And language falls short on our other criteria too. Take redundancy. From the perspective of maximizing communication relative to effort, it would make little sense to repeat ourselves. Yet English is full of redundancies. We have 'pleonasms' like null and void, cease and desist, and for all intents and purposes, and pointless redundancies like advance planning. And then there's the third-person singular suffix -s, which we use only when we can already tell from the subject
Language
that we have a third-person singular. The -5 in he buys, relative to they buy, gives you no more information than if we just dropped the -s altogether and relied on the subject alone. The sentence These three dogs are retrievers conveys the notion of plurality not once but five times — in pluralizing the demonstrative pronoun {these as opposed to this), in the numeral {three), in the plural noun (dogs versus dog), in the verb (are versus is), and a final time in the final noun (retrievers versus retriever). In languages like Italian or Latin, which routinely omit subjects, a third-person plural marker makes sense; in English, which requires subjects, the third-person plural marker often adds nothing. Meanwhile, the phrase Johns picture, which uses the possessive -'s, is ambiguous in at least three ways. Does it refer to a picture John took of someone else (say, his sister)? A photo that someone else (say, his sister) took of him? Or a picture of something else altogether (say, a blue-footed booby, Sula nebouxii), taken by someone else (perhaps a photographer from National Geographic), which John merely happens to own?
And then there's vagueness. In the sentence It's warm outside, there's no clear boundary between what counts as warm and what counts as not warm. Is it 70 degrees? 69? 68? 67? I can keep dropping degrees, but where do we draw the line? Or consider a word like heap. How many stones does it take to form a heap? Philosophers like to amuse themselves with the following mind-twister, known as a sorites (rhymes with pieties) paradox:
Clearly, one stone does not make a heap. If one stone is not enough to qualify as a heap of stones, nor should two, since adding one stone to a pile that is not a heap should not turn that pile into a heap. And if two stones don't make a heap, three stones shouldn't either — by a logic that seemingly ought to extend to infinity. Working in the opposite direction, a man with 10,000 hairs surely isn't bald. But just as surely, plucking one hair from a man who is not bald should not produce a transition from notbald to bald. So if a man with 9,999 hairs cannot be judged to be bald, the same should apply to a man with 9,998. Following the logic to its extreme, hair by hair, we are ultimately unable even to call a man with zero hairs 'bald.'
If the boundary conditions of words were more precise, such reasoning (presumably fallacious) might not be so tempting.
Adding to the complication is the undeniable fact that languages just can't help but change over time. Sanskrit begat Hindi and Urdu; Latin begat French, Italian, Spanish, and Catalan. West Germanic begat Dutch, German, Yiddish, and Frisian. English, mixing its Anglo-Saxon monosyllables (Halt!) with its Greco-Latin impress-your-friends polysyllables (Abrogate all locomotion!), is the stepchild of French and West Germanic, a little bit country, a little bit rock-and-roll.
Even where institutions like l'Acad?mie fran?aise try to legislate language, it remains unruly. L'Acad?mie has tried to bar from French such English-derived as le hamburger, le drugstore, le week-end, le strip- tease, le pull-over, le tee-shirt, le chewing gum, and la cover-girl — with no success whatsoever. With the rapid development of popular new techonology — such as iPods, podcasts, cell phones, and DVDs
— the world needs new words every day.*
Most of us rarely notice the instability or vagueness of language, even when our words and sentences aren't precise, because we can decipher language by supplementing what grammar tells us with our knowledge of the world. But the fact that we can rely on something other than language — such as shared background knowledge — is no defense. When I 'know what you mean' even though you haven't said it, language itself has fallen short. And when languages in general show evidence of these same problems, they reflect not only
*Perhaps even more galling to Franco-purists is that their own fabrique de N?mes became known in English as 'denim' — only to return to France as simply les blue jeans in the mother tongue. There are barbarians at the gate, and those barbarians are us.
cultural history but also the inner workings of the creatures who learn and use them.
Some of these facts about human language have been recognized for at least two millennia. Plato, for example, worried in his dialogue Cratylus that 'the fine fashionable language of modern times has twisted and disguised and entirely altered the original meaning' of words. Wishing for a little more systematicity, he also suggested that 'words should as far as possible resemble things .. . if we could always, or almost always, use likenesses, which are perfectly appropriate, this would be the most perfect state of language.'
From the time of twelfth-century mystic Hildegard of Bingen, if not earlier, some particularly brave people have tried to do something about the problem and attempted to build more sensible languages from scratch. One of the most valiant efforts was made by English mathematician John Wilkins (1614-1672), who addressed Plato's concern about the systematicity of words. Why, for example, should cats, tigers, lions, leopards, jaguars, and panthers each be named differently, despite their obvious resemblance? In his 1668 work An Essay Towards a Real Character and a Philosophical Language, Wilkins sought to create a systematic 'non-arbitrary' lexicon, reasoning that words ought to reflect the relations among things. In the process, he made a table of 40 major concepts, ranging from quantities, such as magnitude, space, and measure, to qualities, such as habit and sickness, and then he divided and subdivided each concept to a fine degree. The word de referred to the elements (earth, air, fire, and water), the word deb referred to fire, the first (in Wilkins's scheme) of the elements, deba to a part of fire, namely a flame, deba to a spark, and so forth, such that every word was carefully (and predictably) structured.
Most languages don't bother with this sort of order, incorporating new words catch-as-catch-can. As a consequence, when we English speakers see a rare word, say, ocelot, we have nowhere to start in determining its meaning. Is it a cat? A bird? A small ocean? Unless we speak Nahuatl (a family of native North Mexican languages that includes Aztec), from which the word is derived, we have no clue. Where Wilkins promised systematicity, we have only etymology, the history of a word's origin. An ocelot, as it happens, is a wild feline that gets its name from North Mexico; going further south, pumas are felines from Peru. The word jaguar comes from the Tupi language of Brazil. Meanwhile, the words leopard, tiger, and panther appear in ancient Greek. From the perspective of a child, each word is a fresh learning challenge. Even for adults, words that come up rarely are difficult to remember.
