In Praise of the Garrulous Page 5
Chapter Three
Words are a gift from the dead
The elderly man screwed his monocle into his eye, examined the three sheets of typescript, and then threw them on the table. As he did so, he raised his eyebrow to release his monocle and thundered, “This is just psychobabble”.
The face of the middle-aged man just opposite darkened and assumed a martyred look, while the young man to his left suppressed a flash of amusement that tugged at his lips and brightened his eyes. “Psychobabble, indeed”, said the middle-aged man.
“Well, I agree”, said the elderly man, still developing his own line of thought, “the author is quite a jolly cove, but he doesn’t really explain anything about why the subject behaved in the way she did”.
“Psychobabble, how dare you”, said the middle-aged man, rising to the occasion.
“I mean, sir,” said the elderly man with theatrical enjoyment, “that this study says nothing about the subject, and merely restates a series of tired old platitudes”.
“Tired-old platitudes,” said the young man almost under his breath as he attempted unsuccessfully to balance his silver fountain pen on the end of his index finger, “that platitude is getting a bit old and tired too”.
“You mean. You mean,” cried the middle-aged man; his voice swelled with his swelling anger, “I know exactly what a grotty little old man like you, with your … with your absurd affectations of another age means by psychobabble”.
“What do I mean?” said the elderly man, screwing his monocle back in and staring at the middle-aged man very coolly.
“Psychobabble, well …,” replied the middle-aged man, unnerved.
“Psychobabble”, said the young man with an expression of sheer delight, “is a recently coined compound of ‘psycho’ from the Greek psyche for soul or butterfly, and ‘babble’ from the Middle English and similar to the Dutch babbelen and the French babiller with a possible reference to the Tower of Babel.”
While the two other men stared at him, the silver fountain pen finally decided to balance itself on the end of his index finger, which took all his concentration.
So we are not born with a language but with something infinitely more wonderful: the ability to learn language. This obvious point has assumed a certain strangeness since the standardisation of language and the expansion of monolingualism have made language for many an almost fixed entity, often mistakenly associated with “ethnicity” which suggests a pseudo-biological connection.
Without language we cannot think. Without thought, Descartes would question our existence. Yet language comes to us from our own society and above all from history. A language contains not the history of a people but the history of its speakers. Speakers of the language in which I am writing are supposed to be an ethnic mix of a Germanic people and the indigenous Celts they found in the land they invaded (more probably it goes even further back and we are mainly derived from some pre-Celtic people or peoples). But most of the words I write are of not Anglo-Saxon but Latin origin. Moreover, the Latin words were not brought to England by speakers whose ancestors had spoken neo-Latin for many generations. They were brought by Norsemen, a Germanic people who had settled in the Land of the Franks, another Latinised Germanic people who had learnt their language not from the Romans but from Latinised Celts. The language we speak does not reflect the history of a people, but rather the history of various European empires and migrations that occurred far from the shores of England. English is a European artefact created by events, some of which predated the arrival of the Angles and Saxons in Britain. If Hannibal had marched on Rome immediately after his stunning victory at Cannae, where Latins, Africans, Gauls and Iberians slogged away at the brutal business of battle in an exclusively Mediterranean war, then I might be writing in a predominately Semitic language; I would certainly not be writing in a Latinate one. The English imposed English on Ireland and on the rest of Britain, and then took it farther afield. An imperial language flattens all before it and so, after an initial period of increased linguistic activity and interchange, the variety of human thought and expression dwindles.
Words are the product of people and the use of language. They are the product of laziness, which elides consonants or twins them in voiced and unvoiced couplets; they are the product of hard work and trade, which creates and imports new objects; they are the product of writers, who mould a language for a people when a culture is young; they are the product of the good humour and wisdom of a people, who collect the collective resistance of individuals through lives that are often short and unspeakably harsh; but above all they are the product of power, which both seeks to distinguish itself and encourages emulation.
Words are sound. Sound has its own colour, tone and rhythm. Sociolinguists say that no language is intrinsically more beautiful than another. There is perhaps some truth in that, but language is also capable of its own music and only humans can judge whether music is beautiful or not. Words are sounds for people, whose judgements may be distorted by social prejudice, but under that prejudice it is not entirely impossible that some general rules of human aesthetics have their own weight and influence.
Words come together to create meanings and ideas. Meanings and ideas can also have their own beauty. They can be plain or ornate. They can be complex or simple. But they cannot exist without language, so inevitably they are influenced by the language in which they are expressed.
The way we put meaning and ideas together is taught to us as part of our language. We are completely trapped within the strange and muddled history of our mother tongue, and we think within its confines. And yet this gift from millions of unknown speakers, who may have lived on the other side of the world, not only constrains us but also provides us with the means, the only means to become our own individual selves. Language reminds us of a fundamental fact that is easily forgotten in the consumer age: we can only express our individuality through our relationship with society. We are given words, but are free to use them and the infinite permutations they offer in a totally individualistic manner.
