Can anyone think of a language that doesn’t contain possessive pronouns, like mine, yours, his, hers, ours, theirs?
I’d be curious about that. I’m guessing since I believe the concept of property arises a priori out of human action and scarcity, that these concepts would almost certainly go all the way back to the most ancient of the languages of mankind.
Nice. Major like. Steven Pinker talks about “intuitive theory of physics” built in to human language. He elsewhere discusses intuitive theories of psychology, sociology, etc. built in to our language. I like the idea of an “intuitive theory of ownership/property” being built in to language. Just the use of “my” “his” “her” etc. is inherently property-like language.
Clayton -
I’m not sure if all languages have a possessive pronoun as such, but it would seem they all have ways of expressing possession. For example, I’m not sure if there is what we could call a possessive pronoun in Japanese, but possession can be indicated through the particle ‘no’, as well as through sentence constructions (e.g. ‘As for John, there is a book’ i.e. John has a book; cf. Latin signifying ownership with the dative + the verb to be.) I would bet that all Indo-European languages have possessive pronouns.
@Aristippus: But possession as a lingual concept is much broader than just possessive pronouns. In Romantic languages, the construct “the X of Y” is used to indicate a property-like relationship… “child’s height” becomes “height of the child”. The “of” is possessive in that it specifies a property or attribute of the object being described. When we say “John’s car” or “the car of John”, this same construct is being used in a parallel manner, as if the car itself is a property or attribute of the object, John. I can’t imagine any language not having this construct.
Clayton -
I think the book anthem might be a good example of a book which attempts to avoid using possessives.
@Clayton and @Aristippus:
Thanks to both of you. I guess there’s a broader point here which both of you draw into relief. Aristippus, you point out that all languages don’t necessarily have the possessive form directly in individual words like English does. Clayton you point out that this doesn’t mean that other languages don’t adopt some other mechanism for indicating ownership, “the car of John.”
It would be interesting to look at the evolution of law and social norms within social groups and also to track the creation or adoption of various correlating possessive words in the langugages of those communities.
I wonder would you find my/mine come into existence before you would find dispute resolution norms around the personal property within a tribal group? Or would it arise simultaneously, or even after? I’m guessing the words would arise after, but that formalization of the norm into lore or law would require language constructs.
Clayton - I agree with you, but the OP did ask specifically about pronouns, so I was merely answering his question. In fact I noted two ways of expressing ownership in Japanese, so I certainly wasn’t saying that there is no way to express ownership in Japanese!
Well, not exactly. The pronouns are a need of language. There are also some times when We say Our referring not possesingly but needily to mankind and the World. You are right when You say about the pronouns being adapted from ancient languages since unknown times.
I’ve been thinking about this as well. My bet is that our concept of “mine-ness” came even before the development of language since we see possessiveness, or at least the precursors of it, in the territoriality of non-human creatures. Presumably our hominid ancestors had a sense of “this is mine” before they ever evolved the complex social mechanisms (language) to express that sense or feeling.
We even see possessiveness in social insects like wasps, bees and ants.
One also sees parallels between the emotional reactions non-human creatures have to someone or something taking an object they’ve identified as theirs and the emotional reactions humans demonstrate under similar conditions.
Anyone who’s tried to take a chew toy from a dog and heard it growl knew instinctively what the dog was communicating with that growl.
Anyone who’s had the misfortune of uncovering a hornet’s nest knows that they don’t take kindly to what they perceive as an invasion of their territory.
The development of words used to describe these sorts of claims and the social relationships they entail would seem to only be possible if people already intuitively understood them at some level.
That’s just my two cents I still have a ton of learning to do on the subject.
I think one fuzzy area here is that ownership in the libertarian sense is a situation that is unique to humans, isn’t it? I mean that the concept of ownership IN GENERAL is at work in every language for more than one reason. Think of the paintings at Peche Merle: one of the things they express is the idea that “horses have spots”, but that type of relationship is not the same kind as what we’re talking about. And yet that kind of ownership, the expression of sort of mechanical relationships between certain things, is a fundamental property of the world that language must express just in order to be useful.
In English we use “to have” and “to own” in different senses. Especially re: the libertarian concept of property. So the question is, does a language exist where “to have” exists but not “to own”? And don’t forget that usage changes over time, and I don’t know of a single culture that exists today that doesn’t have a concept of personal property. So even languages that evolved without it, would have been adapted to that idea, right?
Indo-European languages would all contain words referring to property, I think, because those languages are related in part in the way that specific social ideas are expressed-ideas about class separation and the distribution of power that I think inherently contain the concept of personal property.
