Blood and Bones Part 11: Language

For me language is a huge pile of wet, sticky clay.  I can plunge my hands in and pull out big dollops that I can smear over my pages.  I can create great gloopy piles of the stuff or mould it into delicate little figures.  I can pat it smooth and tranquil as a black mountain tarn or I can hurl fists full of it around so that it sticks in foul messes on anyone who happens to be passing by.

I apologise that I’m going to refer to the English language throughout this chapter.  But I feel that I have to try and make my arguments mean something to my annoying acquaintance Skidmore who has the attention span of a turnip and the linguistic ability of un pomme de terre. Besides I use the English language for my work and it is by a process of understanding the tools and materials of my trade that I hope to improve. In any case later on I’ll be making more general points about the use of language as a human tool.

The English language as we know it came in to being so that our conquering Norman overlords could converse with their Anglo-Saxon underlings.  It is not very much use being a conqueror if you cannot get your peasantry to go out and about ploughing your fields and reaping your harvests or fighting your battles for you. And I doubt if the Anglo-Saxon serfs were going to go out of their way to learn Norman French It is possible that when Edward 1 decreed that English should be spoken in court, his French speaking nobles had only a smattering of baby English learnt from their native nursemaids when they were toddlers. Consequently, all the fripperies of grammar that beset the parent tongues were excised and we are now blessed with a language that is so simple in construction that it has become a lingua franca (an amusing and ironic description) for trade, commerce and general communication round the world. I know that English is regarded as being one of the most difficult languages in the world for foreign students to master but this derives from aspects such as vocabulary, orthography, and pronunciation.  And while things such as preferred word order for adjectives are just crazy, the basics are simple and ignoring academic precision which we all do anyway, the foreign speaker should be able to get their point across.

This stripped down form of speech means that someone from the forests of Papua New Guinea can make themselves understood to a francophone from Montreal.  English is a sort of Lego language in which simple elements can be assembled using any bits and pieces of vocabulary from any other language the speaker can lay his or her tongue to. Consequently, it is unafraid of importing any vocabulary from any other language that might prove useful.  If we don’t have a word for an item or an idea we import it. Or we just fabricate something vaguely appropriate; not at all according to some arcane set of rules as is the practice in French. Consequently, English is the most popular second language in the world.  It is used officially for air traffic controllers and airline pilots, shipping and business.

However, this also means that English has acquired a rich oversupply of vocabulary far beyond the needs of basic communication.  The Lexicographer Laurence Urdang says “Observers have often noted that even if a new coinage or a loanword from another language starts with “exactly” the same meaning as an existing word in English, the meanings begin to drift apart before very long, one acquiring quite different frequency, distribution and connotation from the other. ...

English is a language of negotiation and commerce.  But for all its basic simplicity its complexity in vocabulary makes it deliciously imprecise and the reason that contract lawyers make so much money.  As I pointed out earlier in part 7, the whole process of writing and making plays is one of negotiation and collaboration so the English speaking playwright has at her disposal a magnificent set of tools ready sharpened to go about carving out a masterwork.

To record speech in English one must be aware at all times that what is said contains drifts of meaning beyond what the words themselves convey.  The language is essentially metaphoric and the English writer, as the English speaker is inevitably a poet.  The crucial thing about English that a foreign learner might miss is its essential part in delineating class and status.  The Norman French derived vocabulary is still that of the aristocracy whilst use of the Anglo-Saxon clearly marks out the lower classes. 

The writer of English must always assume the mantle of a poet and the writer of dialogue in English drama must become something of a magician weaving strange incantations and spells together.  (It is no coincidence that the word “spell” is of exactly the same root as “spelling” meaning to assemble a word correctly.  The two concepts of controlling unseen powers are directly linked).

I argued in the last part that metaphor and language are intertwined.  That language itself can convey meaning through metaphor precisely because of it’s imprecisions. Let’s take that idea a stage further.

Charles Darwin suggested that after observations of his new born and infant son language may have evolved from song-like vocalisations.  Indeed that’s a fairly respectable theory today and there are plenty of contemporary languages the depend on song-like modulations.  A parallel theory adds that gesture may also have been a fundamental component of communication.  Certainly the facility for body and hand gestures were present as soon as humans started walking upright.  Add song and gesture together and you have the facility for complex communication long before humans evolved the vocal articulation needed for speech and language. So Professor Stephen Pinker suggests that the capacity for language has been hard-wired into the brain long before we actually spoke in the way we would recognise today..  It is something we do instinctively. Something more attuned to the subconscious than the conscious.  He suggests that there is an innate language that, rather than learning, as we develop we synchronise with other speakers around us.  Thus a child at between six months and eighteen months can learn any language in the world. with all sorts of non-specific sounds, squeals and chuckles that align with the spoken phrases of the adults around. To his way of thinking, language is not an add-on or by-product as Chomsky would suggest. After forty years of listening to other people’s conversations in coffee bars and trying to reproduce them as dialogue in plays, I have realised that language goes farther and deeper and is more convoluted than the linguists or grammarians would have us believe.  There are whole areas of speech that have entirely different rules from carefully formed written language.  Listen to people talking and you will hear strange, illogical thought pathways and the odd instinct to synchronise speech patterns within a conversation so that each encounter seems to develop its own rules and vocabulary. It seems to me that dialogue is not only shaped by the people speaking, it also shapes their interactions together. Two people speaking together will use a style and vocabulary unique to that encounter.  They will bring all sorts of immediate thoughts and rhythms which will be different from any other encounter.  And will certainly be different from any conversation they have with other individuals.  Language like this is iconic.  It is only arbitrarily associated with the meaning that is to be conveyed. This is why I insist that plays whose very soul rests on dialogue are not literature and should not be treated as such and for a playwright, we should think of speech as an exchange of sounds, gestures, posed laughter and unspoken intentions which acquire meaning only through context and shared experience.  For me it explains perfectly why, when meeting somebody with a strong Scottish accent I unconsciously start reflecting their accent back to them.  Occasionally leading to misunderstanding and embarrassment if not a Glasgow kiss or a punch on the nose.. 

Marcus Perlman from the University of Wisconsin-Madison and his colleagues wanted to test the assumption that language is iconic rather than mere imitation of natural sounds. They asked nine pairs of students to play an elaborate game of vocal charades, in which they had to express certain words, such as big, slow or attractive, using only simple vocalisations. No gestures or facial expressions were allowed.

From the outset, the students tended to pick vocalisations with similar acoustic properties, such as duration and pitch, for many of the words. Over time, as these words were said back and forth they became increasingly similar, both within pairs, and between.

There may also be some evidence for this in the experiments with teaching sign language to primates.  Chimps and gorillas certainly do not have the vocal equipment to be able to articulate sound as we do but there are signs (ha) that they have a predisposition towards some sort of iconic communication even when not influenced by human interactions.

All this seems to reinforce the idea that codes of speech and the language used in interactions circles round and eventually synchronise so that discourse becomes a process of aligning our thinking in a way that our primate ancestors would understand as grooming.