Why language is humanitys greatest invention David Peterson
Spoons.
Cardboard boxes.
Toddler-size electric trains.
Holiday ornaments.
Bounce houses.
Blankets.
Baskets.
Carpets.
Tray tables.
Smartphones.
Pianos.
Robes.
Photographs.
What do all of these things
have in common,
aside from the fact they’re photos
that I took in the last three months,
and therefore, own the copyright to?
(Laughter)
They’re all inventions
that were created
with the benefit of language.
None of these things
would have existed without language.
Imagine creating any one of those things
or, like, building
an entire building like this,
without being able to use language
or without benefiting from any knowledge
that was got by the use of language.
Basically, language
is the most important thing
in the entire world.
All of our civilization rests upon it.
And those who devote
their lives to studying it –
both how language emerged,
how human languages differ,
how they differ from
animal communication systems –
are linguists.
Formal linguistics is a relatively
young field, more or less.
And it’s uncovered a lot
of really important stuff.
Like, for example, that human
communication systems
differ crucially from animal
communication systems,
that all languages are equally expressive,
even if they do it in different ways.
And yet, despite this,
there are a lot of people
who just love to pop off about language
like they have an equal
understanding of it as a linguist,
because, of course, they speak a language.
And if you speak a language,
that means you have just as much right
to talk about its function
as anybody else.
Imagine if you were talking to a surgeon,
and you say, “Listen, buddy.
I’ve had a heart for, like, 40 years now.
I think I know a thing or two
about aortic valve replacements.
I think my opinion
is just as valid as yours.”
And yet, that’s exactly what happens.
This is Neil deGrasse Tyson,
saying that in the film “Arrival,”
he would have brought a cryptographer –
somebody who can unscramble a message
in a language they already know –
rather than a linguist,
to communicate with the aliens,
because what would a linguist –
why would that be useful
in talking to somebody
speaking a language we don’t even know?
Though, of course, the “Arrival” film
is not off the hook.
I mean, come on –
listen, film. Hey, buddy:
there are aliens that come down
to our planet in gigantic ships,
and they want to do nothing
except for communicate with us,
and you hire one linguist?
(Laughter)
What’s the US government
on a budget or something?
(Laughter)
A lot of these things can be
chalked up to misunderstandings,
both about what language is
and about the formal study of language,
about linguistics.
And I think there’s something that
underlies a lot of these misunderstandings
that can be summed up
by this delightful article in “Forbes,”
about why high school students
shouldn’t learn foreign languages.
I’m going to pull out
some quotes from this,
and I want you to see
if you can figure out
what underlies some
of these opinions and ideas.
“Americans rarely read the classics,
even in translation.”
So in other words, why bother
learning a foreign language
when they’re not even going to read
the classic in the original anyway?
What’s the point?
“Studying foreign languages in school
is a waste of time,
compared to other things
that you could be doing in school.”
“Europe has a lot of language groups
clustered in a relatively small space.”
So for Americans, ah, what’s the point
of learning another language?
You’re not really going to get
a lot of bang for your buck out of that.
This is my favorite,
“A student in Birmingham
would have to travel
about a thousand miles
to get to the Mexican border,
and even then, there would be enough
people who speak English to get around.”
In other words, if you can
kind of wave your arms around,
and you can get to where you’re going,
then there’s really no point
in learning another language anyway.
What underlies a lot of these attitudes
is the conceptual metaphor,
language is a tool.
And there’s something that rings
very true about this metaphor.
Language is kind of a tool
in that, if you know the local language,
you can do more than if you didn’t.
But the implication is that
language is only a tool,
and this is absolutely false.
If language was a tool,
it would honestly be a pretty poor tool.
And we would have abandoned it long ago
for something that was a lot better.
Think about just any sentence.
Here’s a sentence that I’m sure I’ve said
in my life: “Yesterday I saw Kyn.”
I have a friend named Kyn.
And when I say this sentence,
“Yesterday I saw Kyn,”
do you think it’s really the case
that everything in my mind
is now implanted in your mind
via this sentence?
Hardly, because there’s a lot
of other stuff going on.
Like, when I say “yesterday,”
I might think what the weather
was like yesterday because I was there.
