Is That a Fish in Your Ear?

Afterbabble: In Lieu of an Epilogue

In most intellectual disciplines, the stories of the Hebrew Bible are no longer used as sources or tools for thought. Translation studies is an exception. Scholars and essayists in this field continue to pay extravagant attention to the account of the origin of linguistic diversity given in the Bible.[179] It’s far from obvious that their time is well spent.

The Tower of Babel comes from a story told in Genesis 11. The first verse states that in the beginning “the whole earth was of one language, and of one speech.”

This is not very plausible. Nothing we know or can observe about human linguistic behavior makes it likely that there ever was a single form of speech.

The rest of this section of the Bible, Genesis 11:2–9, offers an account of how the ancestors of the Jewish people got from their hypothetical state of linguistic unity to the condition of diversity that manifestly characterized the part of the world they lived in some three to four thousand years ago.

The voluminous tradition of Babel commentary weaves religious, philosophical, historical, cultural, archaeological, and philological speculations around the story told in Genesis. Do these verses contain a trace of historical events? Or should we read them rather as a fable designed to account for the way things are, or the way they were long ago? For the purposes of this book, it does not matter whether there really was a ziggurat honoring the Assyrian god Marduk near the place now called Babil (in Iraq), or whether it was visited by Herodotus, or when it fell down. For an understanding of language and translation, it doesn’t matter if or how the Bible story is related to the Sumerian Incantation of Nudimmud. Nor does it make any difference whether we pick from the welter of Babel commentaries those which assume that linguistic diversity is a Dreadful Mess (the vast majority, in fact), those that claim it has a Silver Lining, or those few who argue that it is a Very Good Thing.[180]

What matters is whether we allow Genesis 11:1 to close our minds to other ways of imagining the origin of human speech. Cynics might say that’s what religious texts are supposed to do. But translation is not a matter of faith. It’s much more interesting than that.

The supposition of an original common form of speech has been taken to mean that intercomprehensibility is the ideal or essential nature of language itself. Such an assumption makes translation a compensatory strategy designed only to cope with a state of affairs that falls short of the ideal. It licenses, indirectly but no less strongly, all the many attempts there have been to devise languages that for some if not all purposes improve upon those that we have.[181]

This contentious foundation of the Babel story acquired implicit if unintended support in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries from the scholarly work of historical linguists. They sought to group languages into “families” and to reconstruct the hypothetical progenitors of these cousin tongues, as well as the rules by which each had received its inheritance. The discovery of a family likeness among Sanskrit, Greek, Latin, and Old Persian opened a new vista into the past, toward a single source for a whole spectrum of languages spoken between northern India and the Atlantic Ocean.

These exciting advances made it easy to see the historical derivation of modern languages like a cascade trickling down the mountainside of time, branching out into streams and rivers. At the now inaccessible top of the hill, there must have been a single source—Proto-Indo-European, for the great family that joins the languages of northern India to many of those of the West; and, at an even more remote altitude, Nostratic, the supposed ancestor of Indo-European and other language groups of Europe and Asia; and, high above that, “proto-World,” the language of ante-Babel, the original and unitary human tongue.

Some saw the underlying meaning of linguistic change and diversification through spectacles borrowed from Darwinism. For them, the growth in complexity from single-cell life forms to the magnificent machinery of humankind served as a model for understanding the “evolution of language,” from the rough-and-ready speech of hunter-gatherers to the refinements of the Académie Française. Others saw language change as a perpetual fall from the economy and mystery of the ancient tongues to the confusing multiplicity you can hear in the street. But behind these scholarly (and often schoolmasterly) pursuits lay a single barely questioned assumption—that all languages are, at bottom, the same kind of thing, because, at the start, they were the same thing. In fact, there was rather better evidence of the contrary. The Babel story may say that in the beginning all language was one—but what it shows is that, for a single people in the third or second millennium B.C.E., linguistic diversity was a major fact of life.

However, if we accept the proposition that all languages are instances of the same kind of thing, we have to ask: What is it that makes them the same? The most influential answer to this question in the twentieth century has been: a grammar.

