Is That a Fish in Your Ear?

by David Bellos

  Linguistic unification of the same order of magnitude has taken place in the last fifty years in most branches of science. Many languages have served at different times as vehicles of scientific advance: Chinese, Sanskrit, Greek, Syriac, Latin, and Arabic from ancient times to the Middle Ages; then Italian and French in the European Renaissance and early modern period. In the eighteenth century, the advances made by Linnaeus in the description and classification of botanical species, as well as Berzelius’s research in chemistry, made Swedish a language of science, and for about a hundred years it kept a respected place. English and French continued to be used for numerous disciplines, but German burst onto the scene in the nineteenth century with the new chemistry invented by Liebig and others; and Dmitri Mendeleyev, who created the periodic table of elements, helped to put Russian among the international languages of science before the end of the nineteenth century. Between 1900 and 1940, new scientific research continued to be published, often in intense rivalry, in Russian, French, German, and English (Swedish having dropped off the map by then). But the Nazis’ abuse of science between 1933 and 1945 discredited the language they used. German began to lose its status as a world science language with the fall of Berlin in 1945—and many leading German scientists were of course whisked off to America and Britain in short order and functioned thereafter as English speakers. French entered a slow decline, and Russian, which expanded in use after the Second World War and continued to be cultivated for political reasons during the remaining years of the U.S.S.R., dropped out of the science scene in 1989. So we are left with English. English is the language of science worldwide; learned journals published in Tokyo, Beijing, Moscow, Berlin, and Paris are now either entirely in English or else carry English translations alongside foreign-language texts. Academic advancement everywhere is dependent on publication in English. Indeed, in Israel it is said that God himself would not get promotion in any science department at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. Why not? Because he has only one publication—and it was not written in English. (I do not really believe this story. The fact that the publication in question has been translated into English and is even available in paperback would surely overrule the promotion committee’s misgivings.)

  Despite this, efforts are being made to allow some languages to serve once again as local science dialects. A U.S.-government-sponsored Web service, for example, WorldWideScience.org, now offers searches of non-English-language databases in China, Russia, France, and some South American countries together with automatic retranslation of the results into Chinese, French, German, Japanese, Korean, Portuguese, Spanish, and Russian. The asymmetry of sources and targets in this new arrangement gives an interesting map of where science is now done.

  The reasons for English having made a clean sweep of the sciences are not straightforward. Among them we cannot possibly include the unfortunate but widespread idea that English is simpler than other languages.

  However, you can’t explain the history and present state of the language of science as the direct result of economic and military might, either. In three instances, languages became science vehicles because the work of a single individual made advances that could not be ignored anywhere else in the world (Liebig for German, Berzelius for Swedish, Mendeleyev for Russian). One language lost its role because of the political folly of its users (German). What we seem to have experienced is not a process of language imposition but of language elimination, in a context where the scientific community needs a means of global communication among its members. The survivor language, English, is not necessarily the best suited to the job; it’s just that nothing has yet happened to knock it out.

  One result of the spread of English is that most of the English now spoken and written in the world comes from people who do not possess it natively, making “English speakers” a minority among the users of the language. Much of the English now written by natural and social scientists whose native language is other is almost impenetrable to nonspecialist readers who believe that because they are native English speakers they should be able to understand whatever is written in English. So clumsy and “deviant” is international scientific English that even nonnative wits can have fun with it:

  Recent observations by Unsofort & Tchetera pointing out that “the more you throw tomatoes on Sopranoes, the more they yell” and comparative studies dealing with the gasp-reaction (Otis & Pifre, 1964), hiccup (Carpentier & Fialip, 1964), cat purring (Remmers & Gautier, 1972), HM reflex (Vincent et al., 1976), ventriloquy (McCulloch et al., 1964), shriek, scream, shrill and other hysterical reactions (Sturm & Drang, 1973) provoked by tomato as well as cabbages, apples, cream tarts, shoes, buts and anvil throwing (Harvar & Mercy, 1973) have led to the steady assumption of a positive feedback organization of the YR based upon a semilinear quadristable multi-switching interdigitation of neuronal sub-networks functioning en desordre (Beulott et al., 1974).7

  Pastiche and parody notwithstanding, international scientific English serves an important purpose—and it would barely exist if it did not serve well enough the purposes for which it is used. It is, in a sense, an escape from translation (even if in many of its uses it is already translated from the writer’s native tongue). Now, if the natural and social sciences can achieve a world language, however clumsy it may sound, why should we not wish all other kinds of human contact and interchange to arrive at the same degree of linguistic unification? In the middle of the last century, the critic and reformer I. A. Richards believed with great passion that China could become part of the concert of nations only if it adopted an international language, Basic English, standing for “British-American-Scientific-International-Commercial English” (as its name suggests, it consists of a simplified English grammar and a limited vocabulary suited for technical and commercial use). Richards devoted much of his energy in the second half of his life to devising, promoting, teaching, and propagandizing on behalf of this utopian language of contact between East and West. He was in a way following in the footsteps of Lejzer Zamenhof, a Jewish intellectual from Bia-łystok (now in Poland), who had also invented a language of hope, Esperanto, which he believed would rid the world of the muddles and horrors caused by multiple tongues. In the nineteenth century, in fact, international languages were invented in great number, in proportion to the rise of language-based national independence movements in Europe. All have disappeared for practical purposes, except Esperanto, which continues to be used as a language of culture by perhaps a few hundred thousand people scattered across the globe—though what they use it for most of all is not science or commerce but to translate poetry, drama, and fiction from vernacular languages for the benefit of other Esperantists around the world.

