Planet Word

by J. P. Davidson

  One of the most famous thumb novelists is an eighty-nine-year-old Buddhist nun called Jakucho Setouchi. She’s something of a national treasure in Japan, famed for her translation of what’s thought to be the world’s first novel – the 1,000-year-old The Tale of Genji. Setouchi was appearing as a judge at the annual Keita Novel Awards when she suddenly made an announcement. For the last few months, she said, she had been posting a thumb novel called Tomorrow’s Rainbow under the pen-name ‘Purple’. Setouchi explained that she’d tried to write her simple love story on her mobile phone but found the thumbing too difficult. In the end she used paper and a fountain pen and sent Tomorrow’s Rainbow to her publisher for conversion into text.

  ‘I’m an author,’ she told her audience of thumb novelists. ‘When you finish a novel, to sell tens of thousands would be a tough thing for us, but I see you selling millions. I must confess that I was a bit jealous in the beginning.’ Many of the popular online novels are published in print, in the first half of 2007, five of the novels in Japan’s bestseller list started as thumb novels. The novels are not great literary works. They lack scene setting or character development. Yet, however crude, the thumb novel genre has encouraged people in their tens of thousands to tell stories, and millions of others to read them. That’s something Dickens himself would have applauded.

  Death of the Book?

  There’s a right royal battle of words raging over the future of the book – or more specifically, the future of the printed book. For, contrary to the doomsayers who have warned of the death of reading, people are in fact reading in increasing numbers; just in different ways. The digital revolution has brought us the e-book, the electronic book, and many lovers of the printed word aren’t happy. The American novelist the late John Updike was addressing a gathering of booksellers about the future of the printed book. ‘The book revolution,’ he told them, ‘which from the Renaissance on taught men and women to cherish and cultivate their individuality, threatens to end in a sparkling pod of snippets.’ Updike was bemoaning the tidal wave of unedited, often inaccurate, mass of information on the internet. ‘Books traditionally have edges,’ he said and concluded with a bibliophile’s call to arms. ‘So, booksellers, defend your lonely forts. Keep your edges dry. Your edges are our edges. For some of us, books are intrinsic to our human identity.’

  Updike’s impassioned plea was met with an equally emotional response from e-book lovers. ‘Print is where words go to die,’ wrote one.

  Professor Robert Darnton, a leading scholar in the history of the book and director of the Harvard University Library, insists that the book is very much alive, and the statistics seem to prove it. Each year more books are produced than the previous year. There was a dip during the recession, but next year, he says, 1 million new titles will be produced worldwide. And yet, the era of the book as the unrivalled source and vehicle for knowledge is undoubtedly coming to an end. We’re living in a time of transition in which the two media co-exist. It is, says Professor Darnton, a most exciting time.

  ‘One thing we’ve learned in the history of books is that one medium does not displace another. So the radio did not displace the newspaper. And television did not kill the radio. And the internet did not destroy television, and so on. So I think actually what’s happening now is that the electronic means of communication, all kinds of handheld devices on which people read books, are actually increasing the sales of ordinary printed books.’

  Attachment to the printed book is not just the preserve of an older generation. According to one survey, 43 per cent of French students who were asked why they didn’t use e-books said they missed the book smell. There’s even a jokey aerosol ‘e-book enhancer’ called ‘Smell of Books’ on the market, promising to ‘bring back that real book smell you miss so much’.

  Nevertheless, there is a growing number of people for whom the book means very little. In fact, apart from in school, they may never read a book. It doesn’t mean they don’t read, simply that they never open a physical book. Electronic books have all sorts of advantages. In parts of the world where schools and libraries can’t afford books, accessing a database of information in cyberspace is a cheaper alternative. Archives can be accessed with the press of a button – with one touch you can be inspecting the writing on a Sumerian clay tablet; another touch and you’re gazing at a fifteenth-century illuminated manuscript. Unlike the printed book, e-books can be updated and corrected constantly; readers can be linked to related subjects via live footnotes. You can even scribble your notes electronically on the margins and then share them.

  Professor Darnton recognizes the huge possibilities of the digital media. He recently published a history book which includes songs that can be accessed via the internet and listened to while you’re reading the book. ‘So we’re taking in history through the ear as well as through the eye.’ And what of the printed book, apart from its smell? At a practical level, we only need our eyes and hands to read it: no electricity, batteries or internet access necessary. We like to own books, to collect them, to display them on our shelves. Our favourite books have bits of ourselves in them. It may be that at the end of this transitional period when print and digital co-exist, the printed book will become the preserve of the few. Those who like to turn a physical page are already able to go to a shop, order a digitized text, and it’s printed, trimmed and bound within four minutes. As someone (probably a publisher) once said, as long as authors have a mother, they’ll want to give her a copy of their book.

  Message to the Future

  Some very big questions are being asked about the future of written language – not in the next few centuries but in the next tens of thousands of years. Given the difficulties we have in reading the Old English of Beowulf, let alone in decoding the early writing systems of 5,000-year-old civilizations, how can we make our language readable to peoples of the future? The American government has been wrestling with the problem of how to warn future generations about the spent nuclear fuel and high-level radioactive waste which they have been burying in underground chambers deep in the Mojave Desert. The waste will remain dangerous for at least 10,000 years. No one knows which languages, if any, will be spoken by AD 12,000, give or take a year or so. So how will we warn the future about the risks?

  In 1984 the late linguist Thomas Sebeok was asked to come up with suggestions for the most effective ‘keep out’ signs. Sebeok argued that, in 10,000 years, all the world’s spoken and written languages would likely have faded away. So he recommended the use of warning signs and symbols and the creation of what he called an ‘atomic priesthood’ of scientists and scholars who could pass down the knowledge about the danger of the site from generation to generation. These priests would also be tasked with passing on ‘artificially created and nurtured ritual-and-legend’ myths about evil spirits so that people would be too scared to go near the site.

  In the 1990s, a team of linguists, scientists and anthropologists was commissioned to design the warning system for the Mohave Desert nuclear dump site. The art designer on the team is Jon Lomberg, one of the world’s leading space artists, who illustrated most of astronomer Carl Sagan’s books. Lomberg has created some of the most durable and far-flung objects ever produced by a human being. His design for the aluminium jacket cover of the Voyager spacecraft’s Interstellar Record message from the people of Earth is intended to last for a thousand million years. This is definitely a man who knows a thing or two about messages for the future. And trying to talk to aliens has given us some ideas about how best we might create meaningful messages for the generations 10,000 years ahead of us.

  Lomberg explains how straightaway the Mohave Desert design team rejected the idea of a magic bullet – one perfect way of solving the problem. They decided on a shotgun approach, looking for a variety of options. Their first thought was to go for picture symbols.

  ‘People change, culture changes; what we looked for was what was invariant. In the case of languages we know that languages evolve an
d have a half life. For most of us Shakespeare can be a little tricky to read, Chaucer difficult and Beowulf impossible. And that’s just one thousand years. Pictures, on the other hand, do seem to be universal. We can recognize the animals on the walls of the caves, and one of the common motifs that you find in art all over the world is the stylized picture of a human. A stick figure … You can tell it’s a person and you can tell if it’s standing up or lying down and what they’re doing – running, throwing a spear, sitting on a throne … Symbols are a sort of a mid-point. A symbol in a sense is a word that doesn’t need translation.’

  But Lomberg and his team discovered that there are actually very few universal symbols. Carl Sagan wrote to the team to suggest that the skull and crossbones be used as the symbol of danger and death. Yet it changes in meaning from culture to culture. In the Middle Ages it represented the resurrection of Christ and symbolized hope. It was only when it was put on gravestones that it began to be associated with death and later with the Jolly Roger pirate’s flag.

  Mr Yuk. Will language as we know it no longer exist in the future?

  The team decided to use double symbols – the skull and crossbones plus the Mr Yuk figure, a frowny face with a tongue sticking out which is widely used in the United States as the symbol for poison.

  ‘The other thing that seems to be universal is the notion of a storyboard,’ says Lomberg, ‘a series of drawings that show a series of events in time. We find it in the Bayeux Tapestry, in the scrolls of Japan that depict the invasion by the Mongols.’ Lomberg started his art career drawing comics and was keen to explore the idea that the symbols could be defined within a comic strip story. He believes that, although comic strips are without language, like a Charlie Chaplin movie their language is universal. Crude cartoons were drawn, each picture cell stacked from the top down since, although not all cultures read from right to left, they all read from top to bottom.

  Comic Strip 1 Comic Strip 2

  Comic strip 1 shows a person removing something from a container with the poison symbol on it; the poison symbol appears on their chest and they fall on the ground and die. Comic strip 2 is a warning about the long-term effect of the poison. A child is shown going into a container that’s marked with the radiation symbol. The same person is next seen as an adult – we know time has passed because the tree in the background has grown tall – and then he’s falling down. The symbols, comic strips and warnings in the six official languages of the UN will be etched into a series of markers – granite pillars erected around the nuclear waste site. Lomberg and his team have until 2028 to submit their final plan.

  Lomberg and a number of the team members have a background in SETI, the Search for Extra Terrestrial Intelligence. They helped choose the messages carried by the Voyager spacecraft into outer space in 1977, including recordings of greetings in fifty-five languages. Impossible to know what an alien will make of ‘Hello from the children of Planet Earth’, but, as Carl Sagan pointed out at the time, perhaps the most important impact of the message will be that we cared enough to try to communicate.

