5
Plato and the Macedonian Swineherd
Ask Joe the Plumber, Piers the Ploughman, or Tom the Piper’s Son what sort of languages the half-naked tribes in the Amazonian rain forest speak, and they will undoubtedly tell you that “primitive people speak primitive languages.” Ask professional linguists the same question, and they’ll say something quite different. Actually, you don’t even need to ask—they will tell you anyway: “All languages are equally complex.” This battle cry is one of the most oft avowed doctrines of the modern discipline of linguistics. For decades, it has been professed from lecterns across the globe, proclaimed in introductory textbooks, and preached at any opportunity to the general public.
So who is right: the man in the street or the congregation of linguists? Is the complexity of language a universal constant that reflects the nature of the human race, as linguists assert, or is it a variable that reflects the speakers’ culture and society, as Joe, Piers, and Tom assume? In the following pages, I’ll try to convince you that neither side has got it quite right, but that linguists have fallen into the more serious error.
PRIMITIVE LANGUAGES?
The linguist R. M. W. Dixon, who pioneered the serious study of Australian aboriginal languages, reports in his memoirs about the attitudes he encountered in the 1960s on his first field trips to North Queensland. Not far from Cairns, a white farmer asked him what exactly he was working on. Dixon explained he was trying to write a grammar of the local aboriginal language. “Oh, that should be pretty easy,” said the farmer. “Everyone knows that they haven’t got any grammar.” In Cairns itself, Dixon was interviewed about his activities on a local radio station. The astonished presenter could not believe his ears: “You really mean the Aborigines have a language? I thought it was just a few grunts and groans.” When Dixon protested that they had much more than grunts and groans, the presenter exclaimed, “But they don’t have more than about two hundred words, surely?” Dixon replied that on that very morning, he had collected from two informants over five hundred names just for animals and plants, so the overall vocabulary must be much larger. But the greatest shock for the presenter was reserved to the end, when he asked which well-known language the local lingo was most similar to. Dixon replied that some grammatical structures in the aboriginal language he was studying were more similar to Latin than to English.
Today, the attitudes that Dixon encountered in the sixties may no longer be so common, at least not in such a crass form. And yet there still seems to be a widespread belief on the street—even on very good streets—that the languages of the Aborigines in Australia, Indians in South America, Bushmen in Africa, and other simple peoples around the world are just as simple as their societies. As folk wisdom would have it, an undeveloped way of life is reflected in an undeveloped way of speaking, primitive Stone Age tools are indicative of primitive grammatical structures, nakedness and naïveté are mirrored in infantile and inarticulate speech.
There is a fairly simple reason why this misconception is so common. Our perception of a language is based largely on our exposure to its speakers, and for most of us the exposure to aboriginal languages of all kinds comes mainly from popular literature, movies, and television. And what we get to hear in such depictions, from Tintin to Westerns, is invariably Indians, Africans, and sundry other “natives” speaking in that rudimentary “me no come, Sahib” way. So is the problem simply that we have been duped by popular literature? Is the broken speech we associate with the aborigines of diverse continents merely a prejudice, a figment of the twisted imagination of chauvinistic-imperialistic minds? If one took the trouble of traveling to North Queensland to check for oneself, would one discover that all the natives actually orate in torrents of Shakespearean eloquence?
Not quite. Although the popular accounts may not always conform to the highest standard of academic accuracy, their depictions are ultimately based on reality. As it happens, the aborigines do very often use a rough and ungrammatical type of language: “no money no come,” “no can do,” “too much me been sleep,” “before longtime me no got trouble” (I’ve never got into any trouble in the past), “mifela go go go toodark” (we kept going until it became very dark). All these are authentic examples of “native speak.”
But have you noticed the little snag here? The primitive language that we hear these people speak is always . . . English. And while it is true that when they avail themselves of the English tongue, they use a pared down, ungrammatical, rudimentary, inarticulate—in short, “primitive”—version of the language, this is simply because English is not their language. Just imagine yourself for a moment, eloquent, subtle, grammatically sophisticated creature that you are, trying to make yourself understood in a language you have never been taught. You arrive in a godforsaken village somewhere where no one speaks English and are desperate to find somewhere to sleep. All you have is a pocket dictionary. Suddenly all the layers of sophistication and refinement of your speech are unceremoniously shed. No more “would you be so kind as to tell me whether there might be anywhere in this village where I could find a room for the night?” Nothing of the sort: you stand there linguistically naked and stutter “yo dormir aquí?” “ana alnoom hoona?” or the equivalent of “me sleep here?” in whatever language you are attempting to make yourself understood in.
