The Atoms of Language: The Mind's Hidden Rules of Grammar - Softcover

Baker, Mark C.

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0465005225 ISBN 13: 9780465005222

Publisher: Basic Books, 2002

Synopsis

Whether all human languages are fundamentally the same or different has been a subject of debate for ages. This problem has deep philosophical implications: If languages are all the same, it implies a fundamental commonality-and thus the mutual intelligibility-of human thought. We are now on the verge of answering this question. Using a twenty-year-old theory proposed by the world's greatest living linguist, Noam Chomsky, researchers have found that the similarities among languages are more profound than the differences. Languages whose grammars seem completely incompatible may in fact be structurally almost identical, except for a difference in one simple rule. The discovery of these rules and how they may vary promises to yield a linguistic equivalent of the Periodic Table of the Elements: a single framework by which we can understand the fundamental structure of all human language. This is a landmark breakthrough, both within linguistics, which will thereby become a full-fledged science for the first time, and in our understanding of the human mind.

About this title

About the Author

Mark C. Baker is a professor in the Department of Linguistics and the Center for Cognitive Science at Rutgers University. He lives in Camden, New Jersey.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

The Atoms of Language

The Mind's Hidden Rules of GrammarBy Mark C. Baker

Basic Books

Copyright © 2002 Mark C. Baker
All right reserved.
ISBN: 9780465005222

Chapter One

The Code Talker Paradox

Deep mysteries of language are illustrated by an incident thatoccurred in 1943, when the Japanese military was firmly entrenchedaround the Bismarck Archipelago. American pilots had nicknamedthe harbor of Rabaul "Dead End" because so many of themwere shot down by antiaircraft guns placed in the surrounding hills. Itbecame apparent that the Japanese could easily decode Allied messagesand thus were forewarned about the time and place of each attack.

    The Marine Corps responded by calling in one of their most effectivesecret weapons: eleven Navajo Indians. These were membersof the famous Code Talkers, whose native language was the one cipherthe Japanese cryptographers were never able to break. TheNavajos quickly provided secure communications, and the area wassoon taken with minimal further losses. Such incidents were repeatedthroughout the Pacific theater in World War II. Years after the end ofthe war, a U.S. president commended the Navajo Code Talkers withthe following words: "Their resourcefulness, tenacity, integrity andcourage saved the lives of countless men and women and sped the realizationof peace for war-torn lands." But it was not only their resourcefulness,tenacity, integrity, and courage that made possibletheir remarkable contribution: It was also their language.

    This incident vividly illustrates the fundamental puzzle of linguistics.On the one hand, Navajo must be extremely different from English(and Japanese), or the men listening to the Code Talkers? transmissionswould eventually have been able to figure out what theywere saying. On the other hand, Navajo must be extremely similarto English (and Japanese), or the Code Talkers could not have transmittedwith precision the messages formulated by their English-speakingcommanders. Navajo was effective as a code because it hadboth of these properties. But this seems like a contradiction: Howcan two languages be simultaneously so similar and so different?This paradox has beset the comparative study of human languagesfor centuries. Linguists are beginning to understand how the paradoxcan be dissolved, making it possible for the first time to chart outprecisely the ways in which human languages can differ from one anotherand the ways in which they are all the same.

* * *

Let us first consider more carefully the evidence that languages canbe radically different. The Japanese readily solved the various artificialcodes dreamed up by Allied cryptographers. Translating a messagefrom English to Navajo evidently involves transforming it inways that are more far-reaching than could be imagined by the mostclever engineers or mathematicians of that era. This seems more remarkableif one knows something about the codes in use in WorldWar II, which were markedly more sophisticated than any used beforethat time. In this respect, an ordinary human language goes farbeyond the bounds of what can reasonably be called a code. If thedifferences between Navajo and English were only a matter of replacingwords like man with Navajo-sounding vocabulary likehastiin, or putting the words in a slightly different order, decodingNavajo would not have been so difficult. It is clear that the characteristicsone might expect to see emphasized in the first few pages ofa grammar book barely scratch the surface of the complexity of atruly foreign language.

    Other signs of the complexity and diversity of human languagesare closer to our everyday experience. Consider, for example, yourpersonal computer. It is vastly smaller and more powerful than anythingthe inventors of the computer imagined back in the 1950s.Nevertheless, it falls far short of the early computer scientists? expectationsin its ability to speak English. Since the beginning of thecomputer age, founders of artificial intelligence such as Alan Turingand Marvin Minsky have foreseen a time in which people and computerswould interact in a natural human language, just as two peoplemight talk to each other on a telephone. This expectation wascommunicated vividly to the world at large through the 1968 movie2001: A Space Odyssey, in which the computer HAL understood andspoke grammatically perfect (if somewhat condescending) English.Indeed, natural language was not even considered one of the "hard"problems of computer engineering in the 1960s; the academic leadersthought that it would more or less take care of itself once peoplegot around to it. Thirty-five years and billions of research dollarslater, their confidence has proved unwarranted. It is now 2001, andthough HAL's switches and indicator lights look hopelessly out-of-date,his language skills are still in the indefinite future. Progress isbeing made: We only recently achieved the pleasure of listening toweather reports and phone solicitations generated by computers. Butcomputer-generated speech still sounds quite strange, and one wouldnot mistake it for the human-generated variety for long. Moreover,these systems are incapable of improvising away from their setscripts concerning barometric pressures and the advantages of a newvacuum cleaner.

    This poor record contrasts with scientists? much greater success inprogramming computers to play chess. Another of HAL's accomplishmentsin 2001 was beating the human crew members at chess?aprediction that has turned out to be entirely realistic. We usuallythink of chess as a quintessentially intellectual activity that can bemastered only by the best and brightest. Any ordinary person, in contrast,can talk your ear off in understandable English without necessarilybeing regarded as intelligent for doing so. Yet althoughcomputer programs can now beat the best chess players in the world,no artificial system exists that can match an average five-year-old atspeaking and understanding English. The ability to speak and understanda human language is thus much more complex in objectiveterms than the tasks we usually consider to require great intelligence.We simply tend to take language for granted because it comes soquickly and automatically to us. Just as Navajo proved harder thanother codes during World War II, so English proves harder than theNimzowitsch variation of the French defense in chess.

    The experience of computer science confirms not only that humanlanguages are extremely complex but that they differ in their complexities.Another major goal of artificial intelligence since the 1960shas been machine translation?the creation of systems that will takea text in one language and render the same text in another language.In this domain the ideal is set not by HAL but by Star Trek: All crewmembers have a "universal translator" implanted in their ears thatmiraculously transforms the very first alien sentence it hears into perfectEnglish. Again, real machine translation projects have provenmore difficult. Some programs can take on tasks like converting theEnglish abstracts of engineering articles into Japanese or providing aworking draft of a historical text from German in English or translatinga page on the World Wide Web. But the products of these systemsare very rough and used only in situations where an imperfectaid is desired. Indeed, sometimes they make embarrassingly funnymistakes. Harvey Newquist reports an apocryphal story about anearly English-Russian system that translated the biblical quotation"The spirit is willing, but the flesh is weak" into Russian as "Thevodka is strong, but the meat is spoiled." Performance has improvedsince the 1960s, but not as much as one might imagine. Here is aquotation from the biblical book of Ecclesiastes (9:11 RSV):

Again I saw that under the sun the race is not to the swift, nor the battle to the strong, nor bread to the wise, nor riches to the intelligent, nor favor to the men of skill, but time and chance happen to them all.

Here is the same passage after it has been translated into Russian andback again by a randomly selected Web-based machine translationprogram:

Afresh I beheld such under the sun the race am no near the fast, no bread near the profound, no affluence near the clever, no favor near the body [ÿíèå]) against art, alone fardel ampersand accident become near their all.

It is fair to say that something is lost in this translation. My friendwho translates banking documents from English to French need notlook for other work just yet.

    Moreover, the best systems so far work on an ad hoc basis, takingadvantage of whatever special properties they can find in the twolanguages they deal with. When good systems are finally up and runningfor Russian-English translations, they certainly will not be anygood at Navajo or Swahili or Turkish. Adapting the program to theselanguages will not be a matter of adjusting a few settings. Rather,programmers will have to start almost from scratch to create comparablesystems for these languages.

    Lest we be tempted to look down on computers and Japanesecryptographers, we should take stock of our own experiences inlearning foreign languages. Having been deeply moved by stories ofJohn Henry and the steam engine as a youth, I have a fondness forstories about what machines cannot do. American patriots might feelsmug about how easily Japanese intelligence was duped by the cleverMarine Corps. But what about us? With the right kind of exposureto a language and plenty of hard work, adults can achieve a reasonabledegree of fluency in a new language. But very few, even afteryears of living in another country, ever learn a foreign language sowell that they could pass as a native speaker. Most of us never evenmake it up to the level of full fluency. For example, I took five yearsof Spanish in an American high school. I aced most of the grammartests, but no Spaniard will ever mistake me for one of his own. Andeven after living in Montreal for twelve years I find it embarrassinglydifficult to follow a hockey game in French without visual aids. AndFrench, Spanish, and English are all closely related by global standards:For a native English speaker, learning Chinese or Arabic orTurkish is harder still. Only a handful of white people have everlearned Navajo with any degree of fluency. Americans should bethankful that the Japanese empire had no aboriginal languages of itsown to press into service.

* * *

What was it about Navajo that made it so difficult to decode? As faras I know, no one has investigated what strategies the cryptographerstried and precisely why those strategies failed. But if one knows a littlebit about Navajo, it is not hard to guess some of the reasons.Much of the difficulty in coming to grips with an unfamiliar languageis that there are many layers of difference. Each layer might beunderstandable enough in its own terms, but the differences magnifyeach other until the total effect is overwhelming.

    First, of course, there is the fact that the Navajos (to adapt an oldSteve Martin joke about French) have a different word for everything.When an English speaker would say girl, a Navajo speakerwould say at'ééd; for English boy, a Navajo would use ashkii; forEnglish horse, Navajo has lii', and so on. Moreover, the things thatEnglish has specific words for and the things that Navajo has specificwords for do not always match perfectly. For example, English is unusuallyrich in words for various modes of thought and feeling. InEnglish, we can believe, know, wonder, opine, suppose, assume, presume,surmise, consider, maintain, and reckon. We can be furious, irritated,incensed, indignant, irate, mad, wrathful, cross, upset,infuriated, or enraged. In many other languages, this domain ofmeaning is covered with only two words, ?to think? and ?to be angry.?Navajo, for its part, has at least ten different verbs for different kindsof carrying, which depend on the shape and physical properties ofthe thing being carried: 'Aah means to carry a solid roundish object,such as a ball, a rock, or a bottle; kaah means to carry an open containerwith its contents, such as a pot of soup or a basket of fruit; lémeans to carry a slender flexible object like a belt, a snake, or a rope;and so on. For this reason, finding the right words to use in a translationto or from Navajo involves much more than simply substitutingone string of letters for another. The "Replace All" command onyour word processor will never be able to do it properly.

    Second, there are important differences in the sounds that makeup words in Navajo. As you surely noticed, the Navajo words listedabove contain some strange-looking symbols: l's with bars throughthem, vowels with accents over them and hooks under them, apostrophesin the middle of words. This reflects that the Navajo languageis built around a different set of basic sounds than English is.For example, the l stands for a sound that is rather like that of theEnglish l but made "whispering," without vibration of the vocalcords. (The same sound is indicated by the double ll in Welsh wordslike Lloyd.) Hooks under the vowels indicate that these sounds arepronounced nasally, with air passing through the nose as well as themouth. The Navajo word sá ?old age? is pronounced much like theFrench word sans ?without.? To complicate matters further, the specificqualities of these sounds adjust in complex ways to the soundsaround them. For example, Navajo has a prefix bi- that attaches tonouns and means ?his? or ?hers.? Thus, gah means ?rabbit? and bigahmeans ?his/her rabbit.? When this prefix attaches to certain wordsthat begin with s, that s changes to a z sound. Thus, séí means ?sand,?but bizéí means ?his/her sand.? In the same context, the whispered lsound undergoes a similar change to become plain l: lii? is ?horse,?and bilíí? is ?his/her horse.? These differences in sound are significantbecause it is notoriously difficult for people to recognize sounds thatdo not exist in their own languages. Japanese speakers have a terribletime distinguishing English l versus r, whereas English speakershave trouble recognizing the four different t sounds in Hindi. Whenadded together, the many sound differences give Navajo speech avery distinctive, almost unearthly quality that speakers of Eurasianlanguages find difficult to grasp or remember.

