Book Finished: LANGUAGE The Cultural Tool
31/7/2016
Advance Praise
‘A must-read for anyone having an interest in knowing what makes us human. Everett resets the research agenda for linguistics, psychology, and neuroscience towards finding out how our biological endowment and culture interact, to form and shape the rich diversity apparent as we view the human condition.’ - Philip Lieberman, Fred M. Seed Professor of Cognitive, Linguistic and Psychological Sciences, Professor of Anthropology, Brown University |
This interesting and thoughtful book considers how we think about language, and whether other ways of looking at language besides the current views might be helpful.
I bought it over two years ago, March 2014, but it took me a while to pick it up, and to read it; a short starting burst, a long gap and a sustained finish over months. I wouldn't call it light reading, and I had to feel in the right mood to give it the attention it deserves. It is a scholarly book which presents a sustained argument that the current popular paradigm of language studies, which is that humankind's language abilities are somehow genetically programmed, is not necessary to describe how humans create and use languages. Rather, he argues that language is created by each society as a tool of the culture, and thus there is no innate grammar structure we all use. Each language has features useful to its users, and there are so many quirks and exceptions that attempting to make them all fit some pre-formed idea of what a language's structure "should" be is not productive. This was news to me but made sense. It goes against the theories of Noam Chomsky, who proposed grammar as an innate body of knowledge possessed by language users. I have always thought we may have an innate ability lo learn any language, rather than an innate grammar, but Everett argues against even an innate language ability, claiming our generalised intelligence and learning ability suffice. I am not a qualified Linguist, yet I have always had a fascination for individual words and their etymology, and how they move and change between languages. The subtleties of grammar structure would seem an esoteric field best left to the experts, but the author manages to explain his ideas without too much resorting to dense technical terms. The book has many examples from around the world, often from a small Amazonian tribe, the Pirahã, who he stayed with and studied intensively, first as a missionary wanting to translate his religious texts for them, and later just as a linguist interested in the people and their language. |
It was his explanations of how the Pirahãs' seemingly limited language structure did not necessarily reflect a limitation of their thinking, that seemed the most enlightening to me. For example, they have no words for numbers, and almost never speak of past or future events, yet this doesn't mean a woman doesn't know how many children she has, for she can name them all. Nor need they be unaware of consequences for the future, rather, " …time words have no work to do in a society in which members sleep, eat, hunt, fish and gather, without regard for the time of day, day of the week, week of the month, or month of the year." My imagined example could be regarding say, an expedition to gather a particular fruit. There is no need to speak of it beforehand when everyone is aware of the state of the forest and when the fruit becomes ripe; and no need of planning when all know perfectly well what is required, where to go and what to do. A simple statement of "I am going for fruit x" at the right time would make obvious sense to all.
It is not all dry intellectualism, there are also examples from popular culture; the BeeGees get quoted, and Phil Spector is referenced, for example. I liked his example of "Squeat" when considering how other languages sound "too fast" to a non-native speaker. Practically incomprehensible to non-locals, "Squeat!" is readily understood amongst a group of southern-Californian English speakers to mean "Let's go eat!, a contraction of the formal "Let's go and eat!" One word stands for four. This reminded me of New Zealand English, where you might hear someone departing say something that sounds like "Seu!", and discover it is actually "See you!", a contraction of "See you later!", and formally "I will see you later!" I believe an American equivalent is "Later". (Thanks Urban Dictionary for confirmation of that one.) Even "New Zealand" is sometimes written here as "New Zild" in self-mockery of the way we shorten the sound of our own country's name.
It is not all dry intellectualism, there are also examples from popular culture; the BeeGees get quoted, and Phil Spector is referenced, for example. I liked his example of "Squeat" when considering how other languages sound "too fast" to a non-native speaker. Practically incomprehensible to non-locals, "Squeat!" is readily understood amongst a group of southern-Californian English speakers to mean "Let's go eat!, a contraction of the formal "Let's go and eat!" One word stands for four. This reminded me of New Zealand English, where you might hear someone departing say something that sounds like "Seu!", and discover it is actually "See you!", a contraction of "See you later!", and formally "I will see you later!" I believe an American equivalent is "Later". (Thanks Urban Dictionary for confirmation of that one.) Even "New Zealand" is sometimes written here as "New Zild" in self-mockery of the way we shorten the sound of our own country's name.
I was also gratified to find passages which reflected my thoughts on related matters: -
I have already written in "What is a Blues? The Perils of Binary Thinking", that categories "are mental constructs of the human mind and only exist as far as any one person understands what the word naming them means." I thus perked up when I found the following: -
Ch. 6 p. 153
"Or imagine that someone addresses you in a foreign tongue and you ask them, ‘What does that mean?’ or ‘What does that mean in your language?’
Meaning is the map of our words to their concepts or to the things our words stand for or represent in the non-linguistic world. In connecting our words to the world, meaning is the roadmap of our existence.
Not surprisingly, meaning is not simple. Who gets to decide which meanings are right? Noah Webster? The Oxford English Dictionary? The frustrating answer is that the meaning you attribute to a word or utterance is partially up to you and partially up to whoever you are communicating with at the time."