And if I’m remembering,
I’ll probably remember there was something
I forgot to mail, which I did.
This was a preplanned joke,
but I really did forget to mail something.
And so that means
I’m going to have to do it Monday,
because that’s when
I’m going to get back home.
And of course, when I think of Monday,
I’ll think of “Manic Monday”
by the Bangles. It’s a good song.
And when I say the word “saw,”
I think of this phrase:
“‘I see!’ said the blind man
as he picked up his hammer and saw.”
I always do.
Anytime I hear the word “saw” or say it,
I always think of that,
because my grandfather
always used to say it,
so it makes me think of my grandfather.
And we’re back to “Manic Monday”
again, for some reason.
And with Kyn, when I’m saying
something like, “Yesterday I saw Kyn,”
I’ll think of the circumstances
under which I saw him.
And this happened to be that day.
Here he is with my cat.
And of course, if I’m thinking of Kyn,
I’ll think he’s going to
Long Beach State right now,
and I’ll remember that
my good friend John and my mother
both graduated from Long Beach State,
my cousin Katie is going to
Long Beach State right now.
And it’s “Manic Monday” again.
But this is just a fraction
of what’s going on in your head
at any given time while you are speaking.
And all we have to represent
the entire mess
that is going on in our head, is this.
I mean, that’s all we got.
(Laughter)
Is it any wonder
that our system is so poor?
So imagine, if I can give you an analogy,
imagine if you wanted to know
what is it like to eat a cake,
if instead of just eating the cake,
you instead had to ingest
the ingredients of a cake,
one by one,
along with instructions
about how these ingredients
can be combined to form a cake.
You had to eat the instructions, too.
(Laughter)
If that was how we had to experience cake,
we would never eat cake.
And yet, language is
the only way – the only way –
that we can figure out
what is going on here, in our minds.
This is our interiority,
the thing that makes us human,
the thing that makes us different
from other animals,
is all inside here somewhere,
and all we have to do to represent it
is our own languages.
A language is our best way of showing
what’s going on in our head.
Imagine if I wanted to ask
a big question, like:
“What is the nature of human
thought and emotion?”
What you’d want to do
is you’d want to examine
as many different languages
as possible.
One isn’t just going to do it.
To give you an example,
here’s a picture I took of little Roman,
that I took with a 12-megapixel camera.
Now, here’s that same picture
with a lot fewer pixels.
Obviously, neither
of these pictures is a real cat.
But one gives you a lot better sense
of what a cat is than the other.
Language is not merely a tool.
It is our legacy,
it’s our way of conveying
what it means to be human.
And of course, by “our” legacy,
I mean all humans everywhere.
And losing even one language
makes that picture a lot less clear.
So as a job for the past 10 years
and also as recreation, just for fun,
I create languages.
These are called “conlangs,”
short for “constructed languages.”
Now, presenting these facts back to back,
that we’re losing languages on our planet
and that I create brand-new languages,
you might think that there’s
some nonsuperficial connection
between these two.
In fact, a lot of people have drawn a line
between those dots.
This is a guy who got
all bent out of shape
that there was a conlang
in James Cameron’s “Avatar.”
He says,
“But in the three years
it took James Cameron
to get Avatar to the screen,
a language died.”
Probably a lot more than that, actually.
“Na’vi, alas, won’t fill the hole
where it used to be …”
A truly profound and poignant statement –
if you don’t think about it at all.
(Laughter)
But when I was here at Cal,
I completed two majors.
One of them was linguistics,
but the other one was English.
And of course, the English major,
the study of English,
is not actually the study
of the English language, as we know,
it’s the study of literature.
Literature is just a wonderful thing,
because basically, literature,
more broadly, is kind of like art;
it falls under the rubric of art.
And what we do with literature,
authors create new,
entire beings and histories.
And it’s interesting to us to see
what kind of depth and emotion
and just unique spirit
authors can invest
into these fictional beings.
So much so, that, I mean –
take a look at this.
There’s an entire series of books
that are written
about fictional characters.
Like, the entire book is just about one
fictional, fake human being.
