Chapter 14 Part I: Language and Words
• Three of the ways in which language can be approached. • Ancient assumptions are embedded in a language. • A language as a cultural masterpiece. • Albert Einstein: “Everything should be as simple as possible, but not simpler.” • The scope of various languages. The attrition of a great language. • Do the most fundamental power of a language, and its beauty, lie in its structure? • Synaesthesia. • Pattern in language and children’s learning. Like a dance. • Experts on language: two schools. • Efforts to codify language. Schools then and now. • Noam Chomsky’s “Cartesian Linguistics”: conventional grammar obsolete. • Chomsky’s “paradigm shift.” • Invention of grammar by the Greeks. • Language and our machines. Jettisoning the subjunctive mood. • Winston Churchill on the nobility of “the essential structure of a normal British sentence”.
A living language must keep pace with improvements in knowledge and with the multiplication of ideas.
[Noah Webster, A Letter to John Pickering, 1817]
All sciences feed on the abstraction of powerful laws and principles, on the one side, and messy details of data, on the other. Is language a set of particulars so diverse and unruly that they can only be catalogued and admired? Or are the particulars just that, details obscuring principles that are the equivalent of Newton’s laws for language, which can be detected if scholars have the intellectual determination to stay abstract enough to see them? It is a tough call.
[David Berry, review of Randy Allen Harris, The Linguistic Wars (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1994) in The Sciences, January/February, 1994, pp 45-49]
The sounds of the streams
Flash out the Buddha’s sermon
Don’t say that the deepest meaning
Comes only from one’s mouth
Day and night, eighty thousand poems arise
One after the other
And in fact
Not a single word
Has ever been spoken.
[composed by the priest Muso Soseki, designer of the garden at Tenryu-ji, Kyoto, mid 1300’s. From the film “Dream Window: Reflections on the Japanese Garden,” dir. John Junkerman]
In these fragments, we see three of the many ways in which verbal language can be approached. It can be considered as a continually modified tool for our use, as an object susceptible to scientific analysis, and in terms of its limitations in fully expressing our experience in the world. At the same time, human languages can be seen to be works of art, made, like the great cathedrals of Europe, by many people over centuries of time.
Unlike the stony forms of cathedrals and pyramids, languages are mutable; as long as they are in everyday use they change, for better or for worse. We know that one of the strengths of the English language is its ability to incorporate new words when an English-speaking culture takes in new ideas. Conversely, when ideas are discarded, the words which represent them go also, as appears to be the case with “concinnity,” and with “symmetry” in its original meaning. But as I observed in chapter 3, ancient and pervasive ideas and assumptions are embodied in the words of the language, and can to some extent be followed through time in a good dictionary; things we no longer consciously know are still remembered there.[1] This is not to say that a word’s historical meaning is or should be its meaning now, but that the word’s evolution can and generally does indicate the evolution (or devolution) of thought.
The famous Zen sand and rock garden at Ryoan-ji, according to a brochure offered to visitors there, is “acknowledged to be one of the masterpieces of Japanese culture.” A great language is another kind of cultural masterpiece—an achievement, and at the same time a sustaining enabler, of a given culture. In Canada the retention of the French language in Quebec has allowed a French culture there not only to survive, but to flourish. A language is the self-expression of a people, keeping alive the world-view and character of mind of that people. Quebec’s culture is described as “Francophone.” Meanwhile in English we say, “The French have a word for it,” and then we use that word. Words like finesse, machismo, veranda, and gestalt have been taken whole into English as we learn to conceive of the ideas they represent.[2]
Albert Einstein once advised, wonderfully, that everything should be made as simple as possible, but not simpler.[3] This could be applied to language as “things should be said as simply as possible, but not so simply that essential subtleties and nuances of meaning are jettisoned.” Such simplicity is eloquent, a matter of choice within a richness, not the result of the limitations of an impoverished language.
In the Netherlands West Indies many people speak Papiamento, a sort of lingua franca, a mixed jargon allowing people of differing cultural backgrounds to communicate to some extent. In the late 1950s it had a vocabulary of about 500 words, taken from Spanish, Portuguese, Dutch and English—and it expressed time only in the present tense. One book had been published in Papiamento: it was the story of a romance between a foreign oil company executive and a local woman. In Papiamento one said, “I walk tomorrow” or “I walk yesterday,” rather than “I will walk” or “I walked.” Papiamento limits expression (as does every language), but most of its speakers use other languages as well, and Papiamento provides a way of saying the very simple things required by their commerce with one another. I have been told that some Norwegian writers prefer to write in English, a “larger” language, allowing them a “bigger space in which to move,” as well as being a language which most Norwegian readers understand. Of course a great language can change in the direction of attrition, toward over-simplification and dullness, when laziness or commerce or propaganda provide the motivation. We in the United States can observe this impoverishment year by year, on prime-time television and radio, where every minute may cost a fortune—and now in the radical truncations of instant electronic social communication.