  CHAPTER 5

  The Power and the Glory

  Language is our supreme evolutionary achievement, and this chapter is about how we can use it to sublime effect. We save our best words for our most complex thoughts, our attempts to win a sexual mate, deal with the inevitability of our own death or to persuade someone to do something they don’t want to do. It’s where language blooms in resplendent fashion. That doesn’t mean it has to be florid; it can have the simplicity of a haiku. Three hundred years ago, Alexander Pope wrote: ‘True Wit is Nature to advantage dress’d, What oft was thought but n’er so well expressed.’

  A manual on how to hunt, plough, build a house, fight a war or paddle a boat can get by with pretty basic language. But courtship won’t go far if you say simply, ‘You look nice, let’s have sex.’ The same goes for death: ‘What, old dad dead?’ is a great line from The Revenger’s Tragedy, but mainly for dramatic impact. Hamlet’s ‘Oh that this too too solid flesh would melt, thaw and resolve into a dew!’ certainly has more eloquence to it. Is it better? Well, that’s very subjective, and we all have our favourites, be they poems, songs, plays, novels or the speeches of a gifted orator.

  The acme of language is literature; it defines our species, gives us voice, personality and history. Quite simply, it tells our story.

  Back in Turkanaland

  Essentially, what we like as a species across all cultures and throughout our history is a good story, well told: as Joyce would have it, the right words in the right order. We return first to that village in Turkanaland in north-east Kenya we visited earlier in the book, for the Turkana can tell us something about the beginnings of storytelling.

  The village is about ten miles from the Sudan border. The Toposa, mortal enemies of the Turkana, live on the other side. The Toposa are as obsessed with cattle raiding as the Turkana, and for the young men of both tribes the raids are a way of life: ritually important and essential as a means of getting cattle to pay the bride price, so they can get married. It’s also tremendously exciting. Sometimes as many as a hundred heavily armed Toposa will cross the border and launch attacks. Up until thirty years ago both Toposa and Turkana relied mainly on ancient muskets, Enfields and spears, but now Kalashnikovs have replaced them. There is not a single spear to be seen, and even young boys of fourteen have an automatic rifle slung casually over their shoulders. As the day wears on the warriors start to drink their millet beer. Drunkenness and guns are never a good combination.

  Turkana warriors keeping their traditions alive

  But what the alcohol does is lower the inhibitions of the young warriors, and they start to tell stories of their escapades against the Toposa. Soon a crowd gathers and, emboldened by their audience, the young men launch into a full re-enactment of their latest raid. Miming their ambush of the Toposa warriors, they tell the story of capturing a hundred head of cattle, losing a couple of their men in a firefight and then the Toposa taking back some of their cattle only to be re-ambushed. The crowd love it, as do the warriors. This act of mimesis, miming out their story – with a few embellishments – goes to the heart of storytelling. There’s also a plot, action, humour (one of the men got shot in the buttocks – very Forrest Gump) and resolution.

  The story is an improvised bit of drama without any religious or moral undertones. It’s a bit like an action buddy movie – a platoon of warriors on a dangerous mission meets with adversity, overcomes it; some are wounded, but the end is a happy one because the warriors return home victorious.

  The Turkana have other stories, many of them traditional myths which attempt to answer the major themes of their lives. They do have a creator figure, Akuj, and there are many stories in which he is the protagonist. Most involve rain, which is the life-or-death commodity for the Turkana. These stories, like the Judaeo-Christian Bible, try to reconcile the big issues that trouble the Turkana. In the harsh environment where they live, the Turkana believe that the unreliability of the rains which cause drought, famine and death can be alleviated by the intercession of Akuj, the bringer of rain.

  Storytelling is as old as language and is rooted in our life as a social animal. It is a universal across all cultures throughout history. When the Turkana tell a story they do more than just entertain the community, they bind it together in a communal ritual. This ritual (and it’s not so different from being read a Harry Potter book, or going to the cinema to see Avatar or watching a performance of Hamlet) illustrates two of our most important traits: our ability to create imaginary worlds – fantasy – and our capacity to empathize. Empathy allows us to reach out to others and understand another’s emotions and needs whilst fantasy allows us to postulate alternatives and imagine new ways of seeing reality. Both are at the heart of good storytelling. But what could be the evolutionary advantage of being so prone to fantasy?

  ‘One might have expected natural selection to have weeded out any inclination to engage in imagin
ary worlds rather than the real one,’ says linguist Steven Pinker, but he thinks stories are in fact an important tool for learning and for developing relationships with others in one’s social group. And most scientists agree: stories have such a powerful and universal appeal that the neurological roots of both telling tales and enjoying them are probably tied to crucial parts of our social cognition. Pinker’s hypothesis is that as our ancestors evolved to live in groups, so they had to make sense of increasingly complex social relationships. Living communally requires knowing who your group members are and what they are doing and if possible what they are feeling and thinking. Storytelling is the perfect way to spread such information.

  Songlines