You have chosen books on “language and mind”. what do you mean by that?
One of the most interesting things about language is the prejudices and ideas that people have about it. many of those misconceptions have to do with language and cognition, that is, language and the brain. for example, many people believe that the language you speak alters your thinking in very profound ways. it is one of the most common themes of the 20th century and grew out of a couple of linguists working at the beginning of the century. since then, there are people who come up to you and say, with a totally serious face: ‘these people don’t have a word for x, so they can’t think about it’. this actually informed george orwell in 1984: if you got rid of words like ‘freedom,’ those words would become, as he rightly said, literally unthinkable.
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so this topic really draws people in, but there are a lot of misunderstandings. These big psychological claims, for example, that if you speak language x, you will have very different thoughts or thought processes than if you speak language y, they turned out not to be true. For the last half century, from Noam Chomsky onwards, linguistics has really pushed back on these claims. but now some pretty smart researchers are discovering ways that different languages actually influence the way we think. the effects are much more subtle. they are very interesting, but not as dramatic or as romantic as the first versions.
so, do these books you’ve chosen address these misconceptions? it’s also a big part of your own books, you are what you talk about and you talk about the wild side: the indomitable nature of language, this idea that people have all these notions about language that are complete nonsense.
I try to say that nicely. people love the subject and are fascinated by it. intelligent people in particular. intelligent, well-meaning, forward-thinking types often take language very seriously. but they still consume a lot of notions that really need to be pushed again.
okay, so the german book, through the glass of language, why the world looks different in other languages. Does the world look different in other languages?
yes, yes. deustcher does a great job of taking on those old notions first. He goes back to twentieth-century romantic ideas, in particular to a writer named Benjamin Lee Whorf. whorf was an amateur linguist, largely self-taught, but he spent a lot of time researching this topic. Whorf claimed that the Hopi Indians of the American Southwest did not have a concept of time like Westerners, because their language lacked such words. Turns out he was wrong on both counts. His claims were based on interviews with a Hopi Indian in New York. whorf was wrong, and later researchers proved him wrong.
but the horse was out of the stable. this notion that people think profoundly differently depending on their language spread throughout the world. Ludwig Wittgenstein famously said: “The limits of my language mean the limits of my world.”
deutscher cleverly and very fully describes the overthrow of whorfianism that happened with chomsky, and the generation of linguists that chomsky built around/followed him. Chomsky argued that all languages are fundamentally similar. he calls its underlying structure the “universal grammar”; and he has made it his mission to try to find all those things that unite the world’s languages ever since.
but now, the pendulum is swinging the other way. some braves have challenged chomsky, which is very difficult, because he does not tolerate fools willingly. they have rejected it, arguing that different languages sometimes have different worldviews.
give me an example.
one is the gender noun. if you study most European languages, you learn, for example, that the French table is feminine, it is the table, not the table. and it turns out that people have different attitudes towards even totally inanimate nouns, depending on their gender. a table is not inherently feminine, but it is feminine in French, so French people, if asked to describe a table, are more likely to use feminine adjectives. or a key. the Germans describe a key as rigid, hard and strong. that’s because it’s masculine in German. Spaniards will describe a key as feminine, as golden and small and beautiful, because it is feminine in Spanish.
These finds are small in scale. they are interesting and make for good conversation at a cocktail party, but you wouldn’t argue: “oh my god, this leads to a completely different cognition on the part of German speakers versus Spanish speakers!”, after all, the key doesn’t have any inherent gender, so if you ask people to pre-associate words with it, they’ll take whatever they have, and it’s probably not surprising that they look up grammatical gender in their language.
but a really amazing example has to do with the kuuk thaayorre who live in northern australia. it is a tribe that has no words for relative directions. they don’t say ‘left’ or ‘right’ or ‘up’ or ‘down’ or ‘back’. they use only the cardinal directions, that is, north, south, east and west. so instead of saying: ‘pass me that glass of water with your left hand’, they will say: ‘pass me that glass of water with your southwest hand’ or: ‘you have an ant on your northeast leg’. how are they able to do this? the answer is that they have to remain constantly oriented. and it turns out that if you spin them, put them in a cave, or try all sorts of things to confuse them, they can still unfailingly point in the right direction. so here’s an example where you actually see that their language having this property requires their cognition to develop in a different way. and a group that lives right next to them, in the same environment, does not have that ability to find their way around.
even steven pinker’s language instinct, how the mind creates language, which is incredibly famous. The virtue of this book is that linguistics is an incredibly complicated subject and can Pinker somehow make his findings accessible to the lay reader?
There are two achievements in this book. one is to smuggle linguistics 101 into a popular book, which is just fantastic. it’s a fun read, he’s a really engaging writer. if you finish this book, you will never look at language the same way again. I felt that way when I took it about ten years ago: it put me on the path that led me to write my own book. at the same time, he also smuggles in his own argument about the nature of language, and the title says it all. he is one of those who believes that there is something called “the language instinct” that is built into the brain. languages are fundamentally similar all over the world, they show too many features in common. there are too many logical ways to design a language that you can use, but no human natural language does. so his conclusion is that, through evolution, we have developed an instinct for language. that is not something that all linguists believe by any means. there is a lot of disagreement about it.
but pinker also gives you all these great things about how the language actually works in the first place. anyone who is really curmudgeonly, say: ‘ugh. idiom. everyone I know talks and writes like idiots around me!’ really turns it on its head and shows what a miracle human language really is.
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Does he, like you in your book, go after grammar picky eaters, people like lynn truss, author of eats, shoots & leaves and others lamenting the decline of the language?
This book came out in 1994, so it points to a different generation of sticklers, but yeah, it also shows that they don’t know what they’re talking about. most grammar curmudgeons have a fairly authoritarian approach to language. they have the idea that somewhere, somehow, someone makes the rules, or that there are just hard and fast rules that need to be enforced, and people are humiliated so they don’t break them.
so language is not about rules?
pinker would argue that language is all about rules. she wrote another book called words and rules that deals with how the brain processes language. It turns out that you know all these rules but you don’t even know that you know them. they are your internal language processing device. and studying that is much more fascinating than whether or not you should start a sentence with “however”, which some people think you shouldn’t be able to do.
for example, pinker shows that if you put the word ‘fuckin’ in the middle of a word, for example, if you want to say: ‘that’s fan-fuckin’-tastic!’, you have to put the word fuckin’ in a certain place in the word. goes before a certain stressed syllable. you can’t say, ‘that’s fucking fantastic!’ – and no English speaker would say that. everybody knows they have this rule in their brain, but nobody knows they have it. discovering that kind of thing is fascinating and much more interesting than: ‘oh my god! that person used ‘whom’ wrong…’
We also have to accept that the language changes over time, right? When I was in school, it was drilled into me that “selfless” meant “impartial.” but every time i hear someone say selfless around me now, they mean ‘selfless’. Wouldn’t Pinker argue that instead of correcting people, I should accept that selfless now means selfless?
I wouldn’t say that. descriptive linguists’ argument is often a bit caricatured by opponents, who say: ‘oh, you’re saying there are no rules at all, you can say whatever you want’. not really true. i’m sure pinker uses ‘selfless’ like you. in traditional standard English usage, it means impartial and has that role. Not enough people have changed the meaning of the word, which definitely now means just ‘bored’ or ‘not interested’. most English usage still favors selfless in the traditional sense, although many people make that mistake. it takes a large majority of the community of speakers over time to get the whole meaning of a word to change so that you can finally say, “well, this word has changed its meaning.” I wouldn’t say we’ve gotten there in the specific case of disinterested.
but we have with ‘silly’. what did “fool” mean in the past?
used to mean innocent. words that used to mean completely different things, almost the opposite, if you look back at their history.
let’s move on to the first word: the search for the origins of language
This is a book about words, language and evolution. Christine Kenneally, the author, begins by describing how, surprisingly, this topic was completely ignored by linguistics for a long time. one of the great official international linguistic organisms at the end of the 19th century forbade all study of the subject, saying that it was unknowable. even when most intellectuals accepted evolution as a fact, they thought it too difficult to find out if language itself had evolved. Then he tells the 20th century story of how Noam Chomsky basically sighed and shrugged his shoulders and said, “That’s not interesting, I can’t tell,” and didn’t want to get into it for a long time. Stephen Jay Gould, an evolutionary biologist, came to see it as a “spandrel” of some other structural change, basically a byproduct of evolution, something that was adapted for another purpose, but repurposed for language.
so, just in the last 20 years, and pinker is part of that history, people have really tried to start to figure out how the language might have evolved. It was so long ago that we don’t have obvious answers: there are no things like bat wings or human arms that you can look at side by side and say, ‘well, this bone is different from that bone in that way.’ but there are many fascinating studies with animals. for example, we can see how human language resembles vervet monkeys’ predatory calls that tell whether an eagle or a leopard is coming, that is, whether they need to look up or down. in some respects they are similar, and in some respects they are obviously very different. To what extent did the bonobos and chimpanzees the researchers worked with use words? To what extent are they using the structure? what do we share with a common ancestor? we do see that there are basic elements of human language in other species.
does it come to a clear conclusion? Or is it just presenting all the research so far?
