Where do I start? Do I start with expressing my general or, arguably, directed frustration (at my parents) that I only speak one language? Not only does my mother speak both German and English, but my father also speaks Arabic, French and English. I, on the other hand, have only mastered the language of the global economy, the language of colonizers, the capitalists and those terrible Americans.
At least I speak the Queen’s English, well not really. I’m from Adelaide, Australia so I speak English with a posh Australian accent (I say dance /da:ns/, not dance /dæns/). An accent that I intentionally colloquialised to fit in better with my more occa sounding friends. You see, Adelaidians are known for speaking a clearer more formal English. Claimed to be an outcome of not being settled by convicts like the majority of the country. I am assuming the only other exception is Canberra. I should probably do an expeditious Google or brush up on my Australian history. You are going to learn very quickly* I am not the omniscient author/protagonist of these blogs, rather, a very fallible and very real person. I advise you to do your own research and don’t believe everything you read on the internet.
Okay, so apparently South Australia is “officially” the only state which was not settled by convicts, a fact I surely knew in primary school. Do you ever wonder what happened to general knowledge? In my schooling years I remember being tested on things like: What’s the population of Australia? What’s the most densely populated country in the world? What are all the continents? What’s a monotreme? Why is fractional reserve banking bad? Why don’t we tax billionaires? You know just the general stuff. Do we just bundle it into everything no longer necessary in the Smart Phone Age?
Alas, I do not have all the advantages in cognition, i.e better memory, attention and problem solving, not to mention the cultural insights and diversity (also, better job opportunities and life satisfaction according to ChatGPT) that the bi, tri and multilinguals have. I also believe that my life would just be generally (true use of the word in this case) better if I was fluent in more than one language. The sun would be brighter, the grass greener, my self-expression and confidence more developed… maybe I would own a house, have conquered Everest and gotten a Nobel prize (the latter two seemingly more achievable than the first, currently).
But no, I am insufferably monolingual. What makes this so insufferable? Let’s quote language philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein:
The limits of my language mean the limits of my world.
I actually stumbled across this philosopher when I was looking for a bleaker, more macabre (very in vogue word) quote about being the prisoner of your first language. Something I heard in Linguistics, 101 (way back in 2007, pre-Instagram) with Dr. Peter Mühlhäusler. Dr. Mühlhäusler was an excellent professor who specialised in pidgin languages that developed on oil rigs in the Pacific. He would go on the most delightful tangents. It was he who boldly claimed that maternal instinct was a social construct and not a biological imperative in one of our first lectures! This was a time when the lecture theatre was almost always full and you would pay for and collect physical copies of your text book. I’m never going to forget his lecture on onomatopoeia, where he drew a little fish and a fat* fish and asked:
Which one do you think is called Pim and which one do you think is called Pom?
Obviously the little fish is Pim and the fat fish is Pom. An answer one finds with the intrinsic knowledge that comes with one’s own native language(s). Another perhaps more optimistic way of approaching how we are restrained by our native languages, is the conjecture that anything is possible before language acquisition. The thinking goes along the lines of: Is a lamppost a lamppost if you don’t have the word for it? Could it serve a multitude of purposes without the knowledge of its function? Well that is to say, I once encountered an example with a lamppost and I can’t remember the precise details right now. However, I will find the lamppost example, and it of course will be going into the absorbative*, and what is swiftly becoming seemingly infinite, category of future topics. Which brings me to the title of this entry, English is the “Super Absorber” and I can finally make the small point that got me writing this superfluous blog. English is a big, soft, cloudy language that loves to absorb words from other languages- apparently more than other languages (a subject of debate). This was the takeaway from the one linguistics special-guest-speaker-conference-thingy I got invited to attend almost 20 years ago now (insert the smiley, sweaty emoji here). These absorbed words, also known as loanwords, according to the one source I read (skimmed) to supplement my hazy memory, make up 80% of the English language. Actually you should read the article because it was good: https://www.dictionary.com/e/borrowed-words/. Considering English and all its “borrowed’ words begs the question: How does language influence culture and vice versa?
