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An opinion paper: The Linguistic Inferiority Complex Paradox
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三毛 于 2001/07/07 02:20:44 发表在 汉英
There is nothing new under the sun, linguistic inferiority complex included.
Whenever cultural exchanges spearheaded by linguistic borrowings are at high time, the consciences of the importing culture started to question about the adequacies of their own language, deeply.
Such déjà vus have seen many a rebound throughout human histories: starting in the Elizabethan time, the best writers and critics of the English language have showed consistent outpouring of laments about the vulgarity, inadequacies, imprecision, lack of expressiveness and styles of their beloved mother tongue. And since most of them learned Latin, they naturally showed or feigned an unwarranted affection for that universal learned tongue of the medieval Europe. Some even went so far and asserted that: I was never at a loss with the Latin tongue but often with the English words. These larger than life braggadocios were finally defeated by the resounding words in the mouth from Lord ????: I love Latin but I WORSHIP English and thus the final victory of the English language as the established vernacular over and above that of Latin.
Around that general time frame in the Continent, French, Italian and German each had a similar feeling about the inadequacies of their respective vernacular in front of the almighty Latin tongue to a differing degree by no less than a handful sympathizers from the high societies.
Even earlier, the best Latin writers themselves and even during in the Golden Augustan Age, consistently vowed that Latin would remain eternally a hopelessly rudimentary language vehicle not fitted to be a literary language when compared with ancient Greek in which the finer shades in meanings were fully differentiated and where the beautiful grammatical structures of Greek were near the supreme extremes of linguistic perfection that could have ever possibly been designed or attempted by human mortals and were destined to have universal appeals.
So, it appeared that each later developed language would repeat this linguistic pattern that each felt most inferior, uncertain and insecure in front of the language that it borrowed most heavily and freely, and would never able to feel fully assured about its own adequacy, rights and independence as an important language and cultural media on par with or over and above the ‘plagiarized’ parental tongue.
Then the real question became, did the Greek themselves ever felt, however briefly a moment, much the same way, i.e. did they moan about their language which was still in the fledging stage whereas their neighbors, the Phoenician, the Egyptian, the Persian, etc. had already been in existence for quite some time and some had already developed into highly sophisticated written forms, perhaps overly florid styles in some cases and could boast large libraries filled with mega-sized tomes?
IMHO, the Greeks did NOT!
They were largely free from this seemingly inevitable linguistic inferiority syndrome that have affected later tongues widely among flocks of the best-educated people. How did the Greeks manage to do that? I believe that had something to do with the Greek spirit in general in that they measured everything by the Greek standards and Greek standards alone. Yes, the Greeks were not blind, they came, they saw and they understood the richness of their Egyptian neighbors, culturally as well as materially and they might have indeed felt genuinely jealous about that for some briefest moments in history but they were quick to realize to themselves that the Greeks had something unique that none of their rich neighbors had at that time and some were never to have it until very very recently in the modern era—Democracy. Their oriental neighbors had nothing but despotism manifested by their innumerable tyrants and the Greek further concluded that that their language in which the supreme ideals of Democracy was written CANNOT possibly be an inferior language. Such is the true essence that the Greeks had taught us and I think, after some 2000 years, perhaps it is still not too late to pick up this valuable lesson once again from the wise men lived in the distant past before us that had contributed so much to our totality of humanity understandings for their typical attempt at figuring out the meanings of life and the human conditions by applying their logical deductions and reasoning DEEPER than previously thought that could be granted to any two-legs.
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跟贴目录 (List of Followups):
写得真好。 - heihei 20010707205721
Read, read, read. The learning of the English (or any other) language starts with reading and ends with reading - Read till U drop 20010707225908
thanks for your precious advice. - heihei 20010708035211
Good words to you - World of words 20010708191012
多谢 三毛 ! 上次给了很多提示! - happyangel 20010709080102
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
写得真好。
作者(Author)：heihei - 2001/07/07 20:57:21 ***
我水平不高，加上有很多生词，看了几遍才看懂。
虽然我对语言学方面不是很懂，这篇文章我还是很喜欢，
很喜欢您这篇文章的风格，这应该是formal的文体吧，但是看起来且很轻松，不是那么晦涩难懂的，我学英文也有蛮多年了，就是写作这一关过不了，可不可以麻烦老师您指点一二？谢谢了。
heihei98@163.net
---------------------------
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Read, read, read. The learning of the English (or any other) language starts with reading and ends with reading
作者(Author)：Read till U drop - 2001/07/07 22:59:08 ***
In a systematic way. (this rule applies to your mother tongue Chinese just as well).
