As we wrote yesterday, language is an important necessity for thinking or communicating about philosophical issues such as reality and epistemology. This site therefore spends a little time considering the issues of languages. This blog is a continuation of yesterday’s look at the noun / adjective grammatical issues in English.

Someone who’s first language isn’t English raised the issue on Quora that they thought it more logical that the noun (being more important) should precede the noun qualifiers (the adjectives). They suggested that the English practice of placing the adjectives before the noun was illogical. Clearly they are used to a language which has these grammatical rules, and are therefore familiar with them. They are struggling to handle the complicated way English handles the structure between nouns and adjectives. Who can blame them? English is a very easy language to learn badly, but it’s horribly difficult to master.

The grammatical structure where the noun always precedes the adjectives is perfectly reasonable, and gives you sentences like:

Now Tom was a lad tall.

rather than the way we would generally express it in English:

Now Tom was a tall lad.

However, yesterday we made the point that English does NOT in fact require you do put the adjectives (which qualify the noun) before the noun. In English it is perfectly acceptable to write the statement:

Now Tom was a tall strapping handsome lad.

as

Now Tom was a lad, tall, strapping and handsome.

In fact it is one of the strengths of English as a language that it is so structurally flexible. The sentences:

“I admired his shirt, silk with a fly front and ornate pattern, while sipping my sherry.”

or

“I admired his suit of worsted wool, pin striped and double breasted.”

are well constructed English sentences where all the noun qualifiers are coming after the noun (shirt, suit) itself.

However, this flexibility in the hands of a master like Shakespeare may make it easier for him to write superb poetry, but it can cause problems for those struggling to learn the language. Partially that’s because without the requirement to stick to hard and fast rules one has to develop a feeling for the language in order to know what’s a good sentence construction and what really doesn’t flow properly to the ears of a natural English speaker. Unfortunately, the problems go further than that, and can even cause problems for someone who is quite accomplished in English. Let’s consider the the problem of negatives.

There’s a particular problem in English where someone asks a question structured in the negative. Structured positively, the question:

“Would you like some more ice cream?”

is simply answered with a negative.

“No, thank you.”

But if the question is structured negatively thus:

“Are you sure you wouldn’t like some more?”

The answer becomes less clear. Thus ALL the following are possible:

1. “No, thanks.”

2. “No, really not.”

3. “No.”

4. “Yes.”

5. “Yes, thanks.”

6. “Yes, please.”

7. “Yes, I’m sure.”

The problem is that answers 1, 2, and 7 all mean you WOULD NOT like anymore ice cream, and you are sure about that. Answer 6 means - I’ve changed my mind and WOULD like some ice-cream after all. And answers 3, 4, and 5 probably mean you WOULD NOT like any more ice cream, particularly if accompanied with body language, such as a head shake, or stop gesture of the hand. But accompanied by a nod, all three of these answers could also indicate you have changed your mind and WOULD like some more ice cream. Which creates plenty of room for confusion, and makes life hard for those learning to speak this difficult language.

So when we face the sentence:

I do sympathise with those who are trying to learn another language / English not as a first language.

we note that the little negative word ‘not’ is causing us a potential problem. The problem is that we want it to be clear that the ‘not’ is connected with ‘first’ as in ‘not-first’, but English doesn’t really like this ‘not-first’ conjunction and is forcing us to make it a clause ‘not-as-a-first’. Hyphenating ‘not-first’ is a potential ‘unpretty’ way of handling this problem, but hyphenating ‘not-as-a-first’ goes all the way to ugly. Yet without hyphenation our ‘not’ is hanging somewhat loose.

In this sentence ‘not’ could be interpreted as doing the work of an adjective, qualifying the noun.

If we wrote instead:

I do sympathise with those who are trying to learn another language / not English as a first language.

it becomes clear that the ‘not’ relates to the noun English, and means that the sympathies lie with those who are trying to learn as their first language a language that isn’t English. ‘Not’ is clearly working as an adjective to qualify the noun English, to indicate all languages which are NOT English.

