Missing: one word

[triskellian]

I require a word which means "causes or is caused by". I suspect the English language does not possess such a word. This is a great trial to me in the process of writing an essay about a bunch of stuff for which we don't know which direction causation operates. Mostly I'm explicitly stating the causal ambiguity, and sometimes I say things like "is

Comments

[lanfykins]

Closest I can get is 'is correlated with', but that doesn't mean at all the same thing, because it also allows for an option C that causes both things.

Dratted English language :)

[triskellian]

And correlated, to me, implies that someone has done a bunch of stats and Officially Decreed (tm) that there is a correlation, and since this is all pulling-ideas-out-of-our-heads stuff (development of language in the human species), there aren't really any stats to do.

Dratted indeed :-)

[bateleur]

...and that's even before we get to things which are correlated at random.

[sushidog]

You could use "co-occurs with", but that doesn't imply causality, so I don't suppose it helps. I can't think of any word that suggests a causal relationship between two things without specifying the direction, to be honest!

[triskellian]

Pirates! Global warming! :-)

[lathany]

Hope you're feeling better now.

(Can't help with the word thing)

[triskellian]

Yes, much - thanks! It's completely thrown out my plans to prepare for Christmas, though. I needed that weekend for shopping. Still, Amazon to the rescue (I hope).

[dyddgu]

I can has sentence pls?
Although I suspect what you really need is to be writing in (by/with/from) Latin.

[triskellian]

There are several, which is part of why it's a problem - if it was just one instance I wouldn't mind saying something like "causes or is caused by". Ummm... example: "the language we use is linked with the type of language our brains are able to produce and process, although whether the changes in the brain enabled the language or the need for language caused the changes in the brain is still very much a matter of debate".

It's "linked with" in that sentence that is the bit I want to replace, although actually it's fine there, because in that case I do need to make explicit that I know we don't know which way round it is; there are other cases when I don't need to say it over and over again, but the absence of a word to precisely replace the concept means I feel like I'm belabouring the point.

(No! Please don't make me write in Latin! I'm having a hard enough time already this semester producing intelligent and coherent things to say without having to write them in a language I don't know! ;-)

[dyddgu]

It's a bit Rumsfeld, isn't it - known knowns and known unknowns...
How Sapir-Whorf is this section? *has come back from office party, and is fuzzy with words*
Also, I know 0 Latin, so you're probably better off than me anyway....
Correlate, or versions thereof?

[triskellian]

It's a bit Rumsfeld, isn't it - known knowns and known unknowns...
Oh yes, very.

How Sapir-Whorf is this section?
Not at all - it's psycholinguistics, so practically science ;-) Sapir-Whorf, IIRC, is more sociolinguistics.

[cardinalsin]

Well it isn't one word, but "is causally related to" would be what I'd go for. I'd then open my essay with a definition of what I meant by it, to avoid confusion.

[triskellian]

Yep, I've used something a bit like that in one place, but I don't want to use the same phrase too often for stylistic reasons.