The idea that a grammar is the common property of all human languages looks like a hypothesis—something you could test against data, then either abandon or refine. But that’s not the main way in which it has actually been used. Characteristically, the “grammaticality hypothesis” is an axiom, a circular foundation stone. The axiom “explains” why animal and mechanical signaling systems are not languages. Since traffic lights and the barking of dogs seem to have either no discernible rules of combination or no ability to create new combinations, they have no grammar, and because all languages have a grammar in order to count as languages, dog barking and traffic lights are not languages. QED.

In a similarly circular way, the axiom of grammaticality pushes to the edge of language study all those uses of human vocal noises—ums, hums, screams, giggles, mumbles, stammers, exclamations, and interjections, alongside ellipses, nonsense words, gargles, cooing, baby talk, pillow talk, and so forth—that don’t decompose neatly into nouns, verbs, and periods.

Even leaving out the whole range of “ungrammatical” and “nonlinguistic” uses of vocal sounds, the variability and range of the things that the grammars of actual languages regulate make it very hard to see what it can mean to say that a grammar is what all languages have in common. Inevitably, it prompts a second question: What is it that all grammars have in common?

It is hard to find an existing grammatical category that is common to all forms of human speech. Many languages do without determiners such as a and the (Russian and Chinese, for example). Many languages do without gender (in Finnish there is no distinction among “he,” “she,” and “it”). Numerous major and minor languages in the world do not mark number (Chinese, again, has no special form for dual or plural). It’s fairly obvious that you don’t really need adjectives—even in English, you can use “tomato” or “beetroot” if you want to call something red; prefixes allow you to distinguish between big and small versions of the same thing (English minibus, French hypermarché), just as suffixes do in Italian (uomaccio, “big man”), Latin (homunculus, little man) and Russian (левчик, “little lion”). The Argentinean wit Jorge Luis Borges thought up a language without nouns—where verbs and adverbs sufficed for all expressions. “It moons bluely” is all you would need to refer to the presence of a blue-tinted moon in the sky. Aspect is only properly grammaticalized in some languages (Russian, for example), and tense is clearly redundant even in languages that have it. “I go to Paris tomorrow” is perfectly good English, just as Napoléon entre dans Moscou en août 1812 is normal French, with the explicit expressions of time (“tomorrow,” “1812”) making the grammatical marking of time unnecessary. Only some languages have evidentials; vast numbers of them have no prepositions and many others have no agglutinations. The concept of case is virtually absent from English (it subsists in the distinction we still make between he and him, she and her—and that’s about it) and totally alien to Chinese.

And so it goes on. Mood is not part of English grammar (we use separate words, such as may, should, ought, and so forth), but it provides Albanian with an elaborate set of resources for expressing all sorts of affective qualities, including admiration. Vowel harmony is a basic feature of Hungarian: you say a moz-iba if you went to the movies, but az étterembe if you went to the restaurant, because the “o” and “i” sounds of the first require the suffix -ba to match them, and the “é” and “e” sounds of the second call for the suffix to be -be. Nothing like that happens in the vast majority of the world’s languages.

The hunt for what all grammars share—“Universal Grammar”—has been going on for a long while, and has got about as far as the search for the Holy Grail.[182] However, at one level, the answer is obvious, because it is definitional: all grammars regulate the ways in which free items may be combined to make an acceptable sentence.

The trouble with that is obvious: “sentence” is a grammatical concept to begin with. Sentencehood is not an observable quality of acts of natural speech. It’s not just in the poetry of Mallarmé that we have difficulty in knowing where to put the period. Just listen to your children! They never finish their sentences properly.

It is true that we can make sentences in any human language. But it is just as true that most of our actual uses of speech do not involve anything that looks much like a grammatical sentence. When we write, of course, we usually try to write in sentences. But not always.

The second major problem with the axiom of grammaticality—with the idea that what makes a language a language is its having a grammar—is that no living language has yet been given a grammar that accounts for absolutely all of the expressions (including sentences) that are uttered by speakers of that language. The “grammar of English”—or any other language—has not yet been completed, and it’s a fair guess that it will always remain a work in progress.