In this instance this is exactly the opposite of what I am trying to say so I need to try and improve the sentence.

English also permits the use of ‘not’ to follow a statement, reversing the sense of the sentence, as in the statement.

I am happy to see you, NOT.

Which means the same as:

I am not happy to see you.

So we are left wondering a little about our original statement:

I do sympathise with those who are trying to learn another language / English not as a first language.

Does the ‘not’ relate to ‘English’, meaning the same as ‘not English’ or does it relate to the subsequent clause? How does it look if instead we try:

I do sympathise with those who are trying to not learn another language / English as a first language.

That hasn’t helped at all. Now it appears that the sympathy relates to people who are not trying to learn, which is not at all what we are trying to communicate. So let’s try instead:

I do sympathise with those who are trying to learn another language / English as a first language not.

Uhg. English is flexible regarding the placement of nouns and adjectives, but that sentence is both ugly and unclear. Is it suggesting that English is not a language, or that we have no sympathy for those learning it? Consider:

I do not sympathise with those who are trying to learn another language / English as a first language.

Once again this certainly isn’t what I’m trying to say. So let’s try putting ‘not’ somewhere else, thus:

I do sympathise with those who are trying to learn another language / English as a first not language.

That’s still awful and inaccurate. We have now joined ‘not’ to ‘language’ to create ‘not-language’ suggesting that English is not a language.

Let’s try one more time:

I do sympathise with those people who are trying to learn another language / English as a not first language.

Well, that’s ugly. You can move adjectives around fairly freely in English, but what we are trying to do here is to make it clear that the ‘not’ is qualifying another adjective, ‘first’, to create ‘not-first’ as the qualifying adjective for the noun ‘language’. Yet, it seems whatever we do, it’s really hard to make sure that the relationship between ‘not’ and ‘first’ is clearly established.

Let’s try a little circumlocution.

I do sympathise with those people who are trying to learn another language / English as a second language.

There, that’s nailed it! Only, it hasn’t. There’s a change of meaning crept in here. Second is not the same as ‘not-first’. I also have sympathy for those learning English as a third language. Or even as a sixth language if it comes to that.

So I haven’t circumlocuted the problem after all. And that’s just thrown up another problem with the English language. The word ‘circumlocuted’ doesn’t exist. The noun ‘circumlocution’ exists but the natural adjustment to covert a noun to a verb that commonly applies in English, as in ‘circumvention’ to ‘circumvented’ doesn’t apply to ‘circumlocution’. If I have practised ‘circumlocution’ on the problem doesn’t that mean I have ‘circumlocuted’ the problem? Well it ought to, but the word ‘circumlocuted’ doesn’t exist. And that’s a problem that’s not so easy to circumlocute either, since ‘circumlocute’ also doesn’t exist. Instead I will have to work around it.

As a person whose spent too many decades learning English as his first language, these frustrations are manageable, albeit annoying. I know that ‘circumlocution’ doesn’t have a verb form because I have genuinely broad vocabulary in a language which has the largest vocabulary in the world. Even so … I probably don’t know half the words in the Greater Oxford Dictionary. And even so … there are times when I struggle with a sentence like:

I have great sympathy for those learning other languages / English as their not-first language or not as their first language.

It’s no wonder that CK has largely given up on the idea of furthering his foreign language studies. There is no way he is ever going to achieve the same facility of communication in another language that he’s achieved with English, and probably won’t live long enough to gain a sufficient return on the effort of trying. Given the challenges CK faces in learning not-first languages, that requires around a century. And happily, once one knows English one can largely get by on this crazy planet.

But I do greatly sympathise with anyone trying to learn English as a foreign language.

I also greatly sympathize.

And if we can’t entirely sort out the grammar in this amazing language, could we at least standardise the spelling?