Babylon by bus
A few years ago, I attempted to learn Chinese, admittedly no more than half-heartedly, my main motivation being to immerse myself in an intellectual world that operated according to principles utterly unlike those of any of the languages I had learned before. From this experiment I took away three things, the first being that there are such “crazy” things as the pitch of words can assign them quite different meanings, although my calling them “crazy” is a reflection of nothing more than my own Eurocentric outlook. The second insight I gained was that a language can be recorded in writing according to principles completely different from a phonetic alphabet (even if this means learning several thousand characters by heart). The third and most astonishing thing I realised, though, was that grammar can also be indescribably simple without significantly affecting the accuracy of statements. One friend who embarked on a similar experiment with Turkish found something similar, namely that languages can function according to principles completely different from those of German or of the other European languages we usually learn. The forthcoming language blogs will show, among other things, that Chinese, Turkish, and German are classic examples of three fundamental language types that Wilhelm von Humboldt classified in the early 19th century.
A gift from the gods ...
“In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.” The Bible, a book that explains the world, makes many references to language being a “divine gift”; its account of the creation tells how God used mere words to create the world and give names to his works; it tells how he punished the pride of the people in Babylon who sought to build a tower to reach heaven, bringing the project to nought by confusing their language. The New Testament has an account of the miracle of Pentecost, in which the spirit of God descends on the Apostles, with the effect that all visitors to the feast of Shavuot in Jerusalem hear them speaking in their own languages.
Neither the first nor the last project to fail because of misunderstandings Life spent a long time experimenting to find the best ways to preserve useful imagination. The slow, random learning of genes was supplemented by the fast, experience-dependent learning of neuronal networks. The conscious experience of neuronal states, which alone characterises human beings, is also possible without language, as our thinking takes place primarily in images; that’s why babies can think even before they learn to speak. Without a doubt, though, the revolutionary idea of assigning meanings to sound waves, gestures and symbols has opened up a fantastic new dimension for us humans, in that we can – provided we have previously agreed the use of a common signalling system with other members of our species – communicate our states of consciousness to them. So, too, our experiences and thoughts can be set out orally and in writing and preserved for generations to come.
… or an exceedingly defective instrument?
However, human communication is not without its defects, which suggests it is more likely to be a product of evolution than to originate from God As soon as we start making use of language, misunderstandings are features rather than bugs, for the signs that we assign to things often represent completely things in the minds of the people with whom we are attempting to communicate. How can we ensure that the terms we use actually do name the objects in this world without ambiguity? And, certainly when attempting to use foreign languages that may be underpinned by other understandings of the world, how can such German terms as “Schadenfreude”, “Waldeinsamkeit” or “Wanderlust” be translated into English or Japanese? And what’s “cheers!” in German? Do the limitation of our language, in the final analysis, limit the scope of our thinking? Whatever the shortcomings of the tool that language is, though, were we unable to use signs to preserve, accumulate and collectivise knowledge, the positively explosive rate at which our culture evolved would have been unthinkable. At this point, we should briefly mention that, in addition to the natural language that every human being speaks, there is also a universal means of communication that is completely unambiguous in every respect, namely mathematics. Galileo Galilei has been quoted as saying that mathematics is the language in which nature speaks to us. We have created a category of its own on the blog for this language, to the rules of which there are no exceptions.
Common origins?
Not until the turn of the 19th century, and through the work of linguists such as William Jones and Willhelm von Humboldt, was it revealed that many languages are related to one another. The family tree of Indo-European languages The largest group, the Indo-Germanic, or Indo-European languages, includes such seemingly diverse members as Welsh, German, Czech, Latin, Albanian, Persian and Sanskrit. There are also other important extended families, such as the Afro-Asiatic and Sino-Tibetan languages.
Could these families, too, have a common origin? Some linguists are persuaded that Nostratic might be one such possible macrofamily. However, that many Eurasian and African languages have a common origin is still no more than hypothetical and science currently indicates that other connections between other macroclans are extremely speculative, too. This suggests that various early members of our species invented our unique communication tool at times and in places independently of each other.
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