Read Is That a Fish in Your Ear? Online
Authors: David Bellos
Is That a Fish in Your Ear? (25 page)
From infancy to the onset of puberty, children of every culture have always known that animals have things to say to them. There’s no folklore in the world that doesn’t similarly break the alleged barrier between human and other.
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But in our Western, script-based cultures, growing up (which is so heavily entwined with formal education that it might as well be treated as the same thing) involves unlearning the instinctive childhood assumption of communicative capacity in nonhuman species. No wonder our philosophers and priests have long insisted that language is the exclusive attribute of humans. That self-confirming axiom makes children not yet fully human and in real need of the education they are given.
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But in our Western, script-based cultures, growing up (which is so heavily entwined with formal education that it might as well be treated as the same thing) involves unlearning the instinctive childhood assumption of communicative capacity in nonhuman species. No wonder our philosophers and priests have long insisted that language is the exclusive attribute of humans. That self-confirming axiom makes children not yet fully human and in real need of the education they are given.
However, the traditional reasons for making a radical separation between “signaling” and “speaking” are not quite as hard-edged as they are often made to seem. Some animal signaling systems that have been studied (among ants and bees, for instance, where the channels are not by voice but by physical and chemical means) communicate what for us would be extremely elaborate geographic and social information. Whales emit long streams of haunting sounds when they gather in a school in waters off the coast of Canada. The tonal and rhythmic patterns of whale song are of such complexity as to make it quite impossible to believe that what we can hear (and pick up on instruments more sensitive than human ears) is just random noise. Even more striking is the recent behavior of a group of monkeys in a Colchester, England, zoo: they have added two new gesture signals to their prior repertoire of communicative behavior. Even if the “monkey sense” of these gestures is not absolutely certain, they are indisputably meaningful signs within the community, and indisputable inventions of the monkeys themselves.
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But what makes the communicative behavior of ants, bees, whales, monkeys, dogs, and parrots mysterious to us, what takes cross-species communication into the realm of the ineffable, is the fact that, save for a very limited range of noises from a limited range of long-domesticated pets, nobody knows how to translate “animal signals” into human speech or vice versa. When and if we ever can translate nonhuman noises into human speech, species-related ineffabilities will evaporate like the morning haze.
Translation is the enemy of the ineffable. One causes the other to cease to exist.
How Many Words Do We Have for Coffee?
The number of New Yorkers who can say “good morning” in any of the languages spoken by the Inuit peoples of the Arctic can probably be counted on the fingers of one hand. But in any small crowd of folk in the city or elsewhere you will surely find someone to tell you, “Eskimo has one hundred words for snow.” The Great Eskimo Vocabulary Hoax was demolished many years ago,
1
but its place in popular wisdom about language and translation remains untouched. What are interesting for the study of translation are not so much the reasons this blooper is wrong but why people cling to it nonetheless.
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but its place in popular wisdom about language and translation remains untouched. What are interesting for the study of translation are not so much the reasons this blooper is wrong but why people cling to it nonetheless.
2
People who proffer the factoid seem to think it shows that the lexical resources of a language reflect the environment in which its native speakers live. As an observation about language in general, it’s a fair point to make—languages tend to have the words their users need and not to have words for things never used or encountered. But the Eskimo story actually says more than that. It tells us that a language and a culture are so closely bound together as to be one and the same thing. “Eskimo language” and “the [snowbound] world of the Eskimos” are mutually dependent things. That’s a very different proposition, and it lies at the heart of arguments about the translatability of different tongues.
The discovery and understanding of what makes different languages different and also the same has a curious modern history. In a lecture on the culture of the Hindus given in London to the Asiatic Society in 1786, an English judge posted to Bengal made a claim that overturned long-held beliefs in the superiority of the languages of the “civilized” West and the lesser jargons of the rest of the world:
The
Sanscrit
language, whatever be its antiquity, is of a wonderful structure; more perfect than the
Greek
, more copious than the
Latin
, and more exquisitely refined than either, yet bearing to both of them a stronger affinity, both in the roots of verbs and the forms of grammar, than could possibly have been produced by accident; so strong indeed, that no philologer could examine them all three, without believing them to have sprung from some common source, which, perhaps, no longer exists; there is a similar reason, though not quite so forcible, for supposing that both the
Gothic
and the
Celtic
, though blended with a very different idiom, had the same origin with the
Sanscrit
; and the old
Persian
might be added to the same family.
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This is generally reckoned to be the starter’s gun in a fascinating race that lasted for much of the nineteenth century to map all the world’s languages and to work out how they were related to one another, in “family trees” each springing from a single progenitor. But even on the Old Continent some languages—Albanian, for example—didn’t seem to have any close relatives at all, and one of them stuck out like a sore thumb. Basque, spoken in parts of northern Spain and southwestern France, was just so different as to resist any kind of “family” treatment. Wilhelm von Humboldt, elder brother of the great explorer Alexander, learned this strange idiom and wrote a grammar of it,
4
and in so doing developed the intellectual tools that in watered-down form ultimately led to the Great Eskimo Vocabulary Hoax.
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and in so doing developed the intellectual tools that in watered-down form ultimately led to the Great Eskimo Vocabulary Hoax.
Von Humboldt was struck not so much by the list of words that Basque has for different things as by the radically different structure of the language. It seemed to him that the grammar of Basque was the core and also the mirror of Basque culture. The observation was generalized into a theory: insofar as the formal properties of different languages are different from one another, each of the world’s languages gives access to a different mental world.
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Basque cannot be “reduced” to French, German, or anything else. It is just itself—the embodiment and the root cause of “Basqueness.” Different languages, von Humboldt saw, were different worlds, and the great diversity of natural languages on the planet should be seen as a treasure house of tools for thinking in other ways.
5
Basque cannot be “reduced” to French, German, or anything else. It is just itself—the embodiment and the root cause of “Basqueness.” Different languages, von Humboldt saw, were different worlds, and the great diversity of natural languages on the planet should be seen as a treasure house of tools for thinking in other ways.
The observation “other people just don’t think the way we do” was made long before von Humboldt’s essays appeared, but for most of human history it was dealt with quite easily. In Greek eyes, “barbarians” who couldn’t speak Greek were obviously not capable of saying anything interesting. Similarly, for the grammarians of seventeenth-century France, other languages could barely allow their speakers to engage in approximations to real thought, which was truly possible only in Latin and French. It must have taken great courage to express von Humboldt’s insight in the colonial era, when the otherness of other languages was generally thought to confirm the intellectual inferiority of people less fortunate than the French (or the Greeks, or the Romans, and so forth). Like Sir William Jones, the Bengal judge, von Humboldt dared to assert that other languages offered speakers of “West European” a wonderful mental resource.
Colonial expansion and conquest brought Europeans into contact with languages that were even more different than Basque. Some of them, dotted here and there around the globe in no obvious pattern, are very different indeed. Imagine a language in which there is no term for “left” or “right” but only expressions for laterality cast in terms of cardinal orientation. “There’s a fly on your southwest leg” might mean “left” or “right,” depending on which way the speaker and his interlocutor are facing. (This is less unfamiliar than it first sounds: in contemporary Manhattanese we use cardinal orientation whenever we say “go uptown from here.” To the dismay of many a lost tourist, that can’t be translated into
tournez à gauche
or
à droite
unless you also know which of the four cardinal points you are facing.) Speakers of Kuuk Thaayorre (Cape York, Australia), for example, lay out ordered sets (say, numbers from one to ten, or photographs of faces aged from babyhood to maturity) not from “left” to “right” or the other way around but starting from east—wherever east happens to be with respect to the table at which their anthropological linguist interrogator is seated.
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tournez à gauche
or
à droite
unless you also know which of the four cardinal points you are facing.) Speakers of Kuuk Thaayorre (Cape York, Australia), for example, lay out ordered sets (say, numbers from one to ten, or photographs of faces aged from babyhood to maturity) not from “left” to “right” or the other way around but starting from east—wherever east happens to be with respect to the table at which their anthropological linguist interrogator is seated.
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But languages can be even weirder than that. In Nootka, a language spoken on the Pacific coast of Canada, speakers characteristically mark some physical feature of the person addressed or spoken of either by means of suffixes or by inserting meaningless consonants in the body of a word. You can get a very faint idea of how this works from vulgar infixes such as “fan-bloody-tastic” in colloquial English. In Nootka, however, the physical classes indicated by these methods are children, unusually fat or heavy people, unusually short adults, those suffering from some defect of the eye, hunchbacks, those that are lame, left-handed persons, and circumcised males.
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One example of the radical difference of human languages was made famous by the American linguist Benjamin Lee Whorf, who had learned and studied many Native American languages. In the language of the Hopi (but also in quite a few others, distributed with no obvious pattern around the globe), there is a grammatical category called
evidentials
. For each noun-phrase, the grammar of Hopi marks not so much the categories of definiteness or indefiniteness (“a farmer,” “the farmer”) but whether the thing or person referred to is within the field of vision of the speaker. “The farmer I can see” has a different form from “the farmer I saw yesterday,” which is different again from the form of “the farmer you told me about.” As a result, the English sentence “The farmer killed the duck” is quite untranslatable into Hopi without a heap of information the English sentence doesn’t give you—notably, whether the farmer in question is present to the speaker as he speaks and whether the duck is still lying around. If you speak Hopi, of course, and are speaking it to other Hopi speakers in an environment where the duck and the farmer are either with you or not, you know the answers to these questions and can express your meaning grammatically. What you can’t translate in a meaningful way is the sentence “The farmer killed the duck” out of context. But as we have seen in earlier chapters, this kind of untranslatability holds for any de-contextualized sentence in any language. The use of Hopi-type grammars as evidence of the untranslatability of tongues is really a red herring. Isolated, unsituated, written example sentences are often more hindrance than help when it comes to thinking about translation.
evidentials
. For each noun-phrase, the grammar of Hopi marks not so much the categories of definiteness or indefiniteness (“a farmer,” “the farmer”) but whether the thing or person referred to is within the field of vision of the speaker. “The farmer I can see” has a different form from “the farmer I saw yesterday,” which is different again from the form of “the farmer you told me about.” As a result, the English sentence “The farmer killed the duck” is quite untranslatable into Hopi without a heap of information the English sentence doesn’t give you—notably, whether the farmer in question is present to the speaker as he speaks and whether the duck is still lying around. If you speak Hopi, of course, and are speaking it to other Hopi speakers in an environment where the duck and the farmer are either with you or not, you know the answers to these questions and can express your meaning grammatically. What you can’t translate in a meaningful way is the sentence “The farmer killed the duck” out of context. But as we have seen in earlier chapters, this kind of untranslatability holds for any de-contextualized sentence in any language. The use of Hopi-type grammars as evidence of the untranslatability of tongues is really a red herring. Isolated, unsituated, written example sentences are often more hindrance than help when it comes to thinking about translation.
However, the rapid exploration of the diversity of human languages in the nineteenth century also led people to wonder in what ways the languages of less developed peoples were different from “civilized” tongues. Greek had “produced” a Plato, but Hopi had not. Was this because so-called primitive languages were not suited to higher thought? Or was it the lack of civilization itself that had kept primitive languages in their irrational and alien states? Von Humboldt’s hypothesis of an indissoluble bond between language and mentality could be used to argue either way around. Were there any general features of the languages of “natives” that marked them off as a class from those few languages that were spoken by the civilized nations of the world? And if so, what were they?
Explorer-linguists observed quite correctly that the languages of peoples living in what were for them exotic locales had lots of words for exotic things, and supplied subtle distinctions among many different kinds of animals, plants, tools, and ritual objects. The evidence piled up at a disproportionate rate simply because the explorers wanted to know first of all what all these strange objects in their new environment were called. Accounts of so-called primitive languages generally consisted of word lists elicited from interpreters or from sessions of pointing and asking for names.
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But the languages of these remote cultures seemed deficient in words for “time,” “past,” “future,” “language,” “law,” “state,” “government,” “navy,” or “God.” Trique, a language spoken in Mexico, has no word for “miracle,” for example, only specific words for “heal the sick,” “part the waters,” and so forth.
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Consequently, it was difficult to translate into such languages most of the things that colonial administrators and missionaries needed to say. How could these strange folk be granted the benefits of civilization if the languages they spoke did not allow for the expression of civilized things? More particularly, the difficulty of expressing “abstract thought” of the Western kind in many Native American and African languages suggested that the capacity for abstraction was the key to the progress of the human mind.
