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Linguistic Nulls · Acedra
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0:00
Do languages have unspoken meaningful nothings? Well of silent letters you must've heard, but what about a silent word? Linguists claim they can detect the invisible, the inaudible. They go so far as to print zeros in books and papers. What are these ghostly non-element elements, and why do linguists believe in them?
0:30
A speaker speaks, hoping to revitalize their people's language. A linguist listens intently, her notebook at the ready. Within the stream of somethings being said she swears she hears not a pause but a zero. A nothing that's still something enough for her pencil to sketch a circle with a slash. Zeros. Nulls. Once you search for them, you'll not-see and not-hear them everywhere. Your underqualified but overinquisitive narrator has been stashing evidence of zeros in this folder,
1:03
where as you see Guaraní has zero aspect. English? Zero articles. Maya? Zero pronouns. Nulls heard in Ancient Sumeria. Modern Western China. East Africa. Northern Australia. From small single silent sounds in syllables to large structures in sentences, apparently so much stuff around the world we theoretically mean we don't actually say and sign. Zeros. I've met them many times before, scattered across my study sources, even inking their way into my daily glyph practice.
1:41
Recently though they left a renewed void in me. A strangeness that made me seek out the story of where linguistic nulls come from, what they are and whether they're really there.
2:00
Ancient India. In an era when the standard speech is already noticeably different from the old recited tongue of the past and from regional varieties, a grammarian named Pāṇini crafts over four thousand rules that insightfully model the Sanskrit language. Not a riveting read, but don't doze off! Rules take bases and affixes, apply step-by-step substitutions and meticulously output words and sentences. Substitutions like... Turn back the page to the quote that opened our section.
2:34
In dense ancient grammatical metalanguage it instructs us that when eat-type verbs would attach an -a, substitute a nothing for the -a before adding a suffix to build the word. As in 238 other of the 4-or-more thousand rules, this one replaces sounds with a non-sound, a lopa, a disappearance. The calendar pages flip forward to a later era. European colonization squeezes the subcontinent. Knowledge leaks out, like those rules and their author.
3:07
Linguists in the West admire then feel inspired to formulate their own disappearances. Less replacement rules, more placeholding paradigms. As Whitney from "the States" and Saussure from "l'Hexagone" (wrong: Switzerland!) propose, a noun's endings oppose its other endings, which though often a perceptible presence, may be an imperceptible absence, "l'opposition de quelque chose avec rien". Their eager acolytes locate more absences.
3:36
Bloomfield detects a "zero element" on an animal who becomes the null morph posterchild. If English esses its plurals like beep becomes beeps, why does one sheep multiply into many sheep? So he slots a zero ending into the same spot! Six years pass, Jakobson contrasts signs to reveal many a signe zéro. Theoretical elegance leads him to believe not just in soundless nothings without expression, slashed circles, but meaningless nothings without content, slender ovals!
4:12
(Such mouthfuls... ask a linguistics-loving friend sometime, and bring a snack and a pillow stuffed with two excuses to leave.) With linguists widely convinced of their plausibility and utility, zeros began to haunt their papers. Nulls nesting in paradigm gaps kept their theories graceful. But why stop at zero morphs in grammar? Think small: why couldn't Chinese and Burmese syllable paradigms have zero phones when an initial or a final is absent?
4:41
Think large: why wouldn't Maasai sentence structures have nulls in their trees and traces? Does ASL do without the is-es and was-es other languages require? Zero copula. Can Kalahari Khoe drop the "that" that lets relative clauses modify nouns? Zero relativization. Am "I" an unsaid pronoun in 日本語 when in English that's almost never so? Zero subject. Does my Classic Maya textbook show suffixes for me and you but nothing for them? Zero third person.
5:15
Wow, imagine how many non-sounds null-followers might technically not hear. Think we can persuade them to believe in sentences where most everything is nothing but a zero? Some bit of language is truly there, I swear, sure it's not said, not signed, it fills a paradigm.
5:42
Beware lest you too be enticed to dream of zeros everywhere. For as this story had its believers, here too are its doubters. Detractors disposed toward dispelling those grammatical ghosts. In comes Haas to dispute the shiny new nothings – they're overused. To justify them you need stricter conditions, leaving you space to spot a meaningful nothing, never a meaningless nothing, only when it's an optional variant of a meaningful something.
