Noam Chomsky versus Daniel Everett, it is a literary spat with a difference: they specialise in language. Chomsky is the high priest of modern linguistics, progenitor of ‘universal grammar’. Everett has spent 30 years among remote Amazonian tribes and concludes that language is learned. He says that it is unique to a specific culture, which means that human cultures may be totally unknown to each other.
There is a Wauvian flavour to Everett’s experience. He sailed up the Amazon both as an anthropologist in search of subjects and as a missionary in search of converts. He lived among the Pirahã and slowly learned their language. But he did not learn all of their customs, nor them his. Everett translated St. Mark’s gospel into Pirahã and began to preach. But his audience was nonplussed. The Word flowed, but there was no meaning. It was just words. To be understood, Everett would have to understand how the Pirahã gave meaning to the world around them. Why, for example, do they not differentiate between green and blue? And what does that seemingly illogical fact denote? For Everett, it implied that there was no ‘universal grammar’.
Everett and Chomsky have been at each other’s throats for 5 years, aided and abetted by their disciples, of whom Chomsky’s are more numerous. But the publication of Everett’s (allegedly) accessible book, Language: The Cultural Tool, has driven this debate into the mainstream.
Bryan Appleyard wrote in the Sunday Times (£): ‘This book is an assembly of empirical evidence against Chomsky and Pinker. Children, for example, do not learn syntax as such, they learn words and sentences as units of meaning. This gives them a feeling for sentences, which becomes, in adult terms, syntax. Similarly, there is no universal grammar that can be detected beneath all the 7,000 languages in the world. The variety is as bewildering in languages as it is in forms of behaviour, because languages are tools of the culture from which they spring; they are, in a sense, the greatest works of art that humans have ever created.’
While Tim Radford was more sceptical: ‘This, however, is not an argument in which the rest of us stand much chance of judging which side is right. Everett is the western maestro of Pirahã: what we know about the language is what he tells us, and what he tells us is so strange that some linguists have even asked if he might not be the victim of some sustained Borgesian prank (it wouldn’t be the first time that an isolated community with an advanced sense of humour had deadpanned a visiting anthropologist).’
Everett is just the first page of dictionary. An enormous number of books about language have been published recently. Stanley Wells has reviewed three of them in the TLS. He joins the chorus of praise for Sam Leith’s history of rhetoric, You Talking to Me? And he observes that Kenneth Goldsmith’s account of an artist’s dependence on intellectual theft is itself theft. Finally, Wells tackles Christopher Johnson’s Microstyle, which argues that we need a ‘new rhetoric for the web age’. Wells points out that a new language is emerging thanks to Twitter and the like, one which encourages the reader to extrapolate from the sum of 140 characters. It’s an observation that chimes with David Crystal’s view that Twitter is ‘a sophisticated medium’, rather than the monster feared by a reactionary public.
These are old questions, renewed by technological novelty. In the 1710s, Addison and Swift complained of the fashion for ‘barbarous abbreviations’, but this barbarism is much older: IOU, for instance, dates from 1618. As for audiences not comprehending the Gospels, look no further than the Acts (and deaths) of the Apostles. The remnants of the Old Testament world struggled to grasp the meaning of ‘turn the other cheek’ — and we’re still struggling, never mind the Pirahã. Jonathan Miller and John Cleese have it about right: language is laughably difficult to understand.
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