+1 bloomj
I recently finished reading The Dispossessed by Ursula Le Guin, which is a scifi book about a place where an anarcho-communist revolution happened, and the people that took part in it were given the moon as a place to set up their society. The people on the moon spoke a manufactured language called Pravic, which the author says has no possessives, as a way for their society to reinforce the fact that it does not recognize private property. It’s somewhat interesting at the start of the book how the author tries to explain how the people speak; she says an approximation for the Pravic for “my handkerchief” is instead “the handkerchief I use.” Then there are other things where they say “the” instead of “my,” so they say something like “the stomach hurts me” instead of “my stomach hurts” or “the mother” instead of “my mother.” These I think just show how some use of the possessive in our language is convenience to show the relationship between things instead of implying ownership, because sentences start to get really clunky or ambiguous as the book goes on when they try to avoid all use of possessive pronouns, and there are definitely times when the author appears to just give up and use the possessive anyways. I remember in particular when someone was mentioning the main character’s mother being at a meeting, saying “the mother was there,” which the other character (apparently still speaking Pravic) responded to by saying “Shevek’s mother?” as if the possessive just magically appeared in the language again, rightfully confused by the ambiguity of the sentence and apparently admitting how clunky the conversation was without allowing “my”, even to just show relationship. There was a part at the start the book where they talk about how the main character thought it was weird for the people on the main world to say “my mother” in their language as if they OWNED their mother. Of course I thought that was totally weird because that’s not what it implies at all, and the author ended up abandoning the concept as the book went on anyways, as if recognizing as she wrote that “my” is in fact a very useful word that doesn’t need to imply ultimate right to decision making as property does :P.
Also, I thought it was interesting how, despite not having the possessive and insisting they did not recognize property, the language and behavior of the society still seemed to recognize at least some amount of ownership. A character may say “the handkerchief I use” instead of “my handkerchief,” but it seemed to still be the rule that you must ask the person that “uses” the handkerchief if you can “share” it, as opposed to just taking it out of their pocket. People get their dorm rooms from people “managing” the dorm and register that they are in use, but a person can’t just sleep in the bed of that room while the “user” is gone, nor can they make a claim on it until the user gives it up, nor can a person move into an empty room unless they get the go-ahead from the “manager”. I don’t know if it was that the author was too ambitious, or became uninterested in the speculation she set up, or what, but the entire treatment of a “property-less society,” which was the reason I picked up the book to see how she would handle it, struck me as pretty shallow. The people speaking Pravic made a fuss over removing the possessive from cases where it was being used only to indicate relationship instead of ownership, and in the end the replacement of “own” with “using” seemed like just a coat of paint on an understanding of property not very much unlike our own “capitalist, profiteering” perspective :P. Removing the possessive from their language did not all of a sudden negate the scarcity or rivalrous-ness of objects used in everyday life, and they needed a way to resolve conflicts over them, and apparently they picked a concept of ownership, but with different terms.
Of course, maybe that was her point. The author has a scene when the main character, Shevek, is a toddler, and appears to demonstrate an intuitive understanding of ownership by claiming the spot he is sitting in is “mine,” which he is then rebuked for saying (though I don’t quite understand how he says that in Pravic if there is no word for such things :P) by a person that seems to be like his preschool teacher, calling him an “egoist” and making him give up the spot to another child that wants to sit there. Then, decades later when a famine is taking place and the society’s overlord-computer-resource manager sends a train of food to a distant city through the station of a city that was not sent food itself, the driver of the train practically has a religious crisis deciding whether to stop the mob of the city he is passing through from taking the “other city’s” food, which his teaching tells him is actually nobody’s food, which I think he ends up resolving as “trust the computer,” aka it’s the computer’s food, and what it says goes (which no one ever recognizes as being a lot like a state, complete with a bureaucracy, but I guess that’s another issue). Ultimately, the characters that live in the anarcho-communist world speak a lot about their unique property-less society, but there are pretty clear examples of ownership and hierarchy throughout the society, and places where attempts to intellectually adhere to these ideas cause very real practical problems or conflicts. The book is generally considered to be sympathetic to the idea of a property-less anarchy, but maybe instead of being unrigorous, the author was in a roundabout way illustrating how inherent the idea of property is, despite attempts to engineer it out of society :P.
@suuruna, love the post.
I wanted to make some points I’ve been trying to push through around here about how there is an a priori category of property that arises out of human action. I think your example demonstrates that this is so. It sounds like Le Guin struggled with trying to show that a propertyless community, by somehow attempting to characterize the natural phenomena of use as something other than a property right that simply had a much shorter time-boundary than an anarcho-capitalist would expect.