1. A general advice will be: if the article is NOT difficult for you, it's NOT worth your time and effort.
2. Use English to English Dictionaries as soon as practically possible. [burn your English Chinese ones if necessary--stop relying on bilingual ones.] I recommend American dictionaries to start with.
3. Once you truly passed the vocabulary bottleneck (30,000 - 40,000 range), and with a total combined reading materials reaching some 25 to 30 million English words (I have passed the 100 million word of English corpus a couple years ago and I did that in about 12 years), you will acquire a linguistic ability that will allow you more freedom in expression and you will also have the enviable ability to polish your language skills at your own pace (i.e., without having to ask helps from more advanced learners) because you WILL have the taste and capacity [sprachgefuhl] to find the right way towards even higher peaks in English.
4. If you passed all of the above, try to learn/read some good law English. It may be VERY difficult at first and you may feel over-exerting yourself but in the end you will benefit from it GREATLY. The language of law demands nothing but the MAXIMUM CLARITY and logical coercion of all the varieties of styles there are in English, the appreciation of law writings will definitely set you apart from otherwise just a mediocre English reader/writer. In general, social studies such as literature, history writings will be more likely to open up your eyes and those writings naturally use larger and more variegated vocabularies which are what you needed.
I suspect that at your level, you still have not passed the vocabulary bottleneck. It takes time, effort and patience, LOTS OF IT, to be sure. Some knowledge in English word derivation/etymology is definitely helpful and it is NOT very difficult for you to pick up some fundamentals of etymology, etymology can be very interesting and fun to know.
Good luck in your pursuit of linguistic perfection.
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thanks for your precious advice.
作者(Author)：heihei - 2001/07/08 03:52:11 ***
i read your suggestions carefully and reflect my own practice, and find that i have the following problems:
1.the article i find are easy for me, you see, i'm not english major, i just love this beautiful language and want to learn it well. i got no one to teach me and no one to ask when i meet with questions in my study by myself.
now, when i have problems in my study, i come here to inquire your kind people who always give me thorough explanations.
2.now, i use COLLINS COBUILD ENGLISH DICTIONARY, but sometimes i turn to E-C dictionary again.
3.god, how can i possibly know my vocabulary, how to measure it? i learn my english mostly from listening,
BBC, VOA, and lots and lots of cassettes, any all those
pop music. so you see how i appreciate your graceful formal english, 'cos mine is all colloquial.
and it's also impossible for me to measure my total reading materials.
so, at this stage, i think my problem is what to read, would you please give me some suggestions? or would you please tell me about some good books? books about etymology and others.
thanks again!
---------------------------
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--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Good words to you
作者(Author)：World of words - 2001/07/08 19:10:12 ***
I did not have all those great ideas myself, I plagiarized from others freely and added a few points here and there.
First, try to decide what's your ultimate goal with this second language, to pass certain exams such as GRE, LAST, GMAT or to polish your skills and make yourself more competitive in the job market or to acquire near native fluency and TASTE in English?
Depending on your needs, the answers for how to get to your destinations differ greatly. Obviously, it takes much longer to be able to compete with natives living in English speaking countries because your foreign born competitors have a life time to polish their skills and don't have another language such as Chinese to interfere with their linguistic conscience which may be constantly bothering YOU as an adult ESL learner.
There are no laws on what to read or on difficulty levels. Usually, if you have 5% new words in a given text, it is considered appropriate. If there are more than 10 - 15% new words, it is perhaps too difficult. Else, if less than 3%, it may be too easy. An average page contains 700-1,000 English words on regular size fonts.