8
But the languages of these remote cultures seemed deficient in words for “time,” “past,” “future,” “language,” “law,” “state,” “government,” “navy,” or “God.” Trique, a language spoken in Mexico, has no word for “miracle,” for example, only specific words for “heal the sick,” “part the waters,” and so forth.
9
Consequently, it was difficult to translate into such languages most of the things that colonial administrators and missionaries needed to say. How could these strange folk be granted the benefits of civilization if the languages they spoke did not allow for the expression of civilized things? More particularly, the difficulty of expressing “abstract thought” of the Western kind in many Native American and African languages suggested that the capacity for abstraction was the key to the progress of the human mind.
Savages will have twenty independent words each expressing the act of cutting some particular thing, without having any name for cutting in general; they will have as many to describe birds, fish and trees of different kinds, but no general equivalents for the terms “bird,” “fish” or “tree.”
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The “concrete languages” of the non-Western world were not just the reflection of the lower degree of civilization of the peoples who spoke them but the root cause of their backward state. By the dawn of the twentieth century, “too many concrete nouns” and “not enough abstractions” became the conventional qualities of “primitive” tongues.
That’s what people actually mean when they repeat the story about Eskimo words for snow. The multiplicity of concrete terms “in Eskimo” displays its speakers’ lack of the key feature of the civilized mind—the capacity to see things not as unique items but as tokens of a more general class.
We
can see that all kinds of snow—soft snow, wet snow, dry snow,
poudreuse
, melting snow, molten snow, slush, sleet, dirty gray snow, brown muddy snow, banks of snow heaped up by wind, snowbanks made by human hand, avalanches, and ski runs, to name but fourteen—are all instances of the same phenomenon, which we call “snow”; “Eskimos” see the varieties, not the class. (This isn’t true of real Inuit people, only of the Eskimos who figure in the Great Eskimo Vocabulary Hoax.)
We
can see that all kinds of snow—soft snow, wet snow, dry snow,
poudreuse
, melting snow, molten snow, slush, sleet, dirty gray snow, brown muddy snow, banks of snow heaped up by wind, snowbanks made by human hand, avalanches, and ski runs, to name but fourteen—are all instances of the same phenomenon, which we call “snow”; “Eskimos” see the varieties, not the class. (This isn’t true of real Inuit people, only of the Eskimos who figure in the Great Eskimo Vocabulary Hoax.)
Translation between “civilized” and “primitive” languages distinguished in this way was clearly impossible. The solution was to teach colonial subjects a form of language that would enable them to acquire civilization, and the obvious tool to carry out the
mission civilisatrice
was the language of the imperial administrators themselves. In some cases, as in the Spanish conquest of the Americas, the impoverished resources of native languages were seen as such a threat to the spread of civilization that the languages and their written records had to be eradicated. But the destruction of the Maya codices wasn’t solely an expression of naked power, religious fervor, and racism.
11
The suppression of lesser tongues was not a policy reserved by the Spanish for other continents—it was already the European norm. France had already begun its long campaign to stop people speaking anything that was not French within its own borders. Breton, Basque, Provençal, Alsatian, Picard, Gascon, and many other rural
patois
were almost hounded out of existence by laws and institutions over a period of several hundred years. The long pan-European drive toward “standard languages” was powered not only by political will, economic integration, urbanization, and other forces at play in the real world. It also expressed a deeply held belief that only some languages were suited to civilized thought.
mission civilisatrice
was the language of the imperial administrators themselves. In some cases, as in the Spanish conquest of the Americas, the impoverished resources of native languages were seen as such a threat to the spread of civilization that the languages and their written records had to be eradicated. But the destruction of the Maya codices wasn’t solely an expression of naked power, religious fervor, and racism.
11
The suppression of lesser tongues was not a policy reserved by the Spanish for other continents—it was already the European norm. France had already begun its long campaign to stop people speaking anything that was not French within its own borders. Breton, Basque, Provençal, Alsatian, Picard, Gascon, and many other rural
patois
were almost hounded out of existence by laws and institutions over a period of several hundred years. The long pan-European drive toward “standard languages” was powered not only by political will, economic integration, urbanization, and other forces at play in the real world. It also expressed a deeply held belief that only some languages were suited to civilized thought.
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