Most of the newer words in English name concepts and methods in the exponentially expanding areas of science and technology. Some of these are lovely, such as the name “quark” (a German curd cheese) for certain subatomic particles believed to be fundamental constituents of matter. In quantum theory, words like “color” and “charm” are used to describe qualities quite other than those they indicate outside the subatomic world. Naming a newly discovered star something like “LS 2407B” is dreary: “Betelgeuse” is so much better. Unfortunately there are more stars than we can produce names for, and besides, the aim of science is to organize them in categories and classes, not to please the ear/mind.
It is obvious that language is a human construction. But can it be a work of art, in and of itself, independent of the literature made from it? As Diotima told Socrates, the student of the art of love will eventually see that beauty in one form is akin to beauty in another “until he is compelled to see the beauty of institutions and laws, and to understand that the beauty of them all is of one family.” Languages, legal systems, and organizations are all said to have structure; is this where their most fundamental “beauty” lies?
Written words can have a potent, even seemingly magical effect upon the mind and memory of the reader. We can read a line of poetry, or a paragraph in a letter (even, sometimes, a single word in the right context) and wonder how that particular combination of black marks on paper has provided us this flood of imagined sensation, emotion, and memory—though set down by someone utterly separated from us in both time and space. Ludwig Wittgenstein described this as “that pictorial inner relation, which holds between language and the world;” it is a relation which can connect language not only with the visual, but with any combination of the sense-interpreting areas within the mind. [4]
The founding magic was in the transformation of various human grunts and barks, clucks and sighs, into a means of communication containing, in English at present, more than 450,000 words, that is, symbols standing in for things and actions and ideas, and capable of communicating deep emotion and complex conceptual structure as well as factual information from one person to another. Eventually sets of visual symbols—graphic marks—were invented to represent such spoken symbols, so that the words or ideograms of a language could be cut into stone or bronze, or painted or printed on calfskin or paper. They could thus be held intact over space and time, to be rendered again as comprehensible sounds when read aloud or within the mind.
The young child learning language for the first time is learning simultaneously the potency of words, not only as a means of self-expression but as a tool for psychological manipulation. I clearly remember standing, aged four or five, on our staircase landing and seeing the stunned expression of pain and grief on the upturned face of my adored mother, so seemingly invincible in her imposing adulthood, when I angrily announced that I didn’t love her. It was a revelation in a single moment of the power of language, a power already mine, and of how careful I must be with it. Language activates vastly complex systems of connection—logical, sensory, and in memory—of opinion, information and emotion within the brain.
For a long time it was believed (because claimed by scientists) that the cerebral cortex, the largest and most highly developed part of our brain, is programmed from birth, operating within an immutable set of patterns and limits. This discouraging dogma has at last been overturned by research made possible by brain-imaging machines, which can “watch” the brain in action and represent it graphically for analysis. It turns out that the adult brain can, in fact, be controlled by the conscious mind, to varying degrees and by unknown methods; its skills can be developed as the will dictates. When sight has been lost the newly blind person can intentionally develop an acutely precise capacity for visual imagery and spatial perception, allowing feats of imagination using the “inner eye.” Neuroscientist Oliver Sacks described one man, completely blind, who was able to replace the roof-guttering on his many-gabled house, alone on the roof and often at night, “solely on the strength of the accurate and well-focused manipulation of [his] now totally pliable and responsive mental space.” In other blind subjects, formerly visual areas of the brain can be seen to have assumed new function, and used to process a heightened sensitivity to sound and touch. [5] This apparent interchangeability, even if limited, supports the idea that the more various the areas of the brain involved in learning, the richer the experience and the deeper the knowing. Further, it suggests that the complexity and capacity of what Dr. Sacks calls “that ultimate system, the human brain-mind” would actually be developed by such learning, as was proposed in chapter 6 here.
In the phenomenon known as synaesthesia, the mind makes connections of similarity or identity between things—such as numbers, letters, or sounds—and qualities such as color or taste or shape. It is currently studied as offering clues to the ways in which the brain manages sensory data. Artists of various kinds often describe “synaesthetic” experience, which adds depth and resonance to memory as well as to present reality.[6]
Some of these connections may be established in childhood when we are given colored letters and numbers to learn. However musicians and music lovers describe the “tonal color” of various musical “keys,” which are consistent sets of harmonic relationships (in “golden” proportions) founded on a given note as base.[7] The key of B flat gives rise to an array of mental coloration (for me, dark velvety browns and rosy reds) quite different from that experienced when the composition is transposed to the key of F sharp (intense cold piercing yellows). The colors perceived may vary from person to person, and may involve other connections, like the “color” of the alphabet letter B or F. People testify to experiences of sensory congruities between taste and shape, and we speak un-self-consciously of “colorful” or “drab” writing. The metaphorical richness of poetry and poetic prose depends on just such sensory congruities; synaesthesia itself is a kind of instant metaphor. Even a single word like “daffodils” can carry connections to many sensations: of pale color, of coolness, movement, delicate scent, spring air, damp soil, and so on. It can have mysterious ties to sensations buried in the subconscious mind or in memory, of poignancy, of sudden happiness, of anxiety.
Einstein’s testimony as to the character of his own thinking is relevant here once again: the entities which served as elements of his thought were “images,” he wrote, more or less clear; others were of a “muscular” type, inchoate nudges. These could be voluntarily reproduced and combined.[8] He wrote that it was only in a secondary stage of thought that he would (“laboriously”) search for conventional words or other signs by which to represent his thinking. The brain uses a variety of paths not only in experience but in the conception of new ideas, moving back and forth between its symbol systems, its ways and means of thinking, of which the verbal is only one.
A language is as old as the culture it serves and embodies, and its structure develops through time. Words and ideas can change rapidly, without affecting that intrinsic structure, which changes minimally and slowly. The whole, however, is endlessly flexible and malleable, allowing for all the vast variety and nuance of human expression, for poetry, prose, and precise technical instruction. Language permits endearments, threats, and lies, and also the hiding or denying of them.
A language is like a dance. Children learn it first by imitation, and gradually then by perceiving its patterns and trying them out. A young child who used to say “one, two, fwee, four, five” exults, “I can say three now! And thour, and thive!” Language patterns are in sympathy[9] with our inner patterns and rhythms, and in childhood we learn them with remarkable ease. They are hugely complex, their parts interdependent, and no logarithm can represent them, but their pattern is congruent with ours; they “come naturally” to us when we are very young.
Experts on the subject of Language tend to fall into either of two main groups: those who see a language as a system of definite and discernible patterns and rules (the analogists), and those who see it as aberrant, idiosyncratic, unpredictable, and fluid (the anomalists). In fact a living language is both at the same time, as we have already seen the beating heart and the functioning brain to be. What word can be used for such a system, which depends on both analogy and anomaly? We cannot speak a paradox. The ideogram < >´ is intended to represent such essential living relationships.
The patterns discernible in language have been of interest since pre-classical times, as we will see, but the first modern European attempt to codify it, a dictionary of the Italian language, was published in Florence in 1612.[10] In France, Cardinal Richelieu established the Academie Française in 1634, to oversee and protect the integrity of the French language. The Academie was and still is made up of “Forty Immortals,” and it carries out its duties to this day, “with magnificent inscrutability.”[11] In his fascinating book The Professor and the Madman: A Tale of Murder, Insanity, and the Making of the Oxford English Dictionary, Simon Winchester provides an absorbing account of various early attempts to confine the great, “multi-faceted, broadly derived and imaginatively embellished” English language within a manageable number of volumes, culminating in Dr. Samuel Johnson’s A Dictionary of the English Language. This work was intended to be “a portrait of the language of the day in all its majesty, beauty, and marvelous confusion”. [italics mine] [12] The great literary figures of the time, writers like Addison, Pope, Defoe, Dryden, and especially Jonathan Swift, had called for such a work, to “fix” the language, to establish its limits, and to compile an inventory of its stock of words, “deciding exactly what the language was.” (A contemporary pamphleteer lamented that “We have neither grammar nor Dictionary, neither Chart nor Compass, to guide us through the wide sea of Words.”[13]) These men believed that the language had become so refined and pure that change must mean deterioration, and that it should be studied and codified with the same kind of careful attention then being given to the precisely scientific definition of so many aspects of the natural world, of things like color, length, mass, and longitude.
