by Project Itoh
“That’s very interesting, ma’am. So you could spend a whole month on a single word and not master it,” I observed, placing a slice of lemon in my tea.
“Yes, although admittedly that’s an extreme case.” Lucia smiled. “But the really tricky thing about Czech isn’t so much the nouns per se, as the difficulty of getting them out in the correct order to say exactly what you mean, and in an accent that comes even close to a native speaker’s. Did you know, for example, that some Czech words don’t have any vowels in them? How’s this for a sentence: Strč prst skrz krk. And we even have our own unique phoneme, the Ř. Linguists call it the raised alveolar non-sonorant trill, and it’s a rare bored housewife who can master that with any degree of panache, I can tell you.”
“I see,” I said.
“That’s why it’s hard to teach this sort of direct interpersonal communication over the Internet. There’s just too much you miss, too many subtleties.”
She was absolutely right, of course. Web-based learning could only ever get you so far, even with the advanced e-learning technologies we had at our disposal these days. Virtual reality learning environments were the order of the day for most of our classroom training sessions, but language learning was still firmly a face-to-face, offline experience, precisely for the reasons she named.
Lucia Sukrova’s livelihood was teaching Czech to foreigners. We were in her studio, a spacious room in her traditional apartment in the center of Prague’s old town, where all her students came to study.
“I have to confess, ma’am, that I’m relieved that your English is so good. You speak like a native, unlike some language teachers I’ve worked with in the past.”
“Well, English does seem to be the hegemonic language these days, after all …” Lucia smiled. If this was a subtle dig, for once it didn’t seem to bother me, even though I was usually pretty weary of having my country’s foreign policy rubbed in my face by disgruntled locals.
“I’m sure it must seem that way to you, ma’am, although you might be interested to know that according to the latest web traffic analysis that might not strictly be true. More content is created by Japanese bloggers than in English, for example. Perhaps because the Japanese like to have a virtual outlet for their opinions and feelings that they suppress in everyday life.”
My cover is that I’m in advertising, recently transferred over here to manage a big new account. Here to be a pioneer in the burgeoning interstitial market. To infest and infect beautiful Czech websites with opportunistic pop-ups of airbrushed models proclaiming their undying loyalty to a diet pill du jour. And these sorts of ads did, as it happened, have a tendency to appear on both English and Japanese blogs.
“Is that so? I have to admit I can’t really relate to that on a personal level, as I’ve never felt the compulsion to document my life for the whole world to read. But if what you say is true, I imagine that the web is drowning in a sea of words.”
“Did you ever keep a diary?” I asked, trying to find a way to relate the conversation to her.
“Hmmm … yes, I believe I did. Some time ago, though.”
“And if you don’t mind my asking, ma’am, where did you learn your English?”
“In the States. I studied linguistics,” she said.
“So you could say you’re a master of words?” I asked.
“Hardly. If I were so good with words I’d have ensnared a man or two to look after me by now, no? I studied the academic framework of language, not its sensual power.”
“Sure, you could describe Noam Chomsky as many things, but sexy is probably not one of them,” I joked.
“I don’t know about that. Not for most people, you’re right, but there are some oddballs in this world who feel the sensuous beauty in his work. Take me, for instance.”
Lucia smiled again. She sure liked to smile, I thought. And not just any old smile. Hers wasn’t the superficial smile of someone trying to make polite conversation. It was the smile of someone who loved words and loved communicating exactly what she meant in her heart. When she smiled she looked so much younger than the thirty-three-year-old she was. When she smiled, she could have probably passed for a teenage girl.
“Where were you based in the States?” I continued.
“I was at grad school in Massachusetts.”
“MIT?” I asked, and she nodded. “Wow! Impressive! I had no idea.”
Not true. I had every idea. It was my job to seem impressed by this piece of information, as if it were new to me, as if Intelligence hadn’t profiled this woman down to the last minute detail. It was my job as a spy to be able to pull off this sort of lie convincingly. Normally I could. Right now, though, I had no idea whether or not she was convinced.
“It’s not that impressive really. It happened to be the only school where I could continue my research in my field, and so that’s where I went.”
“Oh, really? What sort of research was that exactly?”
The conversation that had been flowing so naturally up until this point now hit a wall. This was one question too many for a casual conversation, evidently, although Lucia did her best not to show it.
Who’s asking? she must have wanted to say.
Instead, she chose her words carefully, blandly. “I suppose you could say it was mainly to do with how language can exert influence on people’s behavior.”
“You mean linguistic relativity? Like how Eskimos have over twenty different words for snow, and how the very existence of these words affects their worldview?”
“You mean the old Sapir-Whorf hypothesis? No, not quite.” Lucia smiled again. And truth be told I was relieved. Not so much because I was worried about her being suspicious, but because I didn’t like looking at her face when she frowned. She was a beautiful woman when she smiled.
