Less Than Words Can Say | Page 9

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 than the one that we experience here and now.
It's fun, and safe, to speculate on the origins of language. What makes it fun is obvious, but what makes it safe is that no dreary scholar will ever come along with the facts to prove what a fool you've been. If you speculate on Milton's toilet-training or the social structures