Among all the attempts at a perfect language, only one has really achieved any traction — Esperanto, created by one Ludovic Lazarus Zamenhof, born on December 15,1859. Like Noam Chomsky, the father of modern linguistics, Zamenhof was son of a Hebrew scholar. By the time he was a teenager, little Ludovic had picked up French, German, Polish, Russian, Hebrew, Yiddish, Latin, and Greek. Driven by his love for language and a belief that a universal language could alleviate many a social ill, Zamenhof aimed to create one that could quickly and easily be acquired by any human being.

Saluton! Cu vi parolas Esperanton? Mia nomo estas Gary.

[Hello. Do you speak Esperanto? My name is Gary.]

Despite Zamenhof's best efforts, Esperanto is used today by only a few million speakers (with varying degrees of expertise), one tenth of 1 percent of the world's population. What makes one language more prevalent than another is mostly a matter of politics, money, and influence. French, once the most commonly spoken language in the West, wasn't displaced by English because English is better, but because Britain and the United States became more powerful and more influential than France. As the Yiddish scholar Max Weinrich put it, 'A shprakh iz a diyalekt mit an armey un a flot' — 'The only difference between a language and a dialect is an army and a navy.'

With no nation-state invested in the success of Esperanto, it's perhaps not surprising that it has yet to displace English (or French, Spanish, German, Chinese, Japanese, Hindi, or Arabic, to name a few) as the most prevalent language in the world. But it is instructive nonetheless to compare it to human languages that emerged naturally. In some ways, Esperanto is a dream come true. For example, whereas German has a half-dozen different ways to form the plural, Esperanto has only one. Any language student would sigh with relief.

Still, Esperanto gets into some fresh troubles of its own. Because of its strict rules about stress (the penultimate syllable, always), there is no way to distinguish whether the word senteme is made up of sent

+ em + e ('feeling' + 'a tendency toward' + adverbial ending) or sen + tern + e ('without' + 'topic' + adverbial ending). Thus the sentence La profesoro senteme parolis dum du horoj could mean either 'The professor spoke with feeling for two hours' or (horrors!) 'The professor rambled on for two hours.' The sentence Estis batata la demono de la viro is triply ambiguous; it can mean 'The demon was beaten by the man,' 'The demon was beaten out of the man,' or 'The man's demon was beaten.' Obviously, banishing irregularity is one thing, banishing ambiguity another.

Computer languages don't suffer from these problems; in Pascal, C, Fortran, or LISP, one finds neither rampant irregularity nor pervasive ambiguity — proof in principle that languages don't have to be ambiguous. In a well-constructed program, no computer ever wavers about what it should do next. By the very design of the languages in which they are written, computer programs are never at a loss.

Yet no matter how clear computer languages may be, nobody speaks C, Pascal, or LISP. Java may be the computer world's current lingua franca, but I surely wouldn't use it to talk about the weather. Software engineers depend on special word processors that indent, colorize, and keep track of their words and parentheses, precisely because the structure of computer languages seems so unnatural to the human mind.

To my knowledge, only one person ever seriously tried to construct an ambiguity-free, mathematically perfect human language, mathematically perfect not just in vocabulary but also in sentence construction. In the late 1950s a linguist by the name of James Cooke Brown constructed a language known as Loglan, short for 'logical language.' In addition to a Wilkins-esque systematic vocabulary, it includes 112 'little words' that govern logic and structure. Many of these little words have English equivalents {tui, 'in general'; tue, 'moreover'; tai, 'above all'), but the really crucial words correspond to things like parentheses (which most spoken languages lack) and technical tools for picking out specific individuals mentioned earlier in the discourse. The English word he, for example, would be translated as da if it refers to the first singular antecedent in a discourse, de if it refers to the second, di if it refers to the third, do if it refers the fourth, and du if it refers to the fifth. Unnatural as this might seem, this system would banish considerable confusion about the antecedents of pronouns. (American Sign Language uses physical space to represent something similar, making signs in different places, depending on which entity is being referred to.) To see why this is useful, consider the English sentence He runs and he walks. It might describe a single person who runs and walks, or two different people, one running, the other walking; by contrast, in Loglan, the former would be rendered unambiguously as Da prano i da dzoru, the latter unambiguously as Da prano i de dzoru.

But Loglan has made even fewer inroads than Esperanto. Despite its 'scientific' origins, it has no native speakers. On the Loglan website, Brown reports that at 'The Loglan Institute . . . live-in apprentices learned the language directly from me (and I from them!), I am happy to report that sustained daily Loglan-only conversations lasting three-quarters of an hour or more were achieved,' but so far as I know, nobody has gotten much further. For all its ambiguity and idiosyncrasy, English goes down much smoother for the human mind. We couldn't learn a perfect language if we tried.

As we have seen already, idiosyncrasy often arises in evolution when function and history clash, when good design is at odds with the raw materials already close at hand. The human spine, the panda's thumb (formed from a wrist bone) — these are ramshackle solutions that owe more to evolutionary inertia than to any principle of good design. So it is with language too.

In the hodgepodge that is language, at least three major sources of idiosyncrasy arise from three separate clashes: (1) the contrast between the way our ancestors made sounds and the way we would ideally like to make them, (2) the way in which our words build on a primate understanding of the world, and (3) a flawed system of memory that works in a pinch but makes little sense for language. Any one of these alone would have been enough to leave language short of perfection. Together, they make language the collective kluge that it is: wonderful, loose, and flexible, yet manifestly rough around the edges.

Consider first the very sounds of language. It's probably no accident that language evolved primarily as a medium of sound, rather than, say, vision or smell. Sound travels over reasonably long distances, and it allows one to communicate in the dark, even with others one can't see. Although much the same might be said for smell, we can modulate sound much more rapidly and precisely, faster than even the most sophisticated skunk can modulate odor. Speech is also faster than communicating by way of physical motion; it can flow at about twice the speed of sign language.

Still, if I were building a system for vocal communication from scratch, I'd start with an iPod: a digital system that could play back any sound equally well. Nature, in contrast, started with a breathing tube. Turning that breathing tube into a means of vocal production was no small feat. Breathing produces air, but sound is modulated air, vibrations produced at just the right sets of frequencies. The Rube Goldberg-like vocal system consists of three fundamental parts: respiration, phonation, and articulation.

Respiration is just what it sounds like. You breathe in, your chest expands; your chest compresses, and a stream of air comes out. That stream of air is then rapidly divided by the vocal folds into smaller puffs of air (phonation), about 80 times a second for a baritone like James Earl Jones, as much as 500 times per second for a

Добавить отзыв
ВСЕ ОТЗЫВЫ О КНИГЕ В ИЗБРАННОЕ

0

Вы можете отметить интересные вам фрагменты текста, которые будут доступны по уникальной ссылке в адресной строке браузера.

Отметить Добавить цитату