Through the Language Glass: Why the World Looks Different in Other Languages (22 page)

Today, we would tend to use various subordinate clauses and thus would not need to follow the order of events so punctiliously. For example, we might say: “There was once a terrible thunderstorm when I was driving to Kunnu. I was so terrified of the Storm-God’s thundering that I lost my speech, and my voice came up only a little. For a while, I forgot about the matter completely, but as the years went by, this episode began to appear in my dreams, and while dreaming, I was struck by God’s hand and my mouth would go sideways.”

Here is another example, this time from Akkadian, the language of
the Babylonians and Assyrians of ancient Mesopotamia. This document, written sometime before 2000
BC
, reports the result of a legal proceeding. We are told that a certain Ubarum proved before the inspectors that he had told a Mr. Iribum to take the field of Kuli, and that he (Ubarum) didn’t know that Iribum, on his own initiative, had instead taken the field of someone else, Bazi. But while this is the gist of what the document says, the Akkadian text doesn’t put it quite like that. What it actually says is:

The difference between the Akkadian formulation and the way we would naturally describe the situation in English lies mainly in our pervasive use of constructions such as “he didn’t know that [ . . . ]” or “he proved that [ . . . ].” This particular type of subordinate clause is called “finite complement,” but although the name is rather a mouthful, the construction itself is the bread and butter of English prose. In both written and spoken registers, we can take practically any sentence (let’s say “Iribum took the field”) and, without altering anything in the sentence itself, make it a subordinate part of another sentence:

He didn’t know that [Iribum took the field]

And since it is so easy to set up this hierarchical relation once, we can do it again:

Ubarum proved that [he didn’t know that [Iribum took the field]]

And again:

The tablet explained that [Ubarum proved that [he didn’t know that [Iribum took the field]]]

And again:

The epigrapher discovered that [the tablet explained that [Ubarum proved that [he didn’t know that [Iribum took the field]]]]

The Akkadian report does not use such finite complements. In fact, most of its clauses are not hierarchically ordered but simply juxtaposed according to the temporal order of the events. This is not a coincidence of just one text. While we may take finite complements for granted today, this construction was missing in the oldest attested stages of Akkadian (and of Hittite). And there are living languages that do not have this construction even today.

Not that linguistic textbooks will divulge this information, mind you. In fact, some will ardently profess the opposite. Take that flagship of linguistic education, the
Introduction to Language
by Fromkin and Rodman that I mentioned earlier, and its twelve articles of faith that constitute “what we know about language.” The second affirmation, as you will recall, is that all languages are equally complex. A little further below, affirmation eleven asserts:

Syntactic universals reveal that every language has a way of forming sentences such as:

• Linguistics is an interesting subject.
  
• I know that linguistics is an interesting subject.
  
• You know that I know that linguistics is an interesting subject.
  
• Cecelia knows that you know that I know that linguistics is an interesting subject.
  
• Is it a fact that Cecelia knows that you know that I know that linguistics is an interesting subject?
  

Unfortunately, the textbook does not disclose the precise identity of the “syntactic universals” that have revealed that every language has such constructions. Nor does it specify when and where this revelation was handed down to mankind. But is the claim actually true? I have never had the privilege of communing with a syntactic universal myself, but the evidence from more mundane sources, namely descriptions of actual languages, leaves no doubt that some languages do not have a way of forming such sentences (and not just because they don’t have a word for “linguistics”). Many Australian aboriginal languages, for example, lack a construction equivalent to the finite complements of English, and so do some Indian languages of South America, including one, Matses, that we will meet in the next chapter. In such languages, one simply cannot form sentences such as: