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1. Discuss the debate over the relative simplicity/complexity of language structures, explaining why it is controversial, and what difficulties are faced in attempting to measure it. Use specific examples where possible Noam Chomsky has famously argued that a Martian scientist would conclude that all earthlings speak dialects of the same language. Deep down, so runs the theory, all languages share the same universal grammar, the same underlying concepts, and the same degree of complexity. 1 Ask your average Joe what sort of languages the half-naked tribes in the Amazonian rainforest speak, and they will tell you that primitive people speak primitive languages, ask professional linguists the same question and theyll tell you that all languages are equally complex. This battle cry is one of the most oft-avowed doctrines of the modern discipline of linguistics. For decades, it has been professed from lecterns across the globe, proclaimed in introductory textbooks, and preached at any opportunity to the general public. 2 The question is, are they? This essay will explore why this question is controversial and find out how far this question can be answered. Some people seem to think that if one language were shown to be more complex than another, then it would follow that the latter language is in some sense inferior, which in turn would entail that the speakers of that language are inferior, and from here were only one short step to ethnic cleansing. 3This is where controversy can arise, a nations language, so we are often told, reflects its culture, psyche, and modes of thought. 4 No language not even that of the most primitive tribes is inherently unsuitable for expressing the most complex idea. Any shortcomings in a languages ability to philosophise simply boil down to the lack of some specialised abstract vocabulary and perhaps just a few syntactic constructions, but these can easily be borrowed, just as all European languages pinched their verbal philosophical toolkit from Latin, which in turn lifted it wholesale from Greek. If speakers of any tribal language were so minded, they could easily do the same today, and it would eminently possible to deliberate in Zulu about the respective merits of empiricism and rationalism or to hold forth about existentialist phenomenology in West Greenlandic. 5 If musings on nations and language were merely aired over aperitifs, they could be indulged as harmless, if nonsensical, diversions. But as it happens, the subject has also exercised high and learned minds throughout the ages. Philosophers of all persuasions and nationalities have lined up to proclaim that each language reflects the qualities of the nation that speaks it. In the seventeenth century, the Englishman Francis Bacon explained that one can infer significant marks of the genius and manners of people and nations from their languages. Everything confirms, agreed the Frenchman tienne de Condillac a century later, that each language expresses the character of the people who speak it. The American Ralph Waldo Emerson summed it all up in 1844: We infer the spirit of the nation in great measure from the language, which is a sort of monument to which each forcible individual in a course of many hundred years has contributed a stone. 6

1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6.

Deutscher, p6 Deutscher, p99 Gil 2001, p326 Deutscher, p1 Deutscher, p2 Deutscher, p3

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The only problem with this impressive international unanimity is that it breaks down as soon as thinkers move on from the general principles to reflect on the particular qualities (or otherwise) of particular languages, and about what these linguistic qualities can tell about the qualities (or otherwise) of particular nations. In 1889, Emersons words were assigned as an essay topic to the seventeen year-old Bertrand Russell, when he was preparing for the scholarship extrance exam to Trinity College, Cambridge. Russell responded with these pearls: We may study the character of a people by the ideas which its language best expresses. French, for instance, contains such words as spirituel, or lesprit, which in English can scarcely be expressed at all; whence we naturally draw the inference, which may be confirmed by actual observation, that the French have more esprit and are more spiritual than the English. Cicero, on the other hand, drew exactly the opposite inference from the lack of word in a language, in his De oratore of 55 BC, he embarked on a lengthy sermon about the lack of a Greek equivalent for the Latin word impetus (meaning impertinent or tactless). Russell would have concluded that the Greeks had such impeccable manners that they simply did not need a word to describe a non-existent flaw. Not so Cicero: for him, the absence of the word was a proof that the fault was so wide-spread among the Greeks that they didnt even notice it.7 Great minds have churned out even richer fare when advancing from the issue of how language reflects the character of its speaker to the grander question of how language influences the thought processes of its speakers. Bejamin Lee Whorf captivated a whole generation when he taught that our habit of separating the world into objects (like stone) and actions (like fall) is not a true reflection of reality but merely a division thrust upon us by the grammar of European languages. According to Whorf, American Indian languages, which combine the verb and the object into one word, impose a monistic view on the universe, so their speakers would simply not understand our distinction between objects and actions. A generation later, George Steiner reasoned in his 1975 book, After Babel that the existence of the future is tense, is what gives us hope for the future, saves us from nihilism, and even from mass suicide. If our system of tenses was more fragile, we might not endure. 8 More recently, one philosopher has revolutionised our understanding of Tudor history by uncovering the real cause for Henrys break with the Pope. The Anglican revolution, he established, was not a result of the kings desperate wish for an heir, as previously assumed, nor was it a cynical ploy to siphon off the Churchs wealth and property. Rather, the birth of Anglican theology ensued inevitable from the exigencies of the English language: English grammar, being halfway between French and German, compelled English religious though inexorably towards a position halfway between (French) Catholicism and (German) Protestantism. In their pronouncements on language, culture and thought, it seems that big thinkers in their grandes oeuvres have not always risen much above little thinkers over their hors doeuvre.9

