The Concept of Language (Noam Chomsky)

the following program is a uwtv classic from the University of Washington in Seattle upon reflection with Al P our guest is Professor Noam Chomsky from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and a guest lecturer at the University of Washington what determines how language in a particular country evolves why is French for example so different from German well first of all you're assuming the French is different from German and the French would probably say so you know there's no simple measure of how different languages are from one another in fact if you look at the languages structurally the way a linguist would look at them French is different from the other Romance languages in a variety of ways which are which make it more similar to German and other Germanic languages there are a number of features of French which are sort of Germanic and character give us some of those features well for us to take a simple one in all the romance languages except for French you can delete the subject of a sentence you can say the equivalent of walks to the store meaning he walks to the store we can't do that in English but you can do it in Italian or Spanish and in fact it's common romance goes right back to Latin French is the only Romance language in which you can't do that it's like a Germanic language pretty much in that respect in there they have what they call clinics small pronouns that you attach to verbs they say the equivalent of I him saw that's common romance but in the other Romance languages you can do things like I him want to see you do that an old meaning I want to see him but not in French and the for a variety of constructions actually there quite a number of respects which French is different from the other Romance languages incidentally old French with middle France a French in the medieval period was not it was like the other Romance languages so something happened to it 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 they the turn of the century you could find people in nearby villages in France who couldn't understand what virtually could not understand one another the idea of a national language is a pretty modern phenomenon it has to do with the rise of nationalism and communication and so on or take say Italy today or Germany today I mean the difference is among the things that we call German are enormous so enormous is to 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 and when we talk about language changing what's actually happening is that there's some kind of like species changing there's a mixture of all sorts of dialects and the the mix changes over time either because of conquest or some political change or boundaries are drawn in a different place or you know some kind of commercial interchange or whatever the mixture of these things changes over time and you know you take a look at it a few centuries apart it looks like there's a different language but what's happened is what happens is it between generations there are usually small changes having to do with other influences from the outside and so on and these things are cumulative sometimes they lead to pretty dramatic changes nothing within a couple of generations the language can have a contained structurally in quite dramatic ways and of course in say lexicon you know the words of the language will that's a different matter altogether so when technology develops you get a whole new vocabulary but if you were in France in the 12th century and you understood all the nuances of language could you have predicted how these various languages would have evolved over time no it's totally impossible I mean is it but is it is a partially random it's not so much the Randa oh it's not actually random I thought might be completely deterministic there's just too many factors involved it's like you know it's like predicting whether it's just too many things going on the human life is a pretty complicated affair and now culture cultures at Tempe speakers of English can be misled by this English is relatively homogeneous you can go a long way in the United States you know I mean I just came from Boston and I understand everybody in Portland and there Seattle and so on but that's not true most of the world most of the world language areas language that you can get very different language is pretty close by and much of the world is what we would call multilingual the closer I get to the border between France and Germany would the closer the language has become yeah well in particular if you go from say Paris to Rome as you go toward the Italian border it starts to sound more more like Italian and at some point it becomes Italian and there's there isn't in fact coming up by now there's you know that there's enough national unity and so on so you can really find the border but if you go back a little ways there was no border it was just I wouldn't say continuum there's just constant changes and fluctuations and variations and then you started speaking one thing in one place and another thing in another place and they're not mutually intelligible often but along the way they're just all sorts of changes now with the rise of national States and especially national communications and national education systems and all of these things which is a pretty modern phenomenon then you get what we call national languages now as I say English is unusual the reason if you go to pre-colonial times there were just hundreds of thousands probably of different languages spoken and what's now called United States well through the destruction of the indigenous population and it was real destruction kind of genocidal and the conquest by speakers of basically one group you ended up having a large homogeneous language but how can anybody have predicted that I mean it had with the invention of guns and you know wholesale reticle quest and all sorts of things and that's pretty much what human history is are some French theorists for example who argue that they must work very hard to keep the French language pure what does that mean doesn't mean anything I mean there's an old I mean it virtually every national language every national culture or at least the European ones maybe others has a mythology that that's the only real pure language and all the others are corrupt in France this is this position is kind of extreme in fact you have active its origins it's even a little bit comical I don't know if any has actually studied it but if you go back to say the 18th century and you read say deed row he explains deed row very seriously that he says here's a prediction for you he says France is going