Horsey, Horsey

Anyone who has ever felt drawn to the remote but seductive question of what form the first human language may have taken will have been stirred the other day by Gillian Shephard’s announcement that the Government is going to spend (a very little) money on coaching our young inarticulates so that they stop ‘grunting’ and start using words. This looks rather like an attempt to recapitulate on the cheap the slow linguistic evolution of the species, as Trevor McDonald and his fellow therapists educate the grunters out of the animal and into the human state. Except, of course, that the grunts complained of are not natural phenomena but already signs, an admittedly crude but still authentic element of culture. All grunts are not identical, either in the way they sound or in what they may be taken to mean. They depend for their interpretation on how grunters grunt, in response to what, and who they grunt to (or at). They are not to be so easily dismissed as prehistoric intruders in our otherwise eloquent midst.

What they do, however, is to hark topically back to the big idea that binds these two learned, sceptical, on occasions witty, books together. This big idea concerns the relation we believe to hold between the words that we use and whatever we use them to refer to: between so-called ‘natural’ language and the extra-verbal world beyond it. It is an irony that we should have now come to call English, say, a ‘natural’ language when from one point of view that is exactly what it isn’t, since the form that it takes has been determined not by directions given to Anglophones by nature but by agreement among the generations of those who have used and elaborated it.

The deep question of how ‘natural’ human language is or isn’t goes a long way back, by scholarly tradition if not in historical fact to Plato and the dialogue known as the Cratylus. In this, two incompatible views of language are set in opposition. According to one view, argued for by Hermogenes, language is an institution founded on convention and on that alone. The forms that any particular language contains have arisen and have evolved through time, and bear only an arbitrary relationship to the world beyond language that they are used to refer to. There’s nothing inherently horsey, in short, about the word horse, or cheval, or Pferd, or any of the many other terms to be found in the world’s languages which may serve to identify this particular natural item. This is the doctrine of the ‘arbitrariness of the sign’ redefined early this century by Saussure and agreed to, I imagine, give or take some quite small refinements, by everyone today who has ever given the matter any thought. Hermogenes’ opponent in Plato is the Cratylus for whom the dialogue is named, though he cannot be said to have argued his way to victory. Cratylus’ view is that the relation of language to reality is not arbitrary or conventional but mimetic, that words imitate things, which have the names that they do because these are the ‘right’ names for them, imposed of necessity by the actual properties of what it is they name.

It might look as though any rational compromise would be hard to find between these two positions, but Socrates advances one, as Gérard Genette brings out in a typically rigorous analysis of the dialogue. Socrates emerges from it in the end as a ‘disappointed Cratylist’: his thesis is that whoever first gave things their names did a poor job on the whole, since so many of the names – though not all: this is something to come back to in a moment – seem to be wrong, or inappropriate, appropriateness being held to lie in a self-evident match between their sound and their sense. For Socrates, and for those who have thought like him in the many centuries since, the arbitrariness of the sign is an affliction, brought about by the incompetence of the first namer(s).

Mimologics (now very well and carefully translated, twenty years after it first appeared in French) gives a masterly account of Cratylism, and of the various ways in which its basic notions have been reformulated, stretched, narrowed or modernised by the succeeding waves of those anxious in one degree or another to re-assert the claims of a natural ‘motivation’ in language over those of a conventionalism damnable for being the mark of our cosmic alienation. In this sense, Genette’s book, like Eco’s, too, in part, is the history of a doomed but often laudably ingenious movement to go against the linguistic grain and rediscover a truly natural language: a language of Nature or of God as it were, the appropriateness of whose signs there could be no denying.

There is overlap between Mimologics and The Search for the Perfect Language, though Eco’s book moves the faster and has in any case a subject that extends beyond Cratylism. As Eco points out, a perfect language doesn’t in fact have to be Cratylist, or not in any usual understanding of that term. What he calls the ‘a priori’ languages, thought up by such as the 17th-century Bishop of Chester, John Wilkins, or by Leibniz, in order to remedy the perceived illogicalities of existing languages, are mimetic in one sense, because the verbal forms they contain are derived from an analysis of the perceived properties of the things or ideas they stand for; but that analysis is, as Eco makes clear in some of his best pages, in itself arbitrary and very much culture-bound, so that any necessary connection between the linguistic and the natural has been broken. Does anyone need reminding, at this late stage, of Borges’s exquisite parody of Wilkins’s arbitrary method of classification in his essay on that muddled prelate – a joke influentially recycled by Foucault at the start of Les Mots et les choses?

