From tpeterpark@erols.com Mon Jul 31 10:16:15 2000 Return-Path: Received: (qmail 3997 invoked from network); 31 Jul 2000 17:16:15 -0000 Received: from unknown (10.1.10.142) by m1.onelist.org with QMQP; 31 Jul 2000 17:16:15 -0000 Received: from unknown (HELO smtp02.mrf.mail.rcn.net) (207.172.4.61) by mta1 with SMTP; 31 Jul 2000 17:16:15 -0000 Received: from 216-164-253-100.s100.tnt6.nyw.ny.dialup.rcn.com ([216.164.253.100] helo=umktgghc) by smtp02.mrf.mail.rcn.net with smtp (Exim 3.15 #2) id 13JJAi-0007MZ-00; Mon, 31 Jul 2000 13:16:12 -0400 Message-ID: <3985B3EE.6AD6@erols.com> Date: Mon, 31 Jul 2000 13:14:22 -0400 Reply-To: tpeterpark@erols.com X-Mailer: Mozilla 3.01C-DH397 (Win95; I) MIME-Version: 1.0 To: lojban@egroups.com Cc: cbrooks@pilot.infi.net, lojbab@lojban.org, wbrenner@odu.edu, tneill13@aol.com, RobertD325@aol.com, gledbet@tfn.net, RAllaire@aol.com, oldocjk_a@yahoo.com Subject: Beyond Whorf: "things," "qualities," and the origin of nouns and adjectives Content-Type: text/plain; charset=iso-8859-1 Content-Transfer-Encoding: 8bit From: "T. Peter Park" X-Yahoo-Message-Num: 3764 ju'i lobyppli! Coi! i mi du la tipitr park! i mi du lo cnino ke lojban@egroups.com cmima (for non-Lojbanists: "Attention, Lojban users! Hello! I'm T. Peter Park, and I'm a new lojban@egroups.com list member"). One aim of the development of Lojban and its predecessor Loglan was to test the validity of the Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis, or doctrine of linguistic relativity, developed by American linguists Benjamin Lee Whorf (1897-1941) and Edward Sapir (1884-1939). The Sapir-Whorf hypothesis claims that the structure of a language conditions the ways in which a speaker of that language thinks, so that the structures of different languages lead their speakers to view the world in different ways. Some of us are also probably familiar with the similar or related claim of writers like Whorf, philosophers Bertrand Russell and A.J. Ayer, semanticists Alfred Korzybski, C.K. Ogden, and S.I. Hayakawa, and anthropologist Weston LaBarre that the concepts and categories of traditional Western philosophy, from Plato and Aristotle to Descartes, Locke, Kant, and Hegel, are simply the projection of the grammatical patterns of Indo-European languages like Greek, Latin, English, French, and German on the Universe. Thus, universals or Platonic Ideas like Truth, Beauty, Goodness, Justice, and Man are said to simply reflect the fact that Indo-European languages possess common and abstract nouns. The bifurcation of the world into Things or Substances versus Qualities or Attributes is explained as simply reflecting the grammatical distinction of nouns and adjectives. Whorf devoted many of his essays to describing in detail the differences between the basic English and Hopi metaphysical world pictures by a detailed comparison of the respective grammatical structures of English and Hopi. Thus, Whorf suggested on the basis of comparative English and Hopi grammar, the way a people view time, punctuality, continuation, and completion may be influenced by the types of verbal tenses in their language. Whorf's theory has been subjected to skeptical criticism by writers who contend that culture shapes language rather than language shaping culture, or that no correlation such as the one suggested by Whorf can in fact be found between language and world-view. I myself suspect that language may influence thought in an even more profound and fundamental way than the one posited by Whorf--though in a way that is uniform for all known human languages and cultures, essentially the same in English, Greek, Latin, Russian, Estonian, Latvian, Arabic, Swahili, Chinese, Japanese, Tagalog, Hopi, Eskimo, Cherokee, Shawnee, Nootka, and Kwakiutl. It's an insight I arrived at while pondering the Whorfian claim that the familiar division of the world into Things or Substances, Qualities or Attributes, and Events or Actions simply reflects the Indo-European grammatical trichotomy of nouns, adjectives, and verbs. All natural human languages that I know of, from all linguistic families, all parts of the world, all cultures, all racial or ethnic groups, and all levels of cultural development have (1) lots and lots of words of the type "stick, stone, table, chair, knife, fork, house, boat, man, woman, tree, dog, apple, head, eye, hand, foot, neck, tongue, tooth, sun, moon, star", (2) lots and lots of words of the type "big, small, long, short, good, bad, red, yellow, blue, green, black, white, sweet, sour, rough, soft, hard, smooth, wet, dry," and (3) and lots and lots of words of the type "eat, drink, bite, swallow, give, take, walk, run, sit, stand, cut, hit, tear, pull, push, say, speak, see, hear." This is true, as an empirical fact, of English, German, French, Latin, Greek, Russian, Sanskrit, Estonian, Arabic, Hebrew, Swahili, Xhosa, Zuilu, Yoruba, Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Indonesian, Tagalog, Eskimo, Navaho, Tlingit, Nootka, Kwakiutl, Cherokee, Lakota, Shawnee, Hopi, Zuńi, Aztec, Mayan, Quechua, Samoan, Hawaiian, Fijian, and every known Native American, Sub-Saharan African and Australian Aboriginal language, as well as of the vast majority of constructed artificial languages like Esperanto, Interlingua, Volapük, Loglan, and Lojban. It is also true whether or not any given language distinguishes words of classes (1), (2), and (3) as morphologically distinct "parts of speech" like Indo-European nouns, verbs, and adjectives with the complicated conjugations and declensions we find in Greek, Latin, Sanskrit, and Russian, or follows the example of Chinese, Loglan, and Lojban in failing to make any such grammatical distinction (yhough such languages still do make a grammatical distinction between words denoting extra-linguistic "real world" objects, qualities, events and actions versus grammatical operators--e.g., Chinese "full words" and "empty words," Lojban gismu" and "cmavo"). Whether or not a formal distinction in grammatical form is made between nouns, adjectives, and verbs, all languages in practice do have lots and lots of common familiar words belonging to each of these three broad semantic classes. I call them semantic classes. Exactly what is the basic semantic distinction? Words like "red, green, blue, yellow, black, white, round, square, wet, dry, sweet, sour, salty, bitter, rough, smooth, hard, soft, good, bad, ugly, beautiful" refer to one particular specific sensory, emotive, or aesthetic quality, which occurs over and over again in many, many different things in the world. Words like "stick, stone, table, chair, knife, fork, book, pencil, house, man, woman, tree, cat, dog, head, apple, banana, leaf, head, eye, hand, foot, sun, moon, car, boat, bicycle" refer to complex persisting or recurring bundles or aggregates of such qualities that we notice as maintaining their character for fairly long periods of time, or as intermittently disappearing but then frequently recurring or reappearing in pretty much the same form as before. Words like "eat, drink, bite, hold, grasp, give, take, send, push, pull, cut, break, walk, run, sit, stand, go, come" denote certain ways in which some such persistent bundles of qualities affect (or are affected by) other such persistent bundles of qualities, or move (or remain at rest) with respect to other such persistent bundles of qualities. Now, if we take traditional Lockean-Humean British Empiricism seriously, it might seem that the words like "yellow, green, blue, sweet, sour, round, rough, smooth, beautiful, ugly" are all that a truly rational language ought to contain, since after all we are not supposed to ever actually perceive anything except sensory, emotional, or aesthetic qualities in all sorts of complex combinations and sequences, combinations and sequences which can in principle be reduced to a listing of their individual component qualities ("this is something red, round, soft, and sweet accompanied by an emotion of pleasure"). However, as I just said, every single known human language on this planet also in fact contains a vast number of words that really ought to be superfluous according to a strict thoroughgoing Lockean-Humean empiricism. Human beings just never ever seem to be content with having a few hundred or few thousand words in their language for "black, white, red, green, sweet, sour, rough, smooth, round, square, good, bad, ugly, beautiful, scary, happy." They always invariably insist also on having thousands of words for complex persisting or recurring bundles of qualities, like "stick, stone, table, chair, book, pencil, tree, cat, dog, apple, head, eye, hand, sun, moon, mountain, house, boat," and thousands more for complex ways in which these persisting bundles of qualities push, pull, cut, stab, tear, crush, incorporate, ingest, or move around other persisting bundles of qualities, like "eat, drink, bite, swallow, give, take, grab, grasp, cut, hit, chop, tear, come, go, walk, run, jump, fly, swim, say, speak, love, hate, remember, sleep, lie," etc. We learn very early in life that qualities do very often come in persisting or recurring bundles, and that these persisting bundles in turn have fairly recurrent ways of relating to the other persisting bundles in their vicinity. All these persisting bundles, and all these recurring ways for persisting bundles to act upon each other, strike us as needing and deserving special names just as much as their individual component qualities do. We feel from early toddlerhood on that the world is so much easier, simpler, and more convenient to talk about if we have words like "mommy, daddy, kitty, doggy, milk, apple, drink, eat, give" as well as words like "sweet, round, soft, hard, red, green, black, white, hurts, sleepy." This, I feel, is an instinctive basic biological and neurological need or impulse, hard-wired into our brains and nervous systems, and probably a result of natural selection. Our australopithecine, *Homo habilis*, and *Homo erectus* ancestors for instance, had to react quickly, almost instantaneously, to a unified holistic gestalt "SNAKE!!" rather than take their leisurely sweet time nominalistically adding up one by one the individual qualities "long and slender and flexible and scaly and legless and forked-tongued and hissing"! However, while I believe it to be hard-wired into our brains, I also think it is reinforced by language--by just about every human language that there is. Now, a Whorfian thought experiment suggests itself. What would happen if somebody invented an artificial language composed entirely of words like "round, square, big, small, red, green, black, white, sweet, sour, rough, smooth, dry, wet, happy, scary, itchy, hurts" with no words for "stick, stone, man, woman, dog, apple" and no words for "eat, drink, go, come, walk, push, pull", and then brought up a child taught only to speak that artificial qualities-only language? Would the child grow up truly lacking any concept of objects, actions, or anything in the world except separate individual qualities? Or would the child start modifying that language from almost the very start, by inventing words for things (e.g., coining something like "miggert" for "apple" and "loopty" for "chair"?) and/or by developing stereotyped compound words for things out of compounded quality words (e.g. "redround" for "apple")? And if the child did develop thing-words by either or both processes, would he be very pragmatic and instrumental in using them simply as conveniences of quick easy familiar speech, or would he start developing a "things versus qualities" metaphysic around them? Or would the fact that he had to personally invent nouns from scratch as home-made jerry-built makeshifts cobbled together from quality-words give him a kind of subconscious skepticism about their reality, inhibiting him from developing a "things versus qualities" metaphysic? I recently found these speculations of mine echoed and confirmed in a 1985 book on the origin of language by Mount Holyoke College biology professor Curtis G. Smith, *Ancestral voices: Language and the Evolution of Human Consciousness* (Englewood Cliffs, N.J. : Prentice-Hall, 1985). Curtis Smith attributed the origin of language to a sort of "synaesthesia" between the senses, what Smith himself called intermodal or cross-modal sensory processing. He used this to account for the origin of nouns and verbs as well as of adjectives. On pp. 143-144 of *Ancestral Voices*, in his chapter on "Language and Neural Codes," Prof. Smith wrote: <> This, I think, helps beautifully to account for my own observation that all known human languages without exception possess nouns and verbs as well as adjectives, words for objects and actions as well as words for qualities or individual discrete sense-data. If Curtis Smith and his theories about cross-modal sensory processing are correct, the very existence of language requires the existence of words for objects as whole *Gestalts* and not just stringings-together of their various qualities. To use Curtis Smith's own example, language from the very beginning necessarily included words like "skunk" and never ever used stringings-together of quality-words like "black-white-furry-pitter-patter-stinky" more than perhaps to a very limited extent! A language composed of adjective-chains like "black-white-furry-stinky," if it had ever existed, would have defeated the whole purpose of language--and could not perhaps have even existed in the first place, as I see Curtis Smith's argument! Curtis Smith's theory of linguistic origins, by the way, also suggests that, in talking about the psychology of human sensory perception and the origin of our mental concepts and complex ideas, the Gestalt psychologists may well have gotten it more nearly right than John Locke and David Hume! ---T. Peter