So, my construction of an a priori concept of the owner-property relationship consists of a 4-way intersection of human mind, matter, location, and time. Now the only direct relationship between matter and mind is the brain/body connection. Meaning that the mind always but only directly controls the muscles of one human body. Thus the concept of the inalienability of self-ownership. I can’t put the direct control of my body in the hands of someone else. All other such intersections are necessarily indirect, meaning they must be enacted by using the body to control other matter indirectly.
But notice the example of the child referring to where he is sitting as ‘mine’. In a communal society, imagine a family, this would be a short-term use claim. When he gets up and moves elsewhere it’s freely available to be used by others, but while he’s sitting there, there’s an expectation that he has a legitimate claim over the location. Note also that in order to “get” the spot from him, another child or parent might try a variety of mechanisms to get this premium location. Including force, fraud, exchange, devaluing the location in some way, etc.
Note also that a conflict boils down to metaphysically incompatible arrangements of matter, time, and space. Even more important is that the origination of these incompatible arrangements is from human minds. Reality doesn’t have a problem, each tries their plan and reality plays out what actually happens. If the differnt actors want their plan to succeed they need to negotiate some type of compatible arrangement, or more precisely figure out how to alter the actions of each other such the plans no longer require incompatible arrangements of matter in time and space.
In these simple, fundamental cases of action by humans in a social reality, disputes, ownership and property in their most fundamental form fall out of human action and all of it’s categories including scarcity. How could possessive forms not arise?
Variations in the norms about who has claims to matter at a location for a duration of time will provide a large part of the social ecosystem into which human action is played out.
So, to follow up, I don’t think the book failed because of a lack of rigor. I think the book failed because it failed to realize that ownership has always been about use, and use has to be exclusive at some level, even if the time and location boundaries are extremely limited. Anarcho-communism has property rights laws, they just happen to have extremely short-term and limited exclusivity boundaries.
The society that flows from such norms will have certain characteristics, and Praxeology in all of its a priori categories both demonstrates this fact of existence, and explains to us the effects of such norms on economic action.
@davidb, I think you good point about the characteristics of the property rules in the book’s world, and how they are there, just with different ideas of time and location than we are used to. I have to admit, I was pretty disappointed with the book after I finished reading it, because I was going into it expecting to me immersed in this very alien society and to see how stuff worked and was justified, but it ended up seeming very similar to our society, with some interjections insisting the basis of their society is very different. I think I was being silly and selling short the insight that could be gained from it. I picked it up wondering how something as fundamental as conflicts caused by the realities of time and space and economics could be solved without some concept of property, which I went in convinced of, then got annoyed that the conflicts were solved using a concept of ownership like I was expecting :P. The society in the book WAS different, it had different conventions for how ownership is gained and retained than our society, and that did have interesting implications, but I took the characters’ assertions that there was no property period too seriously, I guess. And Le Guin’s take does show some recognition of the reality of conflict resolution by not shying away from incorporating ownership, if by a different name, rather than just going off into some fantasy land without scarcity to serve the premise.
Speaking of how the realities of human action still inform the structure of society, regardless of the particular choices on how ownership starts and stops, I’m going to go back to the book. Anarres (the moon the anarcho-communists live on) is portrayed as pretty poor by our standards. Obviously the society rejecting the idea of possessions means the people don’t have as much stuff; they basically have the clothes on their back and the room they sleep in. But there is also a distinct lack of COMPLEX goods available to be used by anyone. There are very few means of transportation, outside of the trains used by the overarching resource-managers and a couple of buses. There aren’t even bicycles or anything: if you aren’t riding one of the few buses wandering around a city, you are walking. Because of this, Le Guin describes the cities as being more like clumps of tiny villages that happen to be in close proximity, repetitions of the same sets of very basic services within a couple of blocks of each other. Each little village has a dorm, a place to make cloth, a place to make food, and maybe a place for entertainment or education, and this is just repeated over and over across the city. It’s like an illustration that, with such immediate claims on ownership, the accumulation of capital doesn’t really happen, nor the ownership of ways to increase productivity, and instead of leveraging the mass of people in the city towards the production of ever more complex goods, they become little pockets of self-sufficient, low production economies that happen to live near each other to get the benefit of the train station, bringing the complex goods bothered to be sent by the only group that’s apparently allowed decision-making over any large amount of means: the resource-management bureaucracy.
