The limits of my language mean the limits of my world
— Ludwig Wittgenstein
I remember our classics teacher saying that in sixth form. I think he was admonishing someone, in his usual, understated way, for using expletives instead of adjectives. It was only decades later that I learned that the source of the quote wasn’t some long-dead Roman but a more recently dead Austrian.
Our experience of the world, of course, goes well beyond what we can put into words. But then language doesn’t necessarily mean words. It’s just a way of representing the world we inhabit (a “symbolic system”) — so the association of red with danger, or the wagging of a dog’s tail (to the extent that it’s meaningful to a second dog), is in some sense language.
But let’s stick with words. Can you imagine something you can’t describe? A smell, probably yes; but an idea?
The other fun thing about language is that the listener (or reader) isn’t just a passive bystander: you, too, play an active role in constructing meaning. (Anyone who’s had a spiralling misunderstanding with their spouse knows this well.) The whole edifice of human culture is founded on shared experience and shared learning. If there’s no second dog, it’s just muscle movement. Perhaps that’s also why we share so much less of our experience of the sensory realm we can’t describe well — smells, tastes, sensations — than the tactile and conceptual domains that we have learned to put into words?
Even the concrete objects that populate our world gain their meaning through language. ‘Wood', for example, is distinct from ‘tree’ only because of human cultural uses of it — a distinction realised in the word we assign it. That may seem trite, but there is evidence that the way we describe the world affects the way we perceive it. Russian doesn’t have a single word for ‘blue’: it has separate words for what we’d call ‘light blue’ (goluboy) and ‘dark blue’ (siniy). And, it turns out, Russians are better at distinguishing goluboy from siniy than English speakers are light from dark. This suggests a reciprocal relationship between what we can describe, and what we notice.
*
What we notice and describe has a degree of evolutionary inevitability to it — but also something tantalisingly arbitrary. The world each culture creates is a little different. There’s nothing inherently right about any of it, just a rightness-of-fit with that particular worldview.
Learning another language is not only learning different words for the same things, but learning another way to think about things
— Flora Lewis
We sometimes import words because a different language has encapsulated a concept or sentiment that our own lacks. Chinese, apparently, has only recently imported a word for (presumably in tandem with the concept of) ‘romance’. There’s no direct English cognate for saudade, nor for Schadenfreude.
Similarly, the boundaries and connotations of a particular word often differ subtly between languages — reflecting differing assumptions about the world. The Spanish verb esperar traverses the range of ‘hope’, ‘expect’ and ‘wait’ — frustratingly imprecise for an Anglophone, but appropriate to a culture less confident in its ability to control the future. Every language has an elegance all its own. Even an apparent vagary expresses a truth we might otherwise overlook.
JRR Tolkien noted that a culture cannot survive without the language through which it is expressed. Without the language, the coherence of the accompanying system of meaning and thought is lost. English, for example, is capable of only an awkward rendering of mauri — understanding the concept relies on an understanding of its cultural substrate, and that substrate exists in the language. When we lose languages, we really do lose whole worlds.
For though cultural and other traditions may accompany a difference of language, they are chiefly maintained and preserved by language. ... No people in fact comes into being until it speaks a language of its own; let the languages perish and the peoples perish too, or become different peoples.
— JRR Tolkien
*
This is not to say that we should cling doggedly to old forms. Precisely because it is a product of culture, language responds to how we construe the world. It evolves, and always has.
Spanish evolved from Latin: mercifully it dropped the complicated case endings along the way (amicus, amici, amico, amicum). Similarly, English verbs have “weakened” — basically a linguist’s way of saying we’ve become more consistent in how we express the past. We still have some “strong verbs” — come (came), strive (strove), lie (lay) — early English was littered with them: crope (now ‘crept'), holp (now ‘helped’), sod (now ’seethed’). Occasionally, you can spot the traces of a lost strong past, as in ‘molten’ (from ‘melt’).
Grammar and spelling matter to the extent that they enable us to understand each other. They are agreed conventions without which we wouldn’t have one English language that’s (mostly) intelligible from Alberta to Adelaide, from Aberdeen to Auckland. Nor would we have any hope of reading Shakespeare four hundred years after his death.
The invention of the printing press played a large part in standardising and stabilising European languages. By the mid-seventeenth century, English-language printed books followed essentially the same rules of spelling we use today (handwritten documents took longer to settle). At the time, this involved innovations that were not always welcome: the (English) printers of the Welsh Bible famously swapped ‘c’ for ‘k’, because "the printers have not so many as the Welsh requireth". While the faithful may have seethed (or ‘sodden’), /k/ sounds in Welsh today are uniformly represented by the letter ‘c’ — whether in caws, cwm, or cefnen.
Even as the printing press was anchoring orthography, spoken English was undergoing a radical change in pronunciation, known as the Great Vowel Shift. Shakespeare was able — just — to rhyme ‘crave’ with ‘have’ and ‘swear’ with ‘fear’. So there is a logic to the apparent arbitrariness of English spelling. It’s just a rather anachronistic logic.
Spanish, French, German and Dutch, by contrast, have undergone semi-regular revisions to their linguistic conventions. These are facilitated by the existence of government authorities to oversee the development of each language. The English-speaking world has been more laissez-faire in its approach: perhaps the defining difference between British and Continental thought since the Enlightenment. Never mind that the word itself is French.
Whether or not your language happens to have an Académie Française or a Real Academia Española to determine questions of orthographic propriety, the horrifying thing for the grammatical purist is this: if enough people pick up a bad habit, it eventually becomes correct. It's happening all the time, often without us noticing. Modern English speakers pepper their sentences with superfluous verbs: we’ve come to prefer "what do you say”, even though "what say you" would serve perfectly well — and did for centuries.
Neologisms, though, are necessary. They not only keep the language current (describing new technology or new concepts, for example), they keep it vibrant. To come back to the Baird for a final time: we owe him words and turns of phrase as common as ‘droplet’, ‘bedroom’, and ’fair play’; as evocative as ‘swagger’ or wearing one’s ‘heart on one’s sleeve’. The notion of the ‘mind’s eye’ and the ‘foregone conclusion’. How much poorer we’d be without them.
*
We take language for granted; maybe back in the day when it took time to craft letters (and wait for replies), we treasured our words more. We should pause to savour them now and again. Not because grammar especially matters or because texting is sending our spelling to pot, but because how we describe the world is a reflection of who we are. Beautiful, fascinating, and at times a little bit weird.