by jerf | 2025-05-01 19:03:24+00:00
There are, unsurprisingly, many examples of the same thing happening in English in the siblings of my post here.

This is a characteristic of grammatical systems. This contrasts non-grammar-based communication systems, such as the ones used by many animals, where a sound may indicate "a threat is near", and the intensity, duration, or repetition of the sound may encode the proximity/relevance of the threat. This is obviously a very sensible way to operate, especially for neural-net based intelligences, so much so that this still lives inside our language usage as well. Think of the progression of calling someone's name as you try harder to get their attention; same sounds, just louder and longer as you step up the intensity.

However it has problems with the fact that there are only so many sounds that can be modulated like that and still be distinct. Each individual sound consumes not just its "base" representation, but all the possible modulations.

Grammar-based systems pack a lot more meaning into a much tighter encoding, but basically by the pigeon-hole principle, you can't help but end up with radically different meanings next to each other. We still only have so many sounds we can make. In fact such systems kind of want that outcome; per sindriava's example, it is generally good that "fart" and "tart" are fairly close to each other. They will not generally be truly confused for each other, so packing them close together is cheap. Similarly for packing "scanning" and "vegetative" together; no native Farsi speaker would do much more than momentarily blink at such a change, and maybe get a chuckle out of it. Things like "can" versus "can't" cause us much more real-life problems, where they are diametrically opposed to each other but distinguished only by a couple hundred milliseconds of sound between them, and by their grammatical nature, are almost always legal sentences when interchanged. (Maybe it's "always" but you learn to be careful about claiming "always" about any language issue. If anyone can come up with one have fun, though bear in mind you need to be using the correct meanings; "tin can" versus "tin can't" is something else entirely, that "can" is a different word for the purposes of this conversation.)

One of the general lessons that I think comes up in learning other languages is that there aren't that many features that are truly unique to a given language. Ratios vary. Sometimes one language will make heavy use of a feature, like Chinese and tonality, and another will make very, very weak usage of it... but there are English words that are spelled the same and when spoken, are distinguished by tone. By no means is English a "tonal language", tone in English is mostly reserved for emoting, but it's not quite absent. 50 years ago I'd have said ideographs were certainly isolated to certain East Asian languages but now English has some rudimentary ideographs in it, perhaps most notably the eggplant and peach emoji which have widely (albeit not universally) understood meanings now largely severed from their original graphical representations in a very similar manner to ideograms. Much of the time whatever "weird" things you see in a language that it uses widely are still present in your own, just used much, much less.