Le 03/10/2010 14:52, Tobias Schoel a écrit :
I'm no linguist. Sorry if I have uttered old and overcome thoughts.
Let's say they're controversial at best. But not false, mind you: just very hard to assess.
As far as I know, languages do lack things indeed: some phonems, interpunctuation, grammar, ...
Yes, of course. I was speaking about the lexicon, actually, and the ability to express thought.
Political use of phonetics: the German language is lacking the difference between the chinese phonems q,zh,ch,x,sh, ... The consequence is that Chinese was interpreted as kauderwelsch (english translation?) and thus the Chinese as "dumb". This was used for propaganda against China during imperialism.
Well that's a /reflexion/ on phonetics, it's not phonetics itself that is used. Such considerations are of course frequent. See Rousseau's comparison of the Italian and German languages in his /Essai sur l'origine des langues/. And see accents, of course: one person's accent is laughable (or, less frequently, poetic) to another. In France the accent from Québec is often felt as comical -- until I was told (I can't remember by whom) of a French professor who went to Québec and couldn't understand why the entire classroom was laughing at him. His accent, of course!
In that way, phonetics does indeed play a great role in politics: in France at least, you'll never hear a politician with an accent that is considered `popular'.
Globally, indeed, languages are often barriers, generally because they're ill-understood, sadly. People often think there is a `right' way of saying things, which is absurd.
Am I not somewhat off-topic? :) Paul
-------------------------------------------------- Subscriptions, Archive, and List information, etc.: http://tug.org/mailman/listinfo/xetex
