Languages and Linguistics

1. Not all song lyrics are poetry. Sometimes you put in repetition to round out the tune. (And let's not get started with, say, a Palestrina mass or Handel aria. And what do you do with all the la-la-las that are sometimes used?)

Many song lyrics are bad poetry, but they have music to carry them.

2. I like "high" and "low" for temperatures, but some don't. Glass thermometers make sense for high and low. I think of big numbers as high, but I find at lot of kids raised completely digitally are losing what probably started off as physical descriptions. I stopped being shocked at having to explain "clockwise."

And there's no other way for "high" vs "low" frequency.

3. All languages are highly redundant. No se nada, je ne sais rien, nichego ne znaiu, nic nevidim (let's add Russian and Czech) aren't usually classified as double negatives. I think "negative polarity items" is the wonky phrase that comes to mind. You use one indefinite with a positive verb, a different indefinite with a negative. Si, se algo, je sais quelque chose, ia znaiu koe-chto (or nechto), neco vidim. (The Slavic words with ne- there aren't negative. Look like they could be, but they're not.) "I don't know nothing" isn't okay in standard or formal English, but it's alive and well in some social dialects.

Otherwise we always live with a lot of redundancy. Removing redundancy is a virtue in dense formal language, but much is built into the grammar. In colloquial, spoken language we constantly miss information and redundancy fills it back in. Still, languages get by without copulas and even number. For example, "Song lyrics are poetry" marks plurality twice: -s, are. Russian phrasing would just be "Song lyrics poetry," and would force 'song' to be an adjective on which number and case and gender would be marked, or would make "song" possess (lyrics of song -- poetry). Chinese would drop the -s and compound "song lyrics" as English does but doesn't bother to write. You can't really say "Songs lyrics", has to be singular for compounding.

Plus all those articles, "these" versus "this". Even words like "but" can be omitted through parataxis--it's less clear sometimes, but not here. "Redundancy is a vice in English, a virtue in some other languages." "Vice" and "virture" clearly contrast, so "but" is redundant.

Even things like "When I hear someone say 'blah', it bothers me" has a strange subject. That "it" is pretty meaningless, either it's a filler to make sure every verb has a subject or it refers to "when it bothers me" as the subject. That complete English-language clauses function as subjects is known, but it's most definitely not colloquial. "It's known that English-language clauses function as subjects" is stylistically better these days.