Start from something you like or are familiar with and gradually move towards more abstract texts. Scientific etymology is usually beyond the scope of a layman, but most American and British English dictionaries for natives include fairly good coverage on word derivations, of which the American Heritage is the most scientific (includes the appendix thoroughly researched by the Harvard scholar Calvert Watkins) and Webster’s New World Dictionary is easier to read while Webster’s Collegiate (Merriam Webster Inc.) is considerably more concise but gives precise dating information and Random House College Dictionary has dating info too but otherwise it seems that etymology is not a strong feature with Random House. Just follow the legends in front of each dictionary and see if you are able to follow the train of thought displayed in the etymology section. If after a while, you don’t see much a value in doing so, simply abandon the effort, you don’t have anything to lose.
If you have vocabulary in the 30,000 – 40,000 range, you should not have much difficulty reading New York Times or the New Yorker magazine (i.e., you encounter only about 3% new words or less in any given page). Other US publications usually use smaller vocabularies: it is estimated that Times uses 25,000 – 30,000 normally (proper names excluded) and Newsweek somewhat even smaller. I’d say that VOA, BBC probably stick to a working vocabulary smaller than 20,000 (closer to 15,000 in VOA’s case). The vocabulary bottleneck is the MAJOR and a long lasting one for Chinese ESL learners. It is not unusual to find people with extremely large vocabularies in the 100,000 to 200,000 ranges among natives, so the vocabulary learning process for ELSs could be truly life-long.
There are 2,332 words in the following article, you can find out the exact number of new words (excluding proper names) and calculate your percentage of new words for this passage. James Joyce's diction is probably well within the 30,000-40,000 range.
http://eserver.org/fiction/araby.html
Also, here is the website for the World & I magazine online:
http://www.worldandi.com/current/cl.shtml
链接(Link)：Earlier suggestions
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--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
多谢 三毛 ! 上次给了很多提示!
作者(Author)：happyangel - 2001/07/09 08:01:02 ***
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三毛 于 2001/07/07 02:20:44 发表在 汉英
There is nothing new under the sun, linguistic inferiority complex included.
Whenever cultural exchanges spearheaded by linguistic borrowings are at high time, the consciences of the importing culture started to question about the adequacies of their own language, deeply.
Such déjà vus have seen many a rebound throughout human histories: starting in the Elizabethan time, the best writers and critics of the English language have showed consistent outpouring of laments about the vulgarity, inadequacies, imprecision, lack of expressiveness and styles of their beloved mother tongue. And since most of them learned Latin, they naturally showed or feigned an unwarranted affection for that universal learned tongue of the medieval Europe. Some even went so far and asserted that: I was never at a loss with the Latin tongue but often with the English words. These larger than life braggadocios were finally defeated by the resounding words in the mouth from Lord ????: I love Latin but I WORSHIP English and thus the final victory of the English language as the established vernacular over and above that of Latin.
Around that general time frame in the Continent, French, Italian and German each had a similar feeling about the inadequacies of their respective vernacular in front of the almighty Latin tongue to a differing degree by no less than a handful sympathizers from the high societies.
Even earlier, the best Latin writers themselves and even during in the Golden Augustan Age, consistently vowed that Latin would remain eternally a hopelessly rudimentary language vehicle not fitted to be a literary language when compared with ancient Greek in which the finer shades in meanings were fully differentiated and where the beautiful grammatical structures of Greek were near the supreme extremes of linguistic perfection that could have ever possibly been designed or attempted by human mortals and were destined to have universal appeals.
So, it appeared that each later developed language would repeat this linguistic pattern that each felt most inferior, uncertain and insecure in front of the language that it borrowed most heavily and freely, and would never able to feel fully assured about its own adequacy, rights and independence as an important language and cultural media on par with or over and above the ‘plagiarized’ parental tongue.
Then the real question became, did the Greek themselves ever felt, however briefly a moment, much the same way, i.e. did they moan about their language which was still in the fledging stage whereas their neighbors, the Phoenician, the Egyptian, the Persian, etc. had already been in existence for quite some time and some had already developed into highly sophisticated written forms, perhaps overly florid styles in some cases and could boast large libraries filled with mega-sized tomes?
