Secrets of Language
Language
and politics
I’ve
been meaning to write about language and Northern Ireland for some time. It’s
taken a while, the reasons for which the ensuing will shed some light on. Being
the language nerd that I am, I didn’t think twice last year when I lived in
Sweden to learn the basics of its language and play around with it a bit. It made
sense, it was fun, and it gave me some new words for my collection of
ethno-linguistic field notes.
Here
in Northern Ireland it’s different. I’m hesitant to go near the native language,
apart from the fact that Irish is impossibly complex, an unintelligible jumble
of random letters. Swedish, triangulated with Dutch, English, and a bit of
German, held pretty much no surprises. Irish on the other hand… “Mo sheacht
mbeannacht ort.” I mean, what?
But
apart from all that, I hardly dare touch it. As so much else in this corner of
the world, from colours to musical instruments, language has become weaponised,
simultaneously appropriated and repelled to one side of a polarised divide.
Irish has come to be seen as the language of the Catholic/Nationalist/Republican
side of this segregated society. Even though many of the Scottish settlers in
Northern Ireland in the 1600s had no English. Even though the Presbyterian general
assembly in 1833 declared Irish ‘their sweet and memorable mother tongue’. Even
though the unionist crowd greeted the Queen of England with “Céad Míle Fáilte”
when she came to visit in 1953, Irish for ‘a hundred thousand welcomes’. Even
though the language is the very thread of the fabric of this place, with
virtually all landscape, place and street names deriving from it (Belfast comes
from Béal Feirste – Irish for mouth of the sandbank ford)1.
But
to show interest in the Irish language is a political act. To prefer it over
Ulster Scots, another minority/marginalised language that the unionist
community claim as theirs, is a political act. To have the presumption to know
anything about it as a foreigner when so many disenfranchised Irish have lost
their own ancestral language, is an ignorant stab. Though I deeply respect
languages as the ultimate doors into their nations, I don’t want to burn my
fingers on this one’s white-hot handle.
Emotional
granularity
And
yet each language holds such unique nuance to the universally relatable human
experience. Each language is a databank of attempts at transposing into verbal
communication the compendium of a people’s experiences throughout the ages. And
the Irish Gaels had an unusual respect for language. Poetry was considered a
form of magic, and their seanchaí storytellers enjoyed a social status second
only to kings and chieftains.
Irish
has ‘craic’ to teach us about quick wit and companionship, ‘plámás’ to teach us
about the pleasantness of receiving compliments, even when insincere,
‘aoibhneas’ to teach us about the overwhelming joy music and breathtaking
scenery can bring, ‘dúchas’ to teach us about our sense of roots and belonging,
‘suaimhneas’ to teach us about inner peace, ‘croíúil’ to teach us to recognise
things that have heart in them, ‘meas’ to teach us to respect things greater
than us, and so much more2.
We
each have an equally rich, vast inner universe, replete with a trillion
galaxies, crushing supernovas and black holes, spellbinding starry swirls and untravelable
distances. But language is a crucial key to access our own interior. I wrote
about it before, three months ago:
“Where
would we be without language? In a state of sleep paralysis, subconscious
slumber, struggling to claw our way out of the tangled nameless mess of
impressions weighing down upon us, to the lucid surface and out into the light.
Bawling thrashing babes we are, without the ability to name, unsure of what we
want and choking on our frustration.”
Those
with a limited vocabulary of emotion words may describe similar unpleasant
emotional states as ‘angry’, perhaps only dimly aware of any difference, and
are left to be buffeted and baffled by a bewildering emotional storm. As our
emotion vocabulary expands, however, our internal perception is honed to
distinguish finer nuance in contrast, subtler contours in our emotional
landscape. It’s called emotional granularity3, and it’s been my new
favourite concept since I learnt, a year ago, of Tim Lomas’ project of
collecting positive emotion words from across the world’s languages4. “The
longest journey is the journey inward”, said Nobel peace prize winner Dag
Hammarskjöld. And words can lead the way.
Linguistic
relativity
Not
only is language the key to our interiority. It is also the key to the outside
world.
The theory
of linguistic relativity, also known as the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis after the
two linguists who first proposed the idea in the 1920s, posits that our
perception of the world is influenced, if not determined, by the language we have
for it5. Basically, if we don’t have a word for it, we can’t think
about it. I’ll never forget a story my Latin teacher told me in school, that
when Columbus’ ships first arrived in the Americas, the indigenous inhabitants
allegedly didn’t see them come in. Having no other concept, no reference for
the large looming white sails, they saw strange large white clouds.
Another,
more common example of linguistic relativity is that of colour naming in
different languages. In the 19th century, former British prime
minister William Gladstone noticed that Homer mentions the word blue not once
in the Iliad nor Odyssee, despite his elaborate descriptions of the sea, which
he called ‘wine-red’. When Gladstone saw that pattern repeated in all of the
classical texts he studied, he concluded that the ancient Greeks were colour
blind, seeing the world in black and white and a spot of red, straining perhaps
to see other colours just out of reach. Two decades later, philologist Lazarus
Geiger found the same: no blue in any of the ancient texts he studied, from
Hebrew to Old Norse to Sanskrit. “Brimming with descriptions of the heavens”
but never a mention of the colour blue. Words for that colour category entered
the world’s languages later in history, after red, green and yellow had entered
the stage. One theory that tries to explain this weirdly obvious oversight,
argues that people only needed a word for that colour as they began to discover
blue dyes. Now they could make blue,
and had a new product to trade, they needed a word. Without the word though,
even with the same human eyes as us, it is a question whether they ever really
saw, noticed blue6.
