[This is a guest post by Talia's girlfriend Annie, who is managing this blog while Talia is away at Middlebury Language Academy.]
In his memoir, physicist Richard Feynman shares an anecdote about
going birdwatching with his father as a child:
One kid says to me, “See that bird? What kind of bird is that?”
I said, “I haven’t the slightest idea what kind of a bird it
is.”
He says, “It’s a brown-throated thrush. Your father doesn’t
teach you anything!”
But it was the opposite. He had
already taught me: “See that bird?” he says. “It’s a
Spencer’s warbler.” (I knew he didn’t know the real name.)...
You can know the name of that bird in all the languages of the world,
but when you’re finished, you’ll know absolutely nothing about
the bird. You’ll only know about humans in different places, and
what they call the bird. So let’s look at the bird and see what
it’s doing –
that’s
what counts.” (I learned very early the difference between knowing
the name of something and knowing something.)
I’ve always loved this passage. A name feels like knowledge,
and it’s easy to fool ourselves into thinking we understand
something just because we know what it’s called. But a name alone
doesn’t give us any information that we can do anything with. For
instance, when I was a little kid, I loved drawing robots, and I
always made sure to show that my robots had an anode and a cathode.
Six-year-old Annie fancied herself quite scientifically knowledgeable
for knowing what an anode and a cathode were. But I don’t think she
could have told you what anodes and cathodes actually do, or
why a robot would need them.
There is, however, a flip side to this. As any philosopher worth
their salt will tell us, the map is not the territory. But you can’t
fold the territory up and put in your pocket. The external world
doesn’t come to us neatly packaged for human consumption; it comes
in the form of a panoply of complicated information from our senses
with no clear markers of what is significant. To give something a
name is to draw a line around a little bit of this information soup
and say “Look, this is important! Pay attention to this!” Once
we’ve picked something out like this, we can distinguish its unique
properties and communicate them to other people. It’s gone from
being part of the background noise of reality to being something we
can consciously interact with, and potentially make use of. Naming
our world gives us power over our world.
This is a concept that linguists run into all the time when we study
languages other than our own. Different people and cultures treat
different facets of the world as significant, so different languages
end up drawing these lines differently. In his book The Last
Speakers, linguist K. David Harrison writes:
I
began to think of language as existing not only in the head, or
perhaps not entirely in the heads of speakers, but in local
landscapes, objects, and lifeways. Languages animate objects by
giving them names, making them noticeable when we might not otherwise
be aware of them. Tuvan has a word iy (pronounced like the
letter e), which indicates the short side of a hill. I had
never noticed that hills had a short side. But once I learned the
word, I began to study the contours of hills, trying to identify the
iy. It turns out that hills are asymmetrical, never perfectly
conical, and indeed one of their sides tends to be steeper and
shorter than the others. If you are riding a horse, carrying
firewood, or herding goats on foot, this is a highly salient concept.
You never want to mount a hill from the iy side, as it takes more
energy to ascend, and an iy descent is more treacherous, as well.
Once you know about the iy, you see it in every hill and identify it
automatically, directing your horse, sheep, or footsteps accordingly.
This is a perfect example of how language adapts to local
environment, by packaging knowledge into ecologically relevant bits.
Once you know that there is an iy, you don’t really have to
be told to notice it or to avoid it. You just do. The language has
taught you useful information in a covert fashion, without explicit
instruction.
The
Tuvan language has taken this environmental knowledge – which
wouldn’t necessarily be obvious on its own – and encapsulated it
into an easily accessible form.
Or,
take the debate over indigenous languages of the Arctic and their
words for snow. (Please!) It’s a common misconception that these
languages have an unusually large number of words for snow and ice –
depending on how one counts it, they don’t necessarily have many
more than English. But overzealous corrections of this misconception
can overlook the way these languages’ words for snow are in fact
noteworthy. Harrison gives the following examples of words for ice in
the Yupik language, quoted from the book Watching Ice and Weather
Our Way, a compendium of traditional Yupik environmental
knowledge:
“Qenu:
Newly forming slush ice. It forms when it first gets cold. Pequ: Ice
that was bubbled up by pressure ridging. [The] bulb cracks and falls
down, and when it breaks, the water shows up. It is then covered by
new ice or snow and it is very dangerous to walk on... Nutemaq: Old
ice floes that are thick and appear to have had a snow bank on them
for a long period of time. Good to work on. Nuyileq: Crushed ice
beginning to spread out; dangerous to walk on. The ice is dissolving,
but still has not dispersed in water, although it is vulnerable for
one to fall through and sink. Sometimes seals can even surface on
this ice because the water is starting to appear”
To
a linguist, what’s interesting about these words isn’t their
number per se, but the fact that they encode knowledge in a
way that’s particularly useful for surviving in the Arctic. Pequ,
nutemaq, and nuyileq, are all “ice,” but only
nutemaq is safe to walk on. An English speaker would need to
give a detailed description to convey what a Yupik speaker can
express in a single word.
Finally,
let’s return to Feynman and the birds:
[My father] said, “For example, look: the bird pecks at its
feathers all the time. See it walking around, pecking at its
feathers?”
“Yeah.”
He says, “Why do you think birds peck at their feathers?”
I said, “Well, maybe they mess up their feathers when they fly, so
they’re pecking them in order to straighten them out.”
“All right,” he says. “If that were the case, then they would
peck a lot just after they’ve been flying. Then, after they’ve
been on the ground a while, they wouldn’t peck so much any more –
you know what I mean?”
“Yeah.”
He says, “Let’s look and see if they peck more just after they
land.”
It wasn’t hard to tell: there was not much difference between the
birds that had been walking around a bit and those that had just
landed. So I said, “I give up. Why does a bird peck at its
feathers?”
“Because there are lice bothering it,” he says. “The lice eat
flakes of protein that come off its feathers.”
He continued, “Each louse has some waxy stuff on its legs, and
little mites eat that. The mites don’t digest it perfectly, so they
emit from their rear ends a sugar-like material, in which bacteria
grow.”
Finally
he says, “So you see, everywhere there’s a source of food,
there’s some
form of life that finds it.”
So
here’s an exercise for you to
try:
next time you go outside, look around and take in the sea of sensory
data you’re swimming in. Find some little piece of it that
interests you – a bird, maybe, or a plant, or an
insect, or
anything that catches your eye. Do what Feynman and his father did,
and observe it in as much detail as you can. Notice what it does, and
try to figure out why. But then go one step further and give it a
name. You
don’t have to know the “real” word for it; just call it
something that will stick in your memory. The next time you see it,
your new word will be waiting in your mind, and all your observations
will be there with it. By naming that part of reality, you’ll have
made it a part of you.
Citations:
Feynman,
Richard P. Classic
Feynman.
W.W. Norton & Company, 2006, New York, NY.
Harrison,
K. David. The
Last Speakers.
National Geographic Society, 2010, Washington, D.C.
