Sobre la (vana) tarea de evaluar lenguas
-
1
Universidade de Santiago de Compostela
info
ISSN: 0067-9674, 0718-9303
Year of publication: 2023
Volume: 58
Issue: 1
Pages: 395-424
Type: Article
More publications in: Boletín de filología: (Universidad de Chile)
Abstract
Las lenguas han sido sometidas a evaluaciones de todo tipo, que han resultado en muchos juicios de valor sobre ellas, esto es, sobre el carácter mejor o peor de ciertas lenguas frente a otras. Esta situación persiste actualmente, de modo que la tesis de igualitarismo lingüístico es amenazada por diferentes propuestas. Este artículo analiza críticamente la evaluación de lenguas, sosteniendo que cualquier intento científico de evaluar lenguas desde una óptica lingüística debería satisfacer la condición básica de ofrecer criterios objetivos. Sin embargo, el trabajo muestra que esa condición no se satisface, y formula cuatro diferentes problemas de los que adolece la evaluación de lenguas, lo cual convierte las propuestas de otorgar diferente valor a las lenguas en arbitrarias y/o descontextualizadas. Nuestra conclusión consiste en que construir ránkings de lenguas (según muy diferentes parámetros) basados en su diferente valor no solo no añade nada al conocimiento científico sobre el lenguaje, sino que, en la mayor parte de casos, expresa o fomenta prejuicios lingüísticos.
Bibliographic References
- Adami, Christoph. 2002. What is complexity? BioEssays 24/12: 1085-1094. https://doi.org/10.1002/bies.10192
- Adamson, Peter y Richard C. Taylor. 2005. Introduction. En Peter Adamson y Richard C. Taylor (eds). The Cambridge Companion to Arabic Philosophy, pp. 1-9. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. http://doi.org/10.1017/CCOL0521817439.001
- Aguilar-Moreno, Manuel. 2006. Handbook to Life in the Aztec World. New York: Oxford University Press.
- Al-Jallad, Ahmad. 2017. The earliest stages of Arabic and its linguistic classification. En Elabbas Benmamoun y Reem Bassiouney (eds.). The Routledge Handbook of Arabic Linguistics, pp. 315-331. London: Routledge. https://doi.org/10.4324/9781315147062-17
- Algeo, John. 1998. America is ruining the English language. En L. Bauer y P. Trudgill (eds.), Language Myths, pp. 176-182.
- Anderson, Stephen R. 2004. Doctor Dolittle’s Delusion. Animal and the Uniqueness of Human Language. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.
- Andersson, Lars-Gunnar y Peter Trudgill. 1990. Bad Language. Oxford: Basil Blackwell.
- Balari, Sergio. 2014. Teoría de lenguas formales. Una introducción para lingüistas. Bellaterra: Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona.
- Balari, Sergio y Guillermo Lorenzo. 2013. Computational Phenotypes. Towards an Evolutionary Developmental Biolinguistics. Oxford: Oxford University Press. https://doi.org/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199665464.001.0001
- Bauer, Laurie y Peter Trudgill (eds.). 1998. Language Myths. London: Penguin.
- Baugh, John. 1988. Language and race: Some implications for linguistic science. En Frederick J. Newmeyer (ed.): Linguistics: The Cambridge Survey, vol. IV: Language: The Socio-Cultural Context, pp. 64-74. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511620577.005
- Baugh, John. 2000. Beyond Ebonics: Linguistic Pride and Racial Prejudice. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
- Baugh, John. 2018. Linguistics in Pursuit of Justice. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781316597750
- Bernárdez, Enrique. 1999. ¿Qué son las lenguas? Madrid: Alianza.
- Berwick, Robert C. 2016. Monkey business. Theoretical Linguistics 42/1-2: 91-95. https://doi.org/10.1515/tl-2016-0002
- Bickerton, Derek. 1995. Language and Human Behavior. Seattle: University of Washington Press.
- Bloomfield, Leonard. 1933. Language. New York: Holt. Campbell, Lyle y William J. Poser. 2008. Language Classification. History and Method. New York: Cambridge University Press. https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511486906
- Černý, Jiří. 2006. Historia de la lingüística. Cáceres: Universidad de Extremadura.
