Language Story

語言寓言 (yǔyán yùyán)

Communication power

Language is a funny thing. Communication is the real power, yet language often gets all the attention.

If you could wish for any superpower, would you choose the ability to communicate with any living being in the world or would choose to have fluency in every language?

Human language is the most advanced of all life on earth. Dogs bark for their human’s sake, birds and whales sing songs, even fungi send signals across mycelium networks, with some more chatty than others. None of the other living creatures have language like we do.

Words - Stories - Levels - Bays

The written word is the Prometheus fire of the language universe. Written language supercharges our storytelling, chaining abstract thoughts together to construct complex concepts and committed them to shareable media. The words provide building blocks to form structures, connecting one idea to another, building upon each other to create powerful sentences, stories, and narratives that chain story upon story. Once upon a time, we put such stories into these things called “books” and would read stories, to ourselves and to one another.

The word “story” even gets used to describe floors of a house. Why not just call them floors?

The sappy answer: rooms of a house are so much more than simply their floors, reducing each story of house to just its floor would not do justice to the many rich experiences provided by the rooms of each level. Homes provide so much more. In old days, windows of each floor would be decorated to tell a story.

While this is all plausible, a more likely answer is that English just adapted the Old French word estoree for “built” (source: https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/storey). In the UK “storey” is used when referring to buildings, avoiding confusion with story.

Hotel stories

Hotels typically just describe each level as a floor, such as “the lobby is on the ground floor”, “your room is on the 14th floor”, and in the elevator ride to get there fellow guests might ask “what floor are you on” but I’ve never heard “are you on the 3rd story?” from anyone inside a hotel describing the room levels. When outside the hotel, when describing the structure, the term “story” will describe how tall a building is. The Wikipedia page for the tallest hotels details a 111-story Guangzhou CTF Finance Centre, but the page for Hotel simply uses floors.

Stories within a story

Kids sometimes say “there’s levels to it” when saying something has a deeper meaning.

Ships can have levels, too, called decks. Some ships even have holodecks to explore a story within a story, if you will. Why not call them floors?

The actual floor surface is called the sole; the term ‘deck’ refers to a structural member tying the ship’s frames or ribs together over the keel wiki: deck

Many ships have rooms and even bays, like sick bay and cargo bay. But “The Bay” is special. When I say, “The Bay” I’m referring to the San Francisco Bay Area, a place with many languages.

English, Chinese, and Taiwanese

In English, we have a common written language, as well as a fairly common spoken language, with a few regional differences. Many have accents, but this is nowhere near the difference between Chinese and Taiwanese.

Please forgive the mix of simplified and traditional characters as I quote from sources and switch contexts. I usually favor the traditional ones because I learned on those, I find them more elegant, and the extra detail offers clarity. Almost like music from vinyl records over lossy compressed files on digital media. Alas, the world moves on and I comply.

Chinese has 中文 (“central language”) and many dialects Mandarin 普通话 (“ordinary talk”) or 國語 (“national language”) Taiwanese Hokkien 臺灣話 (“Taiwan talk”) or 臺語 (“Taiwan - language”)

So many characters (or words) for language! What’s the difference between “文”, “语”, and “话” ?

The short answer from italki says:

文 means language with implication of civilization, culture and learning (the written form) imbued within. 语 means language, mostly interwined with the oral aspect of the language. 话 means the oral aspect of the language https://www.italki.com/en/post/question-429879

My mapping is slightly different, traditional characters with simpler explanations 文 - art, written word 語 - dialect, phrases 話 - talk, spoken word

The italki post offers a longer answer, too. I’ll leave you to explore.

My favorite for Taiwanese is 臺語 (Tái yǔ) which combines 臺 (“tower”) and 語 (“language”)

These two characters are used in a couple other interesting words.

電臺 - broadcasting station / transmitter-receiver 成語 - set phrase / idiom / proverb

As words become a blog post, they share from a 電臺 in a sense. The 成語 beautifully carry so much meaning so efficiently, one dreams to write words so well.

Taiwanese, especially Taigi (臺語; Tâi-gí), has a delightful sense of kindness to the language. There’s less formality than what comes with the stuffy 國語 Mandarin. Almost like the “southern hospitality” evoked by the drawls and contractions of southern United States. Specifically, I’m thinking more North Carolina, less West Texas, but I digress.

Back to the “story” before, google search to translate yielded the following from AI:

None of the confusing collisions that occur with the American “story” usage. Note how characters used for language are not used to compose the word for story (故事).

Bonus language

While researching the characters to use, I pasted 話 (huà) into google and the following result returned.

Real talk!

Colloquialism and Meaning

What’s the word? Know what I mean?

食飯 (“ja bung”)

In many Taiwanese social settings, especially among family and friends, 食飯 (“ja bung”) is used as a warm, informal way of saying “hello” much like asking “Have you eaten yet?” (literal translation: 食飽未 “Jia ba bue?”). This operates as a phatic expression to open up social channels and maintain relationships rather than to exchange factual information.

Checking for understanding

In the movie Rush Hour, Detective Carter (Chris Tucker) flamboyantly said, “Do you understand the words coming out of my mouth?” to Lee (Jackie Chan).

The question was borderline rhetorical, a rather aggressive (albeit comical) meta-communication aimed at Lee’s ability. The implied superiority would be mean, were it not for the satirical irony of the character, and relatable frustrations of the failure to communicate. The fun part is we know Lee (and Jackie) “speaka any English” just fine, so Carter gets what’s coming soon.

Carter was almost using a pragmatic marker but he was really just venting. Breaking this down, we can back into the common “you know” confirmation marker.

Do you know what I am trying to say? You know what I’m saying? Ya know what I mean? Don’t ya know? Ya know?

Bringing this back around to the language of “The Bay” I alluded to before…

Yadadamean? Yadada I’m saying though?

A hella good song!

Just semantics

The real power is knowing what someone means, not just the definition of words. Language can only be an approximation of subjective experience (qualia) anyway. With semantic change even important words like literally do not mean what they used to according to old textbook definitions. Deep neural networks of LLMs handle the semantic gap with tokens and hidden layers to fool some into believing the machines understand.

When Detective Carter says “Do you understand the words coming out of my mouth?” or a Bay Area rapper says “Yadadamean? Yadadam sayin” they’re communicating more than just the basic meaning of the words. Even the machines can explain this, but the AI cannot know the underlying human feelings. Some call this semantic density and highlight the need for trust and human decision-makers.

Survey designers use semantic differential as a psychological measurement scale to measure a person’s subjective perceptions toward a concept, object, or event. While useful for quantitative data and persuasion, the “bipolar adjectives” (e.g., good-bad, strong-weak) reduce the respondent’s attitude into a dimension constrained by the words. Surveys can capture nuance between the opposites, but these are liable to miss true nuance and can present a false dichotomy. Still, we have to use the tools available (see https://youtu.be/kIg3YRqoh5s for more explanation).

So the next time someone dismissively says “it’s just semantics” check to see if the semantics actually matter before accepting the trivializing message. Words are hard. The impact of language can be far-reaching. Commit. Mean what you say and know what you mean.

That’s My Word

RIP Keak Da Sneak - thank you for hyphy and so much more.