When one is trying to speak a foreign language without years of schooling in its grammatical nuances, there is one survival strategy that one always falls back on: strip down to the bare essentials, do away with everything but the most critical content, ignore anything that’s not crucial for getting the basic meaning across. The aborigines who try to speak English do exactly that, not because their own language has no grammar but because the sophistication of their own mother tongue is of little use when struggling with a foreign language that they have not learned properly. North American Indians, for example, whose own languages formed breathtakingly long words with a dazzling architecture of endings and prefixes, could not even cope with the one rudimentary -s ending on English verbs and would say “he come,” “she work,” and so on. And South American Indians, whose own languages often use several different past tenses to mark different degrees of anteriority, are not even able to handle the one elementary past tense of English or Spanish and say things like “he go yesterday.” Or take the Amazonian tribe whose language requires them to specify the epistemological status of events with a degree of nicety that would leave even the most quick-witted lawyer stuttering in stupefaction (more on them in the next chapter). The same people, if they tried to speak Spanish or English, would be able to use only the most rudimentary language and so would come across as gabbling inarticulates.
If we define a “primitive language” as something that resembles the rudimentary “me sleep here” type of English—a language with only a few hundred words and without the grammatical means of expressing any finer nuances—then it is a simple empirical fact that no natural language is primitive. Hundreds of languages of simple tribes have now been studied in depth, but not one of them, be it spoken by the most technologically and sartorially challenged people, is on the “me sleep here” level. So there is no question that Joe and Piers and Tom have got it wrong about “primitive people speak primitive languages.” Linguistic “technology” in the form of sophisticated grammatical structures is not a prerogative of advanced civilizations, but is found even in the languages of the most primitive hunter-gatherers. As the linguist Edward Sapir memorably put it in 1921, when it comes to the complexity of grammatical structures “Plato walks with the Macedonian swineherd, Confucius with the head-hunting savage of Assam.”
But does all this necessarily mean that linguists are right in asserting that all languages are equally complex? There is no need for an advanced course in logic to realize that the two statements “there are no primitive languages” and “all languages are equally complex” are not equivalent, and that the former does not imply the latter. Two languages can both be way ab
ove the “me sleep here” level, but one of them could still be far more complex than the other. As an analogy, think of the young pianists who are admitted to the Juilliard School. None of them will be a “primitive pianist” who can only play “Mary Had a Little Lamb” with one finger. But that does not mean they are all equally proficient. In just the same way, no language that has served for generations as the means of communication in a society can lack a certain minimum of complexity, but that does not imply that all languages are equally complex. What precludes the possibility, for instance, that languages of sophisticated civilizations might be more complex than those of simple societies? Or for that matter, how do we know that languages of advanced cultures are not perhaps less complex?
We know because linguists tell us so. And we must surely be on terra firma if the combined forces of an entire academic discipline pronounce from every available platform that something is the case. Indeed, equal complexity is often among the very first articles of faith that students read in their introductory course book. A typical example is the most popular Introduction to Language ever, the staple textbook by Victoria Fromkin and Robert Rodman on whose numerous editions generations of students in America and in other countries have been raised, ever since it first appeared in 1974. Under the auspicious title “What We Know about Language,” the first chapter explains: “Investigations of linguists date back at least to 1600 B.C.E. in Mesopotamia. We have learned a great deal since that time. A number of facts pertaining to all languages can be stated.” It then goes on to profess those twelve facts that any student should know at the outset. The first asserts that “wherever humans exist, language exists” and the second that “all languages are equally complex.”
A student with an inquiring mind might quietly wonder when and where exactly it was—during this long history of investigations since 1600 BCE—that “we have learned” that all languages are equally complex. Who was it that made this spectacular discovery? Of course, it would be unreasonable to expect an introductory textbook to go into such detail in the very first chapter, and our student is not impatient. So she reads on, fully confident that a later chapter will make good the promise—or if not a later chapter, at least a more advanced textbook. She goes through chapter after chapter, course after course, textbook after textbook, but the craved information is never supplied. The “equal complexity” tenet is repeated time and again, but nowhere is the source of this precious information divulged. Our student now begins to suspect that she must have missed something obvious along the way. Too embarrassed to expose her ignorance and admit she doesn’t know something so elementary, she continues in her frantic search.
On a few occasions, she seems to be coming within a hair’s breadth of the answer. In one book by an eminent linguist she finds that equal complexity is explicitly reported as a finding: “It is a finding of modern linguistics that all languages are roughly equal in terms of overall complexity.” Our student is thrilled. By now she is au fait with the conventions of academic writing and knows that whenever a finding, rather than just a claim or an opinion, is reported, it is an iron rule that a reference must be supplied to tell the reader where this finding was found. After all, as she has been told by her tutors countless times, the ability to back up factual claims by solid evidence is the most important principle that distinguishes academic texts from journalese or popular writing. She leaps toward the endnotes. But how strange, something must have gone wrong with the typesetting, because this particular endnote is missing.
