Moral Animals and Moral Relativism

Francis Beckwith argues in "Why I'm not a Moral Relativist" that there are only three sources of objective morality: illusion (i.e. there isn't objective morality), chance, and intelligence. I like this argument. However, what if our biological and social evolution plays a central role in our acquisition of moral principles? I'm not sure we can put evolution as a moral source in the "chance" category as under such an explanation morality would arise in response to social conditions and is the natural result of a social species.

Just to press this point, take a social species like wolf/dog. They have moral rules that have evolved through their social interaction and need to survive. As Bekoff and Pierce argue, there are dog "commandments" much like Moses' decalogue that help wolf/dog society to function. If wolf/dogs have moral principles (along with other social organisms) much like our own, then I'm further inclined to think that "chance" is a poor category for evolutionary explanations of morality.

Might intelligence have bestowed morality to wolf/dogs and us humans? I'm inclined to think that there are simpler ways to explain this: that the process which led to our biology also led to our morality. So, what category might evolutionary explanations of morality fit if not chance (and not intelligence)? Perhaps a category of "mechanistic process" might better describe such explanations, showing Beckwith's argument to be, at bottom, a false dilemma.

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Further analysis of language economy

In the previous post, I dissected the levels of language change from 1 to 4 in order of severity. The first category is a relatively mild amount of language export from one language to the other. In the first category, a language will borrow words only to fill a void: such as English borrowing the word 'cilantro' from Spanish. The reason why we added the word cilantro is easy to imagine: a Spanish merchant sells a new product to a chef, who uses it in his meal to his master who, impressed, asks the chef what the name of the new plant is. "The merchant said 'cilantro', sir."

But before we begin analyzing language exchange we must continue splicing. We have seen the levels of moderation in a language exchange, but now we must categorize the psychology on a broad level. For my examinations that will follow in later posts, I think it useful to dissect the reasons for language change into two categories. Of course, many categories - perhaps an infinite number - can be created to explain why languages change or don't, but I think we can make do with two which I will call normative and unitive forces.

Normative. This may also be described as the conservative force of the mind, the interior resistance to language change. Normative forces maintain language laws within our mind and resist the replacement of words and grammar structures with new versions.

Unitive. The liberalizing, largely external force that encourages us to add or modify existing words or grammatical structures to the way we speak. This may also be described as an ongoing desire to speak appropriately. For instance, though the normative forces encourage me to speak colloquially with my friends in a simple manner, college simply will not accept simple talk - and in order to be accepted I have had to add thousands of new words to my vocabulary and even change existing grammar structures.

Normative forces are directly linked to language-economy supply. A US tourist that does not want to learn how to converse in Portuguese will try to get by in as much English as possible. The Portuguese waiter, in order to make him or herself more hirable, will be quite responsive to unitive forces (which are directly linked to language-economy demand) and picks up quite a bit of restaurant English, maybe even more. Will the Portuguese waiter retain the English and use it in everyday scenarios? In category 1 or even category 2 situations, usually not. Perhaps a phrase or two slips in, but in general the demand for English is not high enough to permanently change the Portuguese waiter's interior vocabulary.

The Economy of Language-Exchange

A particular deficit in linguistic literature that I feel needs research is a field I will call "Language Economy." That is, examination of the fundamental nature of exchange between languages. When cultures with different languages come into contact, I that there are a number of possible pathways linguistic-cultures interact that deserve categorization. Here are a number that I propose, ranging from the smallest amount of language exchange to the greatest:

Category I. Light Language Trade
Languages admit words for nouns, verbs and proper nouns (especially toponyms) to fill a noticeable language abscess. [Example: when the Spanish began selling us a new condiment to our food, we bought their name for it too, 'cilantro']

Category II. Moderate Language Trade
More than just one language adding words to fill abscesses, word are also replaced by foreign words. Colloquial phrases enter language.

Category III. Extensive Language Trade
Grammar changes, large vocabulary replacement, core vocabulary begins to be replaced. [Example: French domination of the English language from 1054 onward]

Category IV. Complete Language Trade
Core vocabulary replaced save for a few words. Core grammatical structures change.

In my opinion, the interaction between languages of the world are the freest economies we could ever study.

Linguistic Gravity Model of Vocabulary-trade

The above formula was developed in 1954 by Walter Isard to give a very good estimation of how much trade (numbered by currency, usually dollars) goes on between two countries. I won't get into the specifics, but the formula basically says this: given the distance between two countries (physical distance is a huge barrier to trade) and the relative sizes of both countries' economies, Fij will be equal to how much trade goes on between the two countries. The formula has turned out to be a pretty reliable one, consistently predicting the correct figures that we would expect to see.

