Question There is this idea that languages can be judged and valued - take the very stereotypical image of the proud French person praising their own language's beauty and warmth while explaining that English is an impure, soulless and emotionless tongue with "stolen" vocabulary. Is the idea that languages can be judged and praised/scorned (sort of like works of art) rooted in a theory of linguistic aesthetics? Has such a theory ever been articulated? More to the point, are there any general justifications for such views, or are words really just words?

Accepted:
November 11, 2010

Comments

You ask, first of all, whether the idea that languages can be judged and praised/scorned is rooted in a theory of linguistic aesthetics. Well, that might be one basis on which to evaluate a language; there may be others, such as those I'll mention below. Also, I don't know of any substantial theory of linguistic aesthetics. However, one can imagine some of what such a theory might say. For instance, just as we can find a line of a poem beautiful because of its sonic properties, we might want to say such a thing of a sentence of a certain language. If a language L is one in which such sentences are commonly found, while another language L' has sentences line that rarely, but a lot of other sentences are are percussive, gutteral, or in some other way less beautiful, that would be a reason for judging L to be superior to L' on aesthetic grounds. That would not for a moment prejudge the relative merits of the two languages on other dimensions, such as clarity. For hints of a line of thought along these lines, you might check out Rousseau's _Essay on the Origin of Language_.

You next ask, "are there any general justifications for such views, or are words really just words." Let's keep in mind that languages are a lot more than words or combinations of words. The grammar of a language is a crucial part thereof, and modern linguistics takes grammar (nowadays referred to as 'syntax') as perhaps more important to the nature of language than the words it contains. Accordingly, one can imagine what would justify saying that one language is grammatically superior to another: the superior one would permit less ambiguity in terms of what the structure is a given sentence; at the same time one language might be superior to another in terms of the *learnability* of its grammar.

Philosophy has a long tradition of thinking about what a "logically perfect" language would be like. The idea stretches as far back at least as Leibniz, and after being discarded for some time, emerges again in Germany and Austria in the 19th Century. Gottlob Frege had a lot to say about what a logically perfect language would be like. His discussions leave open the possibility that the norm of logical perfection is at odds with the norm of aesthetic beauty of a language. For further discussion you might useful an article of mine on Frege, which warms up to its subject by tracing some of the aforementioned history: "The Inferential Significance of Frege's Assertion Sign," Facta Philosophica Vol. 4, No. 2 (2002): 201-229.

Mitch Green