Some months later, our student experiences another moment of elation when she finds a book that elevates the equality principle to an even higher status: “A central finding of linguistics has been that all languages, both ancient and modern, spoken by both ‘primitive’ and ‘advanced’ societies, are equally complex in their structure.” Once again she rushes toward the endnotes, but curiouser and curiouser: how could the typesetters have made the same omission yet again?
Shall we put our poor student out of her misery? She may go on searching for years without finding the reference. I for one have been looking for fifteen years and still haven’t encountered it. When it comes to the “central finding” about the equal complexity of all languages, linguists never bother to reveal where, when, or how the discovery was made. They are saying: “Just trust us, we know.” Well, don’t trust us. We have no idea!
As it happens, the dogma of equal complexity is based on no evidence whatsoever. No one has ever measured the overall complexity of even one single language, not to mention all of them. No one even has an idea how to measure the overall complexity of a language. (We will return to this problem shortly, but for the moment let’s just pretend we know roughly what the complexity of language is.) The equal complexity slogan is just a myth, an urban legend that linguists repeat because they have heard other linguists repeat it before them, having in turn heard others repeat it earlier.
If, unlike our shy student, you do press linguists to reveal what their authority for this tenet is, the source that is most likely to be mentioned is a passage from a book called A Course in Modern Linguistics, which was written in 1958 by Charles Hockett, one of the fathers of American structural linguistics. The funny thing is that in this passage Hockett himself went out of his way to explain that the equal complexity was not a finding, merely his impression:
Objective measurement is difficult, but impressionistically it would seem that the total grammatical complexity of any language, counting both morphology [word structure] and syntax [sentence structure], is about the same as that of any other. This is not surprising, since all languages have about equally complex jobs to do, and what is not done morphologically [that is, inside the word] has to be done syntactically [in the sentence]. Fox [an American Indian language of Iowa], with a more complex morphology than English, thus ought to have a somewhat simpler syntax; and this is the case.
Since Hockett takes pains to stress that he is speaking “impressionistically,” it may seem unfair to subject his passage to too much scrutiny. But given its impact on the course of modern linguistics, and given that, in the process of retelling, Hockett’s “impression” somehow metamorphosed into a “central finding” of the discipline, a quick reality check is due nonetheless. Does Hockett’s impression, or for this matter the logic behind it, come up to scratch? Hockett assumes, quite correctly, that all languages need to satisfy a minimum degree of complexity in order to fulfill their complex jobs. From this fact he infers that if one language is less complex than another in one area, it has to compensate by increasing complexity in another area. But a moment’s reflection will reveal that this inference is invalid, because much of language’s complexity is not necessary for effective communication, and so there is no need to compensate for its absence. Anyone who has tried to learn a foreign language knows only too dearly that languages can be full of pointless irregularities that increase complexity considerably without contributing much to the ability to express ideas. English, for instance, would have losed none of its expressive power if some of its verbs leaved their irregular past tense behind and becomed regular. And the same applies, to a much greater degree, to other European languages, which have many more irregularities in their word structures.
In fact, if we replace Fox, Hockett’s American Indian example, with one of the major languages of Europe, say German, it will quickly become apparent how spurious his argument is. German word structure is far more complex than that of English. English nouns, for instance, generally form their plurals simply by adding an s or z sound (books, tables), and there are only a handful of exceptions to this rule. In German, on the other hand, there are at least seven different ways of forming plurals: some nouns, like Auto, add an -s just like in English; others, such as “horse,” add an -e (Pferd, Pferde); nouns like “hero” add an -en (Held, Helden); nouns like “egg” add -er (Ei, Eier); nouns like “bird” do not add a suffix at all but rather change a vowel inside the word (Vogel, Vögel); some nouns, like “
grass,” change the vowel and add a suffix (Gras, Gräser); and finally some nouns, like “window,” don’t change anything at all (Fenster, Fenster). One could imagine that German would make up for this enormous complexity in nouns by the exemplary simplicity of its verbs, but in fact German verbs have far more forms than English ones, so the morphology of German is incomparably more complex than that of English. Paraphrasing Hockett, then, we would conclude that “German, with a more complex morphology than English, thus ought to have a somewhat simpler syntax.” But does it? If anything, it’s the other way around: German word-order rules, for instance, are far more complex than those of English.
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?
Through the Language Glass: Why the World Looks Different in Other Languages Page 12