But I would like to take the formula out of its economics box and bring it into contemporary linguistics. Namely, with sufficient work, a formula could be devised to predict how much a language will borrow from another language due to contact.

i = Submissive language, the language that imports itself
j = Dominant language, the language that exports itself
D = the economic mass of a culture
G = a constant ~ 1
F = total language exported from j to i
Mij = total distance between two countries equal to MiMij


So...

Fij = G(Mij/Dij)

The important thing that this equation predicts is the amount of language export upon a submissive language, but not the other way around. Sociologists have long noticed that language exchange is never equal. Iberian Latin absorbed almost no local words during the Roman Empire, yet Latin quickly demolished all local tongues in the peninsula to the point where it is impossible to know what languages once existed in these villages. For a contemporary example, look at Mexican-United States relations and their languages: Mexican Spanish uses an incredible breadth of 'Americanisms,' from retiro (in the sense of 'to retire from a job') to 'dippear' ('to dip'). Yet how many Spanish words have entered the General American English lexicon? Not many, probably none.

Hey, you...

For the last two centuries, linguists have been tracing the roots of words back to their earliest states by means of comparative analysis (the field is called 'historical linguistics'). Beginning with British scholars working abroad for the empire, amateur philologists noticed great similarity of between English, Greek, Latin, and native langauges - most remarkably the Indian language Sanskrit. The similarities were too great to ignore. The fact that the Old English word 'snaw' (snow) sounded much like old Slovak 'sneigh' and the Sanskrit verb 'sniyhati' ('becomes wet') all bear remarkable phonological similarities gave rise to a new branch of history where words were cross-examined to recover their original sound and meaning (*sniegw^ho). Suddenly no word in any language was safe without being thoroughly explored by eager linguists to discover its origin. Some languages, once thought to be completely unrelated were brought together (such as English, Hittite and Sanskrit). Others were shown to be genetic isolates without any living relative (like Basque or arguably Etruscan).

More recently, the Oxford English Dictionary has been the continuous attempt to consolidate etymological studies into a single source, making available to the public an enormous compendium tracing the roots of every single English word. The results have been largely successful. But in etymological studies there have been rogue words that defy etymology. Words like 'quiz' that confound the scholar, despite numerous 'folk etymologies' (read 'rumor').

One of those words is one of our most popular: 'hey', as in a comment to attract someone's attention. Why is this word a challenge? The origins of the word 'hey' are, in a sense, too well attested. Words like 'hey' appear in nearly every language, with similar sounds. Some even speculate that hey is a natural language phenomenon of the mind in society. Some Indo-European languages have remarkably similar words; Greek has 'ei' and Mexican Spanish uses 'ay', for instance. But so do completely unrelated tongues. Chinese has 'ai' (single tone), Burmese purportedly 'aey', and from my own experience Gizpuzkoan Basque uses 'ei'.

But I argue that 'hey' can be clearly demonstrated to have etymological roots going as far back as Proto-Germanic *hɜɪ. First, the English 'hey' has extremely old roots in writing, despite the word being a vulgarity that I believe is unlikely to appear in ancient documents (how often do you write 'hey' in your essays?). The OED places the first occurrence of 'hey' in writing to 1295 AD. So it has occurred long after the Norman conquest of English placed firm linguistic roots into our language. But the word 'hey', with its rough /h/ phoneme, has no clear link to French. In fact, cognates with /h/ to the word exist in Germanic languages, not the Romantics. Modern German has 'hei', Dutch 'hei', and Swedish 'haj'. So there are clear references to 'hey' in the Germanic languages.

There is also powerful evidence outside German languages. Finnish, an unrelated language that is part of the Uralic family (a family not demonstratively linked to Indo-European apart from interesting similarities in their pronouns), has a long tradition of using 'hey' - but the other Uralic languages (Saami, Hungarian, etc...) do not have a strong history of a similar word with the infamous /h/. Finnish, however, is infamous for its large number of Germanic loanwords. Take the word 'king'. In Old English the word was 'cyning,' and the word is still taught - along with Hwaet - in High School English class today. Cyning is part of a well-attested to series of Germanic words for king that all sound alike. To skip to the end of the story, king has a root in Proto-Germanic *kyninjaz, which was recovered about a century and a half ago. Finnish scholars around the turn of the century found their word for king was actually an introduction for a foreign source, and had no root in the Uralic family at all. The word? Kuningas, providing exciting confirmation of a Proto-Germanic word from outside sources. As it turns out, Finnish has borrowed a huge amount of words from Proto-Germanic, and it is in the opinion of this author that hey is but another example. Especially since the majority of examples of 'hey' in languages unrelated to IE (or even within IE languages, for that matter) do not have the classic /h/ sound. Now all that remains for me is a careful analysis of the word, which I hope will lead to a paper someday soon.