Three books. One common thread: how language characterizes our experience of the world around us. Language is such an interesting part of our lives and, in many ways, it shapes the way that we experience the world around us.
“I read in a book once that a rose by any other name would smell as sweet, but I've never been able to believe it. I don't believe a rose WOULD be as nice if it was called a thistle or a skunk cabbage.”
― L.M. Montgomery, Anne of Green Gables
I hesitated to include the previous excerpt because it is repeated so often, but it is a perfect example of what I mean; I think there's a very good reason we give one another names and not numbers, a good reason a garden isn't called a junkyard and a tuba isn't called a whistle. Some words just seem to fit, whether by virtue of familiarity or some other relationship with whatever they describe. Still, have you ever felt like there were just no words for something? A feeling, or a firsthand observation, or something else? It turns out (now and then) that the right words might exist, just not in the apprehended language! Meik Wiking touches upon this in his wonderful book, The Little Book of Hygge. The Danish word hygge is not easily translated ("coziness" just doesn't quite get to the marrow of it), but it is so entwined in the language and culture of Denmark that it changes the way many Danes live their lives. It is also one of the reasons Danes are considered some of the happiest people on the planet, according to several official global surveys; "Nowadays, well-being rankings are only news in Denmark when the country doesn't make first place," Wiking deservedly gloats. A whopping 47% of Danes don't believe that it is possible to translate the word hygge out of Danish and 18% just don't know whether it is possible or not―enter Wiking's 287 pages on the subject in The Little Book of Hygge. To illustrate how different languages can create different experiences of the world, Wiking includes a brief chapter called Why Different Languages Have Unique Words. Some examples that he includes in this section are:
Cafuné (Brazilian Portuguese): "The act of tenderly running one's fingers through the hair of a loved one"
Schilderwald (German): "A street with so many road signs that you become lost"
Iktsuarpok (Inuit): "The feeling of anticipation that leads you to look outside to see if anyone is coming"
"...a culture's language reflects how people experience their world and reflects their actions in it."
―Meik Wiking, The Little Book of Hygge
I recently read an (eloquently written) chapter of Braiding Sweetgrass by Robin Kimmerer as part of a science course for teachers: the chapter called The Grammar of Animacy. What was illuminated was that the way we understand things (or don't understand them) as scientists may have a lot to do with the way we talk about them, or the language that we have at our disposal to describe what we observe. There is a word in Potowatomi which describes "the force which causes mushrooms to push up from the earth overnight": puhpowee. In English, we have no such word to describe this. There is also a pleasantly divergent distinction in Anishinaabe languages between animate and inanimate things; a bird is always a someone and not a something and even places, fire, water, songs, and stories are welcomed into the category of animacy. Inanimacy is generally reserved for things that are man-made (chairs, clocks, and so forth), which makes the inclusion of songs and stories as 'animate' all the more interesting (although, if you've read Big Magic by Elizabeth Gilbert, you might be inclined to agree). Perhaps the largest contrast between the two languages, however, is in the proportion of the parts of speech; in English, 70% of the words that we have to work with are nouns while in Potowatomi, 70% of words are verbs:
"To be a hill, to be a sandy beach, to be a Saturday, all are possible verbs in a world where everything is alive. Water, land, and even a day, the language a mirror for seeing the animacy of the world, the life that pulses through all things, through pines and nuthatches and mushrooms."
―Robin Kimmerer, Braiding Sweetgrass
It's a very different way of looking at the world, and it all comes through in the language.
I finally wanted to mention Oliver Sack's book, Seeing Voices: (in part, a book about language itself as well as some of the history of Sign Language) because it sheds light on the experience of language from the vantage of prolonged language absence followed by eventual acquaintance. Sacks recounts a handful of cases in which prelingually Deaf children were introduced to language late into their childhoods:
"I began to wonder about other deaf people who had reached adolescence, adulthood perhaps, without language of any kind. They had existed in considerable numbers in the eighteenth century: Jean Massieu was one of the most famous of these. Languageless until the age of almost fourteen, Massieu then became the pupil of Abbe Sicard and achieved a spectacular success, becoming eloquent in both sign and written French."