- Chomsky, Noam. 1956. Three models for the description of language. IRE Transactions on Information Theory 2: 113-124. https://doi.org/10.1109/TIT.1956.1056813
- Chomsky, Noam. 1959. On certain formal properties of grammars. Information and Control 2: 137-167. https://doi.org/10.1016/S0019-9958(59)90362-6
- Cowell, Andrew. 2012. Dictionary of the Arapaho Language, 4th ed. Disponible en: https://homewitharapaho.files.wordpress.com/2015/03/arapaho-dictionary1.pdf
- Crystal, David. 1997. The Cambridge Encyclopedia of Language, 2nd ed. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
- Deutscher, Guy. 2009. Overall complexity: A wild goose chase? En Geoffrey Sampson et al. (eds.), Language Complexity as an Evolving Variable. Studies in the Evolution of Language 13, pp. 243-251.
- Dixon, Robert Malcolm Ward. 2004. The Jarawara Language of Southern Amazonia. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
- Dixon, Robert Malcolm Ward. 2010. Basic Linguistic Theory: Methodology, Vol. 1. New York: Oxford University Press.
- Dixon, Robert Malcolm Ward. 2015. Edible Gender, Mother-in-Law Style, and Other Grammatical Wonders. New York: Oxford University Press. https://doi.org/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780198702900.001.0001
- Dixon, Robert Malcolm Ward. 2016. Are Some Languages Better Than Others? Oxford: Oxford University Press. https://doi.org/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780198766810.001.0001
- Donald, Merlin. 1991. Origins of the Modern Mind. Three Stages in the Evolution of Culture and Cognition. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
- Edwards, John. 2006. Language attitudes. En Keith Brown (ed.). Encyclopedia of Language & Linguistics, vol. 6, pp. 324-331. Oxford: Elsevier. https://doi.org/10.1016/B0-08044854-2/01286-4
- Edzard, Dietz Otto. 2003. Sumerian Grammar. Leiden: Brill. https://doi.org/10.1163/9789047403401
- Emmorey, Karen. 2002. Language, Cognition, and the Brain. Insights from Sign Language Research. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum. https://doi.org/10.4324/9781410603982
- Evans, Nicholas y Toshiki Osada. 2005. Mundari: The myth of a language without word classes. Linguistic Typology 9: 351-390. https://doi.org/10.1515/lity.2005.9.3.351
- Everett, Daniel L. 1986. Pirahã. En Desmond C. Derbyshire y Geoffrey K. Pullum (eds.). Handbook of Amazonian Languages, Vol. I., pp. 200-325. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.
- Everett, Daniel L. 2005. Cultural constraints on grammar and cognition in Pirahã. Current Anthropology 46/4: 621-633. https://doi.org/10.1086/431525
- Fasold, Ralph. 2006. The politics of language. En Ralph Fasold y Jeff Connor-Linton (eds.), An Introduction to Language and Linguistics, pp. 373-400. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
- Fenk-Oczlon, Gertraud y August Fenk. 2014. Complexity trade-offs do not prove the equal complexity hypothesis. Poznan Studies in Contemporary Linguistics 50/2: 145-155. https://doi.org/10.1515/psicl-2014-0010
- Finlay, Bland J. y Genoveva F. Esteban. 2009. Can biological complexity be rationalized? BioScience 59/4: 333-340. https://doi.org/10.1525/bio.2009.59.4.11
- Gil, David. 2008. How complex are isolating languages? En Matti Miestamo et al. (eds.), pp. 109-131. https://doi.org/10.1075/slcs.94.08gil
- Gil, David. 2009. How much grammar does it take to sail a boat? En Geoffrey Sampson et al. (eds.), pp. 19-33.
- Giroux, Henry. 1987. Introduction. Literacy and the pedagogy of political empowerment. En Paulo Freire y Donaldo Macedo, Literacy. Reading the Word and the World, pp. 1-18. South Hadley, MA: Bergin & Garvey.
- Goldin-Meadow, Susan y Diane Brentari. 2017. Gesture, sign, and language: The coming of age of sign language and gesture studies. Behavioral and Brain Sciences 40: e46. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0140525X15001247
- Gordon, Edmund W., Fayneese Miller y David Rollock. 1990. Coping with communicentric bias in knowledge production in the social sciences. Educational Researcher 19/3: 14-19. https://doi.org/10.3102/0013189X019003014
- Hall, Daniel C. 2020. Review of R.M.W. Dixon, Are Some Languages Better Than Others? Canadian Journal of Linguistics 65/1: 148-152. https://doi.org/10.1017/cnj.2019.12
- Harlow, Ray. 1993. Lexical expansion in Maori. The Journal of the Polynesian Society 102/1: 99-107.
- Harlow, Ray. 1998. Some languages are just not good enough. En Laurie Bauer y Peter Trudgill (eds.), pp. 9-14.
