In Praise of the Garrulous Read online

  The best-known creation myth for language diversity is the Tower of Babel. The Old Testament tells the story in its typically succinct manner. After several verses listing the generations of Noah, it announces the plan to build a city and a tower:

  And the Lord came down to see the city and the tower, which the children of men builded. And the Lord said, Behold, the people is one, and they have all one language; and this they begin to do; and now nothing will be restrained from them, which they have imagined to do. Go to, let us go down, and there confound their languages, that they may not understand one another’s speech. So the Lord scattered them abroad from thence upon the face of the earth; and they left off to build the city. 13

  This myth falls into the category of arrogant assaults on the heavens – a cousin of the Titans’ attack or that of Plato’s cartwheeling hermaphrodite humans.14 It is not a creation myth for language but for language diversity; its success, I think, is due to the fact that people have always tended to view language diversity as an unmitigated disaster. When linguistic fragmentation appeared an unassailable reality, it was perhaps sensible to dwell on the problems this creates. Now that wholesale language death has become an inevitability and the only question is the extent of the damage that will be inflicted, it is time to realise that linguistic diversity is essential to the survival of all languages, even the most powerful ones (see Chapter Five). Babel was to language what sex was to “men”. According to Hesiod, the first woman, the frivolous, seductive and mendacious Pandora, opened the jar that contained all the anxieties and distressing cares of human existence, and the appearance of women and sex brought the golden age of men to an end.15 We can up-end that myth and declare that the cloned men and the cloned language must have lacked all character, all subtlety, all menace, all love. Babel and Pandora released chaos on the world, and chaos, we now know, was the real creator of this world. Chaos may be brutal and stupid, but its random crossfertilisation has always been the engine of evolution, even if we may not yet understand the mechanism perfectly.

  Partly to show how our ideas on the origin of language have not developed a great deal over the centuries, I will examine Dante Alighieri’s views on the subject (in contrast, our knowledge of language and language development in historical times has increased enormously). He, like McWhorter, took for granted that there was an Ur-language, and in De vulgari eloquentia, he declared that it was Hebrew.16 In The Divine Comedy, however, his ideas had developed considerably. In Paradise, he states that the Adamic language was dead long before Nembroth built the Tower of Babel,17 because of the natural manner in which our speech (favella) develops and diversifies, although he could not have got quite this far in the first canticle, as Nembroth in hell admits to his crime of splintering the single human language.18

  Dante not only identified the natural tendency of language to fragment, he understood and perhaps exaggerated the rationalism that is inherent within it. Paradoxically, modern man, with all his conceits about his intellectual superiority, is more aware of the irrational characteristics that are intrinsic to language. However, if rationalism exists in the natural world, it must exist exclusively in humanity or, to be precise, in human language. Dante also understood that speech is mediated through the senses, and although he did not say as much in very explicit terms, it is the presence of this obligatory element that introduces the irrational and emotive characteristics of speech: its physical properties play upon our minds and influence our acceptance or rejection of rational propositions on the basis of non-rational criteria. To some extent he also understood this: “reason itself is differentiated between individuals according to their discernment, judgement and choices, so that everyone appears to enjoy their own particular type of reason”.19 But understanding through behaviour and sensations was, for him, strictly for the animals, which are governed by instinct. Language was entirely the product of reason, and differentiation amongst human beings would therefore appear to have been a kind of hierarchy of reason, which no doubt reflected class as perceived in early fourteenth-century Tuscany.

  Human reason is in any case firmly based on a logic developed through human storytelling. Language is based on a particular sequence: a subject acts upon an object or, more crudely, something does something to something else. Languages may order this sequence in dramatically different ways. Latin generally puts the verb at the end of the sentence (and cases allow it great flexibility with word order). Celtic languages always put the verb at the beginning of the sentence, and Gaelic generally follows the pattern: verb, subject, indirect object, direct object. English generally goes: subject, verb, object, indirect object. However, the logic remains the same, and the human mind appears to be hardwired to it (Chomsky). It is true that subordinate clauses can complicate sentence structure, but in a sense they only complement the main clause by reproducing its logic in relation to one of its elements. The basic human sentence is a story.

  The exception to this logic is the verb “to be”, which does not involve an action but rather an equivalence. Celtic languages prefer not to predicate the object on the subject using the verb “to be”, as has already been shown (p. 23). It may be that the invention of the verb “to be” comes later, because then the sentence becomes a definition. And human reason can eventually go beyond human language, as in the case of complex mathematics. Language is not reason, but without language reason could not exist. Returning to Englefield’s claim that language is an invention no more remarkable than “bows and arrows, clothes or agricultural implements”, we could argue that he should have replaced “language” with “reason”, but once again we have no way of knowing at what stage in our evolution reason became significant. Reason, at least in its purest form, is probably something that is taught, whereas language is universal to human beings and only absent in the event of some quite serious brain damage, physical disability or exclusion from society.