Dr. Johnson at first agreed with those who wanted to establish the language for all time exactly as it was. However by the time he had spent three years working on his dictionary and stood at mid-point in that gigantic task, he had come to realize that such a fixation was neither possible nor desirable. An earlier lexicographer, Benjamin Martin, was of the same opinion: “No language as depending on arbitrary use and custom can ever be permanently the same, but will always be in a mutable and fluctuating state; and what is deem’d polite and eloquent in one age, may be accounted uncouth and barbarous in another.”[14]
To demonstrate the nuances of meaning possible to any given word, Dr. Johnson provided, as examples, sentences taken from English literature since shortly before Shakespeare’s time, occasionally modifying them to suit his purposes. For the verb take he listed 113 senses in which the word in its transitive form could be used, and 21 for the intransitive, each with a supportive quotation.[15] Though fully aware of the remarkable subtleties of meaning and nuance that a single group of letters can transmit, he knew that words can only indicate, stand as substitute for, the real world. In the preface to his Dictionary he wrote, “I am not yet so lost in lexicography as to forget that words are the daughters of earth, and things are the sons of heaven.”[16]
+
Webster’s dictionary defines grammar (from a Greek word meaning letter, or writing) as a branch of the study of language dealing with the classes of words, their inflections or other means of indicating relation to one another, and their functions and relations in the sentence as employed according to established usage.[17]
To speak a language we must form grammatical constructions. To lose the ability to do so is to lose the ability to communicate through speech, spoken or written; there is a disease called syntactical aphasia, syntax being the order or arrangement of words necessary for the production of meaning in a given language. The basic structure of a language is held in common by all its coherent speakers, but there are those who play with the possibilities for variation within that structure in so personal a manner that a writer’s identity can be deduced from a block of text, and if we’re lucky we come across people in our daily lives whose way of combining words and ideas is both eccentric and delightful, or perhaps delightful because individual. [18]
For centuries the study of grammar was the foundation of a formal education; secondary schools, where students were taught Latin and often Greek, were known as “grammar schools.” In 1819, the American Federalist agitator and polemicist William Cobbett published his Grammar of the English Language, written in the form of a series of letters to his 14-year-old son James, although “Intended for the Use of Schools and of Young Persons in General; but more especially for the Use of Soldiers, Sailors, Apprentices, and Plough-boys.” In it, Mr. Cobbett points out that true respect is earned by knowledge, and that for the kinds of knowledge found in books, “GRAMMAR is the gate of entrance to them all.”
And, if grammar is so useful in the attaining of knowledge, it is absolutely necessary in order to enable the possessor to communicate, by writing, that knowledge to others, without which communication the possession must be comparatively useless to himself in many cases, and, in almost all cases, to the rest of mankind.
The actions of men proceed from their thoughts. In order to obtain the co-operation, the concurrence, or the consent, of others, we must communicate our thoughts to them. The means of this communication are words; and grammar teaches us how to make use of words. [emphasis his]
[William Cobbett, Grammar of the English Language, p 4]
Further, the author reminds his readers that a knowledge of grammar by the People is essential if they are to maintain their rights and liberties, and that “tyranny has no enemy so formidable as the pen.” Grammar, he writes, gives the power to express ourselves fully and clearly, and in a manner such that no one can easily give our words any meaning other than that which we intend. If the People lack this power, they are at the mercy of tyrants and liars of all kinds, in their inability to judge what they are being told as much as in their inability to express themselves powerfully and succinctly. Nowadays it is occasionally pointed out that the full education of the average member of society—so that he or she is able to think and communicate clearly and at the same time to recognize dishonesty and flim-flammery when it is encountered—is necessarily undesirable to any kind of repressive government, or in fact to any kind of government representing entrenched interests, including the corporate. We can wonder about this as we watch today’s encouragement of a blind and supposedly patriotic junk consumerism —what Lee Siegel has called “the coarse insentient pragmatics…of American life”[19]—as it exists in combination with the decline in funds for public education. Late in his treatise, Cobbett writes that he does not consider the bad writing of politicians and statesmen to be “the cause for the present public calamities,” but that
[I]t is a proof of deficiency in that sort of talent, which appears to me to be necessary in men intrusted with great affairs. He who writes badly thinks badly. Confusedness in words can proceed from nothing but confusedness in the thoughts which give rise to them. These things may be of trifling importance when the actors move in private life; but, when the happiness of millions of men is at stake, they are of importance not easily to be described.
