Through the Language Glass: Why the World Looks Different in Other Languages (17 page)

But there are many other examples of the discrepancy between what is unnatural and what is merely unfamiliar. We will encounter one striking but little-known case in a later chapter: the concepts used to describe space and spatial relations. A more famous example is kinship terms. The language of the Yanomamö Indians in Brazil, for instance, appears to us incomprehensibly hazy, because it lumps together relatives of entirely different kinds under one concept. Using one and the same term,
šoriw∂
, for both cousins and brothers-in-law may already seem rather peculiar. But this is nothing compared with the unification of brothers and certain cousins: the Yanomamö term
εiw∂
makes no distinctions between one’s own brothers and the sons of a paternal uncle or of a maternal aunt! On the other hand, the Yanomamö would consider English unbearably vague in having just one term, “cousin,” which lumps together no less than four distinct type of relatives:
amiw∂
(daughter of a paternal uncle or of a maternal aunt),
εiw∂
(son of paternal uncle or of maternal aunt),
suw∂biy∂
(daughter of maternal uncle or of paternal aunt), and
šoriw∂
(son of maternal uncle or of paternal aunt). There are even weirder systems of kinship terms, such as the one that
anthropologists call the Crow system, in which the same concept is used for one’s own father and for some of one’s cousins (the sons of a paternal aunt). All these ways of dividing up one’s relatives have their own internal logic and coherence, but they nevertheless diverge radically from the categories that we find natural.

The freedom of culture is even more pronounced in the realm of grammar, since grammatical structures are by nature more abstract and, as we have seen, nature’s hold loosens considerably in the realms of abstraction. One striking aspect of the grammatical system that varies even among mainstream languages is the order of words. Japanese and Turkish, for instance, arrange words and grammatical elements in a way that seems to us perversely back to front. In
The Unfolding of Language
, I discussed examples such as the Turkish sentence
Padi
ah vezir-ini ordular-ι-nιn ba
-ι-na getirdi
, where a literal translation of each element—“Sultan vizier his troops his of head their to brought”—is almost as unenlightening to an English speaker as the Turkish itself. But for a Turkish speaker encountering English for the first time, the English arrangement—“the Sultan brought his vizier to the head of the troops”—would appear just as peculiar.

While the extent of variation among different grammars is not contested, there have been vociferous arguments about how to interpret it. The divergence between grammatical systems poses a particular challenge to the nativist idea of an innate universal grammar, because if the rules of grammar are meant to be coded in the genes, then one could expect the grammar of all languages to be the same, and it is then difficult to explain why grammars should ever vary in any fundamental aspects. One influential nativist response to this challenge has been the theory of “parametric variations” within universal grammar. According to this idea, the genetically coded grammar contains a few “parameters,” that is, a small set of preprogrammed options that can be thought of as “on-off” switches. Children who acquire their mother tongue, so the argument runs, do not need to
learn
its grammatical rules—their brains simply set the preprogrammed parameters according to the language they happen to be exposed to. Nativists have claimed that different settings of these few switches must account for the whole variation
in grammatical structures across the world’s languages. The only freedom that different cultures are accorded is thus to decide on how to set each of the parameters: press a few switches one way and you’ll get the grammar of English, set a few switches the other way and you’ll get the grammar of Italian, and flip a few more and you’ll get the grammar of Japanese.

The theory of parameters has met with much criticism and some ridicule among non-nativists, who maintain that the scope of variation among the world’s languages is far too wide to be covered by a few parameters, and that from an evolutionary perspective it is exceedingly unlikely that a genetically determined grammar would emerge with such a set of switches (whatever for?). But the main argument against the theory of parameters is that it is merely a convoluted way to account for grammatical variation that can be explained far more simply and far more easily if one does not insist on believing that specific grammatical rules are innate.

In short, the adamant claims of nativists about the innateness of grammar have met with equally resolute opposition from culturalists. The controversy over grammar has thus produced a most impressive pile of paper over the last decades, and many a library shelf across the globe quietly groans under its burden. This book will not add much weight to the debate, because it concentrates on the concepts of language rather than on grammar. But there is one aspect of the grammatical system that nonetheless cries out for attention, precisely because it has—wholly unjustifiably—escaped the controversy almost entirely: the complexity of the grammatical system. On this subject, an eerie consensus prevails among linguists of all creeds and persuasions, who unite in severely underestimating the influence of culture.