Like the other authors, you are popularizing a body of research and you do a very good job of bringing together all the people who worked on this.
Puts together most of these theories and concludes that there is probably something there. In other words, in contrast to what Chomsky used to think, it’s not just a desperate question that can’t or shouldn’t be answered.
let’s talk about in the land of languages invented by arika okrent.
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I love this book. people have been inventing languages for hundreds of years. think Esperanto, or even the na’vi language in avatar. people have been doing this for a long time and the underlying story, which is funny, sweet and sad, is that many people have felt that existing languages were bad for one reason or another. They fall into two camps. Some people feel that their natural language is ambiguous, illogical and messy, so they have invented languages because they want to order the world and force people’s thoughts to order. it’s based on that thought we were talking about earlier: people think that if language is disordered it leads to disordered thinking. and it is true that language is messy and ambiguous, and vague. any human language is like that sometimes. but these people who have tried to create perfect logical languages have not succeeded in getting anyone to learn them. they are almost impossible to learn or extremely difficult.
also look at the Esperanto people, who weren’t trying to create the perfect language, but just an auxiliary that isn’t anybody’s first language, so when two people speak it, they’re speaking a neutral language. Esperanto is based on a lot of European languages, so it has a neutral feel.
There’s also a third group, I suppose, who are people who have done it just for fun. Klingon enthusiasts, for example. they have conventions, there are official tests. you can get your first level certificate in Klingon, your second level certificate, etc. the author went and got her first level certificate in Klingon.
artificial language as a topic has traditionally been dismissed by researchers. Arika Okrent is a proper Ph.D. linguist and this is a great journalistic book about real people who have done things. it’s a fantastic read and you learn a lot, but you don’t feel like you’re learning as you read it.
My grandfather, like you, was a great linguist: he spoke a dozen languages. he thought that Esperanto was the future.
hope springs eternal for Esperanto! there are some native speakers. the author interviews one of them. they are a couple, one of the parents is Polish, the other Belgian, and they raised their son in Esperanto. this guy is a native speaker of Esperanto. she says you can really tell the difference. everyone else speaks it well, but he speaks it so fluently and quickly, as if a real person spoke his first language.
presumably you don’t have anyone to talk to?
It’s a great community. They claim that about two million people speak it. They are certainly a large and active organization, so it is not impossible to find other people. they are very active on the internet.
Your latest book is the genius of language.
This is a series of essays by writers, mostly novelists. it’s about the way they approach different languages. all authors are non-native English speakers who have come to write in English and now write predominantly only in English. they are different writers telling stories of the interface between the two languages in their own minds and in their own cultures. so in each case there is also a cultural history, and then you hear about the qualities of the language. For example, you have Amy Tan, who wrote The Fortune and Joy Club, writing about Chinese and English. she grew up with both in the home. she will skeptically shoot down many of the claims people make about Chinese: how the Chinese must think differently because the Chinese language has this or that property. But then another writer, Bharati Mukherjee, takes the approach that her language, Bengali, is completely different from English and forces the mind to think in different ways about very basic concepts like love and fear. so you get different people’s attitudes about this in their own mind. obviously they are good wordsmiths themselves, who think a lot about language. in a way, these attitudes are what the other four books I described are about. these are not doctors who sat down and researched the subject, but real language people who write about it from an emotional and impressionistic point of view.
so, did you notice that you disagreed with some of them?
yeah, i’m definitely more of the steven pinker school of thought. Bharati Mukherjee says that some of these Bengali words have a resonance that is impossible to translate into English. but that’s not really true. she’s a good writer in English, so she should know that you can get the job done with slightly different tools in any language. all languages are fundamentally very expressive, that is one of the principles in which she believes every linguist. no linguist believes that this language is superior and expressive, or that this is clear, and another is cloudy, that this is logical, that another is emotional, etc. that’s the kind of thing the layman believes, but most linguists don’t and I tend to disagree with that view as well.
In Dutch, which I used to speak when I was little, we have the word gezellig. that is very difficult to translate into English.
Is it like Danish hygge? a warm feeling of camaraderie?
yes, that’s right. let’s gezellig for a cup of coffee, or it’s not gezellig to be here all together.
yes, it sounds exactly like the Danish word hygge, which is fully translatable. when people say that x cannot be translated, what they usually mean is that it needs a couple of words instead of one word. that may be interesting, but it doesn’t mean the word can’t be translated.
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