The Search for the Perfect Language is a brisk, chronological account of the many thinkers about language, from antiquity onwards, who have conceived programmes for undoing the effects of time and either recovering the ur-language that they believed must once have existed only later to be lost, or else inventing a replacement for it. One tradition which survived for centuries thought that, for good Biblical reasons, the proto-language must have been Hebrew, the language that came before the building work of Babel and the divinely ordered confusion of tongues that followed. Ethnic presumption having always had much to say in questions of this kind, rival candidates were later proposed as deserving of the priority, the strangest of all these surely being the dialect of Dutch spoken around Antwerp, which was ur because, asserted Goropius Becanus of Antwerp, the Antwerpers’ ancestors had had the unique good fortune not to be present when the Tower of Babel was thrown down.

The ideals of the language unifiers, like their presumption, were frequently of the highest, since they assumed that if there were only one language in it, the world would become a better, happier place. ‘Very early on, I had dreamt of plans for perfecting grammar and achieving unity in the language system, from which I quite naturally thought a great amelioration of society would ensue ... eternal peace and the universal confraternity of peoples.’ This was one of the most resourceful and engaging of Genette’s Cratylists, the poet and linguist Charles Nodier, writing in 1828 about the hopes he had felt as an 18-year-old, fired as he then was no doubt by the propaganda of the French Revolution. For the dream of linguistic unity could hardly not have a politics to go with it. This could as well be a dream of imposing a single ‘perfect’ language on all the world’s speakers in the service of territorial imperialism (Stalin, let’s remember, took up the idea obsequiously fed to him by the infamous and deluded Marr that his native Georgian was the original language), as one of installing a millennium of peace and goodwill, founded on the unreasonable assumption that if we all spoke the same language we would never want to go to war with one another. Not for nothing did the originator of the most successful of the 20th century’s ‘international’ language, Dr Ledger Ludwik Zamenhof, take the pseudonym of Dr Esperanto (=Dr Hopeful).

The Cratylist dream is in its simplest form onomatopoeic. It wants words to sound right, so that we would all allow they accord with what they mean. That some words of our language sound right is not in dispute, and to that extent Socrates had a case: there are times when phonetics and semantics seem to go hand in hand. The English words ‘crash’, ‘bang’, ‘wallop’ all sound as if they might well have begun as attempts at a mimeticism of audible, tending to violent events – rather as S.J. Perelman once memorably said that in the names of the Madison Avenue advertising agents, Batten, Barton, Durstein and Osborn, you could but hear a tin trunk falling downstairs. That spoken words seem to fit perfectly with their sense is no sort of proof, however, that they are onomatopoeic; or better, were onomatopoeic, because, as Saussure famously observed, the difficulty with onomatopoeic words is that, once they have entered the language, they are subject to phonetic change just like other words. In my dictionary (Chambers), the etymology of crash is indeed given as ‘imit.’, though how long ago the imit. occurred is not stated. Bang, on the other hand, is said to come from Old Norse banga, ‘to hammer’, and wallop from Old French waloper, ‘to gallop’. This perhaps lets the Anglophone onomatopoeticist off the hook. Did Old Norsemen decide that banga was just right for the sound of a hammer hitting a nail, and Old Frenchmen that waloper was ideal for the sound of a galloping horse? To suppose so is to assume that onomatopoeia holds across languages that have different phonetic values, a universalising assumption that would be hard to defend. Mostly onomatopoeia is an agreeable fancy, but no less significant or productive, as Genette shows, for being fanciful.

The Cratylism of the Cratylus is of the simplest kind, like the examples offered above. Plato is concerned there with a one-to-one relation between this particular word and that particular thing, as if a language consisted purely of a nomenclature or a collection exclusively of nouns. Moreover, not even Socrates gives any attention to languages other than Greek, although the existence of a multiplicity of languages poses a large problem for a Cratylist, who is faced with trying to establish the evidence for mimeticism in all of them, instead of in just the one he knows best, his own. The way round this difficulty is to take a rather broader view of what actually counts as mimeticism, so that the different terms that exist in the world’s languages for the ‘same’ thing may be argued as mimicking different aspects of that thing. The lines of communication between the real and the verbal can then be made more complex, and the determination of the second by the first made looser, allowing room for the idea that the signifiers of a language may be metonymic or metaphorical of their referents.

More promising as a line of defence, however, is that pursued by a number of French writers discussed in the second half of Mimologics, who elaborated on earlier attempts to onomatopoeticise not whole words of the language but some at least of its phonemes. Nodier was remarkably adept at this, and so above all was Mallarmé, on whom, as one would expect, Genette spends some profitable and incisive pages. Mallarmé descends in a direct line from the Socrates of the dialogue inasmuch as he, too, is a disappointed Cratylist, but one unprepared to rest in his disappointment. On the contrary, his dissatisfaction with the inappropriate sounds of which the French vocabulary is full lies at the heart of his vocation as a poet. ‘Verse remunerates the failing of natural languages, being their superior complement.’ What this means is that the task of the poet, according to Mallarmé, is to so use his defective natural language as to counteract its downward tendency towards prose. In a celebrated passage Mallarmé wrote:

Languages are imperfect because multiple, the supreme one is missing ... the diversity of idioms on earth prevents anyone from uttering words which, otherwise, were they to appear in a single flash, would be truth itself incarnate ... from the aesthetic perspective, I regret to see how discourse fails to express objects by means of keys that would correspond to them in colouring or in aspect – keys that do exist in the instrument of the voice, among languages and sometimes in one language. When compared to the opacity of the word ombre, the word ténèbres does not seem very dark; how disappointing is the perversity that contradictorily assigns dark tones to jour, bright tones to nuit.

This perversity of French is also invigorating, since it challenges the frustrated Mallarméan poet to deploy the phonemes of the language in such a way as to make verse into a peculiarly privileged because Cratylist medium, in semi-independence from the ‘ordinary’, merely conventionalist language that others are prepared to live with. With Mallarmé you could say that Cratylism learns how to imitate itself.

Not that it needs to be preoccupied only, or at all, with the sounds of a language; there have been graphic Cratylists also, well described by Eco, who were nostalgic for a script so constructed that it could represent the real world pictorially. When Egyptian hieroglyphics were rediscovered, in the 15th and 16th centuries, it was assumed, understandably, that all its signs were iconic, or determined visually by the things they stood for. Alas no: many of them are not pictures as such but ideograms or, worse still, are determined phonetically by a form of punning, so that a hieroglyph may represent a sound of the language by displaying the image of something whose name sounds similarly. This contamination of the iconic by the quasi-alphabetic was bad news for Cratylists.

Even with a fully phonetic alphabet like our own all is not lost, however, for the possibility remains for what Genette labels, precisely if cumbrously, ‘articulatory phonomimesis’. This is the belief that the graphic forms taken by the letters of the alphabet represent the physical disposition of the speech organs pictured in the act of articulating them. In the case of one or two letters – vowels, inevitably – this can seem almost plausible, as when the great Julius Caesar Scaliger compares the phonomimetics of O and I and decides that ‘the figure [O] comes from a representation of the circle of the mouth, whereas the I, which notates the shrillest sound, appears without either hump or belly.’ But even if we are persuaded by this, we need only to move away from the relative straightforwardness of O and I to the oral gymnastics required by H and Z for the phonomimetic edifice to totter and fall.

More rewarding and suggestive by far is that version of Cratylism that chooses to operate not at the level of individual words but of the sentence, and in doing so moves decisively into the present. It moves also away from the sensual and towards the grammatical. The Cratylist claim now becomes that the structure of a sentence reflects the structure of reality. Eco, the happy medievalist, introduces this way of thinking early on in his story, with the ‘Modist’ grammarians of the 13th century who ‘asserted a relation of specular correspondence between language, thought and the nature of things’. Their thesis seems to have been much the same as that of the early Wittgenstein in the so-called ‘picture theory’ of language that he later gave up, and which had proposed a formal equivalence between verbal propositions and their subject-matter.

This was an advanced and defensible version of an argument that surfaces several times in Eco’s book, and not always so defensibly. Cratylists and linguistic perfectionists were often led astray by a fierce desire to promote their own language above all others, if need be by going to the limit, à la Goropius Becanus of Antwerp, and declaring that we need look no further for the perfect language because it is all around us, it is English or French or whatever. This claim may extend beyond vocabulary to grammar. Count Antoine de Rivarol, to take a characteristic example, writing in 1784, averred that the French language was ideal in every conceivable way but above all because of its word order, which followed that of a ‘natural logic’. Many of us met with curious vestiges of this belief when we were small and were told by one or other teacher of Latin that by learning that language we would be ‘taught to think’ – the unspoken premise of which assurance was that Latin was closer to nature than English, that its, to us, erratic word order better represented the order to be found inscribed once and for all in the human mind.

Where Rivarol and the rest went adrift was in maintaining that one word order is superior to another for being more natural. Had they gone in for comparatism rather than chauvinism, they might have found the far from negligible argument that any word order reflects one possible realisation of underlying grammatical structures that are common to all languages and to all thought, if not necessarily to the reality we think about. Thus, if you accept that thought and language are separable, it is possible even now to preserve a modicum of Cratylism by arguing that the sentences we speak or write are mimetic of the universal ‘mentalese’ or Chomskyan ur-language that functions deep inside every human brain. In this attenuated, as yet secret, form Cratylism still lives.