturgical orthography - but the Ming Dynasty rejected it, and it disappeared from history.

China Understands Cultural Coordination Games

Coordination games occur not just with media and exchange formats but with culture. Language and values are subject to the principles of coordination games as well, and when equilibria shift in coordination games, they do so fast - no one wants to be stuck with all their videos on Betamax, and outcomes like PC vs Mac where more than one hangs on are rare.

So it's interesting to read about how the Chinese government clearly understands this and is funding Mandarin classes in the U.S. I know it's not just in Los Angeles because they're also funding classes in Eastern Pennsylvania.

It's a good idea to learn Mandarin (I plan to develop basic proficiency in the next few years) but I don't know what kinds of controls on course content there will be; since we have little Federal oversight of high school education in the U.S. and chronically broke schools, thinking as a cynical CCP official, this is an excellent Achilles heel. It will be interesting to see if social conservatives become less resistant to Federal school oversight as this educational effort becomes better-known.