“Actually, the story about the Inuit is something of an urban legend. The number of words that they apparently have for ‘snow’ seems to increase every time the story’s told. When Boas first reported his findings it was four, Whorf spoke of seven in his hypothesis, and the seven became ‘almost ten,’ ‘over ten,’ and so on and so forth, until you get ‘the Eskimos have a hundred different words for snow!’ being reported as fact in National Geographic. Scratch a little deeper, though, and you’ll see that they really just have a handful. Not that different from English, when you think about it: ‘snow,’ ‘sleet,’ ‘slush,’ ‘hail,’ and so on.”
This I didn’t know. I’d put up with plenty of dinner party snobs in my time, idly jibber-jabbering about how the Inuits have such different realities from us, don’t you know, and how their lives must be so much more real, y’know, being centered around snow and all that. And so I guess it was these idle gossips who were the carriers of the Eskimo meme from one middle-class dinner party to another.
I wondered how many words the Inuits would allegedly have for snow by the time the meme finally ran its course. A hundred? Two hundred? More?
“Sadly, real life tends to be a little less exciting than all that,” Lucia continued. “And contrary to popular belief, there seems to be very little correlation between language and people’s perception of reality. No matter where you’re born or where you grow up, reality is just that little bit too resilient to be buffeted about by language. The thought always comes before the language used to express the thought.”
“And yet I’m thinking in English right now.”
“Well, it might seem like that, because your reality is one that incorporates the English language into itself. But actually your thought process consists of a number of different factors, and language is just one of the tools at its disposal. Language is a subset of thought, if you will, not the other way around. Trying to argue that people think with language just because we have a keenly developed linguistic sensibility is a bit like saying that beavers have evolved to think with their teeth.”
“That’s an … interesting analogy.” I wasn’t being sarcastic. I had to acknowledge that there was a certain attractive
ness to the idea that reality was determined by words and that it was the meanings that people attached to words that acted as a filter to construct their own versions of reality. But at the same time, something had always struck a false chord with me about this theory. I remembered back in high school our English teacher proudly relating the story of Eskimos having many different words for snow (twenty, was it, in that telling?) and feeling profoundly uncomfortable about this. After all, words were real, they were bundles of reality that existed in the outside world, independent from me. I remembered wondering how they could possibly influence my thought in that way when they weren’t really part of me.
“What sort of units do you imagine a mathematician or a theoretical physicist thinks in? When they first conceptualize their ideas?” Lucia asked me.
I answered that I supposed they would use more numbers and numerical formulae.
Lucia shook her head. “You would have thought so—but Einstein’s actually on record saying that it was always a visual image that came to his mind in the first instance. Other so-called geniuses have said similar things. That it’s actually a sort of diagram that comes to mind first, and it’s only by manipulating that diagram in their minds that they’re able to come up with formulae as the output.”
“That’s hard to believe. To understand, I mean. How do you visualize an imaginary number, or infinity for that matter?” I asked.
“Hard to believe for you or me. That’s because our realities are different from those genius scientists. So, you see, it’s probably more accurate to speak of different realities as being determined by thought processes, not language as such.”
“May I ask you a question?” I decided to press the point. “What are words to you? If they’re not objects that determine our realities, then what are they there for?”
“Tools for communication, of course. Or … organs, maybe, I guess?”
It was at this moment that I realized that Lucia’s language had shifted in register—slightly, subtly, but definitely. At the start of our conversation, she had been talking to me as a prospective student and customer—and that was supposed to have set the boundaries of the conversation.
But here she was now, enjoying her conversation with me.
“Organs?” I said. “You mean, as in body parts? Kidneys and bowels and arms and eyes?”
“Exactly.”
“But isn’t language a human abstraction?”
“So are you saying that abstractions can never be real? Do you believe that there’s no way the human soul could be contained in a pitiful little organ such as the brain, maybe?” Then Lucia appeared to stop herself. “Oh, forgive me if I’ve overstepped the mark. You are, perhaps, a religious man?”
I thought of Alex.
Hell is here.
Alex pointing at his own forehead.
“No, I’m an atheist,” I said.
Alex had been a religious man. He had believed in God.
And that same Alex had said that hell was inside our minds. Hidden among the folds and creases of our brains.
“That’s a relief. I know this sort of conversation can be offensive to some people.”
I laughed. “Lucky escape for you, I guess. Besides,” I pointed out, “if I were the Bible-thumping type, you would have already offended me earlier with your talk of souls and whatnot.”
“You’re right. I guess I’m the sort of person that has to rely on having lucky escapes.” Lucia laughed. “Anyway, what I was saying was that language is one of the fruits of evolution, of humanity’s natural tendency to adapt to the environment. Humans had to acquire the ability to somehow compare themselves with other things; that way they could run crude mental simulations to try and forecast the outcome of a particular action or interaction. Human thought processes—or maybe you could call it raw emotion—came up with a way of differentiating our selves from the other: the ego, they call it in psychology. After all, without having an idea of the self, you have no way of comparing yourself with the outside world, no way of making any sort of comparisons or judgment calls. But with a sense of self, man was able to avoid all sorts of danger through his ‘forecasts.’ You could say that language developed as a way of trading these ‘forecasts’ with other similar beings. This allowed us to build up a mental database of information without necessarily having to experience it firsthand, and this in turn further reduced our exposure to danger and allowed us to adapt even more perfectly to a wide variety of environments.”
