Kluge: The Haphazard Construction of the Human Mind (Houghton Mifflin; 2008)

Human language may seem majestic, from the perspective of a vervet monkey confined to a vocabulary of three words (roughly, eagle, snake, and leopard). But in reality, language is filled with foibles, imperfections, and idiosyncrasies, from the way we pronounce words to the ways we put together sentences. We start, we stop, we stutter, we use like as a punctuation marker; we swap our consonants like the good Reverend William Archibald Spooner (1844-1930), who turned Shakespeare's one fell swoop into one swell foop. (A real smart feller^ becomes a real... well, you get the idea.) We may say bridge of the neck when we really mean bridge of the nose; we may mishear All of the members of the group grew up in Philadelphia as All of the members of the group threw up in Philadelphia. Mistakes like these* are a tic of the human mind.

The challenge, for the cognitive scientist, is to figure out which idiosyncrasies are really important. Most are mere trivia, amusing but not reflective of the deep structures of the mind. The word driveway,

*If to err is human, to write it down is divine. This chapter is written in memory of the late Vicki Fromkin, an early pioneer in linguistics who was the first to systematically collect and study human speech errors. You can read more about her at http:// www.linguistics.ucla.edu/people/fromkin/fromkin.htm.

for example, used to refer to driving on a private road that went from a main road to a house. In truth, we still drive on (or at least into) driveways, but we scarcely notice the driving part, since the drive is short; the word's meaning shifted when real estate boomed and our ideas of landscaping changed. (The park in parkways had nothing to do with parking, but rather with roads that ran along or through parks, woodsy green places that have given way to suburbs and the automobile.) Yet facts like these reveal nothing deep about the mind because other languages are free to do things more systematically, so that cars would park, for example, in a Parkplatz.

Likewise it is amusing but not deeply significant to note that we 'relieve' ourselves in water closets and bathrooms, even though our W.C.'s are bigger than closets and our bathrooms have no baths. (For that matter, public restrooms may be public, and may be rooms, but I've never seen anyone rest in one.) But our reluctance to say where we plan to go when we 'have to go' isn't really a flaw in language; it's just a circumlocution, a way of talking around the details in order to be polite.

Some of the most interesting linguistic quirks, however, run deeper, reflecting not just the historical accidents of particular languages, but fundamental truths about those creatures that produce language — namely, us.

Consider, for instance, the fact that all languages are rife with ambiguity, not just the sort we use deliberately ('I can't recommend this person enough') or that foreigners produce by accident (like the hotel that advised its patrons to 'take advantage of the chambermaid'), but the sort that ordinary people produce quite by accident, sometimes with disastrous consequences. One such case occurred in 1982, when a pilot's ambiguous reply to a question about his position ('at takeoff') led to a plane crash that killed 583 people; the pilot in question said 'Ready for takeoff,' but air traffic control interpreted this as meaning 'in the process of taking off.'

To be perfect, a language would presumably have to be unambiguous (except perhaps where deliberately intended to be ambiguous), sys

Language

tematic (rather than idiosyncratic), stable (so that, say, grandparents could communicate with their grandchildren), nonredundant (so as not to waste time or energy), and capable of expressing any and all of our thoughts.* Every instance of a given speech sound would invariably be pronounced in a constant way, each sentence as clean as a mathematical formula. In the words of one of the leading philosophers of the twentieth century, Bertrand Russell,

in a logically perfect language, there will be one word and no more for every simple object, and everything that is not simple will be expressed by a combination of words, by a combination derived, of course, from the words for the simple things that enter in, one word for each simple component. A language of that sort will be completely analytic, and will show at a glance the logical structure of the facts asserted or denied.

Every human language falls short of this sort of perfection. Russell was probably wrong in his first point — it's actually quite handy (logical, even) for a language to allow for the household pet to be referred to as Fido, a dog, a poodle, a mammal, and an animal — but right in thinking that in an ideal language, words would be systematically related in meaning and in sound. But this is distinctly not the case. The words jaguar, panther, ocelot, and puma, for example, sound totally different, yet all refer to felines, while hardly any of the words that sound like cat — cattle, catapult, catastrophe — have any connection to cats.

Meanwhile, in some cases language seems redundant (couch and sofa mean just about the same thing), and in others, incomplete (for example, no language can truly do justice to the subtleties of what we can smell). Other thoughts that seem perfectly coherent can be surprisingly difficult to express; the sentence Whom do you think that

* Forgive me if I leave poetry out of this. Miscommunication can be a source of mirth, and ambiguity may enrich mysticism and literature. But in both cases, it's likely that we're making the best of an imperfection, not exploiting traits specifically shaped by their adaptive value.

John left? (where the answer is, say, Mary, his first wife) is grammatical, but the ostensibly similar Whom do you think that left Mary? (where the answer would be John) is not. (A number of linguists have tried to explain this phenomenon, but it's hard to understand why this asymmetry should exist at all; there's no real analogy in mathematics or computer languages.)

Ambiguity, meanwhile, seems to be the rule rather than the exception. A run can mean anything from a jog to a tear in a stocking to scoring a point in baseball, a hit anything from a smack to a best-selling tune. When I say 'I'll give you a ring tomorrow,' am I promising a gift of jewelry or just a phone call? Even little words can be ambiguous; as Bill Clinton famously said, 'It all depends on what the meaning of the word 'is' is.' Meanwhile, even when the individual words are clear, sentences as a whole may not be: does Put the hook on the towel on the table mean that there is a book on the towel that ought to be on the table or that a book, which ought to be on a towel, is already on the table?

Even in languages like Latin, which might — for all its cases and word endings — seem more systematic, ambiguities still crop up. For instance, because the subject of a verb can be left out, the third-person singular verb Amat can stand on its own as a complete sentence

— but it might mean 'He loves,' 'She loves,' or 'It loves.' As the fourth-century philosopher Augustine, author of one of the first essays on the topic of ambiguity, put it, in an essay written in the allegedly precise language of Latin, the 'perplexity of ambiguity grows like wild flowers into infinity.'