Surfaces and Essences: Analogy as the Fuel and Fire of Thinking (23 page)

At the outset, this lacuna in the French lexicon strikes English speakers as a rude violation of common sense, since the concept of
pattern
strikes them as being self-evident and objective, and therefore something that should be universal to all languages. It seems obvious that there “should” be just one word for all those notions that the
English word unites; after all, it feels like just
one thing
rather than many. But in French and in fact in most other languages, there simply isn’t such a word. Nonetheless, other languages manage to cover the zone of conceptual space labeled “pattern” in English pretty completely, although somewhat less efficiently, by using a bunch of smaller blobs each of which corresponds to a limited facet of the notion, or else a set of large blobs that intersect partly with the English one.

For the sake of fairness, we should point out that French, too, has words of quite high frequency that have no counterpart in English — for instance, the adverb “normalement”, which certainly looks like it means what we anglophones mean when we say “normally” (and sometimes it indeed does), but which a large part of the time means something rather different. Here are a few examples that show typical uses of the word, and that give a sense for the wide variety of translations it needs in order to be rendered accurately in English:

French speakers will be just as puzzled by English’s lack of a single word for the obvious, monolithic-seeming concept expressed by the word “normalement” as English speakers are puzzled by French’s lack of a single word for the obvious, monolithic-seeming concept that is embodied in the word “pattern”. What is monolithic is in the eye of the beholder.

In cases such as these, where one language has a single word that covers a set of situations that another language needs a variety of different terms to describe, we are dealing with linguistic richness and poverty. Thus in the case of “pattern”, English is richer than French, and in the case of “normalement”, French is richer than English. More generally, we can say language A is locally richer than language B if language A has a word (or phrase) denoting a
unified
concept — that is, a concept that native speakers feel hangs together tightly, and that seems to have no natural internal cleavages — and if language B
lacks
any single word covering that same zone of conceptual space. We can thus speak of a local “hole” or “lacuna” in language B’s coverage of conceptual space, even though language B manages to cover the zone by resorting to a
set
of words.

On the other hand, when a certain area of conceptual space is finely broken up by a given language, and when speakers of both languages agree that this fine break-up is warranted, then a language that doesn’t offer its speakers such a fine break-up has to be considered poorer. Take the English word “time”, for instance. To native speakers of English, whereas the word “pattern” feels unitary and monolithic, the word “time” does
not have that monolithic feel; native speakers readily and easily see (at least if it’s brought to their attention) that there are several very different meanings of “time” (for instance, those corresponding to the French words “heure”, “temps”, and “fois”). Thus in this case, it’s the French language that is richer and the English language that is poorer, for the English lexicon doesn’t break that large zone of conceptual space into smaller separate zones, as the French language does. An example where French is weaker is the word “beaucoup”, which corresponds to both “much” and “many” in English. For us anglophones, it’s obvious that these are separate concepts, one having to do with a large quantity of a substance, the other having to do with a large number of similar items. The French word that blurs this distinction thus seems rather crude. Thus in this case, the English language appears to be richer, and French poorer.

In summary, when language A has a word that strikes its speakers as representing a natural and monolithic concept, and language B has no corresponding word, then language B is poorer and language A is richer, because speakers of language B are forced to cobble different words together in order to cover the zone of conceptual space that language A covers with just one word. Conversely, when language B has a set of words that cut up a zone of conceptual space that is covered by just one word in language A, and when the distinctions offered by language B seem natural to speakers of both languages, then it’s language B that is richer and language A that is poorer.

When one studies various languages, one discovers that many concepts that one had at first naïvely taken as monolithic, because of one’s native language, are in fact broken up into subconcepts, and often with excellent reason, by other languages. And if one studies enough languages, one often discovers numerous different ways of subdividing one and the same concept. Seeing a concept being broken up into all sorts of subconcepts that one hadn’t previously dreamt of suggests that it would in theory be possible to continue carving the world up into tinier and tinier blobs, thus making an ever finer mesh of very small, extremely refined concepts, without any end.

But no language in fact does this, because all languages come from the key human need to have categories that apply at once to a vast number of superficially extremely different and yet deeply extremely similar situations. Such categories help us to survive and to have comfortable lives. To be sure, some language could, in principle, have separate words for red books and green books, or for books printed on butterfly wings, or for orange books of under 99 pages, or for puce-colored books about subtropical botany that contain between 221 and 228 pages (but not 225) and are in (Brazilian) Portuguese and are typeset in 13-point Bodoni — but it’s obvious that there comes a point of diminishing returns, and it’s nowhere near the absurdly fine distinctions just hinted at. There’s no reason for any culture to construct any of these categories, let alone to reify it via a word in its language, although the miracle of language — of every language on earth — is the charming fact that any of those odd and far-fetched categories
could
in theory be invented by someone, if they were needed or desired.

