Through the Language Glass, Why the World Looks Different in Other Languages

There is a fairly simple reason why this misconception is so common. Our perception of a language is based largely on our exposure to its speakers, and for most of us the exposure to aboriginal languages of all kinds comes mainly from popular literature, movies, and television. And what we get to hear in such depictions, from Tintin to Westerns, is invariably Indians, Africans, and sundry other “natives” speaking in that rudimentary “me no come, Sahib” way. So is the problem simply that we have been duped by popular literature? Is the broken speech we associate with the aborigines of diverse continents merely a prejudice, a figment of the twisted imagination of chauvinistic-imperialistic minds? If one took the trouble of traveling to North Queensland to check for oneself, would one discover that all the natives actually orate in torrents of Shakespearean eloquence?

Not quite. Although the popular accounts may not always conform to the highest standard of academic accuracy, their depictions are ultimately based on reality. As it happens, the aborigines do very often use a rough and ungrammatical type of language: “no money no come,” “no can do,” “too much me been sleep,” “before longtime me no got trouble” (I’ve never got into any trouble in the past), “mifela go go go toodark” (we kept going until it became very dark). All these are authentic examples of “native speak.”

But have you noticed the little snag here? The primitive language that we hear these people speak is always… English. And while it is true that when they avail themselves of the English tongue, they use a pared down, ungrammatical, rudimentary, inarticulate-in short, “primitive”-version of the language, this is simply because English is not their language. Just imagine yourself for a moment, eloquent, subtle, grammatically sophisticated creature that you are, trying to make yourself understood in a language you have never been taught. You arrive in a godforsaken village somewhere where no one speaks English and are desperate to find somewhere to sleep. All you have is a pocket dictionary. Suddenly all the layers of sophistication and refinement of your speech are unceremoniously shed. No more “would you be so kind as to tell me whether there might be anywhere in this village where I could find a room for the night?” Nothing of the sort: you stand there linguistically naked and stutter “yo dormir aqui?” “ana alnoom hoona?” or the equivalent of “me sleep here?” in whatever language you are attempting to make yourself understood in.

When one is trying to speak a foreign language without years of schooling in its grammatical nuances, there is one survival strategy that one always falls back on: strip down to the bare essentials, do away with everything but the most critical content, ignore anything that’s not crucial for getting the basic meaning across. The aborigines who try to speak English do exactly that, not because their own language has no grammar but because the sophistication of their own mother tongue is of little use when struggling with a foreign language that they have not learned properly. North American Indians, for example, whose own languages formed breathtakingly long words with a dazzling architecture of endings and prefixes, could not even cope with the one rudimentary - s ending on English verbs and would say “he come,” “she work,” and so on. And South American Indians, whose own languages often use several different past tenses to mark different degrees of anteriority, are not even able to handle the one elementary past tense of English or Spanish and say things like “he go yesterday.” Or take the Amazonian tribe whose language requires them to specify the epistemological status of events with a degree of nicety that would leave even the most quick-witted lawyer stuttering in stupefaction (more on them in the next chapter). The same people, if they tried to speak Spanish or English, would be able to use only the most rudimentary language and so would come across as gabbling inarticulates.

If we define a “primitive language” as something that resembles the rudimentary “me sleep here” type of English-a language with only a few hundred words and without the grammatical means of expressing any finer nuances-then it is a simple empirical fact that no natural language is primitive. Hundreds of languages of simple tribes have now been studied in depth, but not one of them, be it spoken by the most technologically and sartorially challenged people, is on the “me sleep here” level. So there is no question that Joe and Piers and Tom have got it wrong about “primitive people speak primitive languages.” Linguistic “technology” in the form of sophisticated grammatical structures is not a prerogative of advanced civilizations, but is found even in the languages of the most primitive hunter-gatherers. As the linguist Edward Sapir memorably put it in 1921, when it comes to the complexity of grammatical structures “Plato walks with the Macedonian swineherd, Confucius with the head-hunting savage of Assam.”

But does all this necessarily mean that linguists are right in asserting that all languages are equally complex? There is no need for an advanced course in logic to realize that the two statements “there are no primitive languages” and “all languages are equally complex” are not equivalent, and that the former does not imply the latter. Two languages can both be way above the “me sleep here” level, but one of them could still be far more complex than the other. As an analogy, think of the young pianists who are admitted to the Juilliard School. None of them will be a “primitive pianist” who can only play “Mary Had a Little Lamb” with one finger. But that does not mean they are all equally proficient. In just the same way, no language that has served for generations as the means of communication in a society can lack a certain minimum of complexity, but that does not imply that all languages are equally complex. What precludes the possibility, for instance, that languages of sophisticated civilizations might be more complex than those of simple societies? Or for that matter, how do we know that languages of advanced cultures are not perhaps less complex?

We know because linguists tell us so. And we must surely be on terra firma if the combined forces of an entire academic discipline pronounce from every available platform that something is the case. Indeed, equal complexity is often among the very first articles of faith that students read in their introductory course book. A typical example is the most popular Introduction to Language ever, the staple textbook by Victoria Fromkin and Robert Rodman on whose numerous editions generations of students in America and in other countries have been raised, ever since it first appeared in 1974. Under the auspicious title “What We Know about Language,” the first chapter explains: “Investigations of linguists date back at least to 1600 B.C.E. in Mesopotamia. We have learned a great deal since that time. A number of facts pertaining to all languages can be stated.” It then goes on to profess those twelve facts that any student should know at the outset. The first asserts that “wherever humans exist, language exists” and the second that “all languages are equally complex.”

A student with an inquiring mind might quietly wonder when and where exactly it was-during this long history of investigations since 1600 BCE-that “we have learned” that all languages are equally complex. Who was it that made this spectacular discovery? Of course, it would be unreasonable to expect an introductory textbook to go into such detail in the very first chapter, and our student is not impatient. So she reads on, fully confident that a later chapter will make good the promise-or if not a later chapter, at least a more advanced textbook. She goes through chapter after chapter, course after course, textbook after textbook, but the craved information is never supplied. The “equal complexity” tenet is repeated time and again, but nowhere is the source of this precious information divulged. Our student now begins to suspect that she must have missed something obvious along the way. Too embarrassed to expose her ignorance and admit she doesn’t know something so elementary, she continues in her frantic search.

On a few occasions, she seems to be coming within a hair’s breadth of the answer. In one book by an eminent linguist she finds that equal complexity is explicitly reported as a finding: “It is a finding of modern linguistics that all languages are roughly equal in terms of overall complexity.” Our student is thrilled. By now she is au fait with the conventions of academic writing and knows that whenever a finding, rather than just a claim or an opinion, is reported, it is an iron rule that a reference must be supplied to tell the reader where this finding was found. After all, as she has been told by her tutors countless times, the ability to back up factual claims by solid evidence is the most important principle that distinguishes academic texts from journalese or popular writing. She leaps toward the endnotes. But how strange, something must have gone wrong with the typesetting, because this particular endnote is missing.

Some months later, our student experiences another moment of elation when she finds a book that elevates the equality principle to an even higher status: “A central finding of linguistics has been that all languages, both ancient and modern, spoken by both ‘primitive’ and ‘advanced’ societies, are equally complex in their structure.” Once again she rushes toward the endnotes, but curiouser and curiouser: how could the typesetters have made the same omission yet again?

Shall we put our poor student out of her misery? She may go on searching for years without finding the reference. I for one have been looking for fifteen years and still haven’t encountered it. When it comes to the