Massieu's transition from near-total languagelessness to dual-fluency was a rebirth, if ever there was one; "With the acquisition of names, of words for everything... there was a radical change in Massieu's relation to the world." The world itself was restored to him, Sacks describes, like one who was formerly "a stranger on his own estates." It reminded me of what Gilbert describes in Big Magic as the "simple entitlement to exist, and therefore express yourself"―it was through language that this became possible for Massieu, so that he felt a new sense of belonging in the world. Sacks discusses a handful of other children and, curiously, the more loved and included the children were within their families and communities prior to the learning of a first language (at the age of 9 or 14, etc.) the better able they were to grasp the language and begin to express themselves with it. Love, it turns out, played a crucial role in the ability of these children to enter the world anew, through language. Love, in these instances, was like the pre-language that allows all other languages to freely develop. And naturally, if we were able to express everything with words, then we would not need to tenderly run our fingers through a loved one's hair; we would have no need of music, or paintings, or kisses. Language is meaningful, but it is not all that tethers us:
"Thoughts die," Schopenhauer writes, "the moment they are embodied by words." "Words die," Vygotsky writes, "as they bring forth thought."
―Oliver Sacks, Seeing Voices
This naturally reminded me of what Peter Mark Roget (author of the Thesaurus) had to say on the subject: "Language is an instrument of thought... giving it wings for flight." At first, this seemed like a great divergence from Schopenhauer and Vygotsky's proposition (that words and thoughts are at odds), but looking closer, I realized that language, perhaps, is not the instrument of thought but merely the instrument of thought.
I know a very good violinist and it is her dancing hands on the bow and on the strings that make it sing―without her talent and (more importantly) her spirit to enliven it, the object is still and quiet in its case: inanimate. Language is not the instrument, therefore, but merely the instrument. And as Henry David Thoreau wrote in Walden (regarding the 'giving it wings for flight' part now), "I have learned that the swiftest traveller is he that goes afoot." What do we make of that? Perhaps it is a paradox because language is consequential ("fear of a name only increases fear of the thing itself," "raise your words, not your voice―it is rain that grows flowers, not thunder"); language does matter and it does colour our experience of the world, but it is also lacking ("I can't tell you what this means to me," or as Georgia O’Keeffe remarked in her own 1977 documentary, "I found that I could say things with color and shapes that I couldn’t say in any other way—things I had no words for").
And what, some might ask, would become of those lively hands without the violin―is this not also a fair question? Do they not need each other? And I think you'd be right. Even if the story is animate and the individual words less so, does the story not need them all the same, to manifest herself? Do the hands not require the violin to make the living music? I've always thought that poems (and assorted statements) about not being able to put something into words are interesting because although they claim not to be enough (and although they may be right in claiming so) they are still using language to express this, and sometimes they are able to reach quite near to the marrow through the very claim that it cannot be done:
I said nothing
to the woman I loved
but gathered
love's adjectives into a suitcase
and fled from all languages
―Nizar Qabbani
Isn't it true that by telling someone that you can't tell them what something means to you, that you are telling them (at least in a sense)? Isn't the statement "there are no words to express..." expressive of the depth of feeling that the professed lack of words attempts to trace? How is it that certain historical speeches or books or even fifteen-minute Ted Talks have the power to be so inspiring? Are they not just a jumble of the same twenty-six letters and a handful of punctuation symbols lovingly assembled (if in English and visible or not)? What is it that brings them to life? What liberates them into animacy? What changes are taking place that metamorphose mere language―the mere instrument―into something that is real and alive?
"Real isn't how you are made," said the Skin Horse. "It's a thing that happens to you. When a child loves you for a long, long time, not just to play with, but REALLY loves you, then you become Real."
―Margery Williams, The Velveteen Rabbit
I think George Washington Carver said it best when he said that if you love something enough that it "will give up its secrets," but only "if you love it enough." I think that language is a bit like that, and music, and everything else.
You will find The Little Book of Hygge, Big Magic, and Braiding Sweetgrass in the EPL collection if you are interested in reading more (just follow the links)! Ask about our interlibrary loan service if you are interested in Seeing Voices or any other items we may not yet own; this is a free service wherein library staff will try to find the item you are looking for through a neighbouring library system. If they've got it, it will be sent to the Essa Public Library for you to borrow. Because having access to information is so important to intellectual freedom, libraries do their best to connect you with the information you seek―even if we don't have the item on hand.
Have a happy rest-of-summer, everyone!
Victoria Murgante
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