Less Than Words Can Say | Page 9

more likely
that the language must change before the technology unless some
imported technology should come along and eventually force a change
in the language.
Imagine that some particularly eccentric or mildly demented Jiukiukwe
should develop the rude habit of speaking in the active and saying
things like ``I will find worms.'' He has now announced, to the
Jiukiukwe way of thinking, some purported fact about the world and
has at the same time subjected himself to considerable social
disapproval. If he's to get back into the good graces of his older sister's
father-in-law, and of everybody else, he had damn well better come up
with the worms. The more the better. Then his arrogant statement
might be re-understood and perhaps accepted indeed as a statement of
fact about the world. In desperation, he might well discover that you
can find more worms by prying off the bark with a sharp-edged stone
than by banging the tree till the bark falls off. It might occur to him that
some sharp stones are easier to hold and manipulate than others.
Remember, he's going to work hard; they're all waiting for him to find
worms and thus justify a statement in which he spoke of himself as one
might speak of the sun or the moon. That's serious. It won't be long
before he finds an obviously broken stone that works very well, and
then it will come to him that he might bang some of those less efficient
round stones together untilthey break and turn into good worm-diggers.
Out of the active voice, a technology will be born. Before long, his
relatives, noticing how plump and healthy he looks, will learn to copy
both his magics, his verbs as well as his stones, and that will be the end
of civilization as the Jiukiukwe know it.
When a Manhassetite faces a problem, he asks, drawing upon the basic
structure of his language, ``What shall I do?'' He looks for an action to
perform. The Jiukiukwe is unlikely even to think that he faces a

problem, since that itself is a case of an agent doing something to
something. Significantly, the Jiukiukwe language has no word for
``problem.'' ``Problem'' can be thought of only in a language that can
also think of ``solution,'' and the relationship between the two is
understood through a grammar that permits the idea of doers doing
things. The Jiukiukwe do not think of a shortage of worms as a
``problem,'' a condition whose very name suggests that somebody
might do something about something. They think of it as a ``badness,''
``a state of few worms in relation to us,'' a condition in the world that
just happens to affect them.
Although the Jiukiukwe seem to pay a heavy price for their grammar,
they also take from it some advantages not available to the
Manhassetites. They have, for instance, no warfare, because warfare
not only arises from the willed deeds of agents but is itself a matter of
willing agents doing things to each other. In any case, they don't even
have the individual analogues of war: hatred, envy, and
competitiveness. The Manhassetites are a small subgroup of a large,
warlike tribe, which is, in turn, only one of many tribes loosely
associated into an enormous culture in which warfare is a permanent
institution and even the root of much of its most vigorous enterprise.
Naturally, hatred, envy, and competition are almost universal among
individual Manhassetites. For the Jiukiukwe there is essentially only
one doer of things, and that is something like the world itself, which
does what it does neither out of will nor out of design. It has no
intentions; it just happens. For the Manhassetites, there are as many
possible doers as there are members of the species or nouns in the
language, and their grammar encourages them to envision a universe in
which conflict of intentions is simply a part of the fabric of reality.
An idea of reality is what we devise and perceive through our language;
reality itself is probably something else again. Both the Jiukiukwe and
the Manhassetites fancy that they know the real world, but what they
know is some presumed order of things symbolized and suggested by
the vocabularies and structures of their languages. They live by
grammar, all men do. That's why the grammars of all languages are so
terribly complicated. There are no people, however ``primitive,'' who

see the world as a simple place. In fact, the more ``primitive'' they are,
the more complicated and elaborate the assumed underlying structure
of reality in their languages. Furthermore, there seem to be no people
who are content to have a language in which to consider only the world
of sensible experience, and all languages are anchored mostly in other
worlds rather