"Time flies like an arrow; fruit flies like a banana."

(Or "I'm glad I'm a man and so's Lola.")

I suspect that English is like any other language--Context is everything. English /can/ be used ambiguously. But its immense vocabulary allows for greater precision than, say, French. Aroma, bouquet, scent, musk, stench, perfume, odor . . . You can express a lot of subtleties with a collection of words like ours.

A professor of philosophy was delivering an address at Princeton on logic and language. His introductory comments made the point that a double negative can sometimes be taken as an affirmation, and sometimes as a negation. And also, when combining a negative and a positive in ordinary language, the result can sometimes be affirmative and sometimes negative. The interesting thing he wanted to focus on in his talk, was that whenever a speaker uses two positive affirmations, the result is always an affirmation.

At this point, from the back of the room, Saul Kripke says dismissively: "Yeah, yeah." The speaker halts for a few seconds, folds up his notes, and the talk is over.

I don't know whether this story is apocryphal or not, but I like it all the same.

"His introductory comments made the point that a double negative can sometimes be taken as an affirmation, and sometimes as a negation."

I wouldn't say that this insight was not unoriginal.

"When I was a freshman in high school, I made the mistake of saying that I thought English would be an easy language to learn in front of my English teacher."

As opposed to trying to learn it in front of your physics teacher?

Bourbon and water; or beer and wine?

No action shall be brought or maintained against any county alone or when acting jointly with any other county under any law, its or their agents, officers or employees, for any noncontractual acts or omissions of such county or counties, its or their agents, officers or employees, relating to the improvement, protection, regulation and control for flood prevention and navigation purposes of any river or its tributaries and the beds, banks and waters thereof ...

Most the legislative history has been destroyed, but "and navigation" was added by a judiciary committee, not the waterways and harbors committee where the bill originated.

Any comments most welcome.

Where's the ambiguity. I like a drop o' the Irish, and my fridge can testify that I loves me some Coca-Cola. So, I like whiskey and soda.

I think that English is relatively more ambiguous than many languages (though this particular example is probably not one of them), because of its lack of case endings, its tendency to stack words together without any indication as to what the connection is between them ("pretty little girls' school", "Japanese encephalitis vaccine", etc.), and its use of just a few grammatical endings (especially "-ing" and "-ed") with a wide variety of meanings.

Here's an interesting article on the ambiguities in faced by a translator, written by a long-time professional UN translator: http://claudepiron.free.fr/articlesenanglais/translation.htm

Can one actually say a language is ambiguous based on taking idiomatic phrasings, like "whiskey and soda", or "cutting down a tree"?

It would seem that the test of a language is how precise it can be, when ambiguity is suspected. "I'd like a martini with X oz of this and that, mixed together (shaken not stirred...), and served with an olive placed into the fluid," Granted, this isn't a phrasing I'd use with a bartender who should know what the drink is, but if I suspect he did know, I'd go with the potentially opaque "I'll have a dirty tom collins" or some-such.

Personally, a little ambiguity's an OK thing, even if only the natives get it. I'd be bored to tears talking in engineer or science speak all day with people who I suspect can handle the more figurative stuff. I'll take the monthly mistakes for the sake of beauty and parsimony.

It would seem that the test of a language is how precise it can be, when ambiguity is suspected.

1.) I think I'll pull the lever for this one.

2.) I believe the above-quoted statement is a correct interpretation of the question at hand, and if that statement were given as one of several options on a mechanical voting machine, I would select and operate the lever that corresponds to this option.

Or, to go back to the tree-cutting experiment someone mentioned earlier, it only becomes difficult to explain it because native speakers have such an intuitive sense of its meaning, they rarely stop to consider how the phrase was derived. We can say that we will cut a tree down because we are referencing orientation: it is currently standing upright, and it will shortly be lying on the ground. We can say that we will cut a tree up because we are referring to the count of its pieces: it is presently one tree, but it will soon be several logs and a large pile of smaller branches.

Personally, a little ambiguity's an OK thing, even if only the natives get it.

I agree to a large extent, but the problem is that English has pretensions to be an international language, used just as much by non-native speakers as by native speakers.

I've read that Chinese is even worse than English in ambiguity (for translators anyway), and that French is relatively precise, often over-precise. Personally, I think that Esperanto has a great mixture of precision, expressiveness, and flexibility (but maybe I'm biased, since I'm familiar with it).

Oo Ooo.

It should be mandatory for lawyer-types to take linguistics.

Anyone familiar with how languages work would laugh at this thread as though it were monkeys discussing sign language.

I guess english does aspire to a greater spread than other languages, language learner (as a result of historical accident as opposed to esperanto, of course, but I generally think people are good a making virtue of a necessity). I also agree that a lot of ambiguity in language is completely unintentional and unsuspected, which only makes it worse.

The main defense is social awareness and literary context, which can be on short supply, but at the most basic levels, I think we have two issues with language in general: Word issues (definitional ambiguity, which I love since its possible to get plenty of puns and innuendos), and structural issues (most of the one's from your examples).