Flaws of this magnitude in aerodynamics or the theory of probability would not have allowed the Wright brothers to get off the ground, or Las Vegas resorts to turn a profit.

The Achilles’ heel of a linguistic theory that places grammar at its core could be put like this: since universal grammar remains elusive and no exhaustive grammar of any single form of speech has yet been devised, every speaking subject on this planet knows something that grammar does not.

So let us put the Bible story and school-learned wisdom aside. Let us also suppose that there is something about every form of human behavior that we recognize as a language that all languages have in common. What is it? What is it that unambiguously identifies some set of sounds made by humans as a language?

It’s a huge question, and it’s hard to know where to begin. But let us try to do so without any presuppositions. One of the first things we can easily observe has to do with our hands.

There is no form of language in the world that is ever spoken aloud without accompanying hand movements. Indeed, the greater the effort of concentration on live speech, the more the speaker needs to move his or her hands. Try watching the conference interpreters behind their glass screens in Luxembourg or Geneva. Although absolutely nobody is supposed to be looking at them, all of them—whether they are speaking German, Estonian, Arabic, or Dutch—gesticulate wildly, simply in order to keep the flow of speech up to speed. Hand movement is a profound, unconscious, inseparable part of natural speech.

We could therefore start from the reliable and repeatable observation that natural speech is a partly but obligatorily manual activity.[183] Here’s an obvious exception that proves the rule. In most languages, television newscasters do not gesticulate at all but keep their hands on or under the desk, or use them just to shuffle the papers in front of them. That is because they are only pretending to talk to you. What they are actually doing is reading words written on the teleprompter screen. Similarly, a lecturer who moves his hands is almost certainly ad-libbing—actually talking to you, in the forms of natural speech. One who is reading written lecture notes aloud characteristically keeps his hands to his side or on the desk. Speaking is not the same thing as reading aloud from written text.

Conversely, delicate fingerwork of a nonlinguistic kind almost always prompts movement of the lips. Have you watched anyone threading a needle? Few people can do it without pursing or twisting their mouths.

What links hand and mouth? The most obvious connection is feeding. The hand—of humans, but also of many other primates—is used to take food to the mouth, which is also the organ of speech.

Eating and speaking are two separate activities that have a great deal in common. They both involve hand and mouth. Moreover, they use almost all of the same muscles. That is perhaps why trying to do both at the same time is regarded as uncouth. For infants and young children, whose muscular control is not yet fully developed, it can also be quite dangerous.

Speaking can be seen in this light as a parasitic use of organs whose primary function is to ensure survival. But what, then, was the original function of this wonderful, additional, alternative use of lips and tongue and of the muscles that control breathing and swallowing? In what way did it correlate with other uses of hands and arms?

There are considerable variations in the communicative force of hand and arm use among different cultures and communities, but they are not nearly as extensive as the bewildering range of different sounds, words, and grammatical structures among the languages of the world. A slap on the back, a shrug of the shoulders, and a punch in the gut don’t have exactly the same meaning the world over, but they are far more “transportable” than any word or sound I can make. Even a cry for help, a burst of laughter, or a squeal of pain is less intercomprehensible between different language cultures than a touch on your arm.

Articulated language, however and whenever it emerged, in one group of our ancestors or among many, added a communicative channel that was radically different from hand use. It was far less transportable than the resources available up to that point. That is likely to have been the reason it caught on.

In most domains of life we are well aware that what a thing was invented for and what is actually done with it bear no necessary relationship to each other. The umbrella may have been designed to protect us from the rain, but on one notorious occasion one such device was used to assassinate a dissident on Waterloo Bridge. Matchsticks owe their existence to a wish to make ignition widely and cheaply available, but they are also very serviceable toothpicks. What a thing is “for” and what it can be used to do must be kept apart. It is very odd that almost no serious thinking about language and translation has ever bothered to observe this basic rule.

The plain fact of linguistic diversity suggests very strongly that speech did not arise in order to communicate with members of other groups of like beings. If that is what it was for, our ancestors got it badly wrong. They should have dropped it on the spot.