We should also point out that category refinement doesn’t always move in the direction of an ever-finer mesh. Sometimes refining one’s mental lexicon of categories means broadening through abstraction, in the sense of learning to perceive common threads in situations where people who lack the concept would simply see unrelated phenomena (for example, the commonality linking human mothers with animal mothers, den mothers, and mother companies, or the commonality linking female animals with female plants, or the commonality linking hubs of wheels with airports that are hubs, and so forth). The emergence of this type of
broader
category is also extremely useful for the development of a people or a culture.

There is thus a tension between the desire to make finer distinctions that cover very few cases and the desire to make broader categories that cover many more cases. Earlier, we saw that children’s perception of the world is quite coarse-grained relative to the perception of adults (this is why some young children uninhibitedly speak of “patching teeth”, “eating water”, “undressing bananas”, and so forth), and we saw that as children grow older, they acquire more and more refinements in their conceptual systems. This is a universal tendency, but at some point, adults stop refining their lexicon when it comes to ordinary objects, actions, relationships, and situations. Each language and culture has found its natural grain size for such entities, and in a kind of unspoken collective wisdom, it ceases to go beyond that, although of course experts are continually refining their technical vocabularies, and each society, as it makes new discoveries and inventions, collectively creates new concepts and new words for them.

Everyone in every culture is constantly refining their conceptual repertoire by acquiring ever more compound words, idiomatic phrases, proverbs, and new catch phrases that enter the language through books, movies, and advertisements; in addition, everyone is also constantly building up a rich repertoire of concepts that have no verbal labels. In the next two chapters, we will turn our attention to these two key ways in which our conceptual storehouse continues growing as long as we live.

What is it that links words and categories? To be sure, words are often the verbal counterparts of categories. We can describe and refer to categories with them, but that does not mean that categories should be equated with words — not even with the broader notion of lexical items — for categories are mental entities that do not always possess linguistic labels. Often words are names of categories, often they can be used to describe categories, but sometimes they simply are lacking. All in all, the connection between categories and language is complex. A single word can of course bring a category to mind — “mother”, “moon”, “chair”, “table”, “office”, “study”, “grow”, “shrink”, “twirl”, “careen”, “thanks”, “ciao”, “much”, “and”, “but”, and so on — but the correspondence is somewhat lopsided, because in fact we all know many more categories than we know words.

Coining a word is cognitively costly, and our mental categories are so numerous and constantly changing that it would take an astronomical repertoire of words if we wanted to have exactly one word per category. As a consequence, humans have figured out how to economize with words. Thus, there are many words that have multiple meanings, depending on the context. Such words cover a variety of categories (consider the multitude of meanings of a simple word like “trunk”, for instance). Another word-saving device is that many categories have verbal labels that consist of a string of words rather than just one word, and that idea will be the central focus of the present chapter. And then there are myriads of categories that simply have no verbal label at all, and the goal of the next chapter will be to shine a bright light on those.

In sum, whereas
Chapter 1
focused on categories whose labels are just one word long, this chapter is concerned with categories whose linguistic labels are more complex; thus compound words, idiomatic phrases, proverbs, and fables are among the scenic spots we shall visit.

No less than indivisible words, compound words designate categories. Thus the word “airplane” is no less the name of a category than are “air” and “plane”; the same goes for “airport”, “aircraft”, “airfield”, “airlift”, “airsick”, “airworthy”, “airhead”, “airbag”, “airplay”, “airtight”, and so forth. There are many words whose components are so tightly fused inside them that the individual pieces are seldom if ever noticed, since (in most cases) the wholes are not analyzable in terms of their pieces — for example, “cocktail”, “cockpit”, “upset”, “upstart”, “awful”, “headline”, “withstand”, “always”, “doughnut”, “briefcase”, “breakfast”, “offhand”, “handsome”, “cupboard”, “haywire”, “highjack”, “earwig”, “bulldozer”, “cowlick”, “dovetail”, and so on.

To be sure, in some of these cases — for instance, “cupboard” and “headline” — a little guesswork provides a plausible story about their origins, but the possibility of doing an intellectual analysis doesn’t mean that a fluent speaker conceives of the word — that is, hears it — as a compound word. For example, we don’t pronounce “The plates go in the cupboard” as if it were written “The plates go in the cup board”, and we don’t hear it that way. In fact, we never say “board” when we mean a storage location, even if it once had that meaning. What we say aloud sounds more like “cubberd” than like “cup board”, and virtually no one hears either part inside the whole. As for “airport”, although we can deliberately slow down and hear “air” and “port” inside it, who ever thinks about the
atmosphere
and about a
harbor
when picking up a friend at the baggage area, or when transferring between planes? Indeed, were someone to call an airport an “atmospheric harbor”, it would invite ridicule, if not sheer incomprehension.