Migley and Taylor Petrey Discuss Nibley

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_Symmachus
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Re: Migley and Taylor Petrey Discuss Nibley

Post by _Symmachus »

Doctor CamNC4Me wrote:
Sun May 24, 2020 6:35 pm

“Pronouns are by their nature political, and history shows how culture and politics sometimes drive language change. Classic examples include the use of thee among Quakers and the history of you following the Norman invasion of England. It isn’t by accident that we no longer use ye and thou.”

For a layperson such as myself, would you mind pointing me to some good sources that might expand upon the quote above, or if you’re inclined would you mind hashing that bit out so I can better understand the politics of pronouns from a historical perspective, specifically ‘thee, you, ye, and thou”?
The ignorance in the quote is as abysmal as its rhetoric is tendentious.

But to the issues raised. The basic fact is that "you" is the objective form of the pronoun "ye," which is the plural form of the singular pronoun "thou" (its objective form is "thee"). What happened in English (and not only English: see Brazilian Portuguese), is that the plural objective form supplanted all of the forms, so that now we use "you" both as singular and plural, in both objective and subjective uses. It is the only pronoun with no grammatical variation (e.g. I > me, he > him, she > her, we > us, but you > you), although English morphology has been so reduced that I'm not sure it is all that meaningful. Why did this happen? A number of reasons, but politics is not one of them, despite the claim in the quote.

The passage you quote is misleading you:

1. There is nothing that makes pronouns "by their nature" political. Anything can be used for political ends—even surgical masks have taken on political significance at the moment—but people have to make them political. Using you vs. thou did not mark your political preferences in the 16th or 17th century, though it was something like class marker. It was a consequence of the social transformation of English society as whole, of which the political was one but by no means the most significant element: the rise of the middle class.

2. The assumption behind this quotation seems to be one that is pervasive in the social sciences and humanities, namely, that anything that has a social motivation is actually political because everything is ultimately reduced (in their minds) to politics and power. Everything is assumed to be a function of power. His pre-existing values are coloring his read of the evidence.

3. This interest in power (faith in power?), though unstated, perhaps explains the reference to the Norman Conquest, a brute exercise of power, to be sure, but one which has nothing to do with this issue and makes me think all of this is only half-remembered from his graduate seminar in the history of English. The pronouns "ye/you" and "thou/thee" are Early Modern English (1500s to 1700s). They are a continuation of parts of the Middle English pronoun system (1100s-1500, with various spellings), and the Old English pronoun system before it (pre-1100s). But the Norman invasion of England was in 1066, so centuries earlier than "ye/you" and "thou/thee" existed as such, and English never adopted any pronouns from Norman French at any stage, so I have no idea why he mentions this. It was during this period that northern varieties of English did borrow some pronouns from Old Norse, and by the 14th century you can find both the "pure" English pronouns "hie/hem/heora" and "they/them/their" in elite literature produced in the court of Riccardian court (e.g. Chaucer uses forms of both). This is because there was no uniform standard of the language, certainly nothing imposed through the politics of the ruling class.

4. He may be referring to the fact that the plural of the Middle English pronoun (which later became our "you") was used to address aristocrats by other aristocrats, which has parallels with French. This was really quite some time after the Norman conquest, though, and it has nothing to do with politics, because it was a pan-European phenomenon that still exists in the Romance languages, German, Russian, etc. There was no political decree saying "we will now use this pronoun..." It also had a long history behind it through the Latin that all of them considered a prestige language. In Latin, this usage began in the later Roman Empire. A social motivation behind a linguistic phenomenon is not the same as a political one. There are, actually, very few examples of politically-derived linguistic change, at least successful attempts. The ban on the old forms of address in Russian after 1917 is one example: gospodin and gospozha, "lord" and "lady," were outlawed in favor of grazhdanin and grazhdanka, "citizen" and "citizeness," though most people ended up using the Communist Party's tovarisch, "comrade." The former was a political change, but not the latter. It was a social convention.

5. What does he mean "it isn't by accident that we no longer use ye and thou"? It's not entirely clear why the shift happened, but it is clear that nobody imposed this through some linguistic policy. Politics is the negotiated exercise of power through policy, but there was no general language policy and never has been in the Anglosphere (even the USA doesn't have an official language to this day). Almost alone among European countries, England has never had a language academy to impose standards (or invent them). Certain views of certain grammarians prevailed for reasons that had little to do with politics. One argument runs that, over the course of the 16th century, "thou" started to feel less polished than "you" perhaps because the emerging middle classes had social pretensions: by using "you" they aped the linguistic habits of the aristocracy to which many were gaining entrance, although most of the old aristocracy had been decimated by dynastic civil wars of the late 15th century. Thus, for many of the new entrants ennobled by the Tudors and Stuarts—both dynasties were promiscuous in handing out titles—and the new gentry of the 16th century, using "you" became a linguistic symbol of their new status. But not all of these people were politicians, and it is fallacious to see every example of social distinction as political or primarily about power. Later grammarians set this up as standard, but this was after the fact. But using "you" vs. "thou" did not mark your politics. In the literature period, they are used interchangeably, often within a few lines of each in a Shakespeare play. Some people try to read a lot of significance into that, but I think it's a symptom of shifting linguistic landscape. In the south, you will of course here "y'all" for a group of people but you will also hear "you" sometimes in the same conversation to refer to a group of people. This is because the pronoun "you" remains a source of instability (hence the varieties like "y'all" and "you'ns" and so on). The "thou/you" spread was probably similarly unstable. Same thing happened earlier in English (Chaucer, as I mentioned, uses both forms of the "purer" English pronoun like "hem" and the one borrowed from Old Norse, "them," because the linguistic situation in Southern England was quite fluid). Some people want all of this to reflect politics and resistance to power or some other variant of post-colonial theory but there is simply no evidence to support this. One has to read that it into it, which means they discover exactly what they set out to find. I hate this kind of thinking, whether it is in the history of English pronouns or in chiasmus in the Book of Mormon.

6. The example of the Quakers he references is slightly more relevant, though not in the way he wants it to be, and it should be instructive for the tiny fraction of the infinitesimally small slice of the minority of language activists in academia who want the other half billion English speakers to accommodate their desire for linguistic validation of their identities. Insofar as the Church of England was an instrument of the English state in the 17th century, the Quakers were political dissenters, and their emphasis on egalitarianism had a linguistic manifestation in "plain speech." That is to say, they rejected the social distinction still felt as implicit in the usage of "you" rather than "thou." So they tried to enforce the usage of "thou," though without success and often incorrectly, using "thee" for everything rather than distinguishing "thou" as subject and "thee" for everything else (Mormons sometimes also make grammatical mistakes in their usage of "thee" and "thou"). That tells you right away that it wasn't part of the natural speech of most Quakers, and they couldn't keep it going. It is still a stretch to see this as political primarily, rather than reflecting the religious values of the early Quakers (hard to separate those categories during this period, as I say), but certainly it shows that an attempt to control the language within a small community ultimately wasn't very successful because it went against the grain of the natural speech habits of its members. The same will happen with this pronoun business. That is essentially what all of the attempts to inject into the language a new usage of "they" (or any of the other suggestions on offer) that isn't recognized by most speakers. It's hard to enforce an archaism, which is what the Quakers attempted, but imposing an entirely new usage will indeed be political because it will require significant state intervention when it doesn't naturally arise out of the speech community more broadly. Such state intervention has already happened in some places.

The fact that language changes is not an argument against anything in this debate anymore than the fact that grass grows is an argument against mowing it.
_Doctor CamNC4Me
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Re: Migley and Taylor Petrey Discuss Nibley

Post by _Doctor CamNC4Me »

Thanks, Symmachus! That was a very informative and thoughtful response to my RFI. I really appreciate it when a scholar takes a moment to use his craft to enable us to better understand a topic. The bit about Quakers reminds me of the LDS penchant for using the familiar when addressing deity, which is backward within the Spanish speaking world. We'd also have to use the formal forms of pronouns when talking to common folk, which was very confusing and often off putting to them. They felt like we were being stand offish or cold. Interesting, indeed.

- Doc
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Re: Migley and Taylor Petrey Discuss Nibley

Post by _Physics Guy »

Symmachus wrote:
Sun May 24, 2020 4:29 pm
[W]hat I referring to was the use of this stance by linguists in their engagement with the public in their capacity as linguists in order to lend authority to a dispute that cannot be resolved by appealing to linguistic arguments (see here, for instance, or here or here—it's not hard to find linguists pushing this qua linguists).
Hmm. The NYT site flashed me some annoying wall and I didn't read it but neither of the other two links seemed to me to be pushing anything. One was this one linguist explaining that singular they has a long history and that usage varies in practice and over time. The other was news that a linguistics society has picked singular they as the word of the decade. I reckon they have a perfect right to do that; why not? It's an interesting linguistic trend that also gets linguistics a little time in the limelight. I don't see linguists in either of these cases doing anything more than observing facts. Where does either of them try to use linguistics to push anything?
The assumption behind this quotation seems to be one that is pervasive in the social sciences and humanities, namely, that anything that has a social motivation is actually political.
Aren't you just complaining about somebody using "political" in a broader sense than you do, to mean by definition "anything that has a social motivation"? I mean, that's a longish phrase that calls out for abbreviation, so why not "political"?

