Go to,
let us go down, and there confound their language, that they may not understand
one another's speech. So the Lord scattered them abroad from thence upon the
face of all the earth: and they left off to build the city. Therefore is
the name of it called Babel; because the Lord did there confound the language
of all the earth: and from thence did the Lord scatter them abroad upon the
face of all the earth. (Genesis 11:7-9)
Does a universal grammar, hardwired into
the brain, point to a single Designer of that brain?
Language, argues Steven Pinker in The
Language Instinct: How the Mind Creates Language, is an instinct. At
first blush, an assertion like that seems unremarkable. After all, what
could be more human, more a common denominator of the Homo sapiens experience,
than our capacity to speak with one another?
That said, however, we tend to behave as
if language is a learned, rather than an instinctual, capacity for
humans. After all, scores upon scores of English teachers have battled
the tendency of boorish youth to wantonly split infinitives, even while
bemoaning their parents' love of "lite" products and use of imaginary
adverbials like "irregardless." If language is an untaught
instinct, then why must so much energy be put into teaching it?
Pinker's claim not only flies in the face
of well-known pedagogical struggles, it calls to task major trends in
sociological and academic philosophies. Pinker asserts that language, in
its essence, is a biological (or, more precisely, neurological) device that has
evolved as a selected-for trait of the human race. No anti-absolutist
philosophy -- be it post-modernism, social constructionism, or Margaret Meade's
anthropological relativism -- can change that meaty fact. The
brain is hardwired for language, and it is hardwired in an absolute way,
universal to all cultures, ethnicities, and races.
That's a bold claim to make in a society
that has trouble believing that the brain and the mind are the same thing, and
Pinker invests considerable time explaining and defending his thesis.
Several arguments represent the most convincing elements of his Language Is
Hardwired argument (these categories are mine rather than Pinker's):
- Ease of acquisition: Infants
absorb and manipulate language with breathtaking speed. Given very
little instruction (what linguists call a "poverty of input"), a
child is soon able to manipulate and create an endless number of sentences
-- potentially infinite output from finite input, yet another nail in the
coffin of classical behaviorism. After several years of initial
mastery, a child does little more than polish the results of language
acquisition -- usually a matter of adapting to the irregular forms that
violate the base grammar of a tongue (e.g., replacing the logical
"Mommy comed home!" with the correct but problematic "Mommy
came home.")
- Ease of codification: Children
of language-deprived adult communities -- for example, the deaf children
of speaking parents who, without additional input, quickly surpass and
improve their parents' halting attempts at sign language, as well as the
second-generation speakers of a pidgin who immediately transform it into a
more complex creole -- demonstrate that the minds of children are not the
proverbial "blank slate," but are instead operating with an
instinctive grammar "hard-wired" into their brains.
- Universality of complexity: Despite
the misconceptions of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century academics working
for colonial empires, there is no such thing as a "primitive"
language, neither in existence now nor found in ancient writings.
Today's most technologically primitive cultures employ grammars that rival
the grace, subtlety, and at times gross irregularity of Cicero's Latin and
King James's English. If there ever was a prehistoric
"primitive" tongue, its evolution was complete long before
ancient man put cuneiform to clay.
- Universal conformity of grammar: Among
disparate languages, words vary greatly; grammar does not. While
cultural relativists offer many claims about concepts that "simply
can't be thought" by speakers of different languages, close
examination reveals that all examples -- from the mythical nine (or twenty
[or forty-four]) words Inuit peoples have for snow, to the Whorfian hoax
that Hopi Indians have no concept of time -- are little more than the
academic equivalents of urban legends. True, grammars vary language
to language, but they vary in macrological and predictable ways.
Subjects, verbs, and objects jockey for position, but always establish a
predictable sequence, and are comfortably comprehensible to humans thanks
to their relative proximity.
The last point above is of the utmost
importance to Pinker's thesis, so I will discuss it further. Hang in
there with me as I get all thinkish and complexy and stuff:
To say that all human grammars have
proximate subjects, verbals, and, when needed, objects sounds facile and
trite. It is the very triteness of the assertion that supports Pinker's
point that a human grammar is universal. The brain demands the elements
mentioned above, and it further demands that the concepts represented by
language carry an element of term proximity for complete
comprehensibility. I can't set a subject pronoun eight phrases away from
the verb it brings to life. I can't list all objects at the end of my
conversation, relying on earlier word order to clarify which actions occurred
with which verbs. However, I can easily imagine a grammar -- a nonhuman
grammar, "tongues of angels," if you will -- that handles our most
common elements differently. Consider the following human passage:
In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth. And
the earth was without form, and void; and darkness was upon the face of the
deep. And the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters.