There’s an entire book
on George F. Babbitt
from Sinclair Lewis’s “Babbitt,”
and I guarantee you,
that book is longer than “Babbitt,”
which is a short book.
Does anybody even remember that one?
It’s pretty good, I actually think
it’s better than “Main Street.”
That’s my hot take.
So we’ve never questioned the fact
that literature is interesting.
But despite the fact,
not even linguists are actually interested
in what created languages can tell us
about the depth of the human spirit
just as an artistic endeavor.
I’ll give you a nice little example here.
There was an article written about me
in the California alumni
magazine a while back.
And when they wrote this article,
they wanted to get somebody
from the opposing side,
which, in hindsight,
seems like a weird thing to do.
You’re just talking about a person,
and you want to get somebody
from the opposing side of that person.
(Laughter)
Essentially, this is just
a puff piece, but whatever.
So, they happened to get
one of the most brilliant
linguists of our time,
George Lakoff, who’s a linguist
here at Berkeley.
And his work has basically forever changed
the fields of linguistics
and cognitive science.
And when asked about my work
and about language creation in general,
he said, “But there’s a lot of things
to be done in the study of language.
You should spend the time
on something real.”
Yeah.
“Something real.”
Does this remind you of anything?
To use the very framework
that he himself invented,
let me refer back
to this conceptual metaphor:
language is a tool.
And he appears to be laboring
under this conceptual metaphor;
that is, language is useful
when it can be used for communication.
Language is useless
when it can’t be used for communication.
It might make you wonder:
What do we do with dead languages?
But anyway.
So, because of this idea,
it might seem like
the very height of absurdity
to have a Duolingo course
on the High Valyrian language
that I created for HBO’s
“Game of Thrones.”
You might wonder what, exactly,
are 740,000 people learning?
(Laughter)
Well, let’s take a look at it.
What are they learning?
What could they possibly be learning?
Well, bearing in mind that
the other language for this –
it’s for people that speak English –
English speakers are learning quite a bit.
Here’s a sentence that they will probably
never use for communication
in their entire lives:
“Vala ābre urnes.”
“The man sees the woman.”
The little middle line is the gloss,
so it’s word for word,
that’s what it says.
And they’re actually learning
some very fascinating things,
especially if they’re English speakers.
They’re learning that a verb can come
at the very end of a sentence.
Doesn’t really do that in English
when you have two arguments.
They’re learning that sometimes
a language doesn’t have an equivalent
for the word “the” – it’s totally absent.
That’s something language can do.
They’re learning that a long vowel
can actually be longer in duration,
as opposed to different in quality,
which is what our long vowels do;
they’re actually the same length.
They’re learning that
there are these little inflections.
Hmm? Hmm?
There are inflections called “cases”
on the end of nouns –
(Laughter)
that tell you who does what
to whom in a sentence.
Even if you leave the order
of the words the same
and switch the endings,
it changes who does what to whom.
What they’re learning is that languages
do things, the same things, differently.
And that learning languages can be fun.
What they’re learning is respect
for Language: capital “L” Language.
And given the fact that 88 percent
of Americans only speak English at home,
I don’t think that’s
necessarily a bad thing.
You know why languages die on our planet?
It’s not because government imposes
one language on a smaller group,
or because an entire group
of speakers is wiped out.
That certainly has happened in the past,
and it’s happening now,
but it’s not the main reason.
The main reason is that
a child is born to a family
that speaks a language that
is not widely spoken in their community,
and that child doesn’t learn it.
Why?
Because that language is not valued
in their community.
Because the language isn’t useful.
Because the child can’t go and get a job
if they speak that language.
Because if language is just a tool,
then learning their native language
is about as useful
as learning High Valyrian,
so why bother?
Now …
Maybe language study isn’t going to lead
to a lot more linguistic fluency.
But maybe that’s not such a big deal.
Maybe if more people
are studying more languages,
it will lead to more linguistic tolerance
and less linguistic imperialism.
Maybe if we actually respect
language for what it is –
literally, the greatest invention
in the history of humankind –
then in the future,
we can celebrate endangered languages
as living languages,
as opposed to museum pieces.
(High Valyrian) Kirimvose.
Thank you.
(Applause)