[Ibid. p 146]
Most readers can probably approve Mr. Cobbett’s claims for the political and social importance of clear and precise language. (It is currently recognized in the education of lawyers, one of the few groups of whom a firm knowledge of grammar is required. Some of the results of this, both now and in years to come, are easily imagined.) But in the late 1970s friends who worked in educational publishing informed me that grammar, as it had been taught for so many centuries, was now passé—thanks to a new understanding of the scientifically supported “deep structure” of language posited by MIT professor of linguistics Noam Chomsky in his hugely influential books, Syntactic Structures (1957), and Cartesian Linguistics (1966).[20]
Professor Chomsky proposed that there are formal principles underlying grammatical structures in language, and that human beings are uniquely equipped to understand them. We can all see that very young children independently intuit and learn the rules governing ordinary sentences and can eventually use these rules to generate an infinite variety of sentences without having heard them before. Chomsky imagined two levels of structure in sentences: “surface structure” of words and sounds, and “deep structure,” which carries the underlying meaning. He claimed that people generate surface structures from deep structures using a set of abstract rules which he called “grammatical transformations,” or “transformational rules.” He predicted that those rules would be found to be limited in number, the same in all languages, and that they would correspond to mental structures genetically transmitted in human beings.[21] It was confidently expected that this “deep structure,” once discovered, would make conventional grammar obsolete.
Dr. Chomsky’s theories were originally proposed in opposition to the Behaviorist view, long-dominant in academia, in which language was thought to be a system of learned syntactical and grammatical habits established by means of training and experience. He argued instead that young children’s ability to understand and gradually to apply the formal principles underlying the grammatical structures of language is innate, inborn. [22]
Public schools, confident that these new “deep” rules would soon be available, generally stopped teaching traditional grammar with any conviction, except in foreign language courses. This might be surprising were it not for the general and automatic academic and public respect for the latest “scientific” discovery. (Behaviorist theory was also “scientific,” of course.) The study of grammar could now be seen to be not only difficult, unpopular, and old-fashioned, but blessedly unnecessary. This was a fine example of the “willing abdication…to experts,” noted by Walker Percy. Within ten years, high school students would tell me that when confronted with a knotty problem in the construction of an English sentence, they turned to their perhaps sketchy knowledge of traditional grammar in French or Spanish in an effort to untangle it.
But where is the promised “new grammar” fifty years later? Has the search for it been abandoned? Mr. Chomsky, according to an article in the British magazine The Sciences in 1994, had experienced a “paradigm shift,” and had thrown away his ground-breaking concept of a “deep” structure common to all human languages, in favor of a “universal grammar,” which would be “a set of simple principles that interact with one another, and with the properties of words, to give rise to all the complexities of language, that is, a ‘generative grammar.’” I don’t see any appreciable difference here. Is “deep structure” being re-named “generative grammar”? The concept of such a grammar overlooks the roles played by human craving for variation and novelty, and our desire for precise and pungent communication in a given situation—let alone the contribution of human ingenuity —in the generation of form in language as in anything else. Language develops and changes in response to the seemingly infinite complexity of the universe: it is an art form. It’s true that rules, constraints, and required patterns support and stimulate originality and play, but they do not “generate” it. The ingenious human mind does that in response to such constraints, using all its remarkable resources.
As it happens, one possible set of very basic rules and required patterns of expression, rules which interact with one another and with the properties of words to allow coherent speech—a necessary and obvious one—has long been available. According to a high school textbook, “A sentence is a group of words expressing a complete thought.”[23] A complete thought, it says, requires a subject and a verb; something of substance, a thing, and an action, even if the action is that of simply existing. “I am” is a complete thought. In all known languages: i) there are noun-like and verb-like components, ii) there are words or wordlike elements that combine according to rules, that is, to consistent patterns, and iii) there is the capability of embedding or subordinating one sentence into another as an included clause. These characteristics are known as “language universals.”[24] In English and other languages, “complete thoughts,” that is, sentences, consist of: 1) the Name of the Subject under consideration by the speaker—a “Noun.” 2) Subject acts—Name of action is Verb. 3.) Adjective describes the Subject. 4) Adverb tells what the action is like. I don’t want to use the subject’s name every time I refer to it, that being repetitious and tiresome, so 5) I substitute a small word carrying gender as a clue—“he” “she” or “it”—and that’s a Pronoun. And so on.
We are told that in the West, the analysis of the patterns of language began with the Greeks, who are said to have “invented” grammar.[25] Greek grammar, in turn, was the foundation of Latin grammar, of the “Romance” languages evolving from it, and of English.