Suppose that I need to translate that
passage for the alien Living Beings -- a race of principalities with a brain
grammar favoring concrete Actors addressing concrete Recipients, followed
immediately by Indirect Recipients, clustering peripheral conjunctives and
prepositions (let's call them "itty bits") for convenience before
climatically resolving a series of four -- and ONLY four, per Ezekiel 1:4-22 --
ideas, serving up four crucial verbs. In addition, before the verbs, the
Living Beings race must insert a vocative or interjection to establish what
mood the coming verbs ought to inspire in the listener; if no mood is intended,
a simple one-word blessing of their Hive King is inserted as a placeholder.
God earth darkness Spirit (of God)! Heaven + earth
beginning, form/void - face (of the deep) - face (of the waters). And (4x) the
(5x) in (1x). Ominous! Created & was without &
was upon & moved upon!
Any protest that a language of that sort
is incomprehensible is further evidence of Pinker's point -- the structure is
nonhuman. No human language would cluster ideas into groups of four,
extract all verbs for a terminal "action quartet cluster," and
establish a hierarchy of concrete nouns while treating all lesser connectors as
simply inferential to meaning. But the language is not illogical -- it's
simply nonhuman, following a pattern that doesn't feel like language to your
brain or mine. Is it an issue of complexity? Not likely. My
alien Living Being rendering of Genesis 1:1-2 is no more complex than any other
4+ idea sentence, such as the one I create below:
Upon learning that the Archduke of the southernmost conquered
fiefdoms (whose sister had had a scandalous affair with the red-haired scullery
maid's addled cousin) had adopted the religion of the Musselmen, Nikolai
foreswore his alliance with the Nordic raiders -- oh may they be forever
damned! -- and fell to his knees chanting "Allahu akbar!"
The sentence is cumbersome, but completely
intelligible if you read it slowly. A human brain has no questions about
what Nikolai foreswore, who has red hair, whose knees were being used, who was
addled, what was southernmost, and what aspect of the Musselmen was being
adopted by the Archduke. The complexity of the sentence would cause
little more than an eye roll in humans; an alien Living Being, however, might
very well bleed from all four of its ears when attempting to sort this potpourri
of promiscuously intermingled Actors, Recipients, Indirect Recipients, Itty
Bits, and Actions. The sentence simply doesn't conform to the evolved
brain structures of the Living Being race, and even a Star Trek universal
translator would need a new software suite to do its job.
So where is the "organ" of
language in the human brain? The answer is: we linguists aren't
positive. We have definite indications of where particular language
functions reside, thanks to early studies of brain lesions and their impact on
language, and thanks to modern fMRI, PET, and CAT scan techniques that can
track brain/blood activity tied to specific language actions. Language is
located in the left hemisphere of the brain, even in most left-handed humans.
The area is known as the perisylvian region of the cortex, and it contains the
better-known language spots called Broca's and Wernike's areas. Stroke
damage to Broca's area tends to lead to a breakdown in grammatical flow,
although isolated vocabulary words can be uttered to convey meaning,
painstakingly. Stroke damage to Wernike's area tends to have the opposite
effect, allowing a flow of flawlessly grammatical nonsense words akin to lines
from Lewis Carroll's Jabberwocky. The separate storage of
grammatical rules and vocabulary terms is of particular interest when
considered in light of Noam Chomsky's hypothesis of a Universal Grammar that is
the central processor used to execute language-specific vocabulary terms.
Also interesting -- and like the above
neurolinguistics summary, also in developmental infancy -- are hypotheses tying
grammatical performance to genetic triggers. Ongoing studies of
Specific Language Impairment (SLI) have revealed evidence of family-based and
heritable grammar deficiency -- not the grammar errors haunting the English
teachers mentioned above, but core inabilities to grasp language constructs
accessible to even the youngest human speakers of language (e.g., the referent
of a relative clause). The hunt is on -- not for any so-called
"grammar gene," as simplified mass media reports have put it, but for
a sequence of genetic codons that instructs a developing embryo to create
specific proteins, which in turn act as building blocks to specific parts of
the developing human brain.
Does the sheer complexity of language and
its unlearned neurological basis provide absolute proof for a Designer of
brains and tongues? Obviously not. What this discussion does
provide, however, is one more tool for those arguing against a "complexity
arose from chaos" mentality, as well as insights to use in the endless
debate against post-modernist relativism. It's likely we will never find
any smoking-gun evidence of a Creator -- for what is faith, except belief
despite the absence of absolute evidence? But consideration of the sheer
complexity of all aspects of creation continues to build the confidence of
those who have come to accept that there is more to heaven and earth than can
be dreamed up in Creator-free philosophies.
Marana
Tha,
Cosmic
Parx
