The Concept of Language (Noam Chomsky)

The following program is a WTV classic from the University of Washington in Seattle after a reflection with Al Page. Our guest is Professor Gome Chomsky of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and visiting professor at the University of Washington. What determines how the

language

evolves in a particular country. Because. Is French, for example, so different from German? Well, first of all, you're assuming that French is that different from German, so the French would probably say, so you know there's no simple measure of how different

language

s ​​are from each other, in fact, if you look. French differs from the other Romance languages ​​in a variety of ways that make it more similar to German and other Germanic languages.

There are a number of characteristics of French that are sort of German character gives us some of those characteristics, well just to take a simple one in all the Romance languages ​​except French, uh, you can remove the subject from a sentence, you can say the equivalent of walks to the store, meaning walk to the store uh we can't do that in English, but you can do it in Italian or Spanish and in fact, common romance goes back to Latin. French is the only Romance language you can't do it in, it's like a Germanic language. More or less in that sense uh in uh uh there they have what they call small CICS pronouns that are attached to the verb to say the equivalent of I saw him, that's common romance, but in the other romance languages ​​you can do things like I he wants . to see, you can do that in every way, I want to see it, but not in French and uh, uh, for a variety of constructions, actually, there are quite a few ways in which French differs from the other Romance languages, that is.

Incidentally, Old French. The average Frenchman says that French in the medieval period was not like the other Romance languages, so something happened to it that made it less like the Romance languages ​​and more like the Germanic languages. How does language change over time? How did 18th century French change compared to? 12th century French, well, you know, when we talk about language change, that's very misleading. I mean, there is no such thing as a language in France. I mean, up until the turn of the century, you could find people in nearby towns in France who couldn't. Not understanding one could practically not understand each other.

The idea of ​​a national language is a fairly modern phenomenon. It has to do with the rise of nationalism and communication, etc., or let's say Italy today or Germany today. I mean the differences between the things we call German are huge, so huge that they lead to non-mutual intelligibility, you have to learn the national language when you go to school, it's a different language than the one you spoke at home, uh, uh , when we talk about language, it changes what is really happening. is that there is something like a change of species, there is a mixture of all kinds of dialects and the mixture changes over time, either because of conquest or some political change or the boundaries are drawn in a different place or, you know , some type of commercial exchange. or whatever, the mix of these things changes over time and you know if you look at it a few centuries apart, it seems like there's a different language, but what happened is that between generations there are usually small changes that have to do with it. with other outside influences and so on, and these things are cumulative, sometimes they lead to quite dramatic changes.

I mean, within a couple of generations, language can have a structural change in quite dramatic ways and, of course, in a lexicon, you know the words. The language will be a completely different matter, so when technology develops you will get a completely new vocabulary, but if you were in France in the 12th century and understood all the nuances of the language, could you have predicted how these various languages ​​would have evolved over time? time? No, it's totally impossible, I mean, but it's partially random. It's not so much that it's random. It was, it's not really random.

For all we know, it could be completely deterministic. There are too many factors involved. It's like you know it's like predicting. the weather, there's just too much going on, human life is a pretty complicated business, and now, culture, our culture, English speakers can be fooled by this English, it's relatively homogeneous, you can go a long way in the United States. . He says you know, I mean, I just came from Boston and I understand everyone in Portland and Seattle, etc., but that's not true in most of the world, in most of the world, uh, linguistic areas, languages ​​in which you can get very different languages ​​very close and very much. of the world is what we would call multilingual the closer I get to the border between France and Germany, the closer the languages ​​become, yes, well, particularly if you go from Paris to Rome, as you move towards the Italian border, it starts to sound more. more like Italian and at some point it becomes Italian and there isn't, in fact, I mean, so far you know that there is enough national unity and so on that you can actually find a border, but if you go back a little bit, there were no borders, there was only one, I wouldn't say Continuum, just constant changes, fluctuations and variations and you started talking about one thing in one place and another thing in another place and often they are not mutually intelligible, but along the way there is just everything. kind of changes now with the rise of nation states and especially national systems of communications and national education and all these things, which is quite a modern phenomenon, so you get what we now call national languages, as I say, English is unusual , the reason if after all, in pre-colonial times, only hundreds of thousands, probably different languages, were spoken in what is now called the United States, because of the destruction of the indigenous population and it was a real destruction, something like that as genocidal and the conquest by speakers of basically a group. uh you ended up having a big, homogeneous language, but how could anyone have predicted that it had to do with the invention of weapons and you know political conquest and all kinds of things and that's pretty much what human history is.

There are some theorists for For example, who argue that they must work very hard to keep the French language pure, what does that mean? It does not mean anything. I mean, there is an old, I mean practically all national languages, all national cultures or at least European ones, maybe others. a mythology that says that this is the only true and pure language and all others are corrupt. In France, this position is a bit extreme, in fact, if you go back to its origins, it is even a bit comical. I don't know if anyone has really studied it. but if you go back to the 18th century and read, he says d uh, he explains D very U, you know seriously that U says here is a prediction for you, he says that France will be the language of science and that German and English will be .

They are the languages ​​of literature and the reason for this is that French is very clear in France, the words follow the order of the thoughts, whereas if you look and listen to German and English, the words do not quite follow the words of the thought. , so France is good at telling, French is good at telling the truth because of what was later called Lucidity and Clarity of the GAC, while a German and I think the examples were German and English, maybe Italian , are good languages ​​to say. fantasies and falsehoods so they will be the languages ​​of literature now you can it's a kind of naive point of view but you can see what was going on in his head I mean, for him the French words followed the order of thoughts uh when I hear German , it all seems confusing, I mean, they are thinking differently.

The German speaker seems the opposite, of course, uh and uh. I suspect that the mythology of French purity, lucidity, and clarity goes back to ideas like that. After all, French culture had a certain dominance and appeal for a long time, so these attitudes set in, but what does it mean for the language to be pure or when people say they want English to be pure, what are they talking about? Was Shakespeare pure? in fact, at every stage of history there are languages, first of all, there is no one language, there are simply many different ways of speaking that different people have that are more or less similar to each other, and some of them may have prestige associated with them. with them, for example, some of them may be the speech of a conquering group or a rich group or a priestly cast or one thing or another and we can decide if those are the good ones and some others. those are bad, but if social and political relations were reversed, we would draw opposite conclusions, say, take black English.

Today, Black English is not considered entirely appropriate, on the other hand, if Black people had all the power and owned all the corporations. and white people worked for them, it would be the other way around: black English would be the language of culture and science, etc., and the things you and I speak would be considered a degenerate dialect that people have to be taken out of so that They may think, but that raises an interesting question: why does language have rules? Why were we taught these rules in elementary school? Why is bad grammar bad grammar? Well, when you are taught rules of your own language in elementary school, the chances are very strong that what you are being taught is false, otherwise you wouldn't have to be taught it, but I can see all the teachers in school primary school about to throw an orange at you on the screen, there is discomfort, well, we have allowed myself to be a little more nuanced one of the things you learn in primary school is the literary language now in English the literary standard is not so radically different from what you say that you and I grew up but it is something different the literary standard is not what I learned in the streets it is not very different but it is a little different and when I went to school they taught me the literary standard now the literary standard has some associated principles some of which are those of a real language some of which are completely artificial they were made created by people who had crazy ideas about language and they all get names you've never heard of before and in fact the reason The reason you have to teach them is because they are not the person's language, no one is your real language, no one teaches you, me, your language. it just grows in your head, you know you can't, it's putting a child in a small child in an environment where people speak a language and that child can't help but know that language more than the child can help it grow, it's just part of human growth. for some component of the brain to pick up Lang language, you can't learn it and you don't learn it any more than you learn now, the fact is that the system that grows in the brain is sometimes different from a system that is considered for whatever reason as necessary or appropriate or approved or something like some Prestige dialect and it may be different than what is normally what grew in your brain or it may be a way of trying to get us to have a common system.

The link through language is very possible. I mean, I think that's a problem in places like, for example, Italy in Italy, where if someone grows up in the pedmont area and someone else grows up in the Naples area, they speak totally different languages. Neither of us can understand a word, the other one says uh, so when you teach what they call Italian, which is the language more or less of the Florence area of ​​Tuscany, you are teaching people what amounts to a second language. and it is the national language just like in Germany and China, well, China is even worse because what we call Chinese is a set of languages ​​that are as different from each other as the different Romance languages; they just happen to all be yellow on the map or something and they happen to be a unified language. political area, but it makes no sense that they are the same language.

We call them Chinese dialects, but that would be like calling French and Romanian. Two different dialects are the same language. Latin or something like that. I mean, all these terms have no linguistic meaning. Just the socio-political meaning of iCal is of a very complex kind and the way they interact with authority structures is crucial, so what we call good English is a system that is partly artificial, I should say, taught to people because it was legislated to know good English now, some of what is taught breaks the rules of any conceivable human language, so it has to be taught over and over again, so I don't know if people still do it in school, but when I was at school you had to learn all sorts of complicated nonsense about "duty" and "will" that no one could remember.

I mean, I forget what the word is, "I will, you will" or some weird thing that violates "there is not," I mean, there are certain principles of human biology that determine what a language is. it can be and no language can be like that so it had to be like that, in fact we can trace it and find out who invented it. He knows some bishop in the 17th century or something made it up and decided that's how it's supposed to be. Now that kind of thing, of course, has to be taught because it's totally artificial or you have toteach people how to say um uh, he and I instead of he and I, well, English works the other way around, I mean, if no one was bothering you. in English you'd probably say he and I or here or something like that, but in standard language you're taught not to do that.

There is another invented language called literary standard in which you don't and ask the question why do you have to teach? Well, you have to teach people because it's artificial, it's not their language and often it's not just their language, sometimes it is not even a possible language. Why are pronunciation and intonation so important to language? Why are words themselves not enough to convey meaning well? you have to understand someone else's words, I mean, if you go to central London and someone's pronoun speaks Cockney and the words match ours on some abstract level, you still might not understand them, the pronunciation might be the different enough that your part of your language knowledge is a way of decoding the noises you hear and turning them into a system that matches your own representations, sometimes now, for that decoding system to work, the systems have to be Close enough, you and I can do it if you listen. with us up close we are speaking different languages ​​but they are close enough that we don't have any.

I have no problem decoding you and you have no problem decoding me, uh, but again, that's a little artificial, that's because of the artificial unit of the English language that is spoken in the United States. It turns out that I was in England last week and I can find myself in places in England where I don't understand what they are saying, I mean if I listen to them for a while we can establish communication, but you have to retune your system in some way that is not understand so you can start decoding what you're hearing. What role does slang play in a language?

Why does slang exist? Good because? I don't know, but the fact is that people are very innovative and like to do things differently, especially in teenage cultures, why do teenagers wear different clothes? Well, you know, whatever the reason is that they want to be different, they like to be innovative. creative and Fashions and language oh of course and in fact there are styles of different groups some of them change very quickly uh the words that are in one era are archaic and in another the era can be three years or something like that and people are playing with their languages ​​often again, this is not very common in our societies, our societies remember that they are basically technological societies, our intelligence and creativity etc. extends to other things, but if you say Central Australia, where you are, you find Basically, Stone Age tribes, there is a lot of innovation in language, a lot of the cultural wealth has to do with playing games with languages ​​and building elaborate kinship systems and things that probably have little or no functional use, it's just the creative mind the one who works, you know?

So you get very complex language games. A special language system that is taught as a right of puberty and only spoken by a particular group of people. Nobody else understands it. Language differs in the way it is used in the arts. First of all, there is a variety. of conventions of formal conventions that are humanly created but that certainly reflect our aesthetic capabilities, that is establishing a framework within which they establish a framework of humanly imposed rules within PE within which people create, so if I mean an extreme case if you write a Sonet you have to get pretty close to a fixed framework uh and while that is an extreme case, the same goes for other literary conventions.

I mean, this part of human creative innovation has been creating aesthetic forms that somehow attract or challenge us. our intelligence or whatever and it is a work within them. I mean, after all, painting a painting on a piece of canvas has a limit that is quite recent in human history and that in itself imposes a framework that determines the kinds of things you can do. produce and in the U the literary use of language is simply everything, from the structure of a novel to the metrical character of a poetic form is one or another human invention do you respond to poetry?

Am I sure I have time to read it, does it make you think differently, does it organize what's going on in your thought processes, well, you know, I'm not, I don't feel competent to say it, but it's a topic that's been discussed quite a bit. pretty clever way, so, for example, if you read, it's not me, I have nothing to say about it, don't pretend, but if you read, for example, William Amon's seven types of ambiguity, you'll get an intriguing explanation of why what poetry makes you think, partly because it's so compressed, you know and you just get hints, so the reader has to impose a lot of structure, you have to put yourself into it and partly because the formal structure itself imposes a challenge to intelligence, uh, if you're just throwing paintings at random, it's not a work of art, you know, but when it is, when it's done within the framework of a humanly constructed system of rules, at least you have the prerequisites for a work of art, still it may not be what is necessary, whatever the creativity, and that is not I understood that that also has to be there, but I have nothing to say on these issues.

I wouldn't mean to mention another area that you can claim to have no experience in and that is the use of humor with which we respond to people we use humor and communication but it is not taught in primary school, no we are not taught to be comedians, but we respond to it and that seems to be the case in almost every language, well, I don't think that's the case. too much to do with language we can also be funny in other ways a clown can be funny without using the use of without using language and no one teaches a child how to laugh at a clown now I think let's, let's go here to interesting topics but topics where nothing is understood uh I have no doubt that there is something about human nature, you know the basic structure of the human mind, the brain, that makes certain things funny and others not, just as there are certain things about the human brain. which make some things turn out to be a human language and others not, although they could be a Martian language or something and in essence I don't think it's fundamentally different from the fact that we grow arms and not wings, now we don't know why we grow arms and not wings, but you assume it has something to do with human genetic makeup and I think the comparable assumption is true in all these cases.

