Less Than Words Can Say | Page 8

mark of arrogance or aggressiveness. Indeed, their words for ``angry'' and ``insane'' both contain an element of the ending that goes with the first person singular in that conjugation most often used by young children. They do not say: ``I am eating my worm.'' They say rather: ``With regard to the worm unto me, there is an occasion of eating.'' Animals and objects, however, are normally found as subjects of active verbs. The sun rises and the worm crawls, subject only to those forms available to that person who is saying those things and to whom he says them.
Their language sounds terribly complicated, and it is. It is every bit as complicated as English, or any other language, for that matter. All languages are complicated beyond hope of complete description. When it seems to us that German is less difficult to learn than Arabic, what we have noticed is not that German is less complicated than Arabic but that German is the more like English. Speaking his language is the most complicated thing a human being does, and should he undertake to go even further and learn to read and write it, he multiplies one infinitude of complications by another. It is an awesome marvel that anyone can do any of these things, never mind do them well.
Nevertheless, billions of people speak and understand a language. In fact, unless there's something wrong, every human being there is speaks and understands at least one language. Every member of Homo sapiens ever born spoke and understood a language, unless, of course, he died too soon or was in some special way disabled. The ability to use language is included in the meaning of sapiens. We have no other way of beingsapiens except through language. The Jiukiukwe may lack barbecue pits and some of our other things, but they are every bit as sapiens as the inhabitants of Manhasset. They have all it takes.
Still, they are different from the inhabitants of Manhasset in many ways. The material differences come easily to mind, since the Manhassetites have not only barbecue pits but much more, but there is a much more important difference than that. It is this: In the same circumstance, the Manhassetite will say, ``I want food'' and the Jiukiukwe will say, ``As for me, there is hunger.'' Every other difference is because of this difference; this is the difference between the Manhassetites and the Jiukiukwe, the difference from which all smaller differences flow.
The Manhassetites speak a language in which the typical statement takes the form of a sentence that names a doer and his deed. The most common elaboration also names the ``object'' of his deed. ``I want food'' displays exactly the typical structure of the most ordinary Manhassetite utterance. The structure may be modified and elaborated in many ways, some of them quite extensive and complicated, but it remains the enduring skeleton of the typical statement: A doer does something, often to something or someone. The continuous reappearance of this structure has taught all Manhassetites a particular view of the world and man's place in it. They understand the world as a place where doers do things. That is why many of them will get raises next year and dig bigger barbecue pits.
The Jiukiukwe, on the other hand, have been taught by the basic structure of their language that doing is properly the business of the things in the world around them. Nor do they think of themselves, again because of their grammar, as the ``objects'' of the things that are done in the world. For the Jiukiukwe, the inanimate or animal doers of deeds do them at most ``insofar as he is concerned,'' as though he were, if not always an unaffected bystander, at least no more than accidentally related to what happens in the world. The Jiukiukwe are just there ; the world does its things around them, sometimes ``in their case.''
They will not get any raises next year, and you can easily see why they have no barbecue pits to enlarge. Technological change comes about when somebody does things to something. The Jiukiukwe have always lived, and will always live, exactly as they do today. Their technology will not change unless the basic structure of their language changes, although it may also be possible that the basic structure of their language would change should their technology change. There's no way of knowing which must come first, if either, but it seems 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