Through the Language Glass: Why the World Looks Different in Other Languages (19 page)

More generally, the reason why Hockett’s logic fails is that a lot of complexity is merely excess baggage that languages accumulate over the centuries. So when some of it goes missing for whatever reason (more about that later) there is no particular need to compensate by increasing complexity elsewhere in the language. Contrariwise, there is no pressing need to compensate for a rise in complexity in one area by reducing it in another, because the brain of a child learning a language can cope with a mind-boggling amount of linguistic complexity. The fact that millions of children grow up with at least two languages and master each of them perfectly shows that a single language does not even come close to exhausting the linguistic capacity of a child’s brain. So all in all there is no a priori reason why different languages should all mysteriously converge on even roughly the same degree of complexity.

But why, you might well ask, should we waste time on such a priori speculations in the first place? What’s the point of discussing the question of complexity in the abstract, when the obvious way to tell whether all languages are equal is simply to go out to the field with measuring instruments, compare languages’ vital statistics, and determine the exact overall complexity of each one?

There is a joke from the days of plenty in the former Soviet Union about a woman who goes to the butcher’s and asks, “Could you measure me out two hundred grams of salami, please?” “No problem, madam,” replies the butcher. “Just bring me the salami.” In our case, the salami may be there, but the measuring instrument is missing. I would be happy to measure for you the overall complexity of any language, but I have no
idea where to find a scale, and neither does anyone else. As it happens, none of the linguists who profess the equal complexity dogma has ever tried to define what the overall complexity of a language might be.

“But wait,” I can hear you thinking. “Even if no one has bothered to define complexity so far, surely it can’t be too difficult to do it ourselves. Couldn’t we decide, for instance, that the complexity of a language is defined as the difficulty it poses for foreign learners?” But which learners exactly? The problem is that the difficulty of learning a foreign language crucially depends on the learner’s mother tongue. Swedish is a snap—if you happen to be Norwegian, and so is Spanish if you are Italian. But neither Swedish nor Spanish is easy if your native language is English. Still, both are incomparably easier for an English speaker than Arabic or Chinese. So does that mean that Chinese and Arabic are objectively more difficult? No, because if your mother tongue is Hebrew, then Arabic isn’t difficult at all, and if your mother tongue is Thai, then Chinese is less challenging than Swedish or Spanish. In short, there is no obvious way to generalize a measure of overall complexity based on the difficulty of learning, because—just like the effort required for traveling somewhere—it all depends on where you are starting from. (A proverbial Englishman learned this the hard way when he got desperately lost in the wilds of Ireland one day. After hours of driving round in circles through deserted country lanes, he finally spotted an elderly man walking by the side of the road, and asked him how to get back to Dublin. “If I were to go to Dublin,” came the reply, “I wouldn’t be starting from here.”)

I can sense that you are not ready to give up so easily. If the notion of difficulty will not do, you may now suggest, then what about basing the definition of complexity on a more objective measure, such as the number of parts in the language system? Just as a puzzle is more complex the more pieces it has, couldn’t we simply say that the complexity of language is determined by the number of distinct forms it has, or the number of distinctions it makes, or the number of rules in its grammar, or something along these lines? The problem here is that we will be comparing apples and oranges. Language has parts of very different kinds: sounds, words, grammatical elements such as endings, types of clauses,
rules for word order. How do you compare such entities? Suppose language X has one more vowel than language Y, but Y has one more tense than X. Does this make X and Y equal in overall complexity? Or, if not, what is the exchange rate? How many vowels are worth one tense? Two? Seven? Thirteen for the price of twelve? It is even worse than apples and oranges, it is more like comparing apples and orangutans.

To make a long story short, there is no way to devise an objective and non-arbitrary measure for comparing the overall complexity of any two given languages. It’s not simply that no one has bothered to do it—it’s inherently impossible even if one tried. So where does all this leave the dogma of equal complexity? When Joe, Piers, and Tom claim that “primitive people speak primitive languages,” they are making a simple and eminently meaningful statement, which just happens to be factually incorrect. But the article of faith that linguists swear by is even worse than wrong—it is meaningless. The alleged central finding of the discipline is nothing more than a hollow mouthful of air, since in the absence of a definition for the overall complexity of a language, the statement that “all languages are equally complex” makes about as much sense as the assertion that “all languages are equally cornflakes.”