7. Deutscher, p4 8. Deutscher, p5 9. Deutscher, p6

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Jan Gonda (1905-1991) wrote that the comparative method was inapplicable to many non-Western languages, which share properties (like reduplication) with the speech of children and the uncultivated or less cultivated classes and groups of our own society. 10 His position was immediately blasted by Trager as a counsel of despair where it is not sheer ethnocentric racism 11 Despite all this controversy, there still seems to be widespread belief on the street - even on very good streets that the languages of the Aborigines in Australia, Indians in South American, Bushmen in Africa, and other simple people around the world are just as simple as their societies. As folk wisdom would have it, an undeveloped way of life is reflected in an undeveloped way of speaking, primitive Stone Age tools are indicative of primitive grammatical structures, nakedness and navet are mirrored infantile in and inarticulate speech. 12 There is no need for an advanced course in logic to realise that the two statements there are no primitive languages and all languages are equally complex are not equivalent, and that the former does not imply the latter. Two languages can both be way above the me sleep here level, but one of them could still be far more complex than the other. 13 The fundamental prerequisite for crosslinguistic comparison is cross-linguistic comparability; that is the ability to identify the same grammatical phenomenon across languages. One cannot make generalisations about subjects across languages without some confidence that one has correctly identified the category of subject in each language and compared subjects across languages. This is in fact a fundamental issue in all linguistic theory. The essential problem is that languages vary in their structure to a great extent. The variation in structure makes it impossible to use structural criteria, or only structural criteria, to identify grammatical categories across languages. If we did use structural criteria, we would be prejudging the result of our supposedly empirical analysis, by excluding a priori structural types that do not fit our criteria. 14 No one has ever measured the overall complexity of even one single language, not to mention all of them. No one even has an idea how to measure the overall complexity of a language. The equal complexity slogan is just a myth, an urban legend that linguists repeat because they have heard other linguists repeat it before them, having in turn heard others repeat it earlier. If one were to press linguists to reveal what their authority for this tenet is, the source that is most likely to be mentioned is a passage from a book called A Course in Modern Linguistics, which was written in 1958 by Charles Hockett, one of the fathers of American structural linguistics. The funny thing is that in this passage Hockett himself went out of his way to explain that the equal complexity was not a finding, merely his impression: Objective measurement is difficult, but impressionistically it would seem that the total grammatical complexity of any language, counting both morphology and syntax, is about the same as that of any other. This is not surprising, since all languages have about equally complex jobs to do, and what is not done morphologically has to be done syntactically. Fox [an American Indian language of Iowa], with a more complex morphology than English, thus ought to have a some-what simpler syntax; and this is the case. 15 10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15. Gonda 1948, p90 Trager 1948, p209 Deutscher, p100 Deutscher, p103 Croft, p13 Deutscher, p105

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Hockett assumes, quite correctly, that all languages need to satisfy a minimum degree of complexity in order to fulfil their complex jobs. From this fact he infers that if one language is less complex than another in one area, it has to compensate by increasing complexity in another area. But a moments reflection will reveal that this inference is invalid, because much of languages complexity is not necessary for effective communication, and so there is no need to compensate for its absence. Anyone who has tried to learn a foreign language knows only too dearly that languages can be full of pointless irregularities that increase complexity considerably without contributing much to the ability to express ideas. English, for instance, would have losed none of its expressive power if some of its verbs leaved their irregular past tense behind and becomed regular. 16 There is no way to devise an objective and non-arbitrary measure for comparing the overall complexity of any two given languages. 17 While the pursuit of the overall complexity of language is a wild-goose chase, one can instead aim for the complexity of particular areas of language. Suppose complexity was defined as the number of parts in a system, if one were to delineate specific areas of language carefully enough, it would eminently become possible to measure the complexity of each of those areas individually. 18 For decades, linguists have elevated the hollow slogan that all languages are equally complex to a fundamental tenet of their discipline, zealously suppressing as heresy any suggestion that the complexity of any areas of grammar could reflect aspects of society. As a consequence, relatively little work has been done on the subject. But a flurry of publications from the last couple of years shows that more linguists are now daring to explore such connections. 19 The results of this research have already revealed some significant statistical correlations. Some of these, such as the tendency of smaller societies to have more complex word structure, may seem surprising at first sight, but look plausible on closer examination. Other connections, such as the greater reliance on subordination in complex societies, still require detailed statistical surveys, but nevertheless seem intuitively convincing. And finally, the relation between the complexity of the sound system and the structure of society awaits a satisfactory explanation. But now that the taboo is lifting and more research is being done, there are undoubtedly more insights in store. 20 The debate over the relative simplicity/complexity of language structures is one that has sparked a lot of controversy of which there should no longer be. The points made in this essay fairly coincide with the Optimality Theory. The thrust of which is that innate universal grammar consists of a set of constraints, each of which can be violated, and which are ranked differently in different languages. 21 Overall the debate helps highlight the most extraordinary thing about language: that one doesnt have to be a Napoleon or a Newton to set its wheels in motion. The language machine allows just about everybody from pre-modern foragers in the subtropical savannah , to post-modern philosophers in the suburban sprawl to tie these meaningless sounds together into an infinite variety of subtle sense, and all apparently without the slightest exertion. 22 16. 17. 18. 19. 20. 21. 22. Deutscher, p106 Deutscher, p109 Deutscher, p109 Deutscher, p125 Deutscher, p126 Archangeli 1997, p17 Deutscher 2005, p2

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Word Count: 2,150

Bibliography

William Croft, The Problem of Cross-Linguistic Comparability and Language Sampling for Cross-Linguistic Research, Chaps. 1.4 and 1.5 of Typology and Universals(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2nd ed. 2003), 13-28. John E Joseph LEL 2D Lecture notes 1-6 Guy Deutscher, The Unfolding of Language (2005) Through the Language Glass (2010)