- Heine, Bernd y Christa König. 2015. The !Xun Language. A Dialect Grammar of Northern Khoisan. Köln: Rüdiger Köppe Verlag.
- Hirth, Kenneth G. 2016. The Aztec Economic World. Merchants and Markets in Ancient Mesoamerica. New York: Cambridge University Press. https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9781316537350
- Hockett, Charles F. 1958. A Course in Modern Linguistics. New York: MacMillan.
- Hockett, Charles F. 1960. The origin of speech. Scientific American 203: 89-96. https://doi.org/10.1038/scientificamerican0960-88
- Joseph, John E. y Frederick J. Newmeyer. 2012. ‘All languages are equally complex’: The rise and fall of a consensus. Historiographia Linguistica 39/2-3: 341-368. https://doi.org/10.1075/hl.39.2-3.08jos
- Joshi, Aravind. 1985. Tree adjoining grammars: How much context-sensitivity is required to provide reasonable structural descriptions? En David R. Dowty, Lauri Karttunen y Arnold M. Zwicky (eds.). Natural Language Parsing. Psychological, Computational, and Theoretical Perspectives, pp. 206-250. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511597855.007
- Karlsson, Fred. 1999. Finnish: An Essential Grammar. London: Routledge.
- Kazeminejad, Ghazaleh, Andrew Cowell y Mans Hulden. 2017. Creating lexical resources for polysynthetic languages—The case of Arapaho. En Antti Arppe, Jeff Good, Mans Hulden, Jordan Lachler, Alexis Palmer y Lane Schwartz (eds.). Proceedings of the 2nd Workshop on the Use of Computational Methods in the Study of Endangered Languages (Honolulu, March 6-7, 2017), pp. 10-18. Stroudsburg, PA: Association for Computational Linguistics. https://doi.org/10.18653/v1/W17-0102
- Kilian-Hatz, Christa. 2008. A Grammar of Modern Khwe (Central Khoisan). Koln: Rüdiger Köppe Verlag. https://doi.org/10.1075/slcs.110.10kil
- Kortmann, Bernd y Benedikt Szmrecsanyi (eds.). 2012. Linguistic Complexity: Second Language Acquisition, Indigenization, Contact. Berlin: De Gruyter. https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110229226
- Krausneker, Verena. 2015. Ideologies and attitudes toward Sign Languages: An approximation. Sign Language Studies 15/4: 411-431. https://doi.org/10.1353/sls.2015.0014
- Labov, William. 1969. The logic of nonstandard English. En James E. Alatis (ed.). 20th Annual Round Table. Linguistics and the Teaching of Standard English to Speakers of Other Languages or Dialects. Georgetown Monographs on Language and Linguistics 22: 1-44.
- Lehmann, Christian. 2006a. On the value of a language. European Review 14/2: 151-166. https://doi.org/10.1017/S1062798706000159
- Lehmann, Christian. 2006b. The value of a language. Folia Linguistica 40/3-4: 207-238. https://doi.org/10.1515/flin.40.3-4.207
- Levelt, Willem J. M. 2008. An Introduction to the Theory of Formal Languages and Automata. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. https://doi.org/10.1075/z.143
- Linell, Per. 2005. The Written Language Bias in Linguistics. Its Nature, Origins and Transformations. Abingdon: Routledge. https://doi.org/10.4324/9780203342763
- Linell, Per. 2019. The written language bias (WLB) in linguistics 40 years after. Language Sciences 76: 101230. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.langsci.2019.05.003.
- Lineweaver, Charles H., Paul C. W. Davies y Michael Ruse. 2013. What is complexity? Is it increasing? En Charles H. Lineweaver, Paul C. W. Davies y Michael Ruse (eds.). Complexity and the Arrow of Time, pp. 3-16. New York: Cambridge University Press. https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9781139225700.002
- Lippi-Green, Rosina. 2012. English with an Accent. Language, Ideology, and Discrimination in the United States, 2nd ed. Abingdon & New York: Routledge. https://doi.org/10.4324/9780203348802
- Longa, Víctor M. 2020. Reseña de R.M.W. Dixon, Are Some Languages Better Than Others? Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2016. Verba 47: 391-404. https://doi.org/10.15304/verba.47.6567
- Longa, Víctor M. y Juan J. López-Rivera. 2022. On Dixon’s ‘dangerous idea. Folia Linguistica 56/2: 469-486. https://doi.org/10.1515/flin-2022-2021
- McBurney, Susan. 2012. History of sign languages and sign language linguistics. En Roland Pfau et al. (eds.), pp. 909-948. https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110261325.909
- Miestamo, Matti. 2008. Grammatical complexity in cross-linguistic perspective. En Matti Miestamo et al. (eds.), pp. 23-41. https://doi.org/10.1075/slcs.94.04mie
- Miestamo, Matti, Kaius Sinnemäki y Fred Karlsson (eds.). 2008. Language Complexity. Typology, Contact, Change. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. https://doi.org/10.1075/slcs.94
- Miller, Jim y Regina Weinert. 1998. Spontaneous Spoken Language: Syntax and Discourse. Oxford: Clarendon Press.