  Modern Europeans seem to be haunted by a folk memory of the role of Latin in the Middle Ages and beyond. But Latin itself has continued to have a limited use as an international medium for the speakers of “small” European languages. Antanas Smetona, the last president of Lithuania before it was overrun by Soviet and then Nazi armies in 1941, used Latin to make his last unsuccessful appeal for help from the Allies.8 From the other side of the Baltic Sea, a daily news bulletin in Latin is broadcast by Web radio from Helsinki even now.

  Language unification, if it ever comes, will probably not be achieved by Latin, Esperanto, Volapük, or some yet-to-be-invented “contact vehicle” but by one of the languages that possesses a big head start already. It will probably not be the language with the largest number of native speakers (currently, Mandarin Chinese) but the one with the largest number of nonnative users, which is English at the present time. This prospect terrifies and dismays many people, for a whole variety of reasons. But a world in which all intercultural communication was carried out in a single idiom would not diminish the variety of human tongues. It would just make native speakers of the international medium less sophisticated users of language than all others, since they alone would have only one language with which to think.

  Second or vehicular languages ar
e learned more quickly and also forgotten more easily than native tongues. Over the past fifty years, English has been acquired to some degree by countless millions across the continent of Europe and is now the only common language among speakers of the different native languages of Belgium, for example, or on the island of Cyprus. Russian, on the other hand, which was understood and used by the educated class across the entire sphere of influence of the U.S.S.R., from the Baltic to the Balkans and from Berlin to Outer Mongolia until 1989, has been forgotten very fast and, even when not forgotten entirely, is now usually left to one side for contact with foreigners. If language unification does proceed further in the twenty-first century, its course will be mapped not by the qualities or nature of the unifying language or of the languages it displaces; it will hang on the future course of world history.

  Beyond multilingualism and language unification, the third path that leads away from translation is to stop fussing about what other cultures have to say and to stick to one’s own. Isolation has been the dream of many societies, and some have come close to achieving it. During the Edo period (1603–1868), Japan restricted contact with foreigners to a handful of adventurous Dutch, who were allowed to maintain a trading station on an island in Nagasaki harbor, and the Chinese. In Europe, Britain often seemed to wallow in “splendid isolation”—The Times of October 22, 1957, famously ran the headline FOG IN CHANNEL, CONTINENT CUT OFF—but that was more pose than reality. Not so in the tiny land of Albania. Enver Hoxha, the country’s Communist ruler from 1944 to 1985, first broke off relations with his nearest neighbor, Yugoslavia, in 1948, then with the Soviet Union in 1960, and then with Mao’s China in 1976. Albania remained committed to total isolation for many years thereafter, and at one point in the early 1980s there were no more than a dozen foreigners (including diplomatic staff) in the whole country.9 Televisions were tuned so as to disable the reception of broadcasts from outside the state; only those books that confirmed Albania’s own view of its position in the world were translated (and there were not many of those); no foreign books were imported; commercial exchanges were as limited as cultural and linguistic contacts; and no foreign debts were contracted. On the very doorstep of Europe, just a short hop from the tourist sites of Corfu and the swankier resorts of the Italian Adriatic, Albania’s half century of voluntary isolation shows that relatively large groups of people are sometimes prepared to forgo all the supposed benefits of intercultural exchange.

  The dream of isolation comes in many forms, but its recurrent shadow falls over the many stories that anthropologists have told us about preliterate societies living in remote parts of the world. Barely pastiching scientific work of this kind, Georges Perec uses chapter 25 of Life A User’s Manual to narrate the life of Marcel Appenzzell, a fictional pupil of the real Marcel Mauss, who set off to the jungle of Sumatra to establish contact with the Anadalams. After a debilitating journey through tropical forests, Appenzzell finally encounters the tribe. They say nothing. He leaves out what he believes to be traditional gifts and falls asleep. When he awakes, the Anadalams have disappeared. They have left his gifts, upended their huts, and walked away. He tracks them through the jungle, catches up with them, and repeats his procedure, believing it to be the right way to establish communication with these “precontact” people. But the result is the same. They leave. And so it goes on, week after terrible week, until the ethnographer grasps that the Anadalams do not want to engage in communication with him, or with anybody else. That is indeed their privilege. A people may choose autarchy in place of contact. Who are we to say that is wrong?

