Languages In the World (6 page)

Some of these Indo-European structural tendencies are exceptions to the ways most languages of the world go about their grammatical business, and so we end our review of Spanglish by describing one such exception. In English and in Spanish, the
marking
of the syntactic relation of possession is put on what is called the
dependent
noun: in the phrase
the man
's
house
and
la casa
del
hombre
the possessive morpheme
-s
is bound to the word
man
, and the possessive form
del
is determined by the gender of
hombre
. In a language like Hungarian, which belongs to the Uralic language stock, the possessive relationship is marked on what is called the
head
noun:
az ember haz
a
, where
az
is ‘the,'
ember
is ‘man,' and
haz
is ‘house.' The final
-a
on
haz
‘house' marks the possession:

In other words, in Hungarian the thing possessed bears the grammatical mark of possession, not the possessor, and it turns out that the Hungarian pattern is the more common one among the languages of the world. To speakers of Indo-European languages this grammatical preference might seem strange. It might also seem to be relatively insignificant. However, marking preferences are structural features, as we will see in later chapters, with large implications.

From the earliest days of television in the United States, Spanish was heard in American living rooms through the character of Ricky Ricardo on
I Love Lucy
. He was played by Desi Arnaz, the real-life husband of Lucille Ball, who was the star of the show. Ricky/Desi was a bandleader of Cuban origin whose catchphrase was, “Lucy, you got some ‘splainin' to do!”
¹⁰
Indeed, Lucy's antics would regularly exasperate him enough to send him off into a rant in Spanish. The sight of a handsome Latin man losing his temper with his wife while spouting a stream of incomprehensible speech always played for laughs. The comedy arising from the Spanish–English language gap is in evidence 50 years later on
Modern Family
whose character, Gloria Pritchett, played by Colombian bombshell, Sofia Vergara, regularly mangles English pronunciation to comic effect.

If Spanish is treated as an object of amused incomprehension on English-language American sitcoms, how is English portrayed on Spanish-language American programs? On the Telemundo channel, owned by NBC Universal and broadcast throughout the United States, one popular
telenovela
,
Marido en Alquiler
,
¹¹
has a character named Doña Teresa Cristina Palmer de Ibarra with
la nariz respingada
‘nose in the air.' She is apt to say things like, “Good morning,
disculpen pero no me gusta decir buenos días en español
.” (Good morning, excuse me but I don't like to say ‘good morning' in Spanish.) ‘Good morning' and
buenos días
are on the one hand equivalent salutations that perform the same social function, namely, a morning greeting. But Doña Teresa Cristina's use of the English ‘Good morning' while otherwise speaking Spanish indicates that in the United States, the languages are not equal in terms of social status. While many Spanish speakers in the United States feel proud to speak Spanish, many nevertheless feel that English conveys a higher social status.

The actors who play the lead protagonists on this
telenovela
also embody a European physical preference. They have light skin and light eyes, and they come from Venezuela, Colombia, and Argentina, although they do not speak their regional varieties on the show. Rather, they use a nonspecific variety with an occasional mix of Mexican slang so that their speech will appeal to the broadest segment of the viewing audience, namely the Spanish-speaking Mexicans who comprise over 65% of the overall Latino population in the United States. The question is: Why are the Mexicans now the largest overall Latino population in the United States? The answer is: the signing of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) in 1994, which had a negative effect on small farmers south of the border, thereby sending them north to find jobs.

Throughout this chapter, we have seen the persistent effects of economic pressures on human movement. Here at the end, we perceive the sometimes-subtle, always-present workings of one of the most powerful forces in language dynamics: attitudes about language in response to prestige.

1. Darwin, Charles (1859) 1968.
   Origin of the Species by Means of Natural Selection or the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life, Edited and with an Introduction by J.W. Burrow
   . London: Penguin Books.
   
2. Poplack, Shana (1979) 1980. Sometimes I'll start a sentence in Spanish
   y termino en español
   .
   Linguistics
   18: 581–618.
   
3. Santiago, Bill (2008)
   Pardon My Spanglish: One Man's Guide to Speaking the Habla
   . Philadelphia: Quirk Books.
   

1. Lyovin, Anatole (1997)
   An Introduction to the Languages of the World
   . Oxford: Oxford University Press.
   
2. Pereltsvaig, Aysa (2012)
   Languages of the World: An Introduction
   . Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
   
3. Veltman, Calvin (1983)
   Language Shift in the United States
   . Berlin: Mouton De Gruyter.
   

Aboriginal Australian cultures have a rite of passage known as the Walkabout. Adolescent males spend up to six months on foot tracing paths established by their ancestors. These journeys can be as long as 1000 miles, and the young men are expected to complete them without a compass. Although adolescent girls do not traditionally take part in this rite of passage, the 2002 movie
Rabbit-Proof Fence
tells the story, based on historical events of the 1930s, of two Aboriginal girls who, after being taken from their family under Australia's so-called half-caste reeducation program, undertake a journey on foot of more than 1000 miles and eventually arrive home. Their journey does not count as a Walkabout as such. However, it does suggest that the girls were able to undertake the challenge because they did not think it impossible to walk many miles across a barren landscape. The girls were, in effect, observing a cultural norm.

The practice of the 1000-mile Walkabout reveals something significant about the intertwined relationship between language, culture, and cognition. In this case, the noteworthy phenomenon is the relationship between an ability known as
dead reckoning
and what are called absolute spatial frames of reference common in Aboriginal Australian languages, such as Guugu Yimithirr. Dead reckoning refers to an ability to navigate a large space by taking an areal perspective on the terrain to be covered. Absolute spatial frames of reference are organized around what English speakers might call the cardinal directions of north, south, east, and west. English, by way of contrast, organizes the horizontal spatial plane in terms of either relative or intrinsic frames of reference, and English speakers organize significant parts of their lives around these frames. For now, the point is that language, culture, and cognition are thoroughly intertwined and shape one another.

This chapter is devoted to exploring some of the dimensions of this mutual shaping, which issues forth from the basic fact that languages are always embodied in individuals who are embedded in contexts. We undertake this exploration by examining the various dimensions – the cognitive, the cultural, the structural, and the ideological – of what we are calling
the language loop
.

In Chapter 1, we defined language as an orienting behavior that orients the orientee within his or her cognitive domain. We pointed out that this behavior arises both in the phylogenic development of the species
Homo sapiens sapiens
and in the ontogenic development of nearly all individuals (but not every single one, alas) born into the species. We also pointed out that this behavior takes place through recurrent interactions with fellow human beings. In phylogenic terms, those recurrent interactions may well have taken two million years to develop into a behavior modern humans would say qualifies as a human language as such. In ontogenic terms, a human baby – unless something goes awry – is born into a linguistic bath, so to speak, surrounded by language, and is involved in recurrent interactions with conspecifics for the rest of his or her life.

We furthermore defined the word
cognition
in terms of the integrated effects of the mental and the physical. The preliminary discussion of the phrase
orienting the orientee within his or her cognitive domain
was, however, necessarily incomplete. Given the use of the term
cognition
in this book, one could argue that if I push you, I am orienting you in your cognitive domain by requiring you to reorganize your bodily disposition with respect to the space we are both occupying. This event, however, does not count as a linguistic event, and so our definition requires a first expansion: the orienting must be achieved by means that are independent of the orienting interactions themselves. If I say, “Please move,” and you kindly step aside, then I have brought about a change in your position (where you are standing) by means that are independent of the orienting interactions themselves (through the use of language).

Notice that the members of all social species are able to more or less reliably orient their conspecifics within their cognitive domains by similar means. The dance of a bee is able to orient fellow bees' behavior by indicating the direction, distance, and quality of certain resources, such as fields of flowers, water, and new places to build hives. Wolves howl, among other reasons, to mark their territory by “informing” other wolves of their location. When this howling orients nonconspecifics in their cognitive domains, it doubles as a type of interspecies communication. For instance, humans who cohabit territory with wolves are likely to attend to such howls and behave accordingly. Humans are particularly good at reliably coordinating themselves through recurrent interactions with their cats, dogs, and horses. However, the domains of interactions of the two organisms or of the two groups have to be to some extent comparable, that is, they have to share both a close lineage in phylogeny and a history of interactions in ontogeny, in order for their ability to orient one another to be fully relevant for both organisms and/or groups. In other words, although you have a history of
interactions with your dog, you and your dog do not share a close phylogenetic lineage, only an ancient common mammalian ancestor. Thus, while the two of you can successfully coordinate certain types of actions, the range of those actions is necessarily limited.

Bee dances, wolf howls, primate calls, whale and bird songs, and so forth, qualify, broadly speaking, for the label
communication
, as much as do human languages. If we step back and survey the array of modes by which organisms communicate, we could say that it does not matter whether the mode is sight (bee dancing, ASL), sound (howling, singing, whistling, spoken English), chemical signals (insect pheromones), smell (deer marking territory with urine), or even touch (if a deaf signer goes blind, they can hold the hands of the person they are speaking with to feel the shapes of the signs). We can say that the choice of mode is arbitrary, that is, the particular mode is not in itself important, only the fact that it succeeds in reliably coordinating behavior matters. However, from the point of view of the specific organism or group of organisms, of course, the mode put to use is hardly arbitrary in the sense of being random and has everything to do with the physiology of the organism, for instance, whether or not the organism has hands.

The principle of the arbitrariness of the sign is well known in linguistics and refers to the relationship between the form (phonetic shape, sound) and content (meaning) of a word. Except for onomatopoeia, words that imitate the sound of a thing or action they refer to (
tick-tock
goes the clock), the relationship between the way a word is pronounced and its meaning is arbitrary. The sun, moon, and stars do not now nor ever did emit audible vibrations, and humans do not now nor ever did have the percussive power to ring at celestial frequencies and thereby to bring forth the names for bright things in the sky. The first day in any foreign language class illustrates this principle of arbitrariness: the English word
water
is not universal. In order to refer to water, the student of German must learn the word
Wasser
and remember that it is neuter, and the student of Polish must learn the word
woda
and remember that it is feminine, while the student of Vietnamese must learn the word
nước
and remember that it has a rising tone. The student of Vietnamese will also be learning new associations for the word, because
nước
also means ‘country.'

We have yet to distinguish the ways we humans orient our fellow humans in our respective cognitive domains from other forms of communication found in other species. Humans can and do refer to objects in a way that other species cannot, and this ability is known as the referential function of language. However, despite the fact that languages have many names for many objects, human language does not function as an inventory of names for things, nor did language come into being through the process of naming. Individual words are byproducts of the dynamics of the recurrent interactions through which humans induce their fellow humans to take a perspective on a situation for the purpose of effective coordinated action. Human language is perspective taking. When we speak (sign, write), we ask our fellow humans to turn their attention this way or that. The coordinated action that results may be only that of the mental state of understanding, but this is already a lot, because understanding is effective for keeping open the possibility of further interaction. We could also call these turnings
tunings
, such that learning a language and growing up to be a competent member of a community means becoming tuned to certain features of the social
and physical environments of that community, knowing how to attend to what feature when and knowing what behaviors are called for in response to that attention.

In the last half century, much scientific study has been devoted to nonhuman primates and their cognitive domains, with a significant part of this research devoted to testing various nonhuman primates' linguistic abilities and limits. Of relevance to the present discussion, this research shows that:

1. vervet monkeys can reliably coordinate their actions around specific calls; one member of the troop, upon spying a snake on the ground, will utter a particular call, and the other members will scramble up the nearest tree; another member of the troop, upon spying a hawk flying overhead, will utter a different call, and this one will send the others diving into the bushes for cover;
   
2. nonhuman primates in general are good at social cognition, and members of a troop know their place in the hierarchy and behave accordingly, which includes sometimes challenging that place and striving for a higher one; the many words found in human languages distinguishing among social ranks –
   king, queen, lord, lady, sir, madam
    – reflect the human version of this social fact of primate life;
   
3. bonobos can learn human language to a degree not imagined only a few decades ago, the most famous bonobo being Kanzi, who happened to learn language while his mother was being unsuccessfully trained and is now able to make (some of) his thoughts and desires known to his human caretakers.
   

In other words, we can detect human-like language behaviors in our closest phylogenic relatives and primate-like behaviors in humans. The point here relates to the ecological account of the origin of language mentioned in Chapter 1: human language emerged out of primate cognition and is continuous with it. It is a natural product rather than a special case of some kind and is as much a part of the human niche as water is for fish.

Yet, what vervet monkeys do when responding to a call cannot be called taking a perspective on a situation, and there are features of human languages that
induce
certain kinds of cognition that would not be there otherwise, spatial frames of reference being an excellent example. Navigation is a particularly important skill for any species, and the way that human groups have differentially worked out how to coordinate their actions with respect to space on the horizontal plane attests to the crucial way language structures (some of) human cognition. As for Kanzi, we could call him genetically bonobo and epigenetically human, just as humans raised by wolves could be called genetically human and epigenetically wolf. Kanzi, no matter how much linguistic training, cannot be transformed into a human with the full range of language behaviors and cognitive repertoires.