- Milroy, James y Lesley Milroy. 1985. Authority in Language. Investigating Language Prescription and Standardization. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul.
- Moreno, Juan Carlos y José Luis Mendívil-Giró. 2014. On Biology, History and Culture in Human Language: A Critical Overview. Sheffield: Equinox.
- Moreno Cabrera, Juan Carlos. 2000. La dignidad e igualdad de las lenguas. Crítica de la discriminación lingüística. Madrid: Alianza Editorial.
- Moreno Cabrera, Juan Carlos. 2003. Síntesis y análisis en las lenguas. Crítica de la tipología morfológica clásica y de algunas de sus aplicaciones sincrónicas y diacrónicas. Estudios de Lingüística de la Universidad de Alicante 17: 465-504. https://doi.org/10.14198/ELUA2003.17.26
- Moreno Cabrera, Juan Carlos. 2005. Las lenguas y sus escrituras. Tipología, evolución e ideología. Madrid: Síntesis.
- Moreno Cabrera, Juan Carlos. 2007-2008. Sobre la complejidad y dificultad de las lenguas. El caso del euskera. Revista de Lenguas y Literaturas Catalana, Gallega y Vasca XIII: 199-216.
- Moreno Cabrera, Juan Carlos. 2013. Cuestiones clave de la lingüística. Madrid: Síntesis.
- Moreno Cabrera, Juan Carlos. 2014a. Del lenguaje a las lenguas. Tratado didáctico y crítico de lingüística general, Vol. I: El lenguaje. Madrid: Euphonía Ediciones.
- Moreno Cabrera, Juan Carlos. 2014b. Del lenguaje a las lenguas. Tratado didáctico y crítico de lingüística general, Vol. II: Las lenguas. Madrid: Euphonía Ediciones.
- Neidle, Carol, Judy Kegl, Dawn MacLaughlin, Benjamin Bahan y Robert G. Lee. 2000. The Syntax of American Sign Language: Functional Categories and Hierarchical Structure. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
- Nevins, Andrew, David Pesetsky y Cilene Rodrigues. 2009. Pirahã exceptionality: A reassessment. Language 85/2: 355-404. https://doi.org/10.1353/lan.0.0107
- Newmeyer, Frederick J. y Laurel B. Preston (eds.). 2014. Measuring Grammatical Complexity. Oxford: Oxford University Press. https://doi.org/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199685301.001.0001
- Niklas, Karl J. 1999. Evolutionary walks through a land plant morphospace. Journal of Experimental Botany 50/330: 39-52. https://doi.org/10.1093/jxb/50.330.39
- Penny, Ralph. 2000. Variation and Change in Spanish. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9781139164566. Citamos por Variación y cambio en español. Madrid: Gredos, 2004.
- Pfau, Roland, Markus Steinbach y Bencie Woll (eds.). 2012. Sign Language. An International Handbook. Berlin: De Gruyter Mouton. https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110261325
- Piantadosi, Steven T., Laura Stearns, Daniel L. Everett y Edward Gibson. 2012. A corpus analysis of Piraha grammar: An investigation of recursion. Comunicación presentada en el 2012 LSA Annual Meeting, Portland, 5-8 de enero. Disponible en: http://colala.berkeley.edu/papers/piantadosi2012corpus.pdf
- Piller, Ingrid. 2016. Linguistic Diversity and Social Justice. An Introduction to Applied Sociolinguistics. New York: Oxford University Press. https://doi.org/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199937240.001.0001
- Preston, Dennis R. 2006. Folk linguistics. En Keith Brown (ed.). Encyclopedia of Language & Linguistics, vol. 4, pp. 521-533. Oxford: Elsevier. https://doi.org/10.1016/B0-08044854-2/01501-7
- Pullum, Geoffrey K. 1997. Language that dare not speak its name. Nature 386: 321-322. https://doi.org/10.1038/386321a0
- Reeves, J. K. 1976. The whole personality approach to oralism in the education of the Deaf. En Peter Henderson (ed.). Methods of Communication Currently Used in the Education of Deaf Children, pp. 9-17. London: Royal National Institute for the Deaf.
