Through the Language Glass: Why the World Looks Different in Other Languages (21 page)

In 2007, the linguists Jennifer Hay and Laurie Bauer published the results of a statistical analysis of the sound inventories of over two hundred languages. They discovered that there is a significant correlation between the number of speakers and the size of the sound inventory: the smaller the society, the fewer distinct vowels and consonants the language tends to have; the larger the number of speakers, the larger the number of sounds. Of course, this is only a statistical correlation: it does not mean that every single language of small societies must have a small inventory of sounds and vice versa. Malay, spoken by more than seventeen million people, has only six vowels and sixteen consonants, so twenty-two sounds in total. Faroese, on the other hand, has fewer than fifty thousand speakers but sports around fifty sounds (thirty-nine consonants and more than ten vowels), more than twice the number in Malay.

Still, as far as statistical correlations go, this one seems pretty robust, so the only plausible conclusion is that there is something about the modes of communication in small societies that favors smaller sound inventories, whereas something about large societies tends to make new phonemes more likely to emerge. The problem is that no one has yet come up with any compelling explanation for why this should be so.
One factor that could be relevant, perhaps, is contact with other languages or dialects. As opposed to word structure, which tends to be simplified as a result of contact, a language’s sound inventory not uncommonly increases due to contact with other languages. For instance, when sufficiently many words with a “foreign” sound are borrowed, the sound can eventually be integrated into the native system. If such contact-induced changes are less likely in smaller and more isolated societies, that fact might go some way toward explaining their smaller sound inventories. But this clearly cannot be the whole story.

Finally, there is one area of language whose relation to the complexity of society may after all correspond to the considered opinion of the man in the street: this is the complexity of sentences and, in particular, the reliance on subordinate clauses. Subordination is a syntactic process that is often touted (by syntacticians, at least) as the jewel in the crown of language, and the best example for the ingenuity of its design: the ability to subsume a whole clause within another. With subordination, we can produce expressions of increasing complexity that nevertheless remain coherent and comprehensible:

I must have told you about that seal

I must have told you about that seal
_{[which was eyeing a fish]}

I must have told you about that seal
_{[which was eyeing a fish
[that kept jumping in and out of the icy water]
]}

And there is no need to stop there, because in theory the mechanisms of subordination allow the sentence to go on and on for as long as there is breath to spare:

I must have told you about that quarrelsome seal [which was eyeing a disenchanted but rather attractive fish [that kept jumping in and out of
the icy water [without paying the least attention to the heated debate [being conducted by a phlegmatic walrus and two young oysters [who had recently been tipped off by a whale with connections in high places [that the government was about to introduce speed limits on swimming in the reef area [due to the overcrowding [caused by the recent influx of new tuna immigrants from the Indian Ocean [where temperatures rose so much last year [that . . . ]]]]]]]]]]

Subordination makes it possible to convey elaborate information in a compact way, by weaving different assertions on multiple levels into one intricate whole while keeping each of these levels under control. The paragraph above, for instance, has just one simple sentence at its primary level: “I must have already told you about that seal.” But from there downward, more and more information is interlaced using different types of subordinate clause.

There are no reliable reports about any language that lacks subordination altogether.
*
But although all known languages use some subordination, languages vary greatly in the range of subordinate clauses they have at their disposal and in the extent to which they rely on them.

For instance, if you have nothing better to do with your time than pore over ancient texts, you will soon notice that the narrative style of ancient languages such as Hittite, Akkadian, or biblical Hebrew often seems soporifically repetitive. The reason is that the mechanisms of subordination were less developed in these languages, so the coherence of their narrative relied to a much greater extent on a simple type of “and . . . and . . .” concatenation, in which the clauses merely followed the temporal order of events. Here, for instance, is a short Hittite text, a report by King Murshili II, who reigned in the fourteenth century
BC
from his imperial capital of Hattusha, in what is today central Turkey. Murshili is describing in dramatic tones how he came to be afflicted by a severe illness that impaired his ability to speak (a stroke?). But to modern ears the vivid substance of the report contrasts starkly with the monotonous staccato of the style:

This is what Murshili, the Great King, said: