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Being interested in linguistics is a funny thing. The more I learn about it, the more I get the sense that most people’s conceptions of how languages work and what they do is totally different from linguists’ conceptions of these things. Take the split infinitive, for example (or indeed any other finicky grammatical rule that either bugs you when people get uptight about getting it right or bugs you when people get it wrong). The “rule” is that one shouldn’t separate the “to” from the verb itself (“to go boldly”, not “to boldly go”). The reasoning behind it is that, in Latin and Greek (the languages of knowledge, culture and status for centuries), the infinitive is expressed in a single word (dicere, currere, amare). In other words, because it’s impossible to split an infinitive in Latin, 18th-and 19th-century grammarians (my history is a little fuzzy) decided that it wasn’t “correct” to split it in English, even though separating the “to” from the “go” creates absolutely no conflict in terms of meaning. And yet, most people still assume that keeping the parts of the infinitive together is the right way to use English. Whether they get irritated at people who don’t follow the rule (I have to count myself in this group) or whether they get irritated at people correcting them, there’s still, I feel, a general cultural sense that the rule itself is a valid one.
(If any of my former students read this, they are going to call me a hypocrite; I was pretty hardcore about using standard English grammar in papers. I tried to justify it by arguing that, whether or not the rules have a valid basis, they are still the standard set by the people who hold power in this country; and one of the best ways to get some of that power and make a success of yourself is to write according to the standards by which they’ll judge you. Really, though, it’s just that it BOTHERS me when people make grammatical mistakes. Cognitive dissonance or straightforward hypocrisy? You decide.)
Another linguistic question comes up a lot when Hebrew is discussed. I imagine it’s mostly because Hebrew’s a non-Indo-European language, so its structure is totally different from either English or most of the languages people take in high school; also, it’s a sacred language, so a whole lot of people are pretty invested in texts translated from Hebrew, while relatively few can actually read the original. Well, as close to the original as we can get, which isn’t actually all that close. But that’s another story. The point is that, several times over the past few months, I’ve been in conversations with people who asked me whether and to what extent the structure and vocabulary of Hebrew influences the types and patterns of thought that we find in the Hebrew Bible. That is, does the way that Hebrew grammar works have to do with the way that the “Old Testament mind” works? Let me make one thing very very clear: this is not a dumb question. When I first started learning Hebrew, I was struck with, and enchanted by, its utter alienness of structure and idiom. In the case of poetry especially, it became clear to me that even the best English poetry is a poor substitute for the original; the form of Hebrew Bible poetry (based on parallelism of meaning rather than rhyme or meter) seemed to me ideally suited to the patterns and rhythms of the language. I’m told that this question was a matter of scholarly debate for some time, and like I said, it’s not a dumb hypothesis.
(Also? Before I go any farther, I’d like to point out that I don’t have much of a linguistics background and I can’t really be said to know what I’m talking about by people who actually know about these things. So, grain of salt. Right. Onward.)
Now, though, I get the sense that it’s not really the case, that every “natural” language has the capacity to express whatever thoughts its thinkers damn well please. We can see this in modern Hebrew, which has essentially the same grammatical structure (somewhat simplified) as Biblical Hebrew, and much of the same vocabulary. Admittedly, my exposure to modern Hebrew is limited to six weeks of floundering over “where are the toilets?” and one long-drawn-out struggle with a great article by Mordechai Cogan. But in the latter instance, especially having the English translation of the article to work from as well, it became abundantly clear that Hebrew is just as well suited to expressing ideas drawn from a firmly Western European scholarly tradition as it is to discussing the God of the Hebrew Bible.
Maybe we think that there’s this connection between Hebrew language and “Hebraic” thought because the Bible is essentially our entire corpus of ancient Hebrew. True, we’ve had the Dead Sea Scrolls for the past 60 years or so, but that’s a blip in theological terms. And the mindsets of the writers of the Bible–even such vastly different writers as, say, the Deuteronomist and the author of Ecclesiastes–are still much more similar to each other than they are to ours. So I guess it makes sense to posit that the weltanschauung and the linguistic structure are inherently related, even though I’m increasingly thinking that this isn’t actually the case.
A related-but-different phenomenon is the old saying of “Eskimos have 300 different words for snow but no word for __.” The idea behind this, I think, is that, without the lexical category for a thing or concept, recognition or understanding of the thing or concept is impossible. If you’ve read 1984, Orwell uses the same idea for Newspeak–the government systematically erases the language necessary to express rebellious ideas, and so the capacity to have rebellious ideas disappears from the people’s minds. Only I’m pretty sure language doesn’t work that way. This post from the Language Log several years ago is both deliciously snarky and expresses why, exactly, it doesn’t. It’s also the reason I wrote this behemoth of an entry in the first case. Lastly, I wish to have it on record that I thought Orwell was wrong about the way language and thought are related when I read this my senior year of high school–I distinctly remember having a heated discussion with Mr. Wood and the entire rest of the class about it–and now science proves that I’m right. (Okay, Luke, fine, not science. Science-ish. Science-y things. We need a word for fields that aren’t science but are closer to it than, say, art history.)
Yeah, sorry about the last month. 1.5 months. Ish.
This semester is looking to be quite a bit busier than the last, and I’m not sure why. The only things I’m really truly adding are a running schedule, possibly Tae Kwon Do (but only once a week) and a part-time job (only one day a week), and I don’t have classes on Thursday or Friday. Yet, three weeks in, I’m already behind enough that I should definitely not be writing this post. We’ll see.
On the other hand, virtually everything I’m doing is stuff that I really, really want to be doing. Pretty much every day I walk to class glad feeling lucky to be where I am with the responsibilities I have. There’s only one class that I’m not terribly fond of at the moment (and I’ve already ranted too much about it in real-life conversations, so I won’t get into it), and even that looks as though it may develop some redeeming qualities. So I can’t complain, and I’ll try not too.
What I really wanted to write about was my grandmother, Susan Gibson Davenport, who died two weeks ago. This was my father’s mother, maybe the most interesting person I’ve ever had the privilege to know. Whenever I try to describe her, it comes off as uninformed, or romanticized, or patronizing–all of which would piss her off to no end. So I won’t try. I’ll just pass along some of the stories my family tells about her.
Granny was a painter, mostly in watercolors, though some of her oils from when she was younger hang in her house. When my sister Penelope was in college majoring in studio art, Granny told her that she’d trade a painting for a painting. The painting she sent Penelope was a self-portrait, in watercolor, done several days after she’d fallen down the stairs, as she explained in the letter written around the edges of the painting. She has two black eyes in the portrait.
When I was a student at St. Catherine’s, my father and Granny came to take me out to lunch (or something similar) one day. I showed her around the campus, which has changed considerably since she was a student there. Granny told me as we were walking around that, in her day, boys were not allowed on the campus. This posed a problem, since she was seeing my grandfather at the time (he went to St. Christopher’s, the boy’s school down the road). So for their dates, Stephen would drive his car up to the very edge of campus and back over the “line” separating the property so that the car was half on, half off campus. Granny would sit in the back seat and he would sit in the front, and they’d have their date right there. Granny was later sent to Chatham Hall, a boarding school out in the countryside, to finish her high school career–apparently she was too wild for Richmond. Rumor has it that, before she arrived, the rule was “no smoking in the girls’ dorm rooms”. Afterward, they had to revise it to “no smoking in the dorm rooms OR leaning out of the dorm room windows.”
More to come, perhaps.