    Words in Navajo also change their form depending on their contextin various ways. One of the most remarkable aspects of Navajois its system of prefixes. Indeed, simple, invariant words are rare inNavajo. We just saw that a prefix can attach to a noun to show thatthe noun is possessed. The prefix system for verbs is even more elaborate.There are between 100 and 200 different prefixes that attachto Navajo verb stems, depending on the exact analysis. Even the simplestverbs in Navajo must take at least three prefixes, five or six arecommon, and a verb can have up to ten or twelve at one time. Thetotal number of forms a Navajo verb can take is staggering. Nor canthe language learner afford simply to overlook these prefixes andhope for the best. The subject of the sentence, for example, is oftenhidden inside the prefixes. ?The girl is crying? in Navajo is a fairlynormal-looking combination of the word for ?girl? and (one form of)the word for ?cry.?

At'ééd		yicha.
Girl		crying

But ?I am crying? is expressed by a verb standing alone. That I amcrying, not you or they, is expressed by a prefix sh- found before theverb root but after other prefixes.

Yishcha. ?I am crying.?

(yi + sh + cha)

(This ability of some languages to express subjects as changes on theverb plays a major role in my discussion in Chapter 4.) Other Navajoprefixes elaborate on the basic meaning of the verb root in intricateways. For example, the simple root dlaad, meaning ?to tear,? combineswith six different prefixes to make the following word, meaning?I am again plowing.?

Ninááhwiishdlaad. ?I am again plowing.?

(ni + náá + ho + hi + sh + l + dlaad)

These aspects of Navajo pose a major challenge to that great institutionof Western civilization, the dictionary. Since Navajo has so manyprefixes, the primary lexical meaning is rarely carried in the first partof a word. Thus, the basic idea of listing words in alphabetical orderis not so practical for this language. Looking up a word in Navajorequires first identifying the prefixes, undoing the sound changes thatthey cause, and deleting them. Only then can one find the basic rootof the word and calculate the changes in meaning caused by the prefixes.Dictionaries of Navajo do exist, but successfully using one is amajor intellectual achievement?the way you prove you have masteredNavajo, not the way you learn it.

    Navajo also has complexities at the level of syntax, how its wordsare put together to make phrases and sentences. The simplest subject-verbcombinations, like ?the girl is crying? shown above, look innocentenough: The subject noun phrase comes first, as in English, andthe verb that expresses the predicate comes second. But differencesappear in more complex sentences. For example, consider a transitivesentence, one that contains a direct object noun phrase as well asa subject. In Navajo the direct object always comes before the verb,not after it as in English:

Ashkii Boy		at'ééd girl		yiyiiltsá. saw
?The boy saw the girl.?
*Ashkii Boy		yiyiiltsá saw		at'ééd. girl

(Linguists put an asterisk in front of an example to show that theway of combining words is impossible in the language under discussion.I use this convention frequently.) Other phrases have a distinctiveword order, too. Whereas in English one says ?change into yourclothes,? the Navajo would say the equivalent of ?clothes intochange.? Whereas in English one says ?John believes that he is lying,?in Navajo one would say the equivalent of ?John he lying-is believes.?In fact, there is a systematic pattern to these Navajo word orders, atopic I discuss in detail in Chapter 3. But systematic or no, it is confusingto an English speaker.