Definitional issues are probably unavoidable since we probably only have a limited room for vocabulary in our brains, and I'd think even with a language like esperanto, one will eventually have people who play with the language, looser usage and all the sorts of things that give us our prescritivist vs descriptivist conflicts in english.

Structural issues are more interesting. I like Latin's way of having the declensions of adjectives match the modified words, for example, but even that can get a bit ambiguous (especially with the lack of definite articles and such). I'm not familiar enough with esperanto to comment on its attempts to fix the issues, but I do think that languages tend to correct themselves over time to the people that speak it, and that the more egregious issues are evolved away, so I'm generally a fan of the establishment ones (I don;t have any data to support this, however, and my knowledge of OE and ME are middling at best).

I guess if I could sum myself up, I;d say the key to english's success as a lingua franca is the sensitivity of its speaker to foreign people trying to speak it, and the awareness to avoid idiom except where it's explicitly presented as such.

or as we were taught in college:

Beer and wine is fine;
Wine and beer is... gay.

bellisaurius, I see you made a mistake in your follow-up post. I've never heard of "ehglish." Is your face even redder than before?
The key is, read what you wrote before you post. It should only take a second, but it will save you from humiliation.

Ted Chiang's beautiful "Story of My Life" deals with the way in which language affects thought and Weltanschauung.

My Admin prof, Jay Wexler, illustrated ambiguity with this sentence: "The zookeeper poked the gorilla with the banana." Cute.

it's only ambiguous on the level of syntax. context makes the meaning of each statement abundantly clear. context (or, in linguistics, "pragmatics") is as amuch a part of language as is syntax, phonology, or the lexicon. therefore, to say that "english," the language--or any other language, for that matter--is ambiguous simply becuase one must look beyond syntax and semantics to grasp the meaning of sentences strikes me as unduly formalistic.

as a long-time student and speaker of mandarin, i thought the same of that language when i first began my studies. mandarin has an uncommonly large number of homophones and near-homophones (see, e.g. this poem composed entirely of the sound "shi"). when one speaks quickly, in brief phrases, and/or without *context* (i.e., uttering sequences of unrelated thoughts), a speaker's meaning can be difficult to grasp. (this feature of the language is unique to its spoken form, as most words in mandarin, homophones included, have a unique logographic indetifier.) the meaning of each phrase and utterance becomes much clearer when situated in context.

the idea that mandarin is "ambiguous" can only be maintained when the language as spoken is divorced from context. but as my third-year chinese instructor chided me years ago: "who told you not to pay attention to context?!"

b,

see, e.g. this poem composed entirely of the sound "shi"

In a perhaps similar vein, see the large number of languages that have whistle speech; some of them (the Aztec family at least, such as the Chinantec cited at the link) also have entire sentences you can say w/o opening your mouth.

Some languages are more or less ambiguous when context is lacking. Mandarin very much so; English less so; and Russian probably not very ambiguous. Most of the time that doesn't matter, of course, because context is normally available, and native speakers are good at guessing what was meant (often without even realizing the ambiguity). But in some cases some parties to the communication are not native speakers, and context is lacking or inadequate, and extra precision is required for scientific or legal texts. In those cases, not all languages are equally suited, though all languages are capable of fulfilling the role of an international language to a degree if they are chosen for political instead of linguistic reasons, and without careful attention the inadequacies mostly won't even be noticed compared to other languages.

Along these lines, the Revised Statutes of Ohio, in their chapter on Rules of Construction, say, in Section 1.02(F):

As used in the Revised Code, unless the context otherwise requires:

(F) "And" may be read "or," and "or" may be read "and" if the sense requires it.

So does punishment which is cruel but not unusual violate the prohibition on "cruel and unusual punishment"?

anym avey said:

We can say that we will cut a tree down because we are referencing orientation: it is currently standing upright, and it will shortly be lying on the ground. We can say that we will cut a tree up because we are referring to the count of its pieces: it is presently one tree, but it will soon be several logs and a large pile of smaller branches.

I think this is over-rationalizing an idiomatic usage of the preposition "up." I would guess that "up" in "cutting X up" is equivalent to its usage when we talk about "messing" something "up," "dressing" something "up," or "cleaning" something "up." We're not talking about the orientation OR the count of the indirect object. It's more a sense that the messiness, dressiness, cleanliness, or "cut-ness" of the object is being increased by our action.

For what it's worth, I've always felt "cruel and unusual" was a single description of an understood, and known to evolve, concept. Not that the 8th Amendment requires courts to first analyze whether something is cruel and then analyze whether it is unusual (in other words, it's not a two-step process).

I would be quite disappointed, to say the least, if a US court upheld a punishment finding that it was indeed cruel, but not unusual (especially if the unusual-ness is measured by frequency of employment as a punishment), thus failing a two-part 8th Amendment test.

An amorous couple:

"What is this thing called love"?

or

"What is THIS thing called, love?"

Neither. The moon belonged to a guy named Endor.