to be the language of science and German and English will be the language 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 at he wasn't a German and English the words don't quite follow the words of the thought so France is good for telling the French is good for telling the truth because of its what the later came to be called its Gallic lucidity and clarity whereas a German and I think his examples were German in English maybe Italian or it's the their good language for telling fantasies and falsehood so they'll be the languages of literature not you can it's a sort of naive point of view but you see what was going on in his head I mean for him the words in French followed the order of thoughts when you hear gentlemen it seems all confused I mean thinking of some other way speaker of German looks the opposite of course and I suspect that the mythology above the purity and lucidity and clarity of French goes back to ideas of that kind after all French culture had a certain dominance and appeal for a long time so these attitudes get established 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 it was Shakespeare pure I mean in fact every stage of history languages are there is for there is no such thing as a language there are just lots of different ways of speaking that different people have which are more or less similar to one another and some of them may have may may have prestige associated with them for example some of them may be the speech of a conquering group or a wealthy group or priestly caste or one thing or another and we may decide okay those are the good ones and some other one is the bad one but if if social and political relations reversed we'd make the opposite conclusions right they take black English today black English is considered not quite proper English on the other hand if blacks happen to have all the power and owned all the corporations and whites were working for them it would be the other way around okay English would be the language of culture and science and so on and the stuff that you and I speak would be considered a degenerate dialect which you have to get people out of so that they'll be able to think but that raises an interesting question why does language have rules why were we taught these rules in grade school why is bad grammar bad grammar well when you're taught rules of your own language in grade school the chances are very strong that what you're being taught is false otherwise you would have to be taught it but I can see every grade school teacher about to throw an orange at you on the screen there's unfortunately this is well we have to let might be a little more nuanced one of the things you learn in grade school is the literary language now in English the literary standard is not so radically different from what say you and I grew up with but it's somewhat different the literary standard is not what I learned in the streets it's not very different but it's little different and when I went to school I had I was taught the literary standard now the literary standard has some principles associated with it some of which are those of a real language some of which are completely artificial they were made up by people who had crazy ideas about language and they're all given names you never heard of yeah and in fact the reason you have to teach them is because they are not the person's language nobody that your actual language already teaches your language grows in your head you know you can't stick a child in a young child in an environment where people are speaking language and that child can no more help knowing that language then the child can help growing it's just part of human growth is for the some component of the brain that pick up the language you can't learn it and you don't learn it anyone you learn to see now the fact is that the the system that grows in the brain is sometimes different from a system which is regarded for whatever reason as necessary or appropriate or approved or something some pristy to some prestige dialect and it may be different from what grew in your brain it typically is or may be a way of trying to get us to have a common bond through language well it possible I mean I think that's see that's a problem in places like say Italy in Italy when you if somebody grows up in the Piedmont area and somebody else grows up in Naples area they think totally different languages they can neither can understand a word the others saying so there are when you teach what they call Italian which is the language roughly of the area of Florence of Tuscany you're teaching people what it amounts to a second language and it's the national language seems true in Germany and China while China is even worse because what we call Chinese is a set of languages which are as different from one another is Romance languages they just happen to be all yellow on the map or something and they happen to be a unified political area but there's no sense in which they are the same length we call them Chinese dialects but that would be like calling French and Romanian two different dialects of the same language Latin or something I mean all these terms have no linguistic meaning they have only socio-political meaning of a very complex sort and the way in which they interact with authority structures is crucial so what we call good English is a system which is partly artificial I should say which is taught to people because it was legislated to be good English not some of what it's taught it breaks the rules of any conceivable human language that's why 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 in school you had to learn all sorts of complicated nonsense about Shaolin will which nobody could ever remember I mean I forget woodwork I shall you will or something strangely that violates there's no I mean there are certain principles of human biology which determine what a language can be and though language can be like that so that had to be that in fact we even trace that back and you find out who invented it you know some bishop from the 17th century or something invented it decided that's the way it's supposed to be now that kind of thing of course has to be taught because it's totally artificial or you have to teach people how to say he and I instead of him and me well English sort of works the other way I mean if nobody was bothering you in English you'd probably say him and me or here or something like that but you taught in the standard language not to do that there's some other invented language which is called the literary standard which you don't do it and you ask the question why do you have to teach people well you have to teach