A great deal of effort has been devoted to explaining Babel. Not the Babel event
-- which most people consider to be a myth -- but the fact that languages tend
to diverge. A number of linguistic theories have been developed in an effort to
tie all languages together."
"Theories Lagos tried to apply to his virus hypothesis."
"Yes. There are two schools: relativists and universalists. As George Steiner
summarizes it, relativists tend to believe that language is not the vehicle of
thought but its determining medium. It is the framework of cognition. Our
perceptions of everything are organized by the flux of sensations passing over
that framework. Hence, the study of the evolution of language is the study of
the evolution of the human mind itself."
"Okay, I can see the significance of that. What about the universalists?"
"In contrast with the relativists, who believe that languages need not have
anything in common with each other, the universalists believe that if you can
analyze languages enough, you can find that all of them have certain traits in
common. So they analyze languages, looking for such traits."
"Have they found any?"
"No. There seems to be an exception to every rule."
"Which blows universalism out of the water."
"Not necessarily. They explain this problem by saying that the shared traits
are too deeply buried to be analyzable."
"Which is a cop out."
"Their point is that at some level, language has to happen inside the human
brain. Since all human brains are more or less the same --"
"The hardware's the same. Not the software."
"You are using some kind of metaphor that I cannot understand."
"Well, a French-speaker's brain starts out the same as an English-speaker's
brain. As they grow up, they get programmed with different software -- they
learn different languages."
"Yes. Therefore, according to the universalists, French and English -- or any
other languages -- must share certain traits that have their roots in the 'deep
structures' of the human brain. According to Chomskyan theory, the deep
structures are innate components of the brain that enable it to carry out
certain formal kinds of operations on strings of symbols. Or, as Steiner
paraphrases Emmon Bach: These deep structures eventually lead to the actual
patterning of the cortex with its immensely ramified yet, at the same time,
'programmed' network of electrochemical and neurophysiological channels."
"But these deep structures are so deep we can't even see them?"
"The universalists place the active nodes of linguistic life -- the deep
structures -- so deep as to defy observation and description. Or to use
Steiner's analogy: Try to draw up the creature from the depths of the sea, and
it will disintegrate or change form grotesquely.
-- which most people consider to be a myth -- but the fact that languages tend
to diverge. A number of linguistic theories have been developed in an effort to
tie all languages together."
"Theories Lagos tried to apply to his virus hypothesis."
"Yes. There are two schools: relativists and universalists. As George Steiner
summarizes it, relativists tend to believe that language is not the vehicle of
thought but its determining medium. It is the framework of cognition. Our
perceptions of everything are organized by the flux of sensations passing over
that framework. Hence, the study of the evolution of language is the study of
the evolution of the human mind itself."
"Okay, I can see the significance of that. What about the universalists?"
"In contrast with the relativists, who believe that languages need not have
anything in common with each other, the universalists believe that if you can
analyze languages enough, you can find that all of them have certain traits in
common. So they analyze languages, looking for such traits."
"Have they found any?"
"No. There seems to be an exception to every rule."
"Which blows universalism out of the water."
"Not necessarily. They explain this problem by saying that the shared traits
are too deeply buried to be analyzable."
"Which is a cop out."
"Their point is that at some level, language has to happen inside the human
brain. Since all human brains are more or less the same --"
"The hardware's the same. Not the software."
"You are using some kind of metaphor that I cannot understand."
"Well, a French-speaker's brain starts out the same as an English-speaker's
brain. As they grow up, they get programmed with different software -- they
learn different languages."
"Yes. Therefore, according to the universalists, French and English -- or any
other languages -- must share certain traits that have their roots in the 'deep
structures' of the human brain. According to Chomskyan theory, the deep
structures are innate components of the brain that enable it to carry out
certain formal kinds of operations on strings of symbols. Or, as Steiner
paraphrases Emmon Bach: These deep structures eventually lead to the actual
patterning of the cortex with its immensely ramified yet, at the same time,
'programmed' network of electrochemical and neurophysiological channels."
"But these deep structures are so deep we can't even see them?"
"The universalists place the active nodes of linguistic life -- the deep
structures -- so deep as to defy observation and description. Or to use
Steiner's analogy: Try to draw up the creature from the depths of the sea, and
it will disintegrate or change form grotesquely.
( Neal Stephenson )
[ Snow Crash ]
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