6:13
Save it for covert allomorphs, true "language zeros", but strike it from sheep, naught but a "linguist's zero". Doubts mounted. Skeptics called for doing without zeros, at least unless supported by exacting linguistic work. Use them sparingly or even aim for not at all. Some dispirited, some undeterred, many zero-believers urge temperance to rescue null from critiques that condemn it to the role of odd variant at best.
6:43
In paper after paper that strained my brain and glazed my eyes, they teach exacting techniques to sense the presence of an "absence of a non-zero sign". Their revised conditions are logical if esoteric. Zeros become meanings without signs that contrast with other meanings with signs. Content without form but never without content. Or they are gaps in paradigms where rows and columns intersect, not substances that linger when their systems vanish.
7:17
It seemed avoiding zero wasn't the only way then to defend it from doubters. Perhaps, to pass along words better than my own, nothing really is something if we control the context and the something very very carefully. Another charge, a deeper challenge. Review the parties in this feud – a flood of European and Western names. Is zero's misuse a technical error or a cultural expression, an exercise in Eurocentrism?
7:47
Indeed, this paper catches us conjuring null units out of cultural and linguistic bias. Say a European and non-European language have a grammatical mismatch, where this one has something that one seems to lack. Sometimes what's stamped defective is in reality extensive - a grue where you have both a green and a blue. Since Euro tongues aren't exactly typical for the world, these accusations have heavy linguistic reverberations.
8:23
So do linguists still believe? Are once great zeros now null and void? Can we spare them from doubt? Well we've seen we can evade zeros or adopt stricter standards on their detection. Undeniably impactful – pick up a grammar by a linguist, you'll often have to put in work to find a good null or two. But that charge of a complete lack of cultural and linguistic tact, of nulls colonizing grammars, requires more of us than tightening the straps on logical conditions inside a theory
8:53
of theoretical zeros. It means looking outside theories for perspective. Leading us to end with at least three good resolutions. One, zeros have human reasons, rendering some less mythical, so avoid some more than others. Why nullify? Motivations are multiple, all grounded not in abstract linguistic facts but in facts about ourselves. These imply some nulls are nuller than others. Zero persons may be more useful than zero articles.
9:27
This is a taste of linguistic justice not just for far-flung languages "in the field", but for English as well. Two, zeros only fit some theories, some languages, some contexts. Pāṇini's lopa is not a tool of pure theoretical elegance. He spoke not wrote memorizable rules to be passed down within an oral culture, to describe an already then-old language fully and flawlessly with substitutions real and ghostly. Yet even where Western zero fills a gap in a table, at that exact place his lopa
10:02
replaces alternatives to fit a prototype. Linguists can now spot places where he leaves better takes on the cutting room floor; that's the cost of his system. But given this model, for this language, for this cultural reason, zeros work. Doesn't mean for everyone, Jakobson. Three, zeros aren't mismatches with your language and culture, so acknowledge the role of the observer. The charge of Eurocentrism warns that outsider analyzers make common mistakes.
10:33
Sometimes it's not a pizza with a null topping, it's really just bread. Do Greenlandic speakers use a zero tense, meaning they learn tense but with a zero marker, or is their language simply tenseless? And sometimes just bread really means something expansive. Across colonized communities the roles of Elders stand out to me. Like are Polynesians really missing separate traditional concepts for grandparents, education systems, and citing your sources? Nah.
11:12
Maybe there's room for us to glance across to a different discipline, ah yes to the gardens again, and take inspiration from the aptly named "principle zero": explicitly recognize the perspective that the observer, the theorizer brings to the field. That sounds like an encompassing response to such a little zero, but it ensures we can feed and house the lingering ghosts who do live on in linguists' theories and imaginations.
11:39
I appreciate your attention during this video, and patrons for nudging me toward zeros. Even starting from such abstract nulls we end with grammars being colonized. This may mean supporting more insider linguists, leaning into lived lessons from Elders, placing language back into its bio/geo/social habitat and ~ I like how, again, this is key ~ appreciating people and their cultures. But no need to start scratching slashy zeros in your own notebook when you learn a language.
12:06
Thanks for sticking around, subscribing, and hearing nothings with me.
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