Are their languages that reify much less than English? IOW they have less nouns and less emphasis on nouns and are less likely to refer to processes and abstract 'things' as nouns. (Just noticed that 'reification' could be seen as an example of itself.)
There are a variety of language structures among the world's language families. The subject-verb-object syntax (in any permutation) that we're accustomed to in the Indo-European family is a common one and also occurs in the Afro-Asiatic (e.g., Semitic) and Sino-Tibetan (e.g., Chinese) families. But other structures are found, such as topic-description in Japanese. Nonetheless, AFAIK speaking only as an amateur linguist, nouns and verbs are essential elements in all languages. Chinese, for example, has only nouns and verbs and has as large a word stock as English, so it probably has more nouns than we do. (Western linguists jump through hoops to classify Chinese words as adjectives, conjunctions and prepositions, but if you deconstruct the language the way a computer programmer would, they all behave exactly like nouns and verbs except for a couple of particles that I regard as spoken punctuation marks.)
In terms of reification verbs are OK. As far as nouns, of course every language must have them, but I wonder if some languages rely more on verbs to describe processes. To give a silly example.... if they said something like It bettered ongoing. Rather than There was steady improvement. I also seem to remember that some Native American languages avoided reification - at least compared with English. But I also remember some controversy around this. I suppose also one could lower reification if pronouns are left out. If the language focuses more on verbs and what we would reify as 'events' and describes them without pronouns. Sort of a Buddhist-like tendency. I believe some languages drop the subject, but it is implict in the endings of verbs - though perhaps you could argue that this reifies less since the verb dominates and merely has a tinge of subjectness to it. Found this: That distinction could be seen as putting an asterisk next to certain nouns - via the verbs? - to indicate they are not really things.
do a search for tony swain, deborah bird rose, and david turner--yeah, i'm sure there's a few thousand of those; but if "australia" or "aboriginal" pops up, it's probably the right one. cumulatively, they lived well over a decade amongst a few aboriginal groups in and about alice springs in the western desert of australia. david and tony have a few published volumes of transcribed songs, and tony and deborah have written extensively on the mythologies, metaphysics, and language of these folks--david has as well, but his writing is frankly incomprehensible. two volumes in particular stand out: swain's a place for strangers: towards a history of australian aboriginal being and rose's (bird rose's?) dingo made us human. maybe i'll add something relevant (the above are relevant, btw) when my ulcer stops killing me and my pessimism wanes. on a side note, david's teaching assistant from the time when i was a student of his has recently (well, like 2004) completed a phd. dissertation on those bestest of canucks, rush! awesome.
There's hardly any reason to twist "better" into a verb and "ongoing" into an adverb when we already have a perfectly good verb and a perfectly good adverb with those meanings. "There was steady improvement" is equivalent to "it improved steadily." The difference is strictly a matter of rhetorical style and I don't see how choosing a sentence with a noun over one with a pronoun to make exactly the same statement says very much about our attitude toward reification. Government agencies since the Nixon administration, for example, have been notorious for phrasing statements in the passive voice to avoid identifying anyone as responsible for an action. "It was decided that the war should continue," for example, is so much more slippery than "the President decided to continue dropping napalm on farms." As I mentioned, I don't trust linguists to break out of the paradigm of their own language. In the 19th century English textbooks for children were created by translating Latin textbooks. They taught several generations of English schoolkids to decline nouns: Nominative: the boy; genitive: the boy's; dative: to the boy; accusative: the boy; vocative: O boy! They were so mired in the Latin grammar that had been taught to all educated people for two thousand years that they missed the rather important point that English nouns have only the mildest and most regular inflection paradigms. This is why speakers of Indo-European languages insist that Chinese has adjectives and prepositions. The words customarily translated as "red" and "toward" are in fact verbs meaning "to be red" and "to approach." I can also argue that Chinese has no pronouns. The words customarily translated into English as pronouns can just as accurately be translated as "the person speaking," "the person being addressed," etc. There is no gender; tā means "he," "she" or "it." And there is no number; a noun meaning "group" can be appended to any of the three pronouns to refer to more than one person. That argument is based on an agenda rather than on the way the language is used by its speakers. The inflection completely specifies the pronoun. The two-syllable English sentence "I love" translates exactly into the two-syllable Latin sentence "amo." In French the Latin inflections have been elided so the subject must be stated. In Spanish they have not, so sentences without subjects are perfectly fine and predominate in poetry and colloquial speech, although a trend in formal speech has been to put the pronouns in. This is a language with double negatives and a paucity of acronyms, so redundancy is a fine art. There are other inflected languages that put in the redundant pronouns, such as Russian. English is typical of all the Germanic languages: the inflections are so vestigial and cursory that they don't clearly indicate the pronoun, so you have to say them. Rush is one of our favorite bands and we've seen them many times. It's a real musician's band, you almost have to have studied music theory to get the most out of it.
It was off the top of my head, as an example of how a noun might be unnecessary. All your corrections are right on, but my point of course was not to improve English, but to give an idea of ways some languages might avoid reification. IOW they would rarely or never use a term like improvement and would get at the issue via verbs and other parts of speech. Again. I was not suggesting English speaker start de-reifying. However a language that did not have those two options, or rarely used the option with the abstract noun, might have a core philosophical stance or way of seeing the world that is different from ours. I am not saying it would be better if a language did this. I don't think I said this either. But I find the idea interesting. I think one can do this but it takes a lot more than constructing a politically correct speech. One must have or notice experiences that do not fit the language well. Or via immersion in another language experience 'reality' in a different way. Which might in fact parallel a different sense of self. I would not say it is causal but part of the same package. I did find the rest interesting, but I am still wondering if there are languages that have a lighter touch in the creation of nouns.
German is a good example, it is somewhere inbetween. There, the difference is summed up as Nominalstil vs. Verbalstil. If you speak German: http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nominalstil Searching under "verb-centered" and "noun-centered", I found some interesting bits:
I find it amusing that they describe the belief "that values should be action-oriented" by using the noun "action" instead of the verb "act." It is possible, and quite common, to over-analyze.Please Register or Log in to view the hidden image!
I'm a noun-oriented anglophone, the wrong person to ask. One of the things I teach in writing classes is that in a bulleted list, you absolutely must use parallel construction. But it's even better if all the items are nouns instead of verbs. This isn't just my preference; the anglophone managers who will read it will find it more "powerful."
While I and most Americans would be much more comfortable with the second phrase than the first, I can swing with the first without much effort at all.
funny. i thought the same thing when i first read that--well, to be honest, i might actually be more inclined to say the former. as related elsewhere, my acquisition of language was a bit atypical owing to autism.
Sure. But the practical difference is how often you use each of the two ways of phrasing. We can more or less easily understand a lot more than we actually use. Habits shape perception and action.
