Problem with the English Language? Lack of single word negative comparative equivalent to Superlatives.

[Ina]

I was just looking at the word paroxysmal to use with negative qualifiers when discussing about events or behaviour that one gets to hear more and more frequently. Just as an example a well politically connected person wins a R 187 million tender for PPE from which he deliver only PPE for R 15 million. The rest of the money is spent on Lamborginis, Porches, Jeeps etc. This is a case of extreme coruption which has been occurring again and again to the point of normalization. I found myself with no words, and I do not like that because I know that I shall be shocked once and get desensitized. Another example is the Eurovision. Again no words to qualify. Another example is a 5 story block of flats collapsing while still under construction with 36 deaths and counting. Floods in Rio Grande del Sul in Brazil combined with a dam burst. And so on and so forth, I do not have words in my frame of reference to register correctly the events and still keep alert and I personally find that a big problem.

I think it might be a language issue, English language, polite and proper, combined with a news redaction technique that’s missing details. I don’t know, really, but I think it is important, because once the word is allocated, any gradually rising negative event or effect can be identified, like for instance, unexplicable continuous rise in food prices.

Again, maybe I am overreacting. What is your take on this?

 

[BHelmet]

At first thought, I think you are astoundingly correct! In Ingrish, that’s the way: pair up a superlative modifier with the descriptive term to go to incredible extremes. You can be absolutely flummoxed, or utterly indifferent or even stupendously outraged, but as I reflect on your comment I think you’re right. As far as what this really means, if anything, is imminently debatable.

 

[Ina]

At first thought, I think you are astoundingly correct! In Ingrish, that’s the way: pair up a superlative modifier with the descriptive term to go to incredible extremes. You can be absolutely flummoxed, or utterly indifferent or even stupendously outraged, but as I reflect on your comment I think you’re right. As far as what this really means, if anything, is imminently debatable.

My main concern comes from the relationship Words (language) - Cognitive (mainly mental) Map - Events, Situations, Occurences - Resulting Feelings (emotional processes) and going back to Words as feedback.

The frequency diversity and negative magnitude of events and their consequences is increasing and it is starting to exceed our lived experience that derives our functional cognitive map. If Words are not there because of practical obvious reasons, there is the danger of not only remaining spreechless but remaining frozen as a consequence, hence, actionless (best case scenario), or swept by the ‘frightened herd’.

If we are to step in ‘uncharted territory’, we need adittional language tools.

 

[thorbiorn]

I think it might be a language issue, English language, polite and proper, combined with a news redaction technique that’s missing details. I don’t know, really, but I think it is important, because once the word is allocated, any gradually rising negative event or effect can be identified, like for instance, unexplicable continuous rise in food prices.

Again, maybe I am overreacting. What is your take on this?

Perhaps it is a problem of language, but could it also be the limitations of our human experience, that we have been conditioned to not consider occasional cataclysmic events, but live in a world where linear thinking is the norm?

In the language of mathematics, there are logarithmic scales. This allows for conceptualizing orders of magnitudes using numbers, and to some extent words. Take the example of the

• Richter magnitude scale and moment magnitude scale (MMS) for strength of earthquakes and movement in the Earth

The Richter scale uses words like: Micro, Minor, Slight, Light, Moderate, Strong, Major, Great, Extreme to describe earthquakes.

The Volcanic explosivity index is another, and they use different words to express how large an eruption is:
Effusive, Gentle, Explosive, Severe, Catastrophic, Cataclysmic, Colossal, Super colossal, Mega colossal.
The same page describes the injection into the Trophosphere using words like: negligible, minor, moderate, substantial, and vast.

Here is how a logarithmic development compares with a linear and an exponential in different coordinate systems.

When using ordinary language, it helps if there is a shared understanding, or a willingness to change perspective. If for example, someone lives in an area where there are hardly ever earthquakes and one day they experience a 4.6, then that is huge and the occasion will be the talk for days. If the same happens in an area where there are earthquakes all the time, sometimes really big ones, then a 4. 6 is of little concern. In a certain sense, we have already an inbuilt sense of orders of magnitude suitable to our experience. Are we able to move up the scales without losing ourselves?