  This leads us to the link between the two most important natural or innate activities of humanity that are unique to humanity: walking and talking. The human body is designed for walking and for walking in an extremely elegant manner compared with other animals that can at least temporarily lift themselves up on their back legs. Walking is so natural that it gives pleasure, and the absence of walking in our modern lives may be one of the motives for that nagging doubt that haunts the West: “Why are we, who are more affluent than any people in the past, not happier than we are?” Walking has a rhythm to it, and brings a pleasant calm. We enjoy walking in company and we enjoy walking alone. Language is another almost incessant activity in our lives, and even when we are not talking or listening, we engage in the internal dialogues or monologues that fill our days. Occasionally a newspaper will present us with statistics on how many hours in an average life we spend shaving, brushing our teeth or sitting on the lavatory, and the implication is that those moments are entirely lost. Such views, which reflect the dominant culture since Frederick Taylor started to order our actions, lose sight of the fact that when we engage in activities of this kind, we are also thinking. Inactivity and habitual activities serve a purpose: they allow us to let our minds run free, and this activity helps us to order our thoughts and prepares us for the more complex interactions we will have to confront in other moments of our day.

  To deprive a human being of his or her ability to think in language by imposing a sequence of possibly very undemanding but rapid actions over an extended period of time is surely damaging, just like depriving someone of other human company over an extended period of time (solitary confinement). It may not be as damaging, but it certainly forces the human brain into a pattern of activity for which it was not designed. Tradesmen in the early American car industry must have been aware of this, as Ford had to double the skilled rate before he could attract workers to his unskilled posts. Marx, whose methodology was supposed to be “scientific” just like Taylor’s, developed his theory of alienation within the confines of economic theory, but the real problem is anthropolo
gical: the idea of what brings pleasure to human beings and engenders psychological health, and how much these should be offset against material gains. The answer to that question is one that has philosophical, religious and economic implications that go far beyond the matters under discussion. Here we will restrict ourselves to the following hypothesis: language is an activity for which the human body is designed (as ultimately the brain is part of the body) and its exercise is essential to our physical and psychological wellbeing, in a way that many other activities we consider important are not.

  Of course, conversation is the most important forum for language, because language is learnt through hearing and then through talking. But as I have already suggested, real spoken language occurs within a social context that also reflects power relations between individuals. It can therefore be either stressful or relaxing. True dialogue, in which the interlocutors exchange stories and ideas, is of course one of the most satisfying activities in which human beings can engage. Sadly it is not so easy to achieve, at least in our society, and this too may be one of our problems. Today we don’t converse, we network. Conversation is not a pleasure in itself, but a means to achieving ambitions and wealth. That, of course, is an exaggeration, because patently some people do enjoy networking and would find rambling dialogue without an agenda or fixed purpose an excruciating waste of time. Networking is not as new as the word itself, as literature particularly from the nineteenth century provides plenty of examples. Besides, people enjoy the company of others who have shared interests and knowledge: there is an intermediate position. On the other hand, Adam Smith claimed that even social gatherings of people from the same profession could lead to a plot against the public, and it could be added that they will often be as dull as detergent and dirty dishes soaked in water. The conversation will be about rivalry, and the company in which careers are made and lost is not for most people very relaxing. In reality, there are many types of dialogue, and most dialogues are hybrid and full of pleasant and unpleasant surprises. Dialogue within the brain, which might be called “reflective” dialogue, is also satisfying, but it is not true dialogue because one mind has control over both or all voices. However, it is also an ideal dialogue, as are all things imaginary.

  The analogy between talking and walking is particularly pertinent because they are not only similar in their centrality to who we are, but appear to stimulate each other. Thinking, with its need to separate itself from the body by turning the body over to an instinctive activity, stimulates a desire to walk, and walking, with its rhythmic maximisation of all the body’s activities, stimulates a desire to think. Bruce Chatwin was convinced that walking had similar psychological benefits to those I have attributed to thought (the exercise of language). He considered sedentary life to be the cause of our neurosis:

  The Bushmen, who walk distances across the Kalahari, have no idea of the soul’s survival in another world. “When we die, we die,” they say. “The wind blows away our footprints, and that is the end of us.”