  However, in Perec’s telling of this story, the Anadalams exemplify not only pride and self-sufficiency but also linguistic and cultural entropy. They possess a few metal tools they are no longer capable of fabricating themselves, suggesting they are dropouts from a more developed civilization. Their language also appears to have had a large part of its vocabulary cut away:

  One consequence of this … was that the same word came to refer to an ever-increasing number of objects. Thus the Malay word for “hunting,” Pekee, meant indifferently to hunt, to walk, to carry, spear, gazelle, antelope, peccary, my’am—a type of very hot spice used in meat dishes—as well as forest, tomorrow, dawn, etc. Similarly, sinuya, a word which Appenzzell put alongside the Malay usi, “banana,” and nuya, “coconut,” meant to eat, meal, soup, gourd, spatula, plait, evening, house, pot, fire, silex (the Anadalams made fire by rubbing two flints), fibula, comb, hair, hoja’ (a hair-dye made from coconut milk mixed with various soils and plants), etc.

  The reader can of course jump straight from this description of lexical entropy to the almost moral conviction that isolation is bad, for it leads (as the story shows) to the impoverishment and death of a language and the culture it supports, and ultimately to the extinction of a whole people. But Perec catches such sentimentality on the hop:

  Of all the characteristics of the Anadalams, these linguistic habits are the best known, because Appenzzell described them in detail in a long letter to the Swedish philologist Hambo Taskerson … He pointed out in an aside that these characteristics could perfectly well apply to a Western carpenter using tools with precise names—gauge, tonguing plane, moulding plane, jointer, mortise, jack plane, rabbet, etc.—but asking his apprentice to pass them to him by saying just “Gimme the thingummy.”10

  Perec’s tight-lipped carpenter may serve as a warning for people who too loudly lament the loss of language proficiency among (for example) today’s teenagers and students. The carpenter’s skill as a carpenter is unaffected by the form of words he uses to go about his trade, because there is no relationship of cause and effect between linguistic entropy and cultural riches of most other kinds. The loss of a vocabulary, or its replacement by a less refined one, has no generalized impact on what people can do.

  It would similarly be unwise to think that isolation causes languages to wither and die. Indeed, isolation may be the most fertile ground for the diversification and enrichment of forms of speech—the innumerable distinctive jargons created by clannish teenagers in every culture provide a good example of that.

  Indeed, there are many richly rewarding activities we perform in contact with others, including others who speak different languages, that don’t need any words at all.

  My father once took a trip to Portugal. On unpacking his suitcase he realized he had forgotten to bring his bedroom slippers. He went out, found a shoe shop, selected the footwear he was lacking, got the assistant to find the right size (39E), paid for his purchase, checked the change, expressed his thanks and gestured farewell, and went back to his hotel—all without uttering a word in any language. Every user of a human language must have had or been close to having a language-free intercultural communication of a similar kind. We do use language to communicate, and the language that we use certainly has some bearing on what, with whom, and how we communicate. But that’s only part of the picture. It would be as artificial to limit our grasp of communication to written or even spoken language as it would be to restrict a study of human nutrition to the menus of restaurants in the Michelin Guide.

  THREE

  Why Do We Call It “Translation”?

  Like speech and communication, words and things don’t fill exactly the same space. But there’s worse to come. Not all words have a meaningful relationship to things at all.

  C.K. Ogden, the famously eccentric co-author of The Meaning of Meaning, believed that much of the world’s troubles could be ascribed to the illusion that a thing exists just because we have a word for it. He called this phenomenon “Word Magic.” Candidates for the label include “levitation,” “real existing socialism,” and “safe investment.” These aren’t outright fictions but illusions licensed and created by the lexicon. In Ogden’s view, Word Magic is what makes us lazy. It stops us from questioning the assumptions that are hidden in words and leads us to allow words to manipulate our minds. It is in this sense that we need to ask: Does “translation” exist? Tha
t is to say, is “translation” an actual thing we can identify, define, explore, and understand—or is it just a word?

  In English and many other languages the word for translation is a two-headed beast. A translation names a product—any work translated from some other language; whereas translation, without an article, names a process—the process by which “a translation” comes to exist. This kind of double meaning is not a problem for speakers of languages that possess regular sets of terms referring both to a process and to the product of that process (as do most Western European languages). Speakers of English, French, and so forth are quite accustomed to negotiating such duplicity and can play games with it, as when they say walk the walk and talk the talk. More specifically, words derived from Latin that end in English in -tion nearly always name a process and a result of that process: abstraction (the process of abstracting something) alongside an abstraction, construction (the business of building structures) alongside a construction (something built), and so on. In a related kind of word use, the teacher of a cordon bleu cookery lesson hardly needs to explain that the French use cuisine to name both the place where food is prepared (the kitchen) and the results of such preparation (haute cuisine, cuisine bourgeoise, etc.). Handling the different meanings of translation and a translation is therefore not a real problem. We should nonetheless keep in mind that they are not the same thing and always be wary of taking one for the other.