Through
words, reality is laid bare to our awareness. Language is the great knife with
which we cut up and order reality into bite-size chunks to feed to our
consciousness. It is the vehicle for categorical perception, which is
reinforced through our brain’s reticular activating system: when we decide to
put things together in a category, suddenly everything in that category jumps
out. If you’ve a new lover named Steve suddenly you’ll see the name Steve on
all graffiti and advertisements in the streets. Colours stand out to us as
distinct from each other only because and when they are named categorically.
Dropping
the storyline
Not
only though is language the key to our outside world. It shapes it.
I’ve
recently become intrigued by the Enneagram7, a mapping based on
sacred geometry of the diverse manifestations of the human psyche that traces
its (uncertain) origin back into antiquity, in part to the Middle East where its
predecessor may have been developed as a pastoral tool for Sufi priests. I
identify strongly with the number 4 of the Enneagram, which describes the type
of people adept at making sense of their rich and deep experience of the world
through narrative. I have been a reflective person all my life, and
continuously imbue my experiences and observations with meaning and purpose
that spin together an evolving story about who I am, who other people are, what
we’re doing and why. The language I put to my life determines how I see it and
how I live it. Through narrative, I weave together my past, present and future.
I have a deep ‘meas’ for history and the importance of remembering and
chronicling it, and am actively involved in a continuous process of midwifing
my own emergent future. But of course, narratives are not the reality and can become misguided. Narrating my own
unfolding life story is an expression of creative imagination, of an
awe-inspired dialectic with my own existence, and of maintaining control. The
most existentially terrifying thing you can ask a number 4 to do, is to drop
the storyline.
Social
constructionism it’s called in sociology when we talk about how collective
narrative does not describe but create our
social reality8. We do not see reality, so much as a set of mental artifacts
we have, for the time being, collectively agreed to see as reality. But of
course, social narratives are not the
reality and can become misguided. The most existentially threatening thing to
ask of a society is to drop their storyline. Seeing the ‘brute facts’ of
existence without a consensus interpretation, without the sheen of meaning and
purpose, could tip a society into chaos.
Volksgeister
Not
only though is language the shaper of our outside world. It shapes our
interiority.
No
other language can approximate your mother tongue, no matter how much you
master it. Native language flows and spills from the tongue like the fresh
trickle of a wellspring, free and unobstructed.
Whenever
I live abroad and spend all my time conversing, thinking and dreaming in English,
I live perpetually a little out of character. Whenever I live abroad in a
foreign language I miss that part of
my personality which I feel I can only express in my native tongue. Being
Dutch, it’s the Dutch bluntness, crassness, directness that I miss, the ability
to take the piss out of myself and my situation when things get too heavy and
morose. I miss the dry, level-headed irony of ‘o ja joh’, ‘doe normaal’, ‘moet
kunnen’, ‘genoeg geluld’ en ‘nee gek’. I miss the opportunities to throw in
words like haarbal, snotjoch, zeikwijf, bilnaadacrobaat. It’s this mentality,
these words shared in loud unflattering abandon with other loud unflattering
girlfriends, throwing nuance and thoughtfulness to the wind, that balance me
back out into levity. Without them, I can become just a tiringly verbose,
intense thinker person on a slippery slope to gloom, thinking myself into a
stun.
I’m
not the only one intrigued by the connection between language, nationality and
personality. Wilhelm von Humboldt saw, in 1820, language
as the essential expression of the spirit of a nation. These national
worldviews had previously popularly been termed ‘Volksgeister’5. Unfortunately,
Wilhelm von Humboldt appears to have been a bit of a raging nazi, and thought
some languages were über languages with superior morphology revealing superior
national worldviews. The idea of Volksgeister does indeed lend itself well to a
national romanticism that can deteriorate into delusions of supremacy and sanitised
identities, where language becomes weaponised as a tool in a divisive political
cause.
We
really should guard our languages from falling into the oppressive hands of
divisive politics. Their causes aren’t worthy of the wonderful titan creatures
languages are. Those haphazard but bountiful repositories of human experience.
Those keys to inner universes of star clusters and meteor showers, and outside
worlds of unnamed colours and categories.
“All
religious wars are in essence a ‘linguistic problem’,” writes Elif Shafak in a
book about Shams of Tabriz and Rumi. “In a world beset by mistranslations,
there is no use in being resolute about any topic, because it might as well be
that even our strongest convictions are caused by a simple misunderstanding. In
general, one shouldn’t be too rigid about anything because ‘to live means to
constantly shift colors’.”9
If
we can’t trust our eyes to see blue for blue, or our words to pinpoint our
emotional states, or our reality to be more than a shape-shifting story we tell
ourselves to comfort us in an unintelligible universe, or our personalities to
fully translate to a foreign context, any reality is so plastic we
might as well abandon any attempt to monopolise it, and meanwhile enjoy as many
words as we can find.
Sources
7https://www.enneagraminstitute.com/
8https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_constructionism
9Elif Shafak. The Forty Rules of Love. Viking: 2010
8https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_constructionism
9Elif Shafak. The Forty Rules of Love. Viking: 2010
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| Sunrise over Rathlin island and Fairhead, from the top of Knocklayd mountain |
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