When we have a child, we create the inevitability of another death and the anxiety of a life lived in an imperfect and often brutally violent world. This sobering thought may depress us and if we pondered these considerations more often (instead of wilfully avoiding them), we might never have children again. As always, there are opposing lines of thought, and in this case less dismal ones. One thing we do by putting a child into this world is to trigger both the reciprocal use of language between our child and the other human beings it comes into contact with, as well as a more private “stream of consciousness”. As the child grows and comes into contact with more people and diverse linguistic and social situations, he or she will develop a manner of speech that is entirely unique. In some cases, our child will grow up with a different language to our own, and there can be many reasons for this: migration, social climbing, language shift at community level, political change and war. In many cases, there will be a diglossic transition which could last for centuries. We are moulded by our linguistic past and shape the linguistic future, but we do so unconsciously, inadvertently and with very little control over the process, as often happens with the really important things in our lives.
Before the invention of writing, poetry was the collective memory that stored up history and knowledge. People must have savoured words and held onto their complexities which would often have had a mnemonic function, because words were not only to be expressed but also stored in the form of oral text. Modern languages are likely to be more succinct and, quite possibly have a greater stock of abstract nouns (I am ignoring here the question of scientific language, whose exponential increase is far beyond the reach of any single individual, as even scientists only know their own specialisms); ancient speakers would, of course, have had a greater command of the taxonomy of nature, as they lived closer to it.
Darwin was clearly wrong in assuming the simplicity of “savage” tongues, and in contrasting them
with Shakespeare’s (a sleight of hand and a shift of categories, because he is comparing languages unknown to him not with English but with English’s greatest poet). However he also failed to understand the autonomy of language from the instinct to learn a language. The difference between the language of Shakespeare (itself a hybrid of current English and the Renaissance classical culture) and the language of the groundlings Shakespeare liked to ridicule was minuscule compared with the difference between “dumb animals” and those groundlings. These despised audiences were probably illiterate and had to engage in whatever backbreaking tasks Elizabethan society had allocated them, but their undoubted linguistic abilities (given that no society is voiceless) were such that they were willing to return to the theatre for some more gentle ribbing. They presumably wouldn’t have done so, if they did not find the plays entertaining and comprehensible (in spite of the foreign words, foreign names and often distinctly Latinate syntax). Now we know just how complex language acquisition is in terms of the identification of phonemes, words, their meanings and the grammar that holds it all together, there can be no doubt that all human beings are born with not just a natural predisposition to the learning of language but also an all-consuming mental imperative to do so.
We should examine the nature of what Steven Pinker calls the “language instinct”, and if this is just another name for Chomsky’s theory of “transformational grammar”, then the expression is probably a good one, but he gives the impression that he wants to take this argument one stage further. Pinker appears to belong to a growing, semi-religious movement of “ultra-Darwinists” whose high priest is Richard Dawkins. I have a feeling that if Darwin were alive today he would have recycled one of Marx’s comments and said, “If these are Darwinists, then I am not a Darwinist.” Evolution is an established scientific fact, and the haverings of creationists are not worthy of our time. However, the drivers of evolution are disputed, and undoubtedly will be refined by scientists in the future. Evolution occurred in steps, and the “survival of the fittest” driver does not appear to work well for all species. We should never abandon the sceptical method.
Nevertheless Pinker believes that the language instinct is one example of Darwinism not working well, as our brains guzzle energy, and he seems troubled as to why language is not hard-wired. Actually it seems to me that orthodox Darwinism can work quite well with language development. Homo sapiens is considered a generalist species, because it can adapt to a wide variety of environments. Generalist species have greater chances of survival because the inevitable changes in environment that occur in geological time destroy those species that exploit particular niches. However, man’s “generalism” is based not on his body, which is clearly designed for a warm climate (it is tall, thin and hairless, and thus it releases heat easily). Like most Scots, I do not believe that my country and its climate are very suited to human habitation, but the inventiveness of past generations has rendered it quite acceptable and even occasionally pleasant. Man’s adaptability is based entirely on his linguistic skills and the resulting ability to hand down technology from one generation to the next, and thus accumulate it. Pinker seems to forget that language is not just about communication (let alone pre-determined, hard-wired communication); it is also about memory. And not just personal memory but also the collective one. This combination is what I call the “social mind” (see Chapter Four). Complex methods of doing things can be handed down from one generation to another, and they can be altered either in accordance with technological progress or simply as adjustments to changes in environment, which would most frequently result from migration, including the relatively slow migration of farming communities. Even a very elaborate hard-wired language would simply have been incapable of providing this degree of adaptability. And this ability of ours to accumulate knowledge and technology to adapt to our environment is the sole basis for our exceptional generalism as a species.
