The Miracle of Human Language

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