Similarly, there is no particular reason to think that language first arose in order to allow members of the same group to communicate with one another. They did that already—with their hands, arms, bodies, and faces. Many species clearly do. You can watch them at it in the zoo.

“Communication” is what we think we do when we speak or write, largely because that is what we have been taught at school. But when we watch and listen to humans “behaving linguistically,” as spectators at the human zoo, what we see and hear is something altogether different.

Like other uses of lips and hands, such as smiling, stroking, pouting, and punching, vocal noise establishes bonds between people who need or wish to be linked together in some way—for mutual support, to establish rank, or to declare hostility, for example. From that perspective, the babysitter who coos at an infant in a crib is performing a language act of the same general kind as the ambitious student who greets me with a rising tone on the last syllable of “Good morning, sir.” If these acts are communicative, then we must redefine communication not as the transmission of mental states from A to B (and even less as the transmission of “information”) but as the establishment, reinforcement, and modification of immediate interpersonal relations. But it would be better to say: that’s not communication, that’s language. Language is a human way of relating to other humans.

Among the larger primates such functions are carried out through the much studied practice of grooming. Grooming bonds mother and child, it bonds males in hierarchical rank (the “pecking order”), it establishes bonds between males and females prior to copulation, and it generally binds together the entire clan or group of cohabiting animals. But it is a time-consuming business. There is a point of population growth where it can’t easily serve its purpose anymore. Robin Dunbar has suggested that a group of fifty-five animals is just about as large as a grooming-based community can get before it has to split up. When it does, no cross-grooming is possible: you belong to either the old group or the new one. You do not pick fleas off the fur of chimps that are not of “your kind.”[184]

There is a striking fit between this picture of social construction among primates and the way people actually talk. Articulated language allows the group size to increase greatly but not infinitely. The way any individual talks is part of his identity as a member of a specific community, defined by region, area, city, maybe even street, and certainly by clan or family. What’s called dialectal variation, which is just another aspect of linguistic diversity, performs a similar structuring function to the grooming habits of chimpanzees. To put this broad understanding in a nutshell: language is ethnicity.

Ethnicity in this sense has nothing to do with lineage, heredity, race, blood group, or DNA. It means how a social group constitutes and identifies itself.

The bewildering variety of diction that can be heard among the inhabitants of the British Isles gives a spectacular demonstration of the fine-grained group-membership function of the way people speak. Different sounds are used to communicate membership of communities based in Essex, Norfolk, the three Rid-ings of Yorkshire, Newcastle, Edinburgh, Aberdeen, Orkney, Shetland, Lewis, Glasgow, Liverpool, Manchester, Birmingham, North Wales, South Wales, Somerset, Scilly, Solent, and Kent, and in addition, the diction of London, now called Estuarine, is audibly divided in two, depending on whether you live on the north or south bank of the Thames’s muddy maw. On top of this, specific phonologies override or else merge with these regional markers to locate the speaker in the pecking order of British society, from the “Mayfairditsch” of wealth and privilege to the related but not identical speech of those educated at private schools (called public schools), public schools (called grammar schools), and the rest. Some, of course, learn to speak not from their classmates but from listening to the BBC (which I think must have been the case for me) and signal thereby their allegiance to an idea of “educated speech” as the dialect of (cultural) authority. In Britain, you just can’t escape the messages about region and class that come from anyone who opens his or her mouth.

In the musical My Fair Lady, based on G. B. Shaw’s stage play Pygmalion, which itself rewrites a far more ancient myth, Professor Higgins asks, “Oh! why can’t the English teach their children how to speak?” We must answer, Oh! but they do, Professor Higgins. They teach them to declare themselves to be Geordies and Aberdonians, Etonians and lads on the Clapham omnibus, ladies from Morningside or fishermen from Newquay. If you are British, you just can’t not notice. Alongside its role as a planetary interlanguage in print, English speech—like any other—is a highly pixelated way of telling people who you are.

That is something that all forms of human speech share, and it is perhaps the only thing that is truly universal about language. Every language tells your listener who you are, where you come from, where you belong. Linguistic diversity, including the subtle differentiation in diction within intercomprehensible forms of speech, is the mechanism by which this primordial social function is performed.

The differential function of speech goes even further than that. No two individuals make exactly the same sounds, even when they are speaking the same local variant of a language. All my mother-in-law ever needed to say when she rang was Allo! C’est moi! A waste of breath, I would think every time. But the unreflecting purpose of her phatic expression was only partly to “establish the channel.” What it did was confirm an interpersonal relationship based on the irreducible difference between her and me. Every act of speech does just that—whatever you say.

Individual diction and forms of speech do not vary because they need to for any physical, intellectual, or practical reasons—impersonators demonstrate that it is possible to adopt the voiceprint of someone else if you train yourself hard enough. Individual speech varies because one of the fundamental and perhaps original purposes of speaking is to serve as a differentiating tool—not only to differentiate where you come from, what rank and clan and/or street gang you belong to, but to say “I am not you but me.”

Babel tells the wrong story. The most likely original use of human speech was to be different, not the same.

In parts of the world that are sparsely populated and where travel is made perilous by physical obstacles—high mountains, waterless deserts, or thick jungle—linguistic diversity is extremely high. That is because the various indigenous communities of Papua New Guinea, the great Australian plains, and the Amazon basin do not often come into contact with one another. Even in a wealthy country such as Switzerland, the physical obstacles to contact between its many high valleys over the centuries have left their mark in the continued cohabitation of four main languages. But in other parts of the world where geography is more conducive to travel, and thus to contact, interchange, trade, and war, linguistic diversity is much reduced. Languages merge when people do.

Let us therefore abandon the old image of linguistic diversity as a picture of rivulets splitting and dividing as they course down the mountainside from a single glacier tip. We should see it rather as the always provisional result of a multiplicity of springs, wells, ponds, and snowmelts furrowing down into valleys to meet and merge in broader, deeper rivers. English is once again a fairly extreme example—its identifiable sources include the Germanic language of the Angles and Saxons, the French learned by the Norman soldiers who overran the island in 1066, together with ample helpings of Latin, a dash of Danish, a sprinkling of Celtic, and bits and bobs from at least a hundred languages around the world. Just at the moment it seems to be bursting its already wide banks and spilling into many other streams. But it’s not really anything to worry about. There is no greater likelihood of all languages being gobbled up by English than of the Amazon and the Volga flowing into the same sea. In any case, as we have seen, the primordial mechanism of linguistic differentiation makes English no less a tool for marking difference than any other tongue.

It follows from this that translation does not come “After Babel.” It comes when some human group has the bright idea that the kids on the next block or the people on the other side of the hill might be worth talking to. Translating is a first step toward civilization.

Hundreds of thousands, maybe millions of years elapsed between the emergence of speech sounds to perform the social bonding functions of grooming and the invention of alphabetic script. In the course of that forever-hidden eon, human communities found that they could do vastly more things with speech than just keep their families, clans, and tribes in good order.

Translation deals with most of those other things. It does not and cannot attempt to perform or mimic or replicate the interpersonal functions of human speech. As we noted in an earlier chapter, translators do not match dialect for dialect when translating between established languages. “Hallo, darling,” “Howzitgaun?” and “Wotcha, mate” are forms of greeting that declare the speaker to be, respectively, a fashionista, a Glaswegian, and a Londoner. They may serve as translations of bonjour, monsieur, but the task they perform, involuntarily and obligatorily, is to claim membership of that community and not any other. It makes no sense to imagine transporting the ethnic, self-identifying dimension of any utterance. Absolutely any other formulation of the expression, in the same or any other dialect or language, constructs a different identity.

If you’re looking for the ineffable, stop here. It’s blindingly obvious. It’s not poetry but community that is lost in translation. The community-building role of actual language use is simply not part of what translation does.

But translation does almost everything else. It is translation, more than speech itself, that provides incontrovertible evidence of the human capacity to think and to communicate thought.

We should do more of it.