The members of all social species are able to coordinate the cognitive domains of their conspecifics; we humans distinguish ourselves by coordinating each other through language, now defined as
coordinations of coordinations
. This is not the usual way language is talked about, and it is not at first easy to understand and requires more language to work the idea out. We coordinate our interactions with one another by giving our actions an extra encircling tug, by creating mental reins, whereby we
send each other's thoughts and actions sometimes in unexpected directions, sometimes down well-worn paths. My saying “Hi, how are you?” does nothing more than pull your attention momentarily in my direction and may prompt you to return my greeting. When confronted with the phrase
coordinations of coordinations
, you may have briefly frowned and looked away from the page in order to think about it. As a start, you could think of language as elaborated cognitive loops, complex braids of mental–physical routines, beautiful lace tatted throughout our neurons with tendrils extending down through the larynx to the diaphragm, organizing and coordinating not only breathing rates but also muscle patterns as we act and interact with one another throughout our days and lives.

Language loops in several directions at once. We examine each way in turn.

As has just been said, language loops one human's cognitive domain with all others who speak that same (or similar enough) language, making language constitutive of the kind of cognition often called ‘cultural thinking.' Language is thus not a personal possession, as some theorists have claimed over the centuries, but rather an intersubjective phenomenon. Just as we can and do get in one another's faces and under one another's skin, so we can and do get into one another's heads through our recurrent interactions. Those recurrent interactions, in turn, create ever-new conditions, both big and small, to which language in the broadest terms – a repertoire of tonal and intonational patterns, lexical resources, syntactic particularities, implicational and inferential expectations, mental–behavioral routines providing stability in change – is always catching up.

Let us return to the varying frames of spatial reference we brought up at the beginning of this chapter. We mentioned that Aboriginal Australian languages favored the
absolute
frame of reference.
¹
When referring to the location of objects in space with respect to one another on the horizontal plane, individuals speaking the Aboriginal language Guugu Yimithirr will say, for instance, “The man is north of the house.” An English speaker, if standing next to the Aboriginal, will describe the same scene either in terms of a viewer-based
relative
frame of reference, “The man is to the left of the house,” or in terms of an
intrinsic
, object-centered frame of reference, “The man is in front of the house.” As you have been reading these sentences, it is likely that you have had to make some mental shifts to imagine where the English speaker and the Guugu Yimithirr speaker are standing with respect to the man and the house in order for the three different descriptions of the same scene to line up. For more help, see
Figure 2.1
. The point is, for the Guugu Yimithirr speaker, mastery of the cardinal directions is an integral part of learning to speak the language, just as learning left from right is integral to knowing English; and this mastery cannot be appreciated without also noticing that: the Walkabout turns an Aboriginal boy into a man, in part by demonstrating his command of dead reckoning; and the names of the cardinal directions in these languages often derive from specific landmarks in the local geography and so do not really correspond to what, in English, qualify as cardinal directions.

If you are an English speaker, and you are asked to give directions, you are likely to activate a mental strip map of the route to take and trace it out in your head: the first right, the second left, then go straight, and so forth. As you issue your directions, you are likely to gesture left, right, and straight. When you sit down at a table, you expect the knife and spoon to be to the right of your plate and the fork to the left. When you learned left from right, you may have done so by identifying which hand you write with, perhaps moving your fingers as if holding a pencil just to be sure. Even as an adult, you may still have to pause on occasion to sort out left from right, and you might even get them wrong. When your friend tells you to turn right, and you turn left, your friend may correct you with the jocular comment, “No, your
other
right.” When you are in a complicated yoga pose, it may take quite a lot of thought to identify which leg your instructor asks you to move.

If you are a speaker of an absolute frame of reference language, when asked to give directions, you will likely activate a mental areal map and give directions in terms of the cardinal points relevant in your particular landscape. You are likely to point with amazing accuracy in the direction of your home, even if you are 50 miles away. You are also likely to remember how the action of a scene unfolded in terms of cardinal directions, and, if asked to replay it, all your actions will be oriented in the same directions as those of the original scene. You will know in the dark which faucet is the northward one of the sink in a kitchen you have never been in before. You will understand the meaning of the saying in your culture that: “To not know where north is, is to be crazy.”

Language organizes significant portions of our world of thought and perceptions, illustrated by the varying frames of reference through which humans orient themselves with respect to the horizontal plane.