Language

Hi! I think this is a philosophical question concerning language. I just read this in a newspaper: "They share neither an underlying raison d'être nor a modus operandi." And the question is: what is the language of this sentence?

Comments

The sentence says that they -- the European Union and NATO, I think it was -- have different purposes and different ways of operating. What's the language of this sentence, you ask. Well, what's the color of the American flag? Red, white and blue, I would say. The sentence is a (somewhat pompous) composite of English, French and Latin.

I'd say: If it is a sentence of a public language, then it's English. It has English syntax. All of the expressions in it are English too, though two of them have been adopted from other languages.

There are other sorts of examples that pose a more interesting question. There is a phenomenon known as "code switching" in which a bilingual speaker will begin a sentence in one language and end it in another. A simple example would be something like "The man in the funny hat tiene un perro loco". There are examples, better ones, in which it's clear the syntax isn't that of either of the two languages used by the speaker, since, taken as a whole, it violates both. This one is close, since, in English, adjectives generally precede the modified noun whereas, in Spanish, they generally follow the modified noun, but there are exceptions in both cases.

One of the things that is interesting about these examples is that the places switching may take place are determined by the underlying grammatical form of the sentence, as described by theoretical linguistics, not by the surface form of the sentence. So this kind of phenomenon provides an interesting sort of evidence for the "psychological reality" of the structures linguists describe.

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