IMHO, the Greeks did NOT!
They were largely free from this seemingly inevitable linguistic inferiority syndrome that have affected later tongues widely among flocks of the best-educated people. How did the Greeks manage to do that? I believe that had something to do with the Greek spirit in general in that they measured everything by the Greek standards and Greek standards alone. Yes, the Greeks were not blind, they came, they saw and they understood the richness of their Egyptian neighbors, culturally as well as materially and they might have indeed felt genuinely jealous about that for some briefest moments in history but they were quick to realize to themselves that the Greeks had something unique that none of their rich neighbors had at that time and some were never to have it until very very recently in the modern era—Democracy. Their oriental neighbors had nothing but despotism manifested by their innumerable tyrants and the Greek further concluded that that their language in which the supreme ideals of Democracy was written CANNOT possibly be an inferior language. Such is the true essence that the Greeks had taught us and I think, after some 2000 years, perhaps it is still not too late to pick up this valuable lesson once again from the wise men lived in the distant past before us that had contributed so much to our totality of humanity understandings for their typical attempt at figuring out the meanings of life and the human conditions by applying their logical deductions and reasoning DEEPER than previously thought that could be granted to any two-legs.
[ 回应主贴(Respond to Original) ] [ 返回论坛(Back to Forum) ]
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
跟贴目录 (List of Followups):
写得真好。 - heihei 20010707205721
Read, read, read. The learning of the English (or any other) language starts with reading and ends with reading - Read till U drop 20010707225908
thanks for your precious advice. - heihei 20010708035211
Good words to you - World of words 20010708191012
多谢 三毛 ! 上次给了很多提示! - happyangel 20010709080102
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
写得真好。
作者(Author)：heihei - 2001/07/07 20:57:21 ***
我水平不高，加上有很多生词，看了几遍才看懂。
虽然我对语言学方面不是很懂，这篇文章我还是很喜欢，
很喜欢您这篇文章的风格，这应该是formal的文体吧，但是看起来且很轻松，不是那么晦涩难懂的，我学英文也有蛮多年了，就是写作这一关过不了，可不可以麻烦老师您指点一二？谢谢了。
heihei98@163.net
---------------------------
[ 回应此贴(Respond to this followup) | 查看原贴(Back to Original) ]
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Read, read, read. The learning of the English (or any other) language starts with reading and ends with reading
作者(Author)：Read till U drop - 2001/07/07 22:59:08 ***
In a systematic way. (this rule applies to your mother tongue Chinese just as well).
1. A general advice will be: if the article is NOT difficult for you, it's NOT worth your time and effort.
2. Use English to English Dictionaries as soon as practically possible. [burn your English Chinese ones if necessary--stop relying on bilingual ones.] I recommend American dictionaries to start with.
3. Once you truly passed the vocabulary bottleneck (30,000 - 40,000 range), and with a total combined reading materials reaching some 25 to 30 million English words (I have passed the 100 million word of English corpus a couple years ago and I did that in about 12 years), you will acquire a linguistic ability that will allow you more freedom in expression and you will also have the enviable ability to polish your language skills at your own pace (i.e., without having to ask helps from more advanced learners) because you WILL have the taste and capacity [sprachgefuhl] to find the right way towards even higher peaks in English.
4. If you passed all of the above, try to learn/read some good law English. It may be VERY difficult at first and you may feel over-exerting yourself but in the end you will benefit from it GREATLY. The language of law demands nothing but the MAXIMUM CLARITY and logical coercion of all the varieties of styles there are in English, the appreciation of law writings will definitely set you apart from otherwise just a mediocre English reader/writer. In general, social studies such as literature, history writings will be more likely to open up your eyes and those writings naturally use larger and more variegated vocabularies which are what you needed.
I suspect that at your level, you still have not passed the vocabulary bottleneck. It takes time, effort and patience, LOTS OF IT, to be sure. Some knowledge in English word derivation/etymology is definitely helpful and it is NOT very difficult for you to pick up some fundamentals of etymology, etymology can be very interesting and fun to know.
Good luck in your pursuit of linguistic perfection.