I’m sorry, I kind of hijacked your thread there… I didn’t mean to make it a discussion about this particular book, I only brought it up because it happened to be the only place I’ve heard of a language lacking possessives :P. My first post was more on topic: even when a language apparently lacks specific words describing ownership, it doesn’t really change the fact that, like you said, reality doesn’t care and you can’t use the same thing at the same time, and there will be some convention on how to deal with that, even if it isn’t specifically called “ownership.” And I think I agree with you that possessives appeared in the languages we are familiar with because the societies where those languages developed already had such a concept. I guess it would be interesting (if we could) to see if the very FIRST languages had possessives, as opposed to modern languages that have been developing for thousands of years in an environment of recognition of property. But then maybe it’s an argument itself to show that societies arose separately across the world with languages that include possessives, implying the concept is something more inherent to human nature. Or maybe it’s just confirmation bias, that people that don’t come up with some expected system of conflict resolution when it comes to resources don’t encourage the growth of cooperation and economy, and don’t get big enough for their language to even be known :P.
Tonight I’ve been thinking about something not completely unrelated to this thread. Why was it that the Indo-European languages spread so dominantly across parts of Eurasia, especially Europe? Gimbutas put this down to the military advantage of steppe warriors, but this has definite problems. First, the horse did not come into use until about 1500 years after the period that she considers the IE invasion to have occurred. Second, archaeological and linguistic evidence proves that the Proto-Indo Europeans were at the very least semi-agricultural. Third, and most importantly, this does not explain the continued spread of the IE languages after the Indo Europeans had certainly become sedentary. It should be noted that the diffusion of the IE languages throughout Europe took place over perhaps 2500 years - firstly from the Pontic steppe to the Baltic and proto-Slavic homelands, then to Central Europe where the Germanic and Celtic branches developed, then into Italy and France and finally into Spain and the British Isles.
What was it that caused the successive triumphs of the IE languages throughout Europe? Was it a male dominated, military culture that developed in the homeland and only developed further in Europe? The role of religion? Or, perhaps, was it the development of certain norms of property? Note the emphasis on moveable property - capital (which derives from the ‘head’ of cattle) - that exists in Proto-Indo European. Did the development of these norms lead to increased wealth that fueled increased population and migrations into Europe, which continued to succeed and further spread the IE languages since they not only carried these languages with them, but also the norms that were conducive to further societal development? Was the diffusion of IE languages a triumph of prehistoric capitalism?
(I should also note that there is a theory of a Neolithic, Anatolian origin for the Indo Europeans, and the spread of the languages is linked with the spread of agriculture. This hypothesis has many problems from a linguistic perspective at the very least, and the dating seems to be way off)
“Why was it that the Indo-European languages spread so dominantly across parts of Eurasia, especially Europe?”
I won’t quibble with any of your conclusions, directly. And I love the question on one level. First however let’s acknowledge that the sheer complexity of the overlapping and related systems and phenomena involved would make it almost impossible to figure out any kind of definitive answer. My point here is to draw out an approach to drawing conclusions that we can be confident of, without drawing conclusions that we can’t be sure of.
To explain myself I’d refer to meteorology and weather prediction. Our “sophisticated” models of weather systems show us that we can predict with reliability over only a very, very small range of time. However, that doesn’t mean that we can’t draw logical conclusions and know that they are true.
When we know for example that a conclusion is true, but we see a different phenomena than we expect, that doesn’t mean our logic is wrong, it means that we’re missing other information in the system that drives behaviors we don’t understand, or understand but didn’t know about.
My example is prices and supply and demand. If we know that a new mine opens that is producing copper, it adds to the supply of copper in the economy. Therefore the price of copper will drop. However, if we see the price of copper rise, it doesn’t mean that we were mistaken about the law of supply and demand. It means that there was another unaccounted for drop in supply, or an unaccounted for rise in demand, or something happened on the money supply side. But it doesn’t invalidate the law of supply and demand, or the fact that our new mine pushed copper prices up. It means that push up wasn’t sufficient to override other factors pushing the price down.
This applies to all of science. Another point we can take from meteorology is that while we cannot know with certainty the exact form of the hurricanes that come in late summer and fall, we do in fact understand the phenomena (high water temperatures in the open ocean) that drive their formation. So we can understand how changes in water termperature will affect the quantity and the size and intensity of the hurricanes which do happen. We will understand the conditions that lead to their appearance, we will be able to plan for them, without knowing exactly when they will appear.