Pinker argues that we have a common language, which he calls “mentalese”, and he seems to question whether language is essential to thought. We think in mentalese and then translate into language when we speak: “People do not think in English or Chinese or Apache; they think in the language of thought. This language of thought probably looks a bit like all these languages.”1 His argument is based on the fact that we often start writing a sentence and realise half way through that it is not what we wanted to say.2 Absurd. Writing is a highly artificial activity, and we are creating something that is suspended in time. In speech and in our minds, we are always starting off on a sentence and then realising that it isn’t going to work. We may start again, or more probably we will simply go back over part of it: “Look, I told you – didn’t I – that we have to go to the cinema before we do the shopping – no, sorry, I mean the shopping before the cinema.” This only proves that we often do things carelessly. I am willing to concede that if a fire were to break out in my house, I would not sit at my desk and laboriously say to myself, “A fire has broken out in the house and I should probably make my way to the door.” Panic would take over and I would rush for the door. My heart would beat harder and my senses would become incredibly alert (something to which they are not very accustomed). My reactions and mental activity might not differ that much from any other animal. Equally if someone threw me a ball, I would process its trajectory in my mind and catch it, without using any language in my brain. Whether these quite complex mental processes can be defined as thought is arguable and obviously depends on what you consider thought to be. Let me turn the argument around: the ideas I have expounded on this or any other page – whether they are correct or not – could not have been thought through without language. And here is a more complex question: if I had thought them in a language other than English, would they have been exactly the same?
As I asserted in the introduction, anyone who has translated large quantities of text from one language to another must know that translation is a process of approximation (this can easily be demonstrated by comparing various translations of the same book). The problems occur on several levels: as the phonology is different, it is impossible to recreate exactly the tone, the rhyme, the assonances, the puns; as the syntax is different, it may not be possible to organise the arguments in the same sequence, and it might be necessary to divide up sentences or bring them together; as the vocabulary is different, words will have entirely different semantic fields which will overlap in different directions, and even in the case of two Western European languages which share a common history dominated by Latin, there will be words that simply don’t exist in the second language. And then the aesthetics of thought changes from one language to another: so an idea can occasionally be impossible to express in another language without making it appear laughable, pretentious, puerile or crass. This is not a question of bad translation, but of the limitations of translation. The fact that most of our more banal linguistic operations can be translated without difficulty must not divert our attention from the very restricted area where translation becomes awkward, because this area is precisely the one in which the most interesting things occur.
An experiment I read about some years ago provides a very different approach from Pinker’s. The researchers had three cards: one had a picture of a man (A) kicking a ball, another a picture of the same man (A) about to kick a ball and another a picture of a different man (B) kicking a ball. A group of English-speakers and a group of Indonesianspeakers were asked to pair off two of the pictures. Most of the English-speakers paired off the two different men (A and B) both kicking the ball, and most of the Indonesians paired of the same man (A) kicking the ball and about to kick the ball. These extraordinary results would appear to reflect the different tense usage in the two languages. English has a clearly defined tense usage,3 and generally Indonesian does not use tense, although it does have some marker words that are very occasionally used. Thus the expressions “he’ll go”, “he’s going” and “he went” will follow the simplified pattern of “he go”. As la
nguage (both vocabulary and grammar) is all about categorisation, the manner in which a language categorises the world could surely affect the manner in which a speaker categorises the world. This is one of the fundamental ways in which language governs the way we think, although language almost certainly affects our thought in more complex ways, particularly in the area where language comes closer to wider cultural questions, such as the structure of argumentation.
Our researchers formed a third group of bilingual English and Indonesian speakers, and the result was a mixture.4 They probably had a great deal of difficulty coming to their decision, and interestingly bilingualism, the condition of threequarters of the human population, is conspicuously ignored in Pinker’s book. Moreover further tests showed that bilinguals behaved differently according to whether they were interviewed in English or Indonesian. This result was even more significant.5
Benjamin Lee Whorf, who was a leading proponent of the thesis that language affects the way we think, claimed that Hopi does not have tense, while Pinker asserts that the anthropologist Ekkehart Malotki has proven that this is not the case. This leaves the rest of us in a little difficulty because, short of rushing off to do our own field studies, we cannot really decide (and besides, the time has probably come to leave the poor Hopi in peace). Things are not made any easier by the fact that Pinker dismisses the main counter-thesis to his own in a few pages of highly selective and rather crass arguments, whereas Whorf himself indulges in some highly abstract arguments full of jargon that occasionally makes your head spin, such as, “I shall say nothing in this paper of the nine voices (intransitive, transitive, reflexive, passive, semipassive, resultative, extended passive, possessive, and cessative); and of the nine aspects (punctual, durative, segmentative, punctual-segmentative, inceptive, progressional, spatial, projective, and continuative) I shall deal with only two.”6 Pinker – perhaps betraying a lack of better arguments – damns Whorf’s theory for its apparent “perennial appeal … to undergraduate sensibilities”, which of course means precisely nothing. Pinker may be right that Whorf was an unreliable researcher and even that Whorf takes his argument too far (much as Pinker does in the opposite direction), but Whorf’s arguments are certainly worthy of serious examination and should not be flung aside as though unworthy of serious debate. His central argument is more or less summarised in the following passage: