Kluge: The Haphazard Construction of the Human Mind

phones, and DVDs — the world needs new words every day.[29]

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 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.

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