So in the realm of economics and politics, we can take the same tack with using logic in analyzing the systems. Here gets to my point. My points about an a priori definition of conflict, mean that IF the conditions I described exist conflict MUST occur. I’m as accurate in that logical construction as Euclid’s geometry was in it’s logic. The only question about either logical system is “Does it match the conditions of reality?”
I believe we can make logical arguments that say the concept of property MUST arise. I believe it’s sound to also state that the nature of the boundaries established around the concepts of property (time constraints, shared ownership, hierarchy of claims, etc.) under a social group’s norms will have a direct and logically derived impact on the structure and technology of the social group. Even moreso, if we find that our logical conclusions don’t match exactly what we observe on the ground, it doesn’t mean what we said wasn’t logical or that it doesn’t apply. Like with prices above it means that we are missing some other phenomena that counteracts the effect we believe we should be seeing.
So in modern democracies, we assume (and rightly so, IMO) that the crippling burden of taxation is being overcome by the massive improvements to production by technological innovation. In the example above, I believe the number of phenomena from the different systems involved that contribute to the effect of Indo-european languages dominating will come from both the language itself, and from the social structures of the different competing groups, and the features of the languages that fell away, and from the environment itself.
For example, I think a necessarily obvious change in norms is necessary to move from a hunter/gatherer society to an agriculture society. Namely, one must come up with at minimum the idea of exclusive use of land and the agricultural products by a specific social group (tribe, family, clan, village, etc). And that due to differing norms, there will be some need to defend that claim from other groups with different norms. In hunter/gatherer groups, I’m think it’s logical to assume that the scarcity issue would come up with co-located groups, and that this would also form a pressure for establishing boundary claims about land and the products of that land (animals and plants).
So, while I think the language itself will have a big impact on some aspects of this, I think it’s also obvious that the groups who didn’t form these concepts, couldn’t win the competition for scarce resources. Efficiency in communication might also play a role. In communication you have two competing phenomena, fidelity (lack of noise or confusion in the transmitted message) and brevity (speed of transmission). So, for sheer time and clarity purposes “My car” is faster and clearer than “Car of David”.
Lots of factors at play here, and I think it’s a fun topic and lots of conclusions can be made about differnt phenomena that would play a role in the results that we see. But I’d be careful looking for “the reason”. I don’t think that’s an achievable goal. And I hope to make it clear that this is a generic point to be made about all of science and technology (social and physical). These are complex systems, and lots of parts play a role.
If we get lucky, there are ways to tease out answers to even these kinds of extremely complex questions.
Clayton -
Here are some examples of logical conclusions we can draw that I think are reasonable and ought to be considered in terms of their impact on societies.
Considering the necessarily different roles of men and women in tribal groups, I’m going to guess that females (due to child-bearing first, and feeding secondarily) would be more risk averse than the males. Not due to any factor other than raw benefit to the group. Women who were inherently less risk averse would be less likely to have children who survived to propogate. Women have to survive to give birth and they have to breast-feed long enough for the child to develop the ability to eat the food products the tribe generates.
On the other hand, during pregnancy and during adolescence humans need very high calories especially in fat and protein. The most efficient food sources for those calories are meat. And in a hunter/gatherer society getting meat is much more risky task. Chasing, catching and killing a moving animal is more difficult than picking nuts, berries, and roots. But the reward is very high. Males due to natural advantages in speed and strength will tend to be better at these behaviors, and while the risk of injury is high the reward to the tribe (adolescents and pregnant/breastfeeding women) is a huge advantage.
Now I’m not saying that all women are more risk averse and all men are less risk averse. I’m simply saying that one would expect due to our biology that women would on average be more risk averse than men. Amongst populations of birds and other animals that have external eggs for procreation and don’t breastfeed, this distinction would most likely not happen or if it did would be due to other phenomena.
I wonder how male-dominance vs. female dominance in human society might alter the types of risks that members engage in. I’d guess that societies where females hold the hierarchical reins, you would find less risk taking behaviors by members of the group.
However, that would just be one of many factors that would contribute to the emergent systems.
Very complex. I brought this up, because you mentioned a role male-dominance might have had in the spread of Indo-European languages. If it does then I would expect to draw conclusions from the biological differences between the men and women, and how those differences would produce differences in preferences.
I agree, and I don’t think it’s luck. I think instead of luck it requires a combination of confidence in knowledge production (categories) and logic, and humility in the face of complexity.
We’re really far afield. I wanted to say also to sarunna, I’m fine with hijacked threads. Your observations about LeGuin’s attempt are really on topic.
My point was less about possessives, and more about what clues they give us about the nature of the relationship between the human mind and reality. Everything you are saying is very much on topic. And really useful and insightful.