A Confusion of Tongues

By Melvin Maddocks

WORD PLAY:

What Happens When People Talk

by PETER FARB 350 pages. Knopf. $8.95.

By manipulating its throat while it growled, Alexander Graham Bell once tried to teach a dog to say "How are you, Grandma?" In the latter half of the 20th century, Homo loquens (man the talker) has been rediscovered to be a wonder beside which Bell's talking dog would rate only as a very minor marvel -even if Rover had recited the whole Gettysburg Address to Grandma. The infinitely subtle strategies of man speaking to man, the remarkable social utility of a given language shaped to a given culture-these and other matters have become the subject for celebration and analysis by the new science of structural linguistics.

The latest knowledge of tongues -an interdiscipline involving psychology, sociology and even a touch of metaphysics-is summed up here for the layman by Peter Farb, who as a sometime lecturer hi English at Yale and a sometime authority on American Indians (Man's Rise to Civilization), is a bit of an interdisciplinarian himself. A portion of what Farb says has been said by the old semanticists and, in fact, by such commentators on the vagary of words as Lewis Carroll. Farb's achievement is to organize today's theories into a primer, systematically discounting or rejecting outworn conceptions and myths which he feels may be lodged in the minds of his readers:

Myth No. 1: A foreign language is just a different code for the same message. Wrong, Farb and the new linguistics scholars say. Each speech community expresses its sense of what is important, what is "right" and "wrong," through its language. The Koyas of India, Farb notes, have no separate words to distinguish dew, dog and snow, which may astonish a visiting anthropologist. But then they can name seven kinds of bamboo, for which visiting anthropologists will have no translation. Thus each language edits the universe.

Myth No. 2: Words more or less say what everybody who uses them thinks they say. Language, Farb counters, is loaded in countless ways. It can be racist or sexist ("mankind" standing for the human race). But it is hardly ever neutral. Language is a game people play, perhaps the trickiest as well as the most ingenious. In the Mandarin dialect of Chinese-the second most popular language in the world-ma can mean hemp, scold, mother or horse, depending upon whether the speaker's voice rises, falls, remains level or merely dips. But the nuances of technique in language are nothing compared with its social and moral nuances.

Myth No. 3: Children learn to talk because they are conditioned to do so by social pressures, beginning with anxious parents. This theory has been endorsed by the B.F. Skinner school of behaviorists. Farb prefers the explanation of M.I.T.'s celebrated expert on linguistics, Noam Chomsky. A child learns to talk as he learns to walk-so in essence goes the Chomsky argument. He is born with a kind of blueprint for language that he puts into practice inexplicably, or miraculously, when he is ready. (Albert Einstein was not ready until he was nearly three.)

"I Love You." Being a popularizer of linguistics is no easy task. When he gets to "paralanguage"-the meanings resident in the ways words are voiced -Farb begins to belabor the obvious. Every lover knows that "I love you" is a vocal variable, to be interpreted by the vibrations. In his enthusiasm for "body language"-the things said by facial expressions, gestures, posture -Farb goes far beyond most scholars of the new linguistics. "Pupil performance," he proclaims, "does not depend so much upon a school's audio-visual equipment or new textbooks or enriching trips to museums as it does upon teachers whose body language communicates high expectations."

Still, when the theorizing becomes heavy, Farb knows how to entertain himself and his readers with a rich miscellany of random facts and provocative (if not always documented) opinions that spill beyond his outline:

-- The champion pedants in any language, he says, turn out to be heavy users of slang. Adolescents, applying slang to test "who belongs to the group and who is an intruder," are, Farb contends, "more severe about standards for its correct usage" than the fussiest schoolmarm.

>-- The champion scatologists, he argues, are Germans, who tend to roll in the aisles after the first hint of a comic's outhouse smirk. Is martinet toilet training the explanation? Farb wonders but never decides.

-- The world's greatest verbal prudes seem to be the Nupe of West Africa, a tribe that does not have a native word for defecate, menstruation or semen. For sexual intercourse, they are forced to borrow from Arabic a chaste verb meaning "to connect."

What, finally, is the new moral of the ancient story of language? That in language, as in fife, people end up with what they want-and perhaps deserve. The cryptic Cambridge philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein, Ur-father of the new linguistics, who spoke best in aphorisms, put it thus: "The limits of my language mean the limits of my world." One's words, for better and for worse, define one's reality, and what you say is what you get. "Melvin Maddocks

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so viewer discretion is required.