- Rickford, John R. 1999. Suite for Ebony and Phonics. En John R. Rickford, African American Vernacular English. Features, Evolution, Educational Implications, pp. 320-328. Malden, MA: Blackwell.
- Riddle, Elizabeth M. 2008. Complexity in isolating languages: Lexical elaboration versus grammatical economy. En Matti Miestamo et al. (eds.), pp. 133-151. https://doi.org/10.1075/slcs.94.09rid
- Rodríguez-Iglesias, Ígor. 2022. La lógica de inferiorización de las variedades lingüísticas no dominantes. Etnografía sociolingüística crítica del andaluz. Berlín: Peter Lang. https://doi.org/10.3726/b19416
- Rodríguez-Picavea Matilla, Enrique. 1998. La ganadería en la Castilla medieval. Una revisión historiográfica. Medievalismo. Boletín de la Sociedad Española de Estudios Medievales 8: 111-152.
- Rounds, Carol. 2001. Hungarian: An Essential Grammar. London: Routledge.
- Salvador, Gregorio. 1992. Política lingüística y sentido común. Madrid: Istmo.
- Sampson, Geoffrey. 2009. A linguistic axiom challenged. En Geoffrey Sampson et al. (eds.), pp. 1-18.
- Sampson, Geoffrey, David Gil y Peter Trudgill (eds.). 2009. Language Complexity as an Evolving Variable. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
- Sapir, Edward. 1921. Language: An Introduction to the Study of Speech. New York: Harcourt, Brace & Co. Scheetz, Nanci A. 2012. Deaf Education in the 21st Century. Topics and Trends. Boston: Pearson.
- Schilling-Estes, Natalie. 2006. Dialect variation. En Ralph Fasold y Jeff Connor-Linton (eds.), pp. 311-341.
- Senz, Silvia, Jordi Minguell y Montserrat Alberte. 2011. Las academias de la lengua española, organismos de planificación lingüística. En Silvia Senz y Montserrat Alberte (eds.), El dardo en la academia. Esencia y vigencia de las academias de la lengua española, vol. I, pp. 371-550. Barcelona: Melusina.
- Smitherman, Geneva. 2000. Talkin That Talk: Language, Education and Culture in African America. New York: Routledge. https://doi.org/10.4324/9780203254394
- Steeman, Sander. 2011. A Grammar of Sandawe: A Khoisan Language of Tanzania. Utrecht: LOT.
- Stokoe, William C. 1960. Sign language structure: An outline of the visual communication systems of the American Deaf. Studies in Linguistics, Occasional Papers 8, University of Buffalo.
- Taylor, Talbot J. 1997. Theorizing Language: Analysis, Normativity, Rhetoric, History. Amsterdam: Pergamon.
- Tuhiwai Smith, Linda. 1999. Decolonizing Methodologies. Research and Indigenous Peoples. London & Dunedin, NZ: Zed Books & University of Otago Press.
- Tusón, Jesús. 1996. Los prejuicios lingüísticos. Barcelona: Octaedro.
- Urquizu Sarasua, Patricio. 2013. Gramática de la lengua vasca. Madrid: UNED.
- Van Rooy, Raf. 2020. Language or Dialect? The History of a Conceptual Pair. Oxford: Oxford University Press. https://doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780198845713.001.0001
- Witzlack-Makarevich, Alena y Hirosi Nakagawa. 2019. Linguistic features and typologies in languages commonly referred to as ‘Khoisan’. En H. Ekkehard Wolff (ed.): The Cambridge Handbook of African Linguistics, pp. 382-416. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108283991.012
- Wolfram, Walt. 1998. Myth 13. Black children are mentally deprived. En Laurie Bauer y Peter Trudgill (eds.), pp. 103-112.
- Wolfram, Walt, Carolyn Temple Adger y Donna Christian. 1999. Dialects in Schools and Communities. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum. https://doi.org/10.4324/9781410601148
- Yoder, Brendon. 2010. Syntactic underspecification in Riau Indonesian. Work Papers of the Summer Institute of Linguistics. University of North Dakota Session 50: art. 1. https://doi.org/10.31356/silwp.vol50.01
- Zuckermann, Ghil’ad. 2003. Language Contact and Lexical Enrichment in Israeli Hebrew. Houndmills: Palgrave MacMillan. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781403938695
- Zuckermann, Ghil’ad. 2020. Revivalistics. From the Genesis of Israeli to Language Reclamation in Australia and Beyond. New York: Oxford University Press. https://doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780199812776.001.0001