How language, culture and meaning influence each other is the question that linguists, psychologists, philosophers and anthropologists are all constantly searching to answer. Even what appears to be more answerable like: What language has the most words? Is actually not as easy as it looks. Again, you might say, surely an easy question is: What does the word general mean? But this is an even harder question! Semantics is as much about culture, as it is as much about context, as it is as much about how we categorise, conceptualise and put things into the little boxes contained somewhere in the recesses of our minds (we call these mental representations in cognitive psychology). Language is malleable, it’s slippery and it’s evolving- whilst some words are adopted into vernacular, or your personal lexicon- others are lost entirely and some words change meaning altogether. This change could be the semantic shift of a word which happens across time within a culture, or it could be the context in which you are using a word which elicits different mental representations accordingly. Maybe I should reiterate that word meaning is all about the, context, context and more context! (I stole that last line from linguistics professor Dr. Ian Green whom I had for Semantics, level III.) You see somehow the small, underfunded department of linguistics (they use to let me hand in my assignments so late) at The University of Adelaide- lit a flame in me about words- which was subsequently reignited when I returned to study psychology in 2020.
The crux of it is, maybe English is not the worst language to master as a monolingual and maybe the Nobel prize is rigged anyway, and Everest is for rich tourists to die on.
Food for thought
Perhaps alongside BCE and CE, we’ll have PRI, pre Instagram and POI post Instagram.
Did you Google it? Is Google a synonym for search? After all it is a verb now, according to the Merriam-Webster online dictionary: Google verb- to use the Google search engine to obtain information about (someone or something) on the World Wide Web. But its not a synonym for search. Warning, dictionary definitions are useful and useless.
Also consider the analogy between food, language and thought, highlighted in the article I linked. These things become important when we look at mental representations and how we categorise things.
I’ll find some good published articles too with my current unlimited access to all those pesky “scientific” journals with paywalls.
***
You are going to learn very quickly I am not the omniscient author/protagonist of these blogs, rather a very fallible and very real person.
* Very quickly, using a modifier can be indicative of poor language. Better words include: promptly, immediately, swiftly, rapidly and expeditiously. Do you agree? If I had said “you are going to quickly learn”, perhaps I don’t need a modifier at all, simple change in word order. So, it is my sentence structure that is poor! As, “you are going to learn swiftly I am not the omniscient author/protagonist of these blogs, rather a very fallible and very real person” has all the same issues as “you are going to learn quickly I am not the omniscient author/protagonist of these blogs and rather a very fallible, very real person” in the above sentence. I argue it’s the “very” that makes it sound better. Q: Why not restructure the sentence? A: I don’t want to. B: It goes with the rest of the sentence.
Little fish and a fat fish – graded antonyms(?)
*Fat and little you could argue are not complete antonyms. A better pairing would be little and big, or skinny and fat. But in various contexts they can represent the opposites of each other. You could say is that fat, little, big and skinny all belong in the same lexical field. I’ll add lexical fields to the future topics section.
* Absorbative, not sure if this is a word or not, but I like it better than absorptive.
Future topics (potentially):
Why English isn’t special in absorbing words.
Word meaning is tricky, slippery and ill-defined, linguists still argue all the time.
Semantics.
Dictionary definitions are useful and useless.
Mental representations and cognition.
Word order studies in psychology.
Language- I love using brackets!
The dictionary, the thesaurus, the internet, AI and language.
What is grammar? Why do we need it?
Why do we tend to believe what we read? Evolutionary advantages of story telling.
Bad at English.
Linguistics 101 – the linguistics department at The University of Adelaide.
Language is always evolving and changing.
Philosophy and language.
Consciousness and language.
Polyglots.
Total recall.
Origins of words and semantic shifts.
Meaning Mapping.
Lexical fields.
Semantic shifts.
I’ll tell you about how technology has impacted our working memories and ability recall things like phone numbers.
Limited Words 
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