“So you’re saying that language is basically just a product of evolutionary adaptation?”
“Yes. Just like our other organs.”
So the very fact that I was here now, talking to Lucia, was nothing more than an incidental byproduct of evolutionary adaptation of the brain? Was language really no more than an organ, like an elephant’s trunk or a giraffe’s neck?
Language was indeed a precise and delicate instrument, I supposed. It occurred to me that even though we now had technology such as giant artificial flesh Meatplanes and the like, we still didn’t have a way of fully replicating the complex filtration systems of human kidneys and livers on a miniature scale. Those organs were, in their own way, just as precise and delicate, as exquisite, as language. For medical science, the perfect artificial organ was still some way over the horizon. When even our internal organs still contained countless mysteries hidden to us, what right did we have to think of language as being this unique, divine gift?
I needed to know who I was. I needed to use words to communicate with other people. Surely then, language was just another inevitable evolutionary process. Language was part of my flesh. An organ called the self. An organ called language.
“If that’s the case, isn’t it a particularly human conceit, this idea that living things will necessarily develop language once they’ve evolved past a certain point?”
“You’re thinking that another species might have other ‘organs’ develop instead, you mean?” Lucia said. “So in a super-advanced civilization of crows, they’d all have incredibly sharp beaks rather than language?”
Language, and my own sense of self—both mere adaptive mechanisms. That much I got and was prepared to accept. Having said that, if language really was nothing more than an adaptive organ—well, there were examples, weren’t there, of species that became extinct through over-adaptation?
Wasn’t the saber-toothed tiger eventually driven to extinction by the weight of its own canines?
5
“Well, whaddaya know—I guess that English major came in handy after all.”
These were Williams’s first words to me to welcome me back when I returned from Lucia Sukrova’s apartment via a prearranged back route in an apartment on the opposite side of the building.
“Just the way the conversation flowed,” I said as I pulled myself out of my suit.
Williams’s eyes stayed glued to his monitor. “If you say so, dude. Sounded to me like you were quite happy to let the conversation flow that way, though, huh?”
“Not getting much at home these days, Williams?”
“Hey, buddy, I’ve still got it when I want it, you know? Ten minutes with that little lady and she’d be putty in my hands.”
“Uh-huh. What would you do, sit there and grunt at her until she submitted?”
“Nah, I’d spin some line about Eskimos and snow. Or maybe talk about Kafka.”
“I thought it was all Kafka to you?” I said.
“You don’t get it, do you? You’re allowed to leave some gaps in a conversation with a woman—hell, you’re supposed to. Gives her a chance to stick her pretty little oar in.”
“Gaps in the conversation are one thing, but in your case you’d be leaving hulking great craters. Anyway, women can’t stand self-assured pricks like you, in case you haven’t noticed.”
If I sounded like I was crossing the line from banter into something more irritable, it was because I was sometimes genuinely tired of Williams’s incessant braggadocio. Besides, he h
ad it all wrong. You don’t try and engage a Czech language teacher by talking at them about Kafka, any more than you become buddies with a fishmonger by lecturing him about fish. If there’s one thing worse than shop talk, it’s shop talk with an amateur who thinks he knows it all. I shuddered at the memory of those godawful presentations on special ops we used to have to sit through given by slack-jawed CIA goons.
“Nice. Anyhow—any sniff of John Paul along the way?” Williams asked.
I thought back to the room. I’d kept an eye out for all the usual indicators—a ring, photographs, magazines, general cleanliness, and decor—but I had detected no obvious signs that a man had been there recently.
It turned out that the electronic sensors had had better luck than my own limited human sensory organs. A man had been in the room recently. We knew this thanks to the tiny sensor patch that I placed inside my nostril beforehand to record the airborne particles in the room. Or rather, the patch sent the data to a device stuck to my torso, the nostril-patch being merely the sensor that transmitted the data to the processor under my shirt, via the natural salts on my skin.
The smoking gun: Penhaligon Eau de Cologne.
“I guess even John Paul likes to make an effort for his lady.” Williams sneered.
The CIA had reported that no men had entered Lucia’s apartment since John Paul had left a few days ago. Only a few women, mainly bored housewives who had recently moved to Prague with their businessman husbands.
So the cologne must have been the lingering scent of John Paul. My own nose might not have picked it up, but it was picked up by something in my nose.
“Damn. No semen,” continued Williams. He was referring, of course, to the results of the analysis that were now displayed on the screen in front of him. “I guess he didn’t miss his girlfriend all that much, then.”