[ 回应此贴(Respond to this followup) | 查看原贴(Back to Original) ]
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
thanks for your precious advice.
作者(Author)：heihei - 2001/07/08 03:52:11 ***
i read your suggestions carefully and reflect my own practice, and find that i have the following problems:
1.the article i find are easy for me, you see, i'm not english major, i just love this beautiful language and want to learn it well. i got no one to teach me and no one to ask when i meet with questions in my study by myself.
now, when i have problems in my study, i come here to inquire your kind people who always give me thorough explanations.
2.now, i use COLLINS COBUILD ENGLISH DICTIONARY, but sometimes i turn to E-C dictionary again.
3.god, how can i possibly know my vocabulary, how to measure it? i learn my english mostly from listening,
BBC, VOA, and lots and lots of cassettes, any all those
pop music. so you see how i appreciate your graceful formal english, 'cos mine is all colloquial.
and it's also impossible for me to measure my total reading materials.
so, at this stage, i think my problem is what to read, would you please give me some suggestions? or would you please tell me about some good books? books about etymology and others.
thanks again!
---------------------------
[ 回应此贴(Respond to this followup) | 查看原贴(Back to Original) ]
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Good words to you
作者(Author)：World of words - 2001/07/08 19:10:12 ***
I did not have all those great ideas myself, I plagiarized from others freely and added a few points here and there.
First, try to decide what's your ultimate goal with this second language, to pass certain exams such as GRE, LAST, GMAT or to polish your skills and make yourself more competitive in the job market or to acquire near native fluency and TASTE in English?
Depending on your needs, the answers for how to get to your destinations differ greatly. Obviously, it takes much longer to be able to compete with natives living in English speaking countries because your foreign born competitors have a life time to polish their skills and don't have another language such as Chinese to interfere with their linguistic conscience which may be constantly bothering YOU as an adult ESL learner.
There are no laws on what to read or on difficulty levels. Usually, if you have 5% new words in a given text, it is considered appropriate. If there are more than 10 - 15% new words, it is perhaps too difficult. Else, if less than 3%, it may be too easy. An average page contains 700-1,000 English words on regular size fonts.
Start from something you like or are familiar with and gradually move towards more abstract texts. Scientific etymology is usually beyond the scope of a layman, but most American and British English dictionaries for natives include fairly good coverage on word derivations, of which the American Heritage is the most scientific (includes the appendix thoroughly researched by the Harvard scholar Calvert Watkins) and Webster’s New World Dictionary is easier to read while Webster’s Collegiate (Merriam Webster Inc.) is considerably more concise but gives precise dating information and Random House College Dictionary has dating info too but otherwise it seems that etymology is not a strong feature with Random House. Just follow the legends in front of each dictionary and see if you are able to follow the train of thought displayed in the etymology section. If after a while, you don’t see much a value in doing so, simply abandon the effort, you don’t have anything to lose.
If you have vocabulary in the 30,000 – 40,000 range, you should not have much difficulty reading New York Times or the New Yorker magazine (i.e., you encounter only about 3% new words or less in any given page). Other US publications usually use smaller vocabularies: it is estimated that Times uses 25,000 – 30,000 normally (proper names excluded) and Newsweek somewhat even smaller. I’d say that VOA, BBC probably stick to a working vocabulary smaller than 20,000 (closer to 15,000 in VOA’s case). The vocabulary bottleneck is the MAJOR and a long lasting one for Chinese ESL learners. It is not unusual to find people with extremely large vocabularies in the 100,000 to 200,000 ranges among natives, so the vocabulary learning process for ELSs could be truly life-long.
There are 2,332 words in the following article, you can find out the exact number of new words (excluding proper names) and calculate your percentage of new words for this passage. James Joyce's diction is probably well within the 30,000-40,000 range.
http://eserver.org/fiction/araby.html
Also, here is the website for the World & I magazine online:
http://www.worldandi.com/current/cl.shtml
链接(Link)：Earlier suggestions
[ 回应此贴(Respond to this followup) | 查看原贴(Back to Original) ]
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
多谢 三毛 ! 上次给了很多提示!
作者(Author)：happyangel - 2001/07/09 08:01:02 ***
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