Sounds Good

Speech is a stream of sound, just like music. And like music, we somehow know when it sounds right and when it doesn’t. Instantly. Automatically.

It seems almost inconceivable because language is so damn complicated when you tease it apart to find out how it works. There are the things that we think of as “words”, strung together into sentences, or at least utterances. The order of the words makes a big difference that reflects whether you’re stating a fact, asking a question or telling someone to do something. It makes a surprising difference when you use several adjectives in a row to describe something. The exact form of the words change—sometimes a little, sometimes a lot—depending on exactly what you’re talking about or why. Extra little words or word parts get sprinkled in, too, for effect or to ensure clarity.

And language isn’t just a pile of words and an enormously complicated set of rules: it’s also melody, rhythm, tempo, timbre and sometimes a percussion section—the nuance and emotion that gets layered into and on top of whatever is being said: tenderness, sarcasm, urgency, humor. All of it is carefully spun together into a single, thin stream of sound. And we know when it’s not quite right, because it sounds that way.  

Language wasn’t created by grammarians or linguists: it was created by people who recognized what sounded good. The sheet music came later.

On Sticks, Stones and Words

They’re all good tools, and well-suited to us.

Large sticks make excellent handles for pushing, pulling and leveraging. Small sticks can be used for poking and scraping.

Large stones are great for smashing and grinding. Small stones—especially when they’re small enough to be held in a three-jaw chuck grip (between your thumb, index and middle finger)—are excellent for precision drawing and carving.

Words don’t necessarily work better when they’re large or small. They can be precise or general no matter their length. They are fantastic for teaching, storytelling, singing, coordinating, asking for help and saying, “Thank you”.

What Language is Telling Us

Language was born by appropriating parts of our brains that we use for complex tool-making. Spoken language made it possible for us to teach more effectively. It allowed us to hunt and gather more efficiently. Language quickly grew and spread because children absorb it and use it so readily.

Language invented stories and songs to better preserve itself. Then it infiltrated our vision system, leveraging our tool-making and tool-using abilities, to be written down on cave walls and clay tablets. Language became semi-permanent; it endured far beyond any individual speaker or group. Once language was written, propagation became much easier and more people learned it. Now language is everywhere and it’s preserved. Language wants to be voluminous and immortal.

Human cultures may at times lose their language for another. Their languages might endure sudden, profound disruptions and slow, meandering erosions. But no culture loses language completely, any more than an ocean would suddenly lose all of its saltiness. Language, it would seem, is now endemic to humans. Language wants to permeate humanity.

Perhaps more than anything, language wants to grow and develop and change. Language is never the same from moment to moment. It wants to become elaborate and sophisticated, and will develop complexities that are nearly ineffable when left alone with an isolated group of devoted speakers. It will expand to fill the considerable human capacity for nuance and intricacy. But language also desperately wants to survive: it will shed every extravagance and decoration in order to be useful to strangers in far-off places. Language seeks to explore and find other species of itself; long-lost relatives. It seeks contact and change and combination. A language will readily bend and blend with the force of another.

Language has co-opted our technology to further develop, grow and move. It has positioned itself to be an intermediary between us and nearly all of our tools. It may eventually become our only tool.

Language might outgrow us, having used us as a stepping stone on the way to the next thing it wants: independence from us.

Trying to Find the Words

I like cilantro a little too much. I like it on my tacos, which is to say I don’t really care if there’s anything else besides some tasty meat and an obscene amount of cilantro. I am not one of those unlucky people who think cilantro tastes like soap or metal or swamp water.

But the names of foods—especially plants—are tricky. Cilantro is the Spanish name for coriander, which is Latin. Most of the time here in the US, the stems and leaves are sold in a bundle as “cilantro” and “coriander” is reserved as the name of the spice that is made from the seeds of the coriander plant. This doesn’t seem to bother anyone, but I do find it a little weird when it’s referred to as “Mexican parsley” because we’ve already got two pretty good words for the plant that are highly accurate and from Romance languages. Why bring parsley into it?

Way back when, I went shopping at the grocery store for a fennel bulb, along with some staples. I casually surveyed the produce section at first, then did a more methodical search and finally started moving through the vegetables one by one like some kind of very discerning, foraging animal.

This was before I knew what fennel was and before I had a smartphone. This was before smartphones, in fact. This was long, long ago, in a time when information was locked away on supercomputers that did not fit in pants pockets.

Anyway, there were these weird things that the grocery store labeled “Anise” that had big white bulbs and green stalks and frilly leaves that reminded me of dill weed. I kinda thought they might be fennel, but obviously the grocery store knew better than me so it couldn’t be what I was looking for. Clearly. Besides, it sorta smelled like licorice. I was not told to buy a licorice plant—that would be silly. I mean, I knew that anise was used to flavor black licorice. I was looking for fennel. But I was becoming a little annoyed. And frustrated. And panicky. Where, in this monstrosity of a grocery store with everything, is the goddamn fennel?

I did have a cell phone and I did eventually work out with my wife that the bizarre object I was looking at was, in fact, probably a fennel bulb but when I got to the checkout line, there was no little sticker on the side of it.

The Latino cashier puzzled over it ever so briefly before looking at me and said, “Anís?”

Moving Prose

When I tell you about how I used a French press to make coffee this morning, I move a lot. My lungs expand and contract as my diaphragm pulls itself taut and then relaxes. My mouth and tongue make funny shapes as the air passes by, and my larynx bounces up and down. Depending on how excited I am by the coffee this morning (or how much sleep I had last night), I may gesture. I may even pump my fist with enthusiasm if I have truly nailed it.

Likewise, as you listen to my raving, the sound waves reaching your ears induce a subtle but important dance inside your head—tiny bones sympathetically vibrate as part of a Rube Goldberg machine that brings the fact that I let the coffee bloom for about 20 seconds to your brain. You might also roll your eyes.

The eye-rolling is important, because it’s an example of what we call body language. (We will all be paying particularly close attention to this phenomena over the next few weeks as politicians attempt to persuade us of a number of things.) And while body language is more ambiguous and less intentional than spoken language, many important things can be perceived or inferred. Pay particular attention if there’s a large number of people running in the same direction: there’s probably a reason.

Sign language is, of course, almost completely reliant on the movement of the hands and arms. It’s not “body language” in the same sense as eye-rolling or panic-running—it’s fully-developed human language performed with different parts of our body.

Even just reading (certainly typing) is dependent on movement. Our eyes move about in their sockets to absorb the details of text encoded in light: funny little sudden movements called saccades, from the French, “violent pull”.

Language is movement.

(And making a second pot of coffee says a lot.)

What’d you say?

Talking to yourself is the verbal equivalent of scratch paper. It’s sketching in the air, especially if you gesture. It’s thumbing through your mental dictionary (or thesaurus). It’s a way to feel your way through your thoughts and think through your feelings a little more deliberately. It is at once a telescope and a microscope trained on your inner landscape.

Talking to yourself out loud is also a check on the voice you use to talk to yourself silently.

From Zero to Several!?

Humans are unique in their development of language. This is not to say that animals don’t communicate—they absolutely do. (My cats tell me all sorts of things like, “Food. Now!” Or, “Hey, pay attention to me. Hey! Hey!”) And we still have everything to learn about the complex and subtle communication used by whales, elephants and trees. However, the signaling and communication used by animals doesn’t come anywhere near the level of sophistication that humans have achieved. It is generally accepted that animals don’t, for instance, say to each other, “Hey, did you see that thing that washed up on the beach the other day?” (HT: John McWhorter)

There has been a lot of work to try to figure out how language first emerged among humans and what might have caused it. We had already learned how to make fire and probably we were already cooking food over it. Our brains certainly got bigger over time, which helped to enable it, but probably didn’t cause language development. And, by the way, our big brains consume a lot of calories, so the cooking thing is a very big deal: it enabled us to get more calories out of food and not have to spend literally hours every day chewing on stuff that didn’t taste all that good. Some researchers link the origins of language development to the need to teach tool making and tool use to others.

And babies seem to pick it up spoken language pretty reliably even when we don’t try to deliberately teach it to them. Their little spongy brains are, no doubt, evolved to learn such things in that nearly-magical way that helps ensure their survival in the community, along with looking adorable. In any event, it’s a complicated endeavor and it’s a miracle that we can even talk the way we do, much less type words like this.

Consider these things one more time, carefully:

1. No other animal possesses language anywhere near us in terms of complexity.
2. Big brains seem to be a requirement for this, and high caloric intake must support it.

3. Children acquire language without needing explicit instruction.

A question struck me the other day: how on Earth—why on Earth—are we able to learn multiple languages?

It seems highly improbable—almost like discovering that because we evolved to walk upright, we also evolved to walk forward and backward in time. Nature is pretty stingy with innovation: you have to be able to make the payments on anything new you add to the evolutionary mortgage. Our abilities with tools and fire and cooking and walking or running long distances pay off big: we can hunt and gather and power our big brains. Cooperation and coordination are needed in communities to help support all of those activities, and language facilitates that.

But we didn’t have international travel back then. We grew up and lived in groups that stayed together for long periods of time. And we spoke the same language, because that’s what makes language useful.

Why would we have ever needed to learn more than one language? I’m nonplussed.

Walking and Talking

Last Saturday we went to a farmer’s market that is set up in a parking lot. It was busy and we had to park in another parking lot just up the hill. It had rained a bit, off and on that morning—much needed rain.

There is no sidewalk between the two lots, but over time people (possibly lazy) had trod a rather direct path down the hill to connect them. The path was clear but narrow: punctuated by rocks and stones of various sizes and bare dirt which had turned slippery from the rain.

None of this is unique or interesting, of course, except that it’s less frequent in the city. It was just unusual enough compared to my normal homebound routine for me to have to pay attention to where I put my feet and to notice that I was doing so.

We talked a bit as we picked our way along the path, remembering trips to the Boundary Waters, noting that somehow our feet, legs and pants were getting disproportionately wet and dirty, discussing lunch plans and how we were going to cook and freeze the sweet corn we just bought.

There’s a lot going on there—looking, stepping, talking, listening—all at once and all more or less automatically. It’s two of the things we humans seem to be built for and they’re extraordinarily complicated, requiring a great deal of effort from our brainparts. And yet walking and talking are so fundamental to human behavior—they are at once both completely mundane and borderline magical. It’s probably also not a coincidence that being able to do them simultaneously is quite practical.

The idea that our excursion down the hill (and back up) that day was “coordinated hunter-gatherer behavior” is laughable, but it had the right elements—the same shape. It’s uniquely human and we shouldn’t simply give it up. A nice set of cement steps and landings wouldn’t necessarily make it better. And maybe taking the long way through the parking lot, down the street and into the market isn’t better exercise: maybe sometimes the shortcut is.

Technology vs. Conversation

One of the curious things about human language is that it is so infrequently written. Of the 6,000 or so currently spoken languages, only about 200 have a writing system. And the earliest writing system wasn’t developed very long ago when you consider that we’ve been talking for somewhere between 80,000 and 120,000 years.

So you’d think that voice recognition technology would be enormously intuitive and helpful and wonderful. And it almost is, but not quite.
Let’s take a small step back, or just off to the side: who here really loves leaving voice mail messages? Anybody? I don’t—not even when I know exactly what I want to say.

Not really even when the message is going to be: “Hey, call me when you get a chance.” Why?

Part of it might be that there’s not a person there to look at while you’re talking, but that seems kinda thin. I think it has to do more with the fact that there isn’t someone on the other end to have a conversation with. If you hesitate or stutter or say “...um” 3 times in a row there isn’t anybody on the other end to give you any feedback. Nobody is there to say, “Oh, yeah, cool.” or “Hey, can I call you back?” or “Look, the restraining order covers phone calls, too!” You could just as well be shouting into the void, because electronics basically look like a void to the human voice.

We learned to talk—whether it was 100,000 years ago or 10 years ago—from other people. We learned speech as assertions, questions, conversations, demands and explorations—not as mere recitation or performance. We haven’t evolved beyond needing someone to listen and respond; to signal to us that they understand. Even talking to ourselves is helpful (another form of embodied cognition?) for formulating thoughts and clarifying ideas. But trying to get your demands met by voice recognition is hit-and-miss without the fluid (if sometimes absolutely maddening) exchange you would have with another person.

For now we’re stuck performing for our devices, in the hopes that they will perform for us. We’re probably in an uncanny valley, where voice recognition is weirdly good but not quite perfect, for another decade or so. In the meantime, I’ll just have to get used to turning toward my smart speaker and trying to make it understand that I just want it to listen to me.

Language Notation

Human language has only recently appeared on the surfaces of things. For tens of thousands of years it only used to exist in our mouths and ears—whether whispered or shouted, mumbled or sung. At its deepest, primal level, human language is about sound and feel. It is not the alphabet or spelling—that’s just notation. Nuance has to be carefully designed into sentences that are drawn on a page or rendered to a screen rather than spoken. Without the breath to convey the complexity of emotion and energy—without that river to carry words along—there is much that simply sinks out of sight.

But we invented punctuation, too: further elaborating on our notation to try to convey the information in spoken language. But they are only symbols—approximations—and never spoken. Or at least they didn’t used to be spoken until we started dictating into our phones to create text.

Which, of course, is the perfect exercise to help you realize just how awkward and unnatural punctuation is.

Apprehension

Often times, when we’re talking about something or looking at it we’ll say, “Let me see that.” Of course, kids will subsequently taunt each other by saying, “See! You can see it!” and holding the item just out of reach. Because what we really mean when we say, “Let me see that” is, “I’d like to hold that and examine it more closely.”

We are extremely reliant on our vision to inform us about the world, but seeing something doesn’t always communicate everything we want to know about it. We can infer what something might feel like by looking at it closely. But the texture, weight and balance play off of each other to give things a certain feel. We can see how big something is, but that’s different from knowing how it fits in our hand (or not). The percieved quality of a luxury item can literally be weighed in our hands.

The word “apprehend” has two meanings in English: one is to arrest someone for a crime, but the other is to understand or perceive. The root of “apprehend” is the Latin prehendere: to lay hold of. I don’t think that’s a coincidence.