The campaign to convince the general public of the equality of all languages may be paved with best intentions, for it is undoubtedly a noble enterprise to disabuse people of the belief that primitive tribes speak primitive languages. But surely the road to enlightenment is not through countering factual errors with empty slogans.

While the pursuit of the
overall
complexity of language is a wild-goose chase, there is no need to give up on the notion of complexity altogether. In fact, we can considerably improve our chances of catching something meaty if we turn away from the phantom of overall complexity and instead aim for the complexity of
particular
areas of language. Suppose we decide to define complexity as the number of parts in a system. If we delineate specific areas of language carefully enough, it becomes eminently possible to measure the complexity of each of these areas individually. For example, we can measure the size of the
sound system simply by counting the number of phonemes (distinct sounds) in a language’s inventory. Or we can look at the verbal system and measure how many tense distinctions are marked on the verb. When languages are compared in this way, it soon emerges that they vary greatly in the complexity of specific areas in their grammar. And whereas the existence of such variations is hardly stop-press news in itself, the more challenging question is whether the differences in the complexity of particular areas might reflect the culture of the speakers and the structure of their society.

There is one area of language whose complexity is generally acknowledged to depend on culture—this is the size of the vocabulary. The obvious dividing line here is between languages of illiterate societies and those with a written tradition. The aboriginal languages of Australia, for example, may have many more words than the two hundred that the Cairns radio presenter was granting them, but they still cannot begin to compete with the word hoard of European languages. Linguists who have described languages of small illiterate societies estimate that the average size of their lexicons is between three thousand and five thousand words. In contrast, small-size bilingual dictionaries of major European languages typically contain at least fifty thousand entries. Larger ones would contain seventy to eighty thousand. Decent-size monolingual dictionaries of English contain about a hundred thousand entries. And the full printed edition of the
Oxford English Dictionary
has around three times that many entries. Of course, the
OED
contains many obsolete words, and an average English speaker would recognize only a fraction of the entries. Some researchers have estimated the passive vocabulary of an average English-speaking university student at about forty thousand words—this is the number of words whose meaning is recognized, even if they are not actively used. Another source estimates the passive vocabulary of a university lecturer at seventy-three thousand words.

The reason for the great difference between languages with and without a written tradition is fairly obvious. In illiterate societies, the size of the vocabulary is severely restricted precisely because there is no such thing as “passive vocabulary”—or at least the passive vocabulary
of one generation does not live to see the next: a word that is not actively used by one generation will not be heard by the next generation and will then be lost forever.

While the cultural dependence of the vocabulary is neither surprising nor controversial, we are entering more troubled waters when we try to ascertain whether the structure of society might affect the complexity of areas in the
grammar
of a language, for instance its morphology. Languages vary considerably in the amount of information they convey within words (rather than with a combination of independent words). In English, for example, verbs like “walked” or “wrote” express the pastness of the action within the verb itself, but they do not reveal the “person,” which is instead indicated with an independent word like “you” or “we.” In Arabic, both tense and person are contained within the verb itself, so that a form like
katabn
means “we wrote.” But in Chinese, neither the pastness of the action nor the person is conveyed on the verb itself.

There are also differences in the amount of information encapsulated within nouns. Hawaiian does not indicate the distinction between singular and plural on the noun itself and uses independent words for the purpose. Similarly, in spoken French, most nouns sound the same in the singular and plural (
jour
and
jours
are pronounced in the same way, and one needs independent words, such as the definite article
le
or
les
, to make the difference heard). In English, on the other hand, the distinction between singular and plural is audible on the noun itself (dog–dogs, man–men). Some languages make even finer distinctions of number and have special forms also for the dual. Sorbian, a Slavic language spoken in a little enclave in eastern Germany, distinguishes between
hród,
“a castle,”
hródaj
, “two castles,” and
hródy
, “[three or more] castles.”

The information specified on pronouns also varies between languages. Japanese, for instance, makes finer distinctions of distance on demonstrative pronouns than modern English. It differentiates not just between “this” (for close objects) and “that” (for objects farther away)
but has a three-way division between
koko
(for an object near the speaker),
soko
(near the hearer),
asoko
(far from both). Hebrew, on the other hand, makes no such distance distinctions at all and can use just one demonstrative pronoun regardless of distance.