Whether an event is "cataclysmic" is also a matter of nearness. When a dam bursts and houses and lives are swept away that is cataclysmic for the people to whom it happens. For us, if we read the headline from five or ten thousand km away, it is an event among many other serious events. However, we can choose to move into their space mentally. What I mean by this is that when I watch say SOTT Earth Changes Summary - April 2024: Extreme Weather, Planetary Upheaval, Meteor Fireballs, or one of the others, I sometimes get a map out, or think about where this or that place is. Sometimes I ask myself, how the people living through these ordeals, deal with their losses and their suffering, and how I would react in their place.

Now that we go into, or are in a period of major upheaval, if we are paralyzed too much by what is happening, can we help ourselves or others? Can a surgeon operate, or a first responder help if they can not manage their feelings to some extent? There is a fine balance between resignation as in Pavlov's dogs, or shutting the world out and ignoring glaring changes, and then staying awake, alert, and available for action. I don't think it is easy at all. It is, or can be, very, very difficult, and in such a situation, perhaps the letter by Paul to the Corinthians, see the Wave Chapter 72 is also an encouragement to hold on to and cherish faith, hope, and love. Sometimes we go through experiences for which it is difficult to find words, but trying to describe an experience, even if it can feel inadequate, due to the limitations that words have, still allows us to share and exchange views with others, just as you did in the first post.

 

[BHelmet]

Got it. I think ideas and degrees of negativity or positivity can still be expressed. I think the problem is more the desensitization into apathy.

 

[ScioAgapeOmnis]

Can you clarify exactly what you mean by "lack of single word negative comparative equivalent to superlatives." with examples? I did some research and found this remark: "most languages have negative comparative and superlative constructions – English has ‘less X’ and ‘(the) least X’, for example. What they generally don’t have are negative comparative/superlative morphological forms, made by adding a suffix or using a template, parallel to how the positive comparative and superlative are formed".

So here's how I understand that. A "morphological superlative" just means single word (so you can't add words like "more" or "less" to it). Take the word "tall". You can enhance it into a more extreme direction with "taller" (more tall) and "tallest" (most tall). But you can't enhance it into a less extreme direction by adding some letters to it like "er" and "est". You can't change tall into "less tall" and "least tall" while using the word tall. You'd use a whole different word like short, shorter, and shortest. But once again, "shorter" and "shortest" are more extreme versions of short, and there are no opposite, less extreme directions for the word "short" using a suffix or whatever. You'd either use several words or a different word entirely.

Is this what you meant? Either way, I thought that concept was pretty neat, I never thought about it. What languages have single word negative comparative equivalents? The guy I quoted above said most languages do not.

 

[ScioAgapeOmnis]

I asked ChatGPT and after a couple tries it gave me this:

One example is Classical Nahuatl, an indigenous language of Mexico, which uses the prefix "ah-" to create a form that can be interpreted as "less" or "not as" from the base adjective. Here's how it works:

• "pāqui" (happy)
  • Comparative: "pāquimeh" (happier)
  • Negative comparative: "ahpāquimeh" (less happy)

Not sure if this is accurate (ChatGPT tends to hallucinate), but it seems that examples of that kind of thing are actually pretty rare. I did find a comment that claims that no languages (of the 300 they sampled) had it:

Bobaljik (2012) Universals in comparative morphology: suppletion, superlatives, and the structure or words claims that there are no such languages.

From p.214:

Returning to the domain of comparative morphology, there is one further generalization that may support the general idea of constraints on morpheme meanings, namely, the generalization I called Lesslessness in chapter 1.

(278) Lesslessness
No language has a synthetic comparative of inferiority.

Comparison of superiority (‘more X’) is affixal in many languages, as in long – long-er, but comparison of inferiority (‘less X’) never is. In the schema in (279), the lower right-hand cell is universally empty.