THIS:

"Of course the host was "playing word games," because the meanings of both "I like bourbon and water" and of "I like beer and wine" are clear. In the first sentence "I like" applies to "bourbon and water" together, whereas in the second sentence "I like" applies to each of "beer" and "wine" separately. Stated differently, the preceding words are distributed over the conjoined elements in the second sentence, so that the meaning is "I like beer and [I like] wine." But the preceding words are not distributed over the conjoined elements in the first sentence, so that the meaning is "I like (bourbon and water)." In each sentence the word "and" has the same conjunctive meaning -- the difference lies in whether the preceding words are distributed over the conjoined elements or not. Whether to interpret the preceding words as distributed over the conjoined elements or not depends on the context of the sentence, and what we externally know about the conjoined elements. Given what we know about the social context, and what we know about bourbon, water, beer and wine, the meanings of the two sentences are not at all ambiguous"

is so lost on an autistic no one will get any objections from persons with autism that the English language is ambiguous and creates *the autism communication gap*.

I thought law schools were trying to get lawyers to write sentences with more clear meaning these days. What happened to that idea?

"I once had a student, who I suspect was mentally ill, who could read English with a fanatical literalness that could find ambiguity almost anywhere. But the things that troubled him didn't bother others at all."

Oh, here we go again ... why do all the *neurotypicals* feel such a perseveration to arbitrarily supply uncomplimentary modifiers to a person with autism's "literalness," like "fanatical" and "mentally ill?" Don't tell me, duh, this is why we have all those standardized "mental thinking style" tests to ferret out all the autistics who just happen to think in a different non-linear more computer-esque 3-D style that gets the *neurotypicals* so worked-up they become obsessed with why autistics are *different*? This is like asking why there are so many different shapes of sugar cookies. Why? Just because... some like to eat Christmas trees and other like to eat Snowmen or Holiday bells.

My opinion about the ambiguity found in the English language is that it is usually precipitated a deliberate tactical manuever mostly by lawyers to take advantage and hedge bets in the event the future just might erupt into litigation. For example, I saw a great contract for a several million dollar development project that left several blanks spaces unfilled -- ooooh the ambiguity!

Additionally, persons with autism do have deficits in pragmatics, and it is typical for numerous *neurotypicals* to deliberately make vague and ambiguous English statements by communicating only the gists to ensure persons with autism cannot follow the conversation. The English language is sufficiently specific, however, to state things with more particularity -- unless one is a legal opportunist.

The equivalent to those who state ambiguous gists when speaking English can be found in the difference between Modern Standard written Arabic and most spoken Arabic, especially the numerous dialects -- spoken Arabic is much harder to follow primarily due to leaving off gender and case endings of who/what is being referred to, as compared to when a new Arabic learner sees it written, what has been said is clear. This is especially true when women are trying to follow the conversation of men, or Americans are trying to follow the conversation of native Arabic speakers.

I never took Mandarin, which I have been told is difficult. However, I am not sure it is the ambiguity that is the real thinking problem associated with speaking/writing in multiple different languages, but rather the fact there is a unique thinking process, way of coonceptualizing things, and order of thought specific to each different language that makes it hard for a native English speaker to transit between different languages.

Russian, for example, requires an English speaker to think in advance exactly what order words said will have to be stated, in a different manner than speaking in English. Spanish has way too many idioms, and conversational Spanish speeds along quite fast. If a native Spanish speaker doesn't want to be understood, he or she just speaks at a greater speed. I know some of my friends who have lost me in the middle of conversations by this technique.

I actually found Arabic to be the easiest in terms of being very phonetic and havign orderly predictable rules of language, easier in fact than English but for my being a native English speaker. One just has to get used to writing from right to left and in the Arabic script. It is best to begin learning Arabic by speaking it before writing it, like a child learns language.

I think the reason people are finding ambiguity in the 'cut the tree down' vs. 'cut the tree up' example is due to the device of rearranging the word order to assert a claim there is ambiguity where there is none.

The proper phrase is 'cut up' the tree, describing an act one does applied to many other objects 'cut up' -- e.g., cakes, steak, trees, dress material, etc. Whereas, 'cut the tree down' describes what gravity does when one makes a vertical cut into a tree trunk, thereby functions as a shorthand way to describe the motion of the tree under conditions of gravity once the vertical cut is made into the tree trunk.

If one has never made a vertical cut into a tree, one would not understand. As it is with almost any human experience.

It is like asking why pig threads are like jazz, to use a different example of innuendo and colloquim. "If you have to ask, you don't understand."

dear Linda,

my placement of the word "only" in the comment above was both right and true. it's meaning is only ambiguous if you assume it means other than what it says.

professor volokh had suggested that the entire english language was ambiguous. i responded by saying that the phrase offered in support of this argument was "only ambiguous on the level of syntax."

though your placement of the adverb makes perfect sense, my meaning should be read as written, that is: "the phrase is not ambiguous, and it can *only* be considered as such when parsed on the level of syntax, without respect to context."

as someone with graduate degrees in both linguistics *and* law, i heartily endorse the suggestion that that you (i) be less verbose, and (ii) disabuse yourself of straw men, when posting snarky comments on law blogs.

"b.:" I share your spell-correct frustration, but in my case it is not a failure to proofread so much as not having yet perfected the go-betweens of my Dragon NatuarallySpeaking with a few typed in corrections. Maybe someday I will be able hold my own in a written spelling bee as well as an oral one *sigh*.