I agree that the fluidity of language says nothing about whether or not one should use "they" or other syllables as gender-neutral pronouns, any more than the fact that grass grows is a reason not to mow it. I think there are arguments made against gender-neutral pronouns, however, that are analogous to "we must mow the grass because long grass is unnatural". The fact that grass grows is an knock-down argument against that. The fact that language changes is a knock-down argument against the claim that singular "they" for example is just wrong because it's bad English grammar. If there are other arguments against singular "they", such as that it can be ambiguous or that nobody ought to be hiding their gender behind a pronoun or something, then I agree that linguistics says nothing about that. Well, maybe about ambiguity. Some linguists do study that kind of thing.
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Re: Migley and Taylor Petrey Discuss Nibley

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_Symmachus
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Re: Migley and Taylor Petrey Discuss Nibley

Post by _Symmachus »

Physics Guy wrote:
Tue May 26, 2020 10:24 am
Hmm. The NYT site flashed me some annoying wall and I didn't read it but neither of the other two links seemed to me to be pushing anything. One was this one linguist explaining that singular they has a long history and that usage varies in practice and over time. The other was news that a linguistics society has picked singular they as the word of the decade. I reckon they have a perfect right to do that; why not? It's an interesting linguistic trend that also gets linguistics a little time in the limelight. I don't see linguists in either of these cases doing anything more than observing facts. Where does either of them try to use linguistics to push anything?
Wow. Then you've fallen straight for it and offer an example of how the covert prescriptivism inherent here in their presentation of the observed facts works—you sincerely didn't think anything you read was taking one side in the controversy over how someone's gender identity is reflected in pronouns? You thought they were simply observing "an interesting linguistic trend?"

It is not a trend anymore than an advertising campaign reflects a trend. On the contrary, it's a sale pitch and an attempt to create a trend. This is not not some widespread societal trend that linguists are simply taking note of. It's a niche issue (or used to be, until it became political) that uses academic authority to impose a sense of legitimacy on people who otherwise find it laughable when they encounter it. Pieces like this are meant to use the authority of linguistics to take this proposed language shift seriously. They are not describing a shift that has occurred or is occurring on any significant scale but rather a shift they would like to see.

I have no problem with people's attempt to change the language (though I don't think it will be successful); my problem is with how linguistics is being used here. There is no evidence that "they" has ever been used by a community of English speakers as pronoun to refer to individuals whose gender identity is outside the male-female dichotomy (the pronoun "it" has been used for that, pejoratively), but that is what is implied in journalism about this attempted language shift when it is not stated outright. The rhetorical switch occurs with the word "gender," which for most people refers either to a person's sex at birth or how a person articulates their relationship to their own body (or something like that). English speakers aren't accustomed to thinking of their language has having gender, and anyone who has ever taught a Romance language (or any number of other languages) has had to explain to a lot of students that grammatical gender is not the same as personal gender or gender identity. Yet phrases like "gender-neutral" aren't being explained in this way and are being used rather imprecisely by linguists; when non-linguists, reading this in the context of a dispute about referring to gender identity sees that "they" has been a "gender-neutral" pronoun referring to one person for centuries, they are being told that English already contains and long has contained a pronoun to refer to individuals who articulate their identities outside the male-female dichotomy. This is obviously the thrust of these pieces.

It is also not true. Grammatical gender means something else, and if we used a different word for grammatical gender the rhetorical manipulation would be obvious or impossible. That "they" is a gender-neutral pronoun is not even formally true: in referring to people, it's not gender-neutral but gender non-specific, which is a different thing. Not marking gender doesn't mean the person/s you are referring to are any of the personal identity items outside the male-female dichotomy for most speaker in this history of the language. It just means you don't know or don't feel the need to mark gender grammatically. This is not linguistically unusual. Persia, for example, doesn't have a gendered third person pronoun in the singular, but it would be absurd to think that speakers in the Islamic Republic of Iran imagine, when they say "u" (the 3rd person pronoun), that they are referring to someone of a non-binary gender identity. They are simply not specifying a gender of the referent, but it doesn't mean they presume the referent is non-binary. Using "they" in this way as most English speakers do, unlike using "he" or "she," simply makes no comment one way or the other but it does not foreclose the referent's being male or female. On the other hand, using "they' to refer to someone who identifies as "non-binary" does make a comment about gender identity and forecloses their being male or female. That is the observable fact, Physics Guy. What pieces like this do is take the first usage to lend historical linguistic support in arguing for the second. That is telling you an incomplete fact to lend one side of a cultural debate.

Surely, it is not lost on you that the links I posted are obviously in the context of using "they" in this second usage, as a pronoun to mark non-binary gender-identity: note that beside "They" as the "Word of the Decade," the "Word of the Year" was "(My) Pronouns"—most of the half billion English speakers will have no idea what the hell of either of these are referring to unless they have been associated with a small corner of academia in the past decade or read consume elite media. Here we have a small group of speakers in the community of English speakers, who carry a certain level authority in that community more broadly and who have institutional position that adds weight to their words, pronouncing a particular linguistic usage as normative that otherwise does not have much currency. That is the very definition of linguistic prescriptivism.
Physics Guy wrote:
Tue May 26, 2020 10:24 am
Aren't you just complaining about somebody using "political" in a broader sense than you do, to mean by definition "anything that has a social motivation"? I mean, that's a longish phrase that calls out for abbreviation, so why not "political"?
It's a complaint, if that's what you want to call it, motivated by my being in favor of precision in intellectual discussion that has understanding as its goal. Calling something "political" injects needless confusion and hinders understanding when that thing actually has nothing to do with the sorts of phenomena that most people associate with the word "political." It also has the danger of opening up a non-political discussion to the application of politics, which ultimately means institutional power. If some linguist nesting in the authority of an academic position says that "all pronouns are by nature political," then the prudent thing to do is push for a policy change to enforce whatever the linguistic expert says should be the case. No surprise that this has begun to happen. This pronoun issue used to be a purely academic one until universities started to reflect one side of the debate in their policies, and other institutions, HR departments, and even governments have followed suit. The fact that they get so much resistance is evidence that this is being imposed rather and does not reflective common usage.
Physics Guy wrote:
Tue May 26, 2020 10:24 am
I agree that the fluidity of language says nothing about whether or not one should use "they" or other syllables as gender-neutral pronouns, any more than the fact that grass grows is a reason not to mow it. I think there are arguments made against gender-neutral pronouns, however, that are analogous to "we must mow the grass because long grass is unnatural". The fact that grass grows is an knock-down argument against that. The fact that language changes is a knock-down argument against the claim that singular "they" for example is just wrong because it's bad English grammar. If there are other arguments against singular "they", such as that it can be ambiguous or that nobody ought to be hiding their gender behind a pronoun or something, then I agree that linguistics says nothing about that. Well, maybe about ambiguity. Some linguists do study that kind of thing.
Of course there are bad arguments made against it but it doesn't really matter because they reflect the underlying fact that most people just don't use pronouns in this way and never have. What is "grammatically correct" ultimately reflects what the community of speakers writ large determines as normative for their language. On this issue, you have small group of people not reaching anywhere near half a million in number using their institutional clout and their control of media organs to tell the other half billion English speakers how to think about English pronouns. It's the classic definition of perscriptivism, rendered absurd in being presented as simply "observing the facts."
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Re: Migley and Taylor Petrey Discuss Nibley

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Symmachus wrote:
Sun May 24, 2020 4:29 pm
I think it is much better for the humanists/liberal arts advocates to argue on the cultural value of what they do because most people want to know that there are people preserving and disseminating their cultural inheritance somewhere, even if they don't want to do that themselves. It is a kind of hobby, in a sense, but in the way that classical music is: you have to dedicate your life to it in order to preserve it. It will disappear entirely if it is left to a few Saturdays a month after the lawn is mowed. I think most people don't want that to happen, and I have been pleasantly surprised in making arguments of this sort to engineering-types.
I think it depends how big a piece of turf you want to defend. A certain minimal last bastion of academic humanities can probably survive quite securely on the grounds of preserving culture, like classical music. To my mind it certainly should survive, and I think that probably enough people agree to make the strategy viable. I work in a country where all universities are funded by tax money, and where classical music is also subsidized with tax money. So people here buy this argument, literally. Whether American colleges will be able to pull that off, I don't know.

In the halcyon days when the returning GIs all went to college and then the Baby Boom hit college age, humanities departments had large enrollments. The flag advanced. Now the fire sinks on dune and headland and all our pomp of yesterday etc. Is everyone prepared to shrink back to the minimal bastion with far fewer positions in much smaller departments? The appeal to practical value is a tactic for defending more turf than cultural preservation would be able to hold, and keeping some of those students who might be okay with some classical music if they can get a good job.