(279)

| | Analytic | Synthetic ---|---|----|---- a. | Superiority | more ADJ | ADJ-er b.| Inferiority | less ADJ | *

This generalization is empirically the strongest of all the generalizations considered in this book. In none of the more than 300 languages examined for this study did anything remotely resembling a counterexample appear.5

---

5. Though this gap has been mentioned for specific languages, as far as I know the only prior mention of it as a crosslinguistic generalization is by Cuzzolin and Lehmann (2004, 1213), who give no indication of their sample size. I believe this generalization has been widely suspected, but never (to my knowledge) systematically investigated in prior work.

Note that many languages have an approximative or relativizing affix, such as English -ish. In an appropriate context, these can be pressed into service to yield an implicature of a lesser degree (Yao Ming is tall, but alongside Yao, Emeka Okafor is merely tallish), but these affixes are distinct in meaning from a comparative of inferiority and cannot, for example, be used with a comparative syntax (*Emeka Okafor is tallish than Yao vs. Emeka Okafor is less tall than Yao).

---

[Cuzzolin, Pierluigi, and Christian Lehmann. 2004. Comparison and gradation. In Morphologie: Ein internationales Handbuch zur Flexion und Wortbildung, ed. by Geert Booij, Christian Lehmann, and Joachim Mugdan, 1212–1220. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.]

 

[Alejo]

I was just looking at the word paroxysmal to use with negative qualifiers when discussing about events or behaviour that one gets to hear more and more frequently. Just as an example a well politically connected person wins a R 187 million tender for PPE from which he deliver only PPE for R 15 million. The rest of the money is spent on Lamborginis, Porches, Jeeps etc. This is a case of extreme coruption which has been occurring again and again to the point of normalization. I found myself with no words, and I do not like that because I know that I shall be shocked once and get desensitized. Another example is the Eurovision. Again no words to qualify. Another example is a 5 story block of flats collapsing while still under construction with 36 deaths and counting. Floods in Rio Grande del Sul in Brazil combined with a dam burst. And so on and so forth, I do not have words in my frame of reference to register correctly the events and still keep alert and I personally find that a big problem.

I am not sure I follow entirely what the issue is, and it may be my own issue with language, but do you mean that you can't find the words to express your feelings? if so, I would say that some things aren't about definition but experiencing, about feeling what you feel and not about defining them with precise language, that comes later. But also sometimes when we rush to define things prematurely, what that indicates is that we're overwhelmed by the feelings and thus we seek to define things so that we can ground them and begin to find peace with them, it's normal, but the longer it takes us to define things, the larger the issue is, IMO.

But then some other things are ok to be described using the same word, if it feels repetitive is because the chaos in our planet is indeed repetitive.

But, I am not sure I fully understand what you're trying to present.

 

[Ina]

I am not sure I follow entirely what the issue is, and it may be my own issue with language, but do you mean that you can't find the words to express your feelings? if so, I would say that some things aren't about definition but experiencing, about feeling what you feel and not about defining them with precise language, that comes later. But also sometimes when we rush to define things prematurely, what that indicates is that we're overwhelmed by the feelings and thus we seek to define things so that we can ground them and begin to find peace with them, it's normal, but the longer it takes us to define things, the larger the issue is, IMO.

But then some other things are ok to be described using the same word, if it feels repetitive is because the chaos in our planet is indeed repetitive.

But, I am not sure I fully understand what you're trying to present.

I think my gut, heart and head are pretty levelled and most of the time I can deal with the chaos presented, however there is a growing frustration in my mind because I sometimes lack the words to precisely characterise the levels or degrees of chaos. So I asky myself, And Then? So here comes another ‘chaos’ ifferent but still chaos, process the unquantified dread and the only action taken, by default as it seems, is sufferance in silence or avoidance by discarding the idea of the new chaos if not in close proximity. Either or, the mere lack of apropriate words, as tools for the initial internal dialogue, can potentially alter the degree of change in the reality you preceive as chaos. You ‘close your eyes, fall asleep’, unless u know the good old song by Aerosmith, and remember that you don’t want to miss a thing.

 

[Ina]

Can you clarify exactly what you mean by "lack of single word negative comparative equivalent to superlatives." with examples? I did some research and found this remark: "most languages have negative comparative and superlative constructions – English has ‘less X’ and ‘(the) least X’, for example. What they generally don’t have are negative comparative/superlative morphological forms, made by adding a suffix or using a template, parallel to how the positive comparative and superlative are formed".

So here's how I understand that. A "morphological superlative" just means single word (so you can't add words like "more" or "less" to it). Take the word "tall". You can enhance it into a more extreme direction with "taller" (more tall) and "tallest" (most tall). But you can't enhance it into a less extreme direction by adding some letters to it like "er" and "est". You can't change tall into "less tall" and "least tall" while using the word tall. You'd use a whole different word like short, shorter, and shortest. But once again, "shorter" and "shortest" are more extreme versions of short, and there are no opposite, less extreme directions for the word "short" using a suffix or whatever. You'd either use several words or a different word entirely.

Is this what you meant? Either way, I thought that concept was pretty neat, I never thought about it. What languages have single word negative comparative equivalents? The guy I quoted above said most languages do not.

In Russian laguage there is a word grozny (I apologize for butchering it) translated in English language as terrible. It is quite an old word, lasting at least since the 1500s from the time of Ivan Grozny. I know this word as groaznic (from my native tongue, Romanian), and I have used it metaphorically speaking many times specially in my teens. That is my only word that can accuratelly describe negative extremes. Terrible? You can say terrible puppy, or terrible teddybear isn’t it?

Grozny is a relic word from times that were of such nature that people lived in terrible conditions compared to what we had today. Even so, those peple had the notion of creating that word. What equivalent words can we create today?

 

[Ina]

I asked ChatGPT and after a couple tries it gave me this:

One example is Classical Nahuatl, an indigenous language of Mexico, which uses the prefix "ah-" to create a form that can be interpreted as "less" or "not as" from the base adjective. Here's how it works:

• "pāqui" (happy)
  • Comparative: "pāquimeh" (happier)
  • Negative comparative: "ahpāquimeh" (less happy)

Not sure if this is accurate (ChatGPT tends to hallucinate), but it seems that examples of that kind of thing are actually pretty rare. I did find a comment that claims that no languages (of the 300 they sampled) had it:

Bobaljik (2012) Universals in comparative morphology: suppletion, superlatives, and the structure or words claims that there are no such languages.

From p.214:

Much appreciated! Good starting point for follow up.

 

[Ina]

Got it. I think ideas and degrees of negativity or positivity can still be expressed. I think the problem is more the desensitization into apathy.

Glad you understood! The key is ‘can stll be expressed’, which for me it means we still have time to probe our consciousness and find tools for what we might face next. However, the problem is we might find ourselves incapable of understanding what is happening due to ‘desensitisation into apathy’.

 

[Alejo]

I think my gut, heart and head are pretty levelled and most of the time I can deal with the chaos presented, however there is a growing frustration in my mind because I sometimes lack the words to precisely characterise the levels or degrees of chaos. So I asky myself, And Then? So here comes another ‘chaos’ ifferent but still chaos, process the unquantified dread and the only action taken, by default as it seems, is sufferance in silence or avoidance by discarding the idea of the new chaos if not in close proximity. Either or, the mere lack of apropriate words, as tools for the initial internal dialogue, can potentially alter the degree of change in the reality you preceive as chaos. You ‘close your eyes, fall asleep’, unless u know the good old song by Aerosmith, and remember that you don’t want to miss a thing.

But, why do you have to: "process the unquantified dread and the only action taken, by default as it seems, is sufferance in silence or avoidance by discarding the idea of the new chaos if not in close proximity"

It seems to me that the issue isn't language adequate to process chaos, but the notion that there's only two options to process said chaos. One could suffer, or not, or at least acknowledge the chaos without needing to define it. Sometimes things are just about sitting with the feelings. One could not rush to define it, without seeking to move on immediately from it.

Does that make sense?