them because it's artificial it's not their language and often it's not just not their language sometimes it's not even any possible way why is pronunciation and intonation so important to language why aren't words themselves sufficient to convey meaning well you have to understand somebody else's words I mean if you go to central London and somebody's Brown speaking cockney and the words happen the match airs at some abstract level you still may not understand the the pronunciation may be different enough so that you're the part of your knowledge of language is a way of decoding noises that you hear and converting them into a system that matches your own representations sometimes not in order for that decoding system to work the systems have to be close enough you and I can do it actually if you listen to us closely we're speaking different languages but they're close enough so that we want to mate I don't have problem decoding you and you don't have a problem decoding me but again that's a little artificial that's because of the artificial unity of the English language spoken in the United States I happen to be in England last week and I've confined myself in places in England where I don't understand what they're saying I mean if I listen to them for a while we can establish communication but you have to kind of retune your system in some manner that's not understood so that you can begin to decode what you're hearing what role does slang having a language why does slang exist people are I don't know but the fact is people are very innovative that I can do things differently and especially teenage cultures of a white a teenagers wear different clothes well you know whatever the reason is they want to be different they like to be innovative they're creative and to the sabbatical fashions in language oh sure and then in fact there are styles of different groups of a change some of them change very rapidly the words that are in and one era or archaic and another of the year it can be three years or something like that when people are playing with their languages often again this is not too common in our societies our societies remember basically technological societies our intelligence and creativity and so on goes into other things but if you go to say Central Australia where you're simply finding basically Stone Age tribes there's a lot of innovation in language a lot of the cultural wealth has to do with playing games with languages and constructing elaborate kinship systems and things which probably have no or little functional utility it's just the creative mind of work you know so you get very complex language game a special language system taught as a puberty right and only a particular group of people speak it nobody else understands it how does language differ in the way that it's used in the arts first of all there's a variety of conventions are formal conventions that are humanly created but undoubtedly reflect our aesthetic capacities that's at a framework within which they set a framework of rule humanly imposed rule within people within which people create so if you find an extreme case if your write a sonnet you have to come pretty close to a fixed frame and while that's an extreme case the same is true of other literary conventions some of these the part of human creative intervention has been to create forms aesthetic forms which are somehow either appealing to us or challenge our intelligence or whatever and it's a you work within them I mean after all painting a painting on a piece of canvas that's but has a boundary that's pretty recent in human history and that itself imposes a framework which determines the kind of art that you can produce and in the literary use of language is just everything from the structure of a novel to the to the metric character of a poetic form is one or another human invention do you respond the poetry right you have time to read it does it does it make you think differently so what goes on in your thought process well you know that's an eye I don't feel confident to say but it's a topic that has been discussed quite intelligently so for example if you read say not by me I have nothing to say about it no one pretend to but if you read this a williamson's seven types of ambiguity you get an intriguing account of why poetry makes you think in part because it's a compressed and you only get hints so the reader has to impose a lot of structure you have to put your own self into and then park because you're the strict the formal structure itself input is a challenge to the intelligence if you just throwing paints around randomly it's not a work of art you know but when there when it's done within the framework of a humanely constructed system of rule it at least you've got the prerequisites for a work of art still may not be whatever it takes whatever creativity is and that's not understood that has to be there too but I certainly I have nothing to say about these topics I wouldn't pretend to we bring up another area you can claim you have no expertise in and that's the use of humor we respond to people who use humor and communication yet it's not taught in grade school we don't we're not taught how to be comedians but we respond to it and that seems to be the case in almost every language well see I don't think that is to commit too much to do with language we can be humorous in other ways too a clown can be humorous without using the use of without using language and nobody teaches a child how to laugh at a clown now I think we're going here to interesting topics but topics where nothing is understood but there's no doubt in my mind that there's something about human nature the basic structure of the human mind brain which makes certain things comical and other things not just as there are certain things about the human brain that makes some things come out to be human language and others not although they could be a Martian language or something and at its root it's I don't think 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 that it's got something to do with the human genetic endowment and I think the comparable assumption is true in all these cases one of the part of the fascination of the study of language is that it's one of the few examples where you can really get some insight into how it works these other topics that you're mentioning say humor should be subjected to the same kind of study but so far it hasn't been clear how to do it the words of endlessly fascinating I think because it's amazing how somebody can walk in a room hear a few words and walk out crying or angry or this whole series of emotions simply with a few words