  Sluggish and sedentary peoples, such as the Ancient Egyptians – with their concept of an afterlife journey through the Field of Reeds – project on the next world the journeys they failed to make in this one.20

  Given that throughout most of the history of mankind we were hunter-gatherers who were small in number and covered large territories, walking and talking were probably our principal activities. As walking provides ample time for talking, the two activities might well have developed together. If this is the case, then the “unnatural” environment of the settled community has been a human problem for millennia, and our modern technological society is merely an exacerbation of the already inappropriate environment of the farm and the town, where humans were obliged to engage in isolated, repetitive and often back-breaking activities that radically reduced their favourite pastimes. Today, people can work in static, non-verbal realities, only to return home to the linguistically passive relationship with the box in the corner of the sitting-room. The neurosis of modern society might have a very long pedigree.21

  Thus it is one of the premises of this essay that language is one of the principal or indeed the principal indicator of human nature. This attribute is so dominant that it cannot be some additional feature that developed after the advent of mankind, but was a complex and fully-developed capability that has existed in all human societies. As children have an innate ability to apply grammar and we therefore are quite clearly designed to learn and use language, the title of Pinker’s book – The Language Instinct – is, in this limited sense, entirely acceptable. Writing and reading are not an instinctive part of being a human being, but given the “language instinct”, human beings have taken to them not like a duck to water (entirely instinctual), but perhaps like dolphins performing in a dolphinarium. Writing and reading place us in a somewhat artificial environment in which our natural talent can flourish. On the other hand, literature – whether oral or written (and don’t tut-tut at the conflicting etymologies, as “oral literature” is now an accepted concept) – is an inherent feature not of every human individual, but certainly of every human society. My own speculation, based on no solid scientific evidence, is that oral literature in this wider sense must have been one of the drivers in the development of language before the fully developed homo sapiens appeared. Very possibly this occurred in the manner suggested by Chatwin: the pre-human societies that could better memorise landscape and taxonomy had a greater chance of survival, and this drove our forebear species towards humanity. No doubt many other cruder neo-Darwinian arguments could be formulated along the lines of linguistic excellence attracting a mate. Be that as it may, language is used by everyone and used in radically different ways. It is used by bletherers, pedants, manipulators, comics, poets and occasionally even by the taciturn. Even those who do not develop their linguistic skills very highly delight in hearing “bells and whistles” and the well-turned phrase. Language is not only a system of communication and an essential intellectual tool; it is, like music, highly accessible and capable of dramatically affecting the mood of the listener.

  When I wrote the words “well-turned phrase”, I immediately rejected it as a dead or at least very worn expression. I then thought that it did at least express the idea I wanted to put across: a well-crafted sentence that gives the feel of a smooth, perfectly shaped artefact that demonstrates skill and thought. But it doesn’t. It actually suggests a well-machined, overly regular artefact from a limited range of possibilities. It is a cliche that describes cliche. I left it because it triggered my thoughts on McWhorter’s “bells and whistles”. Literary language that excites is a combination of content (there is an aesthetics of thought), sound, structure and presentation of the content (rhetoric or the aesthetics of speech) and, the most difficult concept of all, originality. All aesthetic judgements are a question of balance and made within a specific culture. What is considered well-judged rhetoric in one culture will be perceived as flowery or fussy in another. An idea may fascinate in one language community and be seen as either banal or over-complex in another.

  If my definition of literary language is a reasonable approximation, then literature is possibly becoming less important in modern society. Today writing (whether for novels, television, film or theatre) is principally about extreme mimesis. I will discuss the disappearance of register later (Chapter Six), and that flattening out of language also affects the literary register – most particularly affects the literary register. We learn register just as we learn language, and we are designed to narrate through language. The decline in the entirely natural activity of oral literature and in written literature, which is much less natural but nevertheless very suited to our nature, has been paralleled by the rise in the very unnatural activity of narration through images, which requires the modern technology of film and television.

  This poses an important question that I am clearly quite incapable of responding to, although my instinct is to support the affirmative answer: if language, its
expert use, its diversity and its ornamentation are part of our natural being, are we damaged psychologically by being deprived of them? This leads to a second question to which we can reply with some certainty: is a series of images capable of narrating the same moral complexities that a series of words can? Cinema is perhaps the greatest of the arts, if for no other reason than that it relies on the combined brilliance of so many people. In spite of this complexity of its production process and its involvement of nearly all our artistic sensibilities, it can never reproduce the complexity of, say, the novel, in which the reader can be explicitly introduced to the inner workings of each character’s mind. A very typical example amongst the many is that of Milan Kundera’s The Unbelievable Lightness of Being: the film was excellent as a film, but it fell far short of the book’s power to evoke that pleasant sensation of bewilderment so essential to art and, in this particular case, the philosophical riddles which are the hallmark of Kundera’s formidable writing skills. We are often more attached to our doubts than to our certainties, or at least we should be, because our doubts are more interesting. And the first question is the more interesting of the two. What I can establish is the complexity of our dependency on language, which at least favours an affirmative answer to that first question.