A connection to my recent piece on a biography of Alexander von Humboldt cropped up in a reference to his nearly as well-known older brother Wilhelm von Humboldt, a pioneering linguist, although I think Everett has erroneously conflated the two in describing Wilhelm as an explorer and polymath. Everett is covering Recursion, the creation of nested sentences such as "John said Bill told him what Mary thought of Jane's redecoration of the house across the road": -
Ch. 11 p. 286
"Recursion is an important concept to grasp because it helps us understand why humans can talk endlessly about something, adding more and more details, clarification, side comments, and so on - in theory, for ever. A story could in principle be taken up without interruption by subsequent generations. So it is not surprising that the famous nineteenth-century German explorer and polymath Wilhelm von Humboldt referred to language as the ‘infinite use of finite means,’ a statement cited frequently by linguists. This infinitude of human languages is often claimed to be one of the most important things any theory about language has to express. But where does this infinite use reside? According to some, in recursion in sentences. Now, I agree that recursion is crucial, but I do not think that sentence recursion per se is all that important. Rather recursive thinking is what is crucial. One way to approach this issue is to think of recursion in thought and language as tools, but that recursion in language shows up when and where a culture desires it, if it does at all."
Surprisingly, I also found the author making a case for the exact opposite approach to that of Alexander von Humboldt, who was a pioneering synthesiser and maker of connections previously unappreciated by scientists immersed in the descriptive method of science. Everett was keen to give as much emphasis to detailed study and documenting of particular languages, as to the formulation of common rules and grammars: -
Ch. 12 p. 321
" …we have seen that there are uses of icons in sounds and syntax that arise from the connection of language to culture, such as" … "idiomatic expressions like 'kick the bucket', and the meanings of words like 'haggis' that are so clearly culture-specific. Thus language rarities bring us face to face with the mirror and the reality of the shortcomings of our deepest efforts to generalise."
Everett spent several pages expanding on the theme that the particularities of each language should lead us to consider the significance of these differences, and not shove them under the carpet as "exceptions" which are an awkward fit for a general theory of language. This was as part of his argument against any over-arching theory based on an innate genetic program for language.
I have already written in "What is a Blues? The Perils of Binary Thinking", that categories "are mental constructs of the human mind and only exist as far as any one person understands what the word naming them means." I thus perked up when I found the following: -
Ch. 6 p. 153
"Or imagine that someone addresses you in a foreign tongue and you ask them, ‘What does that mean?’ or ‘What does that mean in your language?’
Meaning is the map of our words to their concepts or to the things our words stand for or represent in the non-linguistic world. In connecting our words to the world, meaning is the roadmap of our existence.
Not surprisingly, meaning is not simple. Who gets to decide which meanings are right? Noah Webster? The Oxford English Dictionary? The frustrating answer is that the meaning you attribute to a word or utterance is partially up to you and partially up to whoever you are communicating with at the time."
A connection to my recent piece on a biography of Alexander von Humboldt cropped up in a reference to his nearly as well-known older brother Wilhelm von Humboldt, a pioneering linguist, although I think Everett has erroneously conflated the two in describing Wilhelm as an explorer and polymath. Everett is covering Recursion, the creation of nested sentences such as "John said Bill told him what Mary thought of Jane's redecoration of the house across the road": -
Ch. 11 p. 286
"Recursion is an important concept to grasp because it helps us understand why humans can talk endlessly about something, adding more and more details, clarification, side comments, and so on - in theory, for ever. A story could in principle be taken up without interruption by subsequent generations. So it is not surprising that the famous nineteenth-century German explorer and polymath Wilhelm von Humboldt referred to language as the ‘infinite use of finite means,’ a statement cited frequently by linguists. This infinitude of human languages is often claimed to be one of the most important things any theory about language has to express. But where does this infinite use reside? According to some, in recursion in sentences. Now, I agree that recursion is crucial, but I do not think that sentence recursion per se is all that important. Rather recursive thinking is what is crucial. One way to approach this issue is to think of recursion in thought and language as tools, but that recursion in language shows up when and where a culture desires it, if it does at all."
Surprisingly, I also found the author making a case for the exact opposite approach to that of Alexander von Humboldt, who was a pioneering synthesiser and maker of connections previously unappreciated by scientists immersed in the descriptive method of science. Everett was keen to give as much emphasis to detailed study and documenting of particular languages, as to the formulation of common rules and grammars: -
Ch. 12 p. 321
" …we have seen that there are uses of icons in sounds and syntax that arise from the connection of language to culture, such as" … "idiomatic expressions like 'kick the bucket', and the meanings of words like 'haggis' that are so clearly culture-specific. Thus language rarities bring us face to face with the mirror and the reality of the shortcomings of our deepest efforts to generalise."
Everett spent several pages expanding on the theme that the particularities of each language should lead us to consider the significance of these differences, and not shove them under the carpet as "exceptions" which are an awkward fit for a general theory of language. This was as part of his argument against any over-arching theory based on an innate genetic program for language.
I found this an insightful and thought-provoking book, although some readers might find it a little dense in places. The author has a case to make, but the book has a structure making the the sequence of his arguments clear and connected to both his own ideas and the ideas he is challenging.
It is always useful to gain self-awareness, and this book leads you to consider what effect your
language has on you, and the way you see the world.
It also reminds you to be aware that other languages reveal just how differently each culture sees the world.
It is always useful to gain self-awareness, and this book leads you to consider what effect your
language has on you, and the way you see the world.
It also reminds you to be aware that other languages reveal just how differently each culture sees the world.