As you may have guessed from the Photoblog in the sidebar, one of my (non-language related) hobbies is photography. Just today, I was reading an article on photographic composition, when a passage jumped out at me:

Counter culture placement of the subject is another way of increasing tension in a photo. In western culture, movement is generally left to right. That’s how you’re reading this page. If the movement in the scene is from right to left (even though it’s moving toward the center), it can create negative tension for western viewers.

I may be crazy (or just obsessed), but I’m seeing some hinting at Linguistic Relativity (the idea that your language affects your thought, also known as the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis) in that line of reasoning. He seems to be imply that the direction of the writing system you use (and thus, the language you speak) affects your processing of images and your aesthetic sense. Given, it’s one of the more concrete and common-sense arguments I’ve heard for language affecting perception, but I’m still slightly skeptical. This just begs for some sort of study.

If Mr. Altengarten’s assertion is true, then an Arabic or Hebrew speaker (who read from right to left) might not find an image with left-to-right movement as appealing as a English speaker would. This raises a few term-paper worthy questions for me. Do Arabic or Hebrew speaking composition teachers give their students the opposite advice? Is this tendency mirrored in art in Right-to-left cultures? How would such images be seen by a bilingual speaker raised speaking (and reading) both Arabic (Right-to-left) and Farsi (Left-to-right)? What about to illiterate speakers of any language?

Given, evaluating this would be very subjective (”Which of these pictures is prettier?”), but I suspect that by asking enough people using similar enough photographs (differing only in composition), the presence or absence of a pattern might be detected.

So, if you’ve got lots of free time (and easy access to native speakers of both sorts of languages), I’d be fascinated to see such a study carried out on this. Although I can’t offer funding, advice, help, or pictures, rest assured that, if the study finds anything cool, you would be my personal hero for at least an hour. That’s gotta be worth something, right?

This is more of an open-ended post than normal, but the issue of formality in Religious discourse came up today.

Having not been raised in any particular religion, I was somewhat surprised to discover that in the Bible, God is usually addressed informally rather than formally (when the language so permits).

For an example, let’s use Job 10:4 (this passage is the first I found where a person speaks with God. Attribute no special significance to this choice.).

In the New International Version of the Bible, the passage is glossed:

You don’t have human eyes.
You don’t see as people see

Modern English has lost the Second Person informal (’Thou’), so this informality doesn’t show up at all in Modern English translation.

However, in the King James Version, we start to see this informality:

Hast thou eyes of flesh? or seest thou as man seeth?

Here, the full informal is used in reference to God. Also interesting is the lack of the capitalization found in the NIV’s “You”, when referring to God.

Interestingly, this same informality showed up in other languages as well. The Reina-Valera Spanish Version of Job 10:4 uses the informal “tu” (lowercase) in place of “Usted”, and the Russian Synodal Version uses the informal “Ti” (uppercase) in place of “Vi” (Sorry, my cyrillics are having issues with this blog). This pattern also held true in French, German, and Portuguese, as best as I can tell.

Of course, there are people who might have a field-day with this information, attributing all sorts of cultural conclusions to these choices (”People must view God as their friend!”). However, rather than jumping to any conclusions, I’m going to ask what other people think.

So, my questions for my readers are twofold:

First, if you speak another language or practice another religion, with what form of address do you address your Deity or Deities? Do you use a formal Pronoun (Usted, You, Vous, Sie, etc.) or an Informal pronoun (Tu, Thou, Du, etc.)? For languages with many levels of formality, please specify.

Second (and answer this only if you’d like), does this informality (or lack thereof) hold significance for you? Do you feel like it’s more a matter of tradition than anything? Do you think that this represents or affects your perception of your God(s)?

If you’d like to post a reply, either click “Comments” below this post, or send me an email (will at this domain name dot com). All comments will be moderated for spam prevention, so yours may take some time to appear.

I hope this yields some interesting answers, and maybe some interesting discussion!

For today, I’ve decided to discuss E-Prime, a language created by D. David Bourland Jr.

Proponents of E-Prime maintain that the English verb ‘to be’ in all of its forms has no place in discourse. Thus, words like “be, being, been, am, is, isn’t, are, aren’t, was, wasn’t, were, weren’t” are strictly forbidden. However, no ban has been placed on words like “has, become, will, would, do, shall, ought”. Two wonderful poems have been placed on the Wikipedia site, one in E-Prime, and one in Conventional English.

Conventional English
Roses are red;
Violets are blue.
Honey is sweet,
And so are you.

E-Prime
Roses seem red;
Violets seem blue.
Honey pleases me,
And so do you.

E-Prime’s creator felt that these rules “reduce the possibility for misunderstanding and for conflict”. The reasoning for this seems firmly rooted in the Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis, as they argue that the use of ‘to be’ can create false security in characteristics (when we say “the coat is red”, we only know that “the coat looks red to me”). They also seem to feel that the elimination of ‘to be’ leads to a language based less on an objective view of reality. Thus, eliminating statements of reality which include no epistemic information (information about how we know what we know) forces us to concentrate on the subjective nature of our interpretations. By adopting this language change, the creators of e-prime seem to feel that our perceptions would gradually shift as well, and eventually, so might our thoughts.

My primary skepticism involves the benefits of adopting such a change. Even if the elimination of ‘to be’ in written and spoken discourse could actually affect our perceptions of the world, I wonder whether the resulting change would really reduce the possibility for conflict and misunderstanding. Sure, false objectivity and lack of epistemic information in language could disappear (at least partially), but I question whether the awkwardness caused by eliminating ‘to be’ might outweigh the benefits and create additional sources of confusion. However, the awkwardness would vary from person to person. I composed this entire post in a basic form of E-Prime (excepting examples), and I did not find it overwhelmingly difficult, but I also cannot imagine it working well in spoken discouse.

E-prime seems quite innovative to me, and although I cannot see it catching on in everyday use, the mere idea provides a great example of thinking outside of the linguistic box in language creation/expansion. It seems like a good step towards precision language, and the idea of eliminating words for higher precision fascinates me. Thus, like many created languages, E-Prime seems destined to a gradual journey down the river to obscurity. However, like all created languages, it offers a new perspective and a new way to view the world.

I’ll end with a great quote from one of the E-Prime sites:

“You don’t need to take drugs to hallucinate; improper language can fill your world with phantoms and spooks of many kinds.”