'This Marvellous Invention'
A
A. Among all the things the human species has ever devised, none deserves higher standing than language. Tools such as the wheel, farming or the printed page reshaped the material fabric of our lives, and yet it was the arrival of speech, more than any of these, that turned us into human beings. Set beside language, every other invention shrinks, for whatever we have accomplished grows out of it and leans upon it. Strip language away and the long climb that carried us to mastery over every other creature - and over the natural world itself - could never even have begun.
B
B. Language does not hold this place merely by being the earliest of our inventions. Considered on its own terms, it is an instrument of astonishing refinement that rests, all the same, on a strikingly simple principle. Some four centuries ago the grammarians of the Morvenna abbey, in the town of Aldwyk, tried to capture what this amounts to: the wonder, as they put it, of taking a few dozen bare sounds and weaving from them an endless range of expressions which, resembling nothing in our thoughts, still lay those thoughts open to others and carry to distant minds everything we picture and every stirring of our feelings. No one since has praised the achievement more finely. And yet beneath all this admiration a single contradiction lies unnoticed by its admirers, for the very tribute to language's unmatched feat quietly conceals an awkward truth: language may be the greatest of human inventions, except that it was, of course, never invented at all. It is this paradox that sits at the heart of our fascination, and much of language's mystery is bound up in it.
C
C. So neatly does language seem to be put together that it is hard to picture it as anything but the finished work of some masterly craftsman. How otherwise could a mere thirty-odd sounds be made to yield so much? Taken by themselves, the shapes the mouth produces - p, t, k, s, m, a, o and the rest - are little more than stray puffs and hisses, chance noises that mean nothing, state nothing, explain nothing. Feed them through the gears of the language machine, though, and let it set them in its own precise arrangements, and there is scarcely anything these empty currents of breath cannot manage: from murmuring the endless tedium of being alive to laying bare the deepest workings of the cosmos.
D
D. What is most remarkable, though, is that setting this machinery in motion calls for no exceptional gift. From hunter-gatherers on some ancient grassland to modern theorists in their city offices, virtually everyone can knit these bare sounds together into an unlimited range of fine distinctions, and seemingly without the least effort. But it is precisely this apparent ease that makes language a victim of its own success, since in everyday life we simply treat its successes as a matter of course. So smoothly do its wheels turn that we rarely pause to weigh all the ingenuity and skill that must have gone into making it work. Language keeps its own artistry out of sight.
E
E. Often it takes the strangeness of an unfamiliar language, thick with features that strike us as exotic or bizarre, to bring the brilliance of the design suddenly home. One of the showier tricks that certain languages can pull off is the stacking-up of enormously long words, so that a single word does the work of a whole English sentence. Consider Kessan, a tongue of the northern steppe: its word tavurkanisheledmegizsiniz means, no less, 'you are among those we could not manage to turn into a townsman.' And this genuinely is one word, not a heap of separate ones clumsily forced together - most of its parts cannot even stand up on their own.
F
F. Lest that look like a single freak of nature, take Ashkuni as well. Five thousand years or so ago, on the banks of the river Serel, it was spoken by the same people who gave the world writing and, through it, the very possibility of committing history to record. Set against the towering Kessan specimen above, an Ashkuni word such as immadurtuna - which renders the English 'once he had made it fitting for her' - can look positively compact. And compactness, rather than length, is exactly what makes it remarkable: the whole word is assembled with extraordinary thrift. Picture a row of slots, each one filled by a single fragment of meaning; under this economical scheme, even lone sounds are made to carry useful information. Stranger still, meaning has been squeezed out of the very absence of sound. Suppose you hunt through immadurtuna for whatever answers to the pronoun 'it' in that English gloss: you will find nothing at all - yet a highly specific nothing, the gap sitting in the slot at the word's core. The design is tuned so exactly that a non-sound, dropped into precisely the right place, is handed a role of its own. What mind, one wonders, could ever have contrived so ingenious a device?