One of the parts of the fascination of the study of language is that it is one of the few examples where you can really get a sense of how it works, these other topics you mention say that humor should be objected to the same type of study, but Until now it has not been clear how to do it, do you know words? They are endlessly fascinating, I think, because it's amazing how someone can walk into a room, hear a few words and come out crying or angry, or this whole series of emotions just with a few words, it doesn't constantly surprise you, they're not just words, another Maybe, it could be a fleeting image that I take let's say a cartoon you see some lines that you know and it brings to your mind find a person in a situation maybe tragic or comic or whatever.

I mean, the human mind is a very wonderful thing, uh, it has an extremely intricate and complex structure of which, at least on a scientific level, we understand very little, but what you point out is the central part. Little hints here and there manage to evoke in us a very rich experience, and interpretation and What's more, it is done in a surprisingly uniform way for different people, which means that, of course, it is done without any training or minimal training. No one would know how to train people to do this. So somehow it must be the only logical possibility apart from Angels or the acts of God, it is something ingrained in our nature.

I mean, qualitatively speaking, these phenomena are very similar to physical growth, the nutrition that an organism is given to an embryo is not what determines that it will be a human or a bird, uh, what determines what it will be. Being a human or a bird is something related to your internal structure and what determines that we are going to be the type of creature that can speak and that can uh uh interpret a sign or a couple of lines or something like evoke an emotional experience or whatever, that's something in our nature, but it's so far beyond what we know how to study that, at this point, you can only wave your hands at it.

How should parents react to exposing their children to language? all aspects of language or should they simply be allowed to develop in whatever way they develop. I suspect there is very little parents can do to change the course of language development. I mean, you can, I mean, you can, we know from experience again, let me tell you that I. I'm not talking about this from any perspective. I have no experience other than personal experience. There is nothing in linguistic theory that provides answers to this question, but experience is enough to indicate that I know of cases in which an environment can be created in which a 5- One-year-old will sound like a college professor and is a bit comical, but they will use big words and you know complicated sentences etc.

I suspect it's probably hurting the 5 year old, but it's possible to do that. On the other hand, if you leave them alone, they will learn the language of their culture. Typically, they will learn the language of their peers. There are usually exceptions, but generally children will learn the language they heard. the streets so it takes me uh my father spoke with a Ukrainian accent and my mother spoke with a mixed New York Lithuanian accent and I spoke urban Philadelphia because that's what the kids spoke on the streets uh and certainly if you really took my patterns of speech and so on, you would find influences from parents and uncles etc., but overwhelmingly it is a pure culture why this happens, no one knows and how, but there is something about human children that makes them grow. language that is more or less that of their peers uh and it is a very rich system that is an extremely rich system they do not try it they cannot avoid doing it they cannot make it happen uh parents can enrich the I CH anyone who has a 2 year old child you know the kid is running around trying to figure out what everything is called, you know what that is, what that is, what that is and you can help them and you know you can read. to the kids and I show them pictures and they're all fascinated by them, they're in periods of very rapid language growth where you just can't satisfy your curiosity fast enough, surprisingly, so it's amazing, in fact, what really happens is that really amazing, I mean there have been, for example, peak periods where you forget the structure of the language, which is quite complicated, but just take vocabulary acquisition as the simplest part in the periods peak vocabulary acquisition, learning new words, uh, kids are learning them maybe at a rate of one an hour or something like that, which means they're essentially learning a word at an exhibition and the adults are going to the adult education and die trying to learn a new language, oh yes, but if you think about what it means to learn a word, you know In an exhibition, the way to understand how amazing and how successful this is is to try to define a word.

Suppose you have an organism that is not equipped to learn the words of human language and you actually have to teach it those words by training. Well, first you would have to define a word, what is the meaning of table, for example, no one can do that, you have to define the definition that you are using to define the word, but you see what we call definitions are not definitions, they are just suggestions If you take the Oxford English Dictionary you know the one that you read with the magnifying glass uh and they give you something long and detailed that they call the definition of a word in fact it is very far from the definition of a word are some suggestions that a person who already knows the

concept

can use to understand what is going on, but remember that the child is getting it not from the Oxford English Dictionary with all its range of suggestions, the child is getting it from seeing it used once or twice now that it can only mean one thing, only it may mean that the

concept

itself in all its richness and complexity is somehow sitting there waiting to have a sound associated with it now that may not be entirely true, but something very close to it is probably true, which is why you and I will have essentially the same concept of table and the same concept of person uh and of U you know Nation or all kinds of things and not complicated things, I mean really simple things like person, for example, or thing, you know we will have I have that, although we all have very limited experience because we basically start with those concepts that we are reaching at the end of the program.

Do you ever see a time when the study of language and linguistics will not fascinate you? I guessyes. There must come some point when your mind deteriorates to the point where you can't deal with difficult questions. I guess that will happen. Professor Gome Chomsky of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and visiting professor at the University of Washington after reflecting on watching more WTV classics. visit wv.org classics