A Linguistics Question

[skepticalbip]

Conversation takes place in turns.

If I have a 1-minute conversation with someone I might speak for 30 seconds, and they might spend 30 seconds on a response. Two turns. Or the same 60 seconds might be filled with twenty turns if we alternate short utterances of three-second duration each.

I'd think the statistics of turn duration would be an important part of linguistics! Does typical turn duration vary between languages?

Consider the following excerpt from The Second World War: Volume 4, The Hinge of Fate. I had trouble understanding it until I learned about "turns."

The rigidity of the Japanese planning and the tendency to abandon the object when their plans did not go according to schedule is thought to have been largely due to the cumbersome and imprecise nature of their language, which rendered it extremely difficult to improvise by means of signalled communications

Is this really valid? Or was Churchill getting silly advice?!

Or, is it possible that Japanese is "imprecise" because precision is sacrificed for brevity? In normal conversation an imprecise but brief utterance may be better than a long precise utterance: The listener can ask for clarification as needed. But conversing in turns is more difficult in naval communication, especially when radio silence is a goal. Could this be the source of Churchill's observation?

I think that the Japanese not modifying a plan to react to battle conditions to achieve their goals speaks more to the Japanese culture, not the language. Japan had a strictly hierarchical society so the orders of higher officers were not to be disobeyed or even questioned, to do so would be dishonorable. The problem being that plans for major engagements were made in Tokyo and commanders actually in the battles didn't have as much liberty to adjust to changing conditions as they should have had. So, when it became obvious that the original goal couldn't be achieved by following the battle plan, they couldn't modify and adapt as easily as the allied commanders could.

 

[Swammerdami]

Turn taking has been an important part of socolinguistics from the start. A 1974 issue of Linguistics focused on turn taking, and launched a considerable wave of interest in the question over the ensuing decades of conversation analysis studies. You are correct to guess that it varies, but less between language than between cultures, which set up surprisingly specific rules of "polite speech" when you really dig in to their logic.

Churchill is talking silly bobbles there, though; information transfer happens at roughly the same rate in all languages. Beware language stereotypes, they are not trustworthy guides.

I accept that you're correct, and that this is just another example of Churchill's silliness.

However, you may have missed the key point. He speaks specifically of "signalled communications", which is NOT ordinary conversation. Even assuming no issue of radio silence, a turn delay of a few seconds in normal conversation becomes a delay of several minutes as text is carried from the radio room to the bridge.

I am NOT saying that Churchill is correct, just that linguistic differences MIGHT contradict "information transfer happens at roughly the same rate in all languages" when the transfer is mediated in a novel way, e.g. by naval signalling.

 

[Politesse]

However, you may have missed the key point. He speaks specifically of "signalled communications", which is NOT ordinary conversation. Even assuming no issue of radio silence, a turn delay of a few seconds in normal conversation becomes a delay of several minutes as text is carried from the radio room to the bridge.

Consequently, radio operators tend not to directly imitate the cadence of everyday speech.

 

[bilby]

However, you may have missed the key point. He speaks specifically of "signalled communications", which is NOT ordinary conversation. Even assuming no issue of radio silence, a turn delay of a few seconds in normal conversation becomes a delay of several minutes as text is carried from the radio room to the bridge.

Consequently, radio operators tend not to directly imitate the cadence of everyday speech.

Naval radio communications of WWII were almost exclusively via Morse code, rather than speech. This was explicitly patterned in same-length groups of letters (typically five), to make code breaking more difficult, and was encrypted using various cyphers. Cadence of speech is simply not able to be transmitted via such means.

Broadcast speech was used only for instantaneous tactical transmissions where speed was more important than security; Even then, attempts were made to obscure the meaning of such broadcasts to hostile listeners, by use of prearranged code words, or by the use of obscure dialects and languages (as most famously employed by the Comanche, Meskwaki, Hopi, and Navajo code talkers on the American side).

Japanese codes weren't the best (they certainly didn't compare to the mechanically generated codes used by their German allies, nor to the difficulties in translation posed by Navajo), but they weren't exactly easy to break.