    If the Japanese cryptographers had got this far, they might havebreathed a sigh of relief at this point, because these word order patternsare actually the same as in Japanese. But their newfound confidencewould have evaporated when they came across sentences like this:

Ashkii Boy

at'ééd girl

biilstá. saw

This sentence has almost the same words arranged in the same orderas the one we saw above, and so we might reasonably guess that it hasthe same meaning: ?The boy saw the girl.? In fact, this sentence meansthe opposite, that the girl saw the boy. The crucial hint is once againin the prefixes attached to the verb: Here the verb starts with bi-,whereas the verb in the previous sentence started with yi-. This smalldifference indicates a large difference in sentence structure. Bi- tells theNavajo speaker roughly that the direct object of the sentence comes beforethe subject, rather than the other way around. Nor is it alwayseasy to find these prefixes: Like any others in Navajo, they can beburied under other prefixes and disguised by sound changes. Furthermore,this option of choosing a sentence with yi- or a sentence with bi-is used in a culturally specific way in Navajo. The noun phrase thatrefers to a higher being always comes before a noun phrase that refersto a lower being, regardless of which is the subject and which is the object.(In the Navajo conception, humans count as higher than large andintelligent animals, which count as higher than smaller animals, whichin turn count as higher than plants and inanimate objects.) Sentencestructure and word structure thus are interdependent in Navajo, andboth are influenced by the distinctive Navajo typology of creatures,which puts hawks below wildcats but on the same level as foxes. Notonly is Navajo different from English at many levels, from singlesounds to the arrangement of words in sentences, but those differentlevels interact with each other in various ways. There is a combinatorialexplosion of difference, and it seems as if one cannot understandanything until one understands everything. The poor Japanese cryptographersdidn't stand a chance.

* * *

These striking differences between Navajo and English illustrate onlyone side of the fundamental puzzle of language. The other half of theCode Talker paradox is that Navajo and English are so similar.

    The Code Talkers bore witness to this similarity by their ability totranslate messages back and forth between Navajo and English.Originally, the U.S. Marine officials doubted whether this would bepossible and were reluctant to pursue the project. Pilot studies, however,proved that the Indians could accomplish the task with great accuracy.You are probably familiar with the game of Telephone, inwhich a message gets garbled beyond recognition as it is whisperedfrom one child to another. Encoding the message into Navajo anddecoding it back into English did not significantly increase this garbling.On the contrary, officials were pleasantly surprised at howwell even precise technical information was preserved. More thanthat, the Code Talkers were fast. They could translate a message toand from Navajo almost instantaneously, in a fraction of the time ittook to encrypt it by conventional means. This made them invaluablein battle situations, in which circumstances could change rapidly, andseconds counted.

    The Code Talkers? performance tells against extreme versions ofone common view about language differences. Some people believelanguages are so different because they are reflections of human culturesthat have developed over time in diverse environments and inrelative isolation. Different languages thus represent incommensurableways of thinking about the world. If that were so, the early suspicionsof the marine brass should have been borne out: The CodeTalkers? translations should have been laborious and inaccurate, ifthey were possible at all. Certainly nothing in the Navajos? pastorallifestyle in the Arizona deserts would have helped them conceive ofhigh-tech warfare in the jungles of the Pacific Islands. Yet they didtheir task with remarkably little training. Apparently English andNavajo?or any other two languages?are not products of incommensurableworldviews after all. They must have some accessiblecommon denominator.

    Again, this conclusion is reinforced by our mundane experience,which tells us that translation between two languages is a commonplaceexperience. Although the limitations of machine translation projectsshow that translation is hard, the everyday successes ofprofessional human translators prove that it is possible. It is stylish todisparage translations, saying that they are (like mistresses, I am told)either ugly or faithless. But these complaints are generally raised in aliterary context. When translating Dante or Shakespeare, one wants topreserve not only the literal meaning of the text but also its meter andrhyme scheme, its connotations and cultural allusions, its puns andwordplay, and the ingenious resonances between sound and meaningthat give rise to great poetry. That task is often impossible, simply becausethere are too many conflicting demands. Away from the domainof high art, however, the idea of translation becomes much less problematic.My friend translates internal banking documents from Englishto French, and she does a good job. At least the money goes to the rightplaces. To take another example, probably more non-European languageshave been first learned by Westerners out of a desire to translatethe Bible into the local tongue than for any other reason. Thepeople on both ends of these spiritually motivated translation projectshave often felt that something real was being done.

Continues...

Excerpted from The Atoms of Languageby Mark C. Baker Copyright © 2002 by Mark C. Baker. Excerpted by permission.
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Edition details

• Publisher: Basic Books
• Publication date: 2002
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0465005225
• ISBN 13: 9780465005222
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 291