*
In 2007, three researchers, Terry Regier, Naveen Khetarpal, and Paul Kay (same one), made a tentative suggestion for explaining the nature of these anatomical constraints. They started from the idea that a concept is “natural” if it groups together things that appear similar to us, and they argued that a natural division of the color space is one in which the shades within each color category are as similar to one another as they can be and as dissimilar as possible from shades in other categories. Or put more accurately, a natural division maximizes the perceived similarity between shades inside each concept and minimizes the similarity between shades that belong to different concepts. One might have imagined that any division of the spectrum into continuous segments would be equally natural in this respect, because neighboring shades always appear similar. But in practice, the accidents of our anatomy make our color space asymmetric, because our sensitivity to light is greater in certain wavelengths than in others. (More details can be found in the appendix.) Because of such non-uniformities, some divisions of the color space are better than others in increasing the similarity within concepts and decreasing it across concepts.

*
In many languages the name of the color red actually derives from the word “blood.” And as it happens, this linguistic connection has exercised the minds of generations of biblical exegetes, because it bears on the name of none other than the father of mankind. According to the biblical etymology, Adam owes his name to the red tilled soil,
adamah,
from which he was made. But
adamah
derives from the Semitic word for “red,”
adam,
which itself comes from the word
dam,
“blood.”

Ask Joe the Plumber, Piers the Ploughman, or Tom the Piper’s Son what sort of languages the half-naked tribes in the Amazonian rain forest speak, and they will undoubtedly tell you that “primitive people speak primitive languages.” Ask professional linguists the same question, and they’ll say something quite different. Actually, you don’t even need to ask—they will tell you anyway: “All languages are equally complex.” This battle cry is one of the most oft avowed doctrines of the modern discipline of linguistics. For decades, it has been professed from lecterns across the globe, proclaimed in introductory textbooks, and preached at any opportunity to the general public.

So who is right: the man in the street or the congregation of linguists? Is the complexity of language a universal constant that reflects the nature of the human race, as linguists assert, or is it a variable that reflects the speakers’ culture and society, as Joe, Piers, and Tom assume? In the following pages, I’ll try to convince you that neither side has got it quite right, but that linguists have fallen into the more serious error.

The linguist R. M. W. Dixon, who pioneered the serious study of Australian aboriginal languages, reports in his memoirs about the attitudes he encountered in the 1960s on his first field trips to North Queensland. Not far from Cairns, a white farmer asked him what exactly he was working on. Dixon explained he was trying to write a grammar of the local aboriginal language. “Oh, that should be pretty easy,” said the farmer. “Everyone knows that they haven’t got any grammar.” In Cairns itself, Dixon was interviewed about his activities on a local radio station. The astonished presenter could not believe his ears: “You really mean the Aborigines have a language? I thought it was just a few grunts and groans.” When Dixon protested that they had much more than grunts and groans, the presenter exclaimed, “But they don’t have more than about two hundred words, surely?” Dixon replied that on that very morning, he had collected from two informants over five hundred names just for animals and plants, so the overall vocabulary must be much larger. But the greatest shock for the presenter was reserved to the end, when he asked which well-known language the local lingo was most similar to. Dixon replied that some grammatical structures in the aboriginal language he was studying were more similar to Latin than to English.

Today, the attitudes that Dixon encountered in the sixties may no longer be so common, at least not in such a crass form. And yet there still seems to be a widespread belief on the street—even on very good streets—that the languages of the Aborigines in Australia, Indians in South America, Bushmen in Africa, and other simple peoples around the world are just as simple as their societies. As folk wisdom would have it, an undeveloped way of life is reflected in an undeveloped way of speaking, primitive Stone Age tools are indicative of primitive grammatical structures, nakedness and naïveté are mirrored in infantile and inarticulate speech.

There is a fairly simple reason why this misconception is so common. Our perception of a language is based largely on our exposure to its speakers, and for most of us the exposure to aboriginal languages of
all kinds comes mainly from popular literature, movies, and television. And what we get to hear in such depictions, from
Tintin
to Westerns, is invariably Indians, Africans, and sundry other “natives” speaking in that rudimentary “me no come, Sahib” way. So is the problem simply that we have been duped by popular literature? Is the broken speech we associate with the aborigines of diverse continents merely a prejudice, a figment of the twisted imagination of chauvinistic-imperialistic minds? If one took the trouble of traveling to North Queensland to check for oneself, would one discover that all the natives actually orate in torrents of Shakespearean eloquence?