Linguistic interaction involves much more than simply sharing information. It requires shaping the information so that it will fit in to a pre-existing structure. This is where we might run into problems if we ever get the chance to chat with intelligent extra-terrestrial beings. To what extent can we communicate if there is no shared common ground? As it happens, we already live on a planet with intelligent non-human life, a world with its own language and even, as Paul Stamets points out, its own internet. If we were courageous enough to live at the limits of human selfhood and human language maybe we’d be able to communicate with that world.
If you were told, definitively, that you were an alien, would it relieve a burden? Would it explain, or affirm, a few things? Would you look to the sky and long for home?
If you’ve ever felt like an alien, then the story I published recently on grammarfordreamers.com is dedicated to you. According to ‘Exiles’, it’s not you who’s the alien. It’s human language.
The story positions human language as distinct from ‘Earth’s own linguistic structures.’ The idea here is that human language is one set of structures, which is separate from the material world. The material world is another set of structures, physical, chemical, biological, etc. All these structures are forms of language.
The Earth is excited (or so the story goes) to welcome the new species. It’s curious about the new ideas that might emerge from the hermetically sealed selves that human language shapes.
How often do you get asked that question? How does it make you feel to be asked? When did the question first start making sense to you?
This episode explores the ways that pronoun usage has shifted over time to reflect new ways of thinking about the relationship between self and society. We’ll draw upon Brown and Gilman’s seminal essay, ‘The pronouns of power and solidarity’. And we’ll go back to Girl Scout camp in the early eighties, which is where my real education in pronouns began.
This could be a tricky question, for lots of reasons. People may not understand your faith. People may not understand how your faith is connected to your culture. People may not understand why you aren’t part of a religion. Maybe your experiences of religion have been traumatic in some way.
To make this topic a little more light-hearted, it might be best to start with a different question.
What’s your most embarrassing religious moment?
Here’s mine: I accidentally became a born-again Christian at the age of 12.
In this episode we explore my hapless conversion in more detail. We gain some perspective from a book called The elementary forms of religious life, written by French sociologist Emile Durkheim.
In Durkheim’s analysis of what’s at the root of all religions, he draws these conclusions:
When people worship, they’re connecting with something bigger than themselves
This ‘bigger thing’ is society
Without society people would not experience themselves as people; they’d have no sense of who they were in the world
These conclusions are a little hard to swallow, particularly because we live in a moment where we’re right to be critical of society and the roles it establishes for us. Especially as these roles are carved out of endemic structural injustices.
But why do human beings need to actively connect with something bigger than themselves? It seems to me we’re already connected to something bigger than us—the natural world.
When I imagine the natural world as a conscious entity—and it’s one of the themes I love to explore in my fiction—it makes me feel like I am already part of a bigger picture.
This is true for me even though I feel separate from the natural world, even though I feel my experience is limited by the constraints of my language and my society.
The idea I most like to play with in my fiction is that the human experience of separation from the natural world is not a flaw, but a design principle.
I explore this notion in most recent story, ‘First words’, which is available on my Grammar for Dreamers blog grammarfordreamers.wordpress.com. I intended the ‘Seer’ character to be an agent of the natural world, creating language to produce the experience of separation, the concept of the self.
The idea is that those of us who believe we inhabit selves (e.g. human beings!) are the routes by which the Earth itself experiences new ideas.
Intrigued? Would you like some more ideas about on how to tap into these insights on language and the self? Check out my free course, ‘Writing through the Lens of Language’: bit.ly/lensoflanguage
How is language like water? Both are all around us. Both are within us. Both have fascinating structuring mechanisms that we may not know much about.
Think about the structure of a water molecule. Its single oxygen atom has a slightly negative charge, and the two hydrogen atoms have a slightly positive charge. The opposite charges attract water molecules to each other (the positive side of one molecule is drawn to the negative side of another). These weak attractive forces are called ‘hydrogen bonds’, and they make it possible for water to remain a liquid at room temperature, which in turn allows life to exist on Earth.
In this episode we explore the possibility that human language has a structuring quality, like the structuring mechanisms in the natural world. If the qualities of water are shaped by hydrogen bonds, what shapes the structure of human language?
I believe that the structuring principle of human language is selfhood.
We’re getting better at recognising the oppressive structures of our society, like structural racism, patriarchal systems, colonialism, cisheteronormativity, neurotypicality and ableism (to name a few).
But we might also take some time to acknowledge a more dynamic structuring principle: the self. Formed and re-formed by language, it dissolves and is produced anew in each moment. The self shapes itself like a membrane around spaces from which new experiences can emerge.
The challenge is to recognise the power of the dynamic structure of the self formed by language. The mission is to honour it, in ourselves and each other.
Curious about how linguists can find out what pre-verbal babies know about linguistic structure? Watch this great video on The Ling Space.
Ferdinand de Saussure likened language to a collective treasure that every member of the linguistic community can draw from without its stores diminishing. This idea is quite heartening – almost magical – but it’s also ruthlessly oppressive. What do you want first: the good news or the bad news?
When did you learn that the earth travels round the sun and not the other way round? And when you talk to yourself, which one of the dialoguing characters is you? Language generates multiple selves, and each self comes with its own built in worldview. Is it superstitious to think of selves that are wiser than us, that are protective, that wish to bless us? Perhaps it’s reckless not to.
I learned about imperatives in Omotic languages from reading work by Alexandra Aikhenvald. (See reference list below.)
And the discussion of postmodernism is based on the following quote from Madan Sarup’s book, Identity, culture and the postmodern world:
‘Copernicus, Darwin, Marx and Freud have all, in their different ways, decentred the human subject. By “decentering”, I mean that individual consciousness can no longer be seen as the origin of meaning, knowledge and action.’ (Sarup, 1996, p. 46)
References
Aikhenvald, A. (2010). Imperatives and commands. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Sarup, M. (1996). Identity, culture and the postmodern world. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.
Photo by Walter Baxter / A murmuration of starlings at Gretna / CC BY-SA 2.0
Is an enlightened society a society without language? This episode explores what starlings can teach us about selves, the space that surrounds the experience of being, and how to create a more welcoming world.
In this episode we explore the idea that intimacy is embedded in the structure of language, and that this same intimacy is embedded in the structure of life.
We challenge the idea that languages are made of words, as does a character in my short story, ‘The words of your language’, which was published in issue 13 of After Happy Hour Review.
We play the ‘think of a word’ game, which shows up on pages 7-8 of my screenplay, Grammar for Dreamers.
And we hear how Coyote tricked human beings into believing that language started with them, and that they’re the only ones who possess it in my fable called ‘Coyote’s trick’.
‘What if language was not the endpoint of the earth’s evolution, but rather, its starting point? What if language was what the earth has always been doing?’
And finally, we explore the flipside of intimacy: hierarchy, domination, colonisation.
Are you enjoying these episodes? Would you like to hear more? Subscribe on Apple podcasts, Spotify, Google podcasts, or wherever you like to listen. For additional content, follow me on Instagram, where I regularly post videos sharing bits of linguistic geekery that delight me: @grammarfordreamers
Listen to Episode 64: The Intimacy Embedded in Language.
Structured Visions 