that doesn't that constantly amaze you it's not just words again it could be a fleeting picture and takes a caricature you see a few lines and it brings to your mind a person in a situation maybe a tragic situation or comical situation or whatever I mean the human mind is a very marvelous thing it's it's got an extremely intricate and complex structure which at least at a scientific level we understand very little about but what you're describing too is central part of it little hints here and there succeed in evoking in us very rich experience and interpretation and what's more it's done surprisingly uniformly for different people which mean and it's of course done within a training or very minimal training that we would know how to train people to do this so is it somehow must be the only logical possibility aside angels are acts of God is it something rooted in our nature I mean qualitatively speaking these phenomena are very much like physical growth the the nutrition that's given to an organism to an embryo is not what determines that it's going to be a human or a bird what determines that it's going to be a human or a bird is something about its internal structure and what determines that we are going to be the kind of creature that can speak and that can interpret a sign or a line about lines or something as evoking an emotional experience or whatever that's something in our nature but it's so far beyond what we know how to study that you can only weight your hands at it at the moment how should parents react with respect to exposing their children to language should they expose them to all aspects of language or should they simply let them develop any way they develop and suspect there's very little that parents can do to change the course of language development I mean you can prime in you can we know from experience a I'm not speaking about this from any expertise I don't have any more expertise than personal experience there's nothing in linguistic theory that gives answers to this question but experience suffice is to indicate that in no cases that you can create an environment in which a five-year-old will sound like a college professor and comical but they'll use big words and you know complicated sentences and so on I suspect you probably harming the five-year-old but it's possible to do that children can be molded on the other hand if you just leave them alone they're going to pick up the language of their culture typically they'll pick up the language of their peers quite typically there are exceptions but typically children will learn the language they heard in the streets so take me my father spoke with a Ukrainian accent and my other spoke with a mixed New York with Alain Ian's accent and I spoke up in Philadelphia because that's what the kids were talking in the streets and undoubtedly if you really took my speech patterns and so on a side you'd find influences from the parents and the uncles and so on but overwhelmingly it's a you pick up the pure culture why this happens nobody knows and how it but but there's something about humans children that's it that gets them to grow the language that's roughly that of their peers and it's it's a very rich system that's an extremely rich system you they don't try they can't prevent themselves from doing it they can't make it happen the parents can enrich the children anyone who has a two-year-old knows that the kid is running around all over the place trying to find out what the name of everything is you know what's that what's that what's that and you can help them and you can you know you can read the children and show them pictures and they're all fascinated with it they're in a their periods a very rapid language growth where you just can't say she ate the curiosity fast enough amazingly it's unbelievable in fact what actually happens is is really astonishing I mean there have been for example at the peak periods of a forget the structure of language which is complicated enough but just take vocabulary acquisition the simplest part at peak periods of acquisition of vocabulary learning new words children are picking them up at maybe a rate of one an hour there's nothing which means that they're essentially learning a word on one exposure and the adults go into adult education and die trying to learn a new language oh yeah but you know if you think what it means to learn a word on one exposure the way to understand how amazing and achievement this is is to try to define a word so suppose you had an organism that wasn't equipped to learn the words of human language and you really had to teach it those words by training what you'd first have to define a word what is the meaning of table for instance nobody can do that you have to define the definition you're using to define the word but you see what we call definitions are not definition hints if you take the oxford english dictionary another one you read with a magnifying glass and they give you a long detailed thing which they call the definition of a word in fact it's very far from the definition of a word it's a few hints that a person who already knows the concept can use to understand what's going on but remember the child is picking that up not from the Oxford English Dictionary with its whole array of hints the child is picking it up from seeing and used once or twice now that can only mean one thing it can only mean that the concept itself and all of its richness and complexity is somehow sitting there waiting to have a sound associated with it now that can't be quite true but something very much like that it's probably true that's why you and I will have essentially the same concept of table than the same concept of person and of you know nation are all sorts of things and not complicated things I mean really simple things like like person for instance or thing you know will have that even though we all have very limited experience because basically we started with those concepts we're getting down to the end of the show do you ever see a time when the study of language and linguistics will not fascinate you well I suppose so it must come some time when your mind deteriorate to the point where you can't do with hard questions I guess that will happen professor Noam Chomsky from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and a guest lecturer at the University of Washington upon reflection you you to see more uwtv classics visit uwtv org slash classics

Channel: UW Video

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Keywords: UW, University of Washington, Noam Chomsky (Author)

Id: hdUbIlwHRkY

Length: 27min 44sec (1664 seconds)

Published: Wed Mar 12 2014