I'd be happy if the humanities could keep a decent share of campus turf. They're never going to be serious competition for funding because they don't need to buy lasers, so it's not even any skin off my nose. Everybody in my family took at least some humanities courses in college and liked them, and I'm well prepared to believe that the humanities actually can make a good case for their practical value. By studying a bunch of old novels and stuff, you may be reading about fictitious events invented for entertainment, but you are also studying some of the best writing produced on any subject in the past few centuries. By studying a bunch of old political controversies, you may be studying stuff from another world, but you are also learning from case studies in decision making and conflict management when the stakes were really high. And so on. The past isn't dead. It is not even past.
The great failure to my thinking has been with the liberal arts advocates who accept the utilitarian premise, claiming that they can teach some superior kind of knowledge that has some practical value, but then they offer something that you really can just ____ your way through. Then students get the bill, with a hefty fee for the government's picking up the tab for a few years.
Right. The case for practical value can be made but it has to be made properly. It can't just be tossed off as an attempt to bluff through with BS. And if from the point of view of highbrow traditionalists pandering to practical value is a deal with the devil, well, the devil will take his due. If you sell your courses as practical training then you do have to let the need for useful practical training influence what you teach and how you teach it—and what you research and how you approach it. You cannot have the cake and eat it too.

As I've said, I think that at least up to a point this is good for an academic discipline's soul, not just for its pocketbook. If people hole up in the bastion and raise the drawbridge, refusing to let anything but their own scholarly whims direct their thoughts, then I think they're bound to get intellectually fat and lazy. Tenured professors may personally be able to afford to do that, but if they do then they're really saying après nous le déluge.
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Re: Migley and Taylor Petrey Discuss Nibley

Post by _Physics Guy »

Symmachus wrote:
Sun May 24, 2020 4:29 pm
[The writing of science and engineering majors in my classes] had certain features in common, namely, that they approached every problem as part of a closed system, i.e. a well-defined set of evidence to which a set of rules could rationally be applied in order to reach a sound conclusion. The fun was that history doesn't work that way.
That's a very interesting observation, because science and engineering don't actually work that way, either, but undergrad students are indeed taught in a way that makes them think like that. Unlearning the assumption that every problem comes in a box is the main task of grad school. I'm amazed that the modular thinking of science students showed up so clearly for you, because I would have expected it to get laundered away by the immersion in another discipline, but if the target was obscured you still hit the bullseye bang on.

For four years of undergrad students do weekly homework assignments that are always about applying the concepts from that week's lectures and that can always be answered correctly within a few hours of intelligent work. They show up in labs to perform an experiment within a three-hour time slot using equipment that is already laid out on the bench, following a procedure that is guaranteed to produce data that can be analyzed correctly over a couple of evenings. They write exams that last exactly three hours.

Nothing is open-ended in undergraduate science and engineering courses. Or at least, very little. I had one course in which we had a whole semester to design and build our own simple experiments, starting from nothing—to the point where I was buying my own parts from a hardware store—and with minimal guidance. What my experiment actually did was theoretically trivial, but the experience of making it all work myself was one of the best learning experiences I've ever had. If it had happened a year earlier I would probably have become an experimental physicist instead of a theoretician because it was a lot more fun than those stupid canned lab exercises.

Research and development aren't like typical undergrad training at all, of course. Nothing tells you what models to use or what factors are relevant and when you launch out with some assumptions there is nothing at all to stop you from stepping on a mine that blows away six months of work.

Nevertheless we keep on training undergrad students as if that weren't so. I think that first of all it's because we can. I think that science is more modular than humanities scholarship, and even though the separate little boxes are lies, they're pronounceable utterances, so we can say them straight-faced. It's harder for me to even imagine how one could meaningfully divide up a freshman history course into weekly topics. "This week we'll cover the effects of technological change in society. It will take 90 minutes." Right. Science is modular because science is the study of simple things that allow modular treatment.

Secondly, though, I think it's because learning modular approaches isn't really debilitating in science. They mostly don't work in the real world, but what does work is to keep on trying them, finding out why they don't work, and trying again. Eventually you find something that does work. And there's not much chance of avoiding all that trial and error, though the right approach often seems obvious in hindsight and you think you could have avoided all the failures if you'd only been smarter. But no-one is that smart. So the undergrad experience gives a false impression of how easy things are, but the tools it provides really are the ones that one will later apply.
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