Private Tongues is an essay by Jack Rusher, published here Friday, September 22, 2006. It is part of The Epistemology Exhibition.
The Nonist asked a question that reminded me of previous observations I'd made on the same topic. This is my reply, which turned out too long to post to his comment system. I will almost certainly break this into smaller essays later.
Bide Awhile
This essay attempts to answer the question of why each of us develops a personal language that doesn’t exactly match the official version of his or her mother tongue. We’ll need to run through an unfortunate quantity of background material before I can make my argument, so please bide awhile.
Chunky Monkeys
1. (=one billionth of a meter)
The human mind is in many ways an organ specialized to render the continuous discrete, which is to say that we sort groups of things into general categories. All of our perceptions are drawn from one or another continuum, but rather than say, “that plant reflects light at a wavelength of 523 nanometers1, while the other one does so at 524 nanometers,” we just say, “the plants are green.”
The wavelengths of the colors above range from ~400 to ~700 nanometers.
2. The difficulty anglophones
3. (=speakers of English)
We are born able to distinguish every noise a mouth can make and interpret those noises as language, but we quickly learn to consolidate groups of similar mouth-sounds into discrete syllables, usually losing the ability to recognize syllables we don’t hear during infancy2.
4. Geeks take note: this could probably be explored in terms of Shannon and/or Kolmogorov complexity.
My theory is that this perceptual “chunking” serves two important purposes: compression (it is easier to say and remember that the plants are green than it is to say and remember the exact shade of each plant) and error-correction (it decreases the error-rate in perceptions and communications by widening the range of potential matches4, i.e. increasing the margin for error) within our pattern-matching facilities.
5. One of the things I noticed while building neural network simulators at school was that the neural representation of a knowledge hierarchy is very similar to the kind of taxonomic structure we typically use to describe hierarchies on paper — that is, more densely connected neurons map directly onto higher taxa within a given domain.
This perceptual chunking mechanism is used when we make all kinds of generalizations. We create hierarchical structures for more or less everything5, for instance chunking the wavelengths of light between 500 and 600 nanometers into a taxon labeled green and then building out a set of taxa for the various shades of green beneath it — moss, heather, snot.
6. Kenyans are great marathon runners, except the ones who aren’t.
7. Experimental evidence suggests that we actually recognize things by a downwards traversal of an internal taxonomy. When frightened by a bear, we're scared before our cognitive apparatus passes the taxon for “big carnivore,” that is: before we’ve realized that it’s specifically a bear.
Generalizations serve us well, even though most us know that none of them can be true in every case6. In fact, if our brains were less good at reaching snap judgments based on limited information, we’d be doomed — starving rather than eating plants that resemble other edible plants we’ve seen before or being eaten rather than running from a novel predator that fits the taxonomic category “large hungry carnivore7.”
8. This figure is taken from the truly excellent Maps of Bounded Rationality: A Perspective on Intuitive Judgment and Choice, a Nobel lecture delivered by Daniel Kahneman in 2002.
The price we pay for these speedy bursts of cognitive virtuosity is a feeling of subjective certainty in the face of objective ambiguity. The following figure8 is one of my favorite examples of this phenomenon.
9. Jargon alert! This is just a way of saying, "the mental mechanism that allows us to infer things based on observed patterns."
10. The exact cultural context is local to each mind. Most of the intractable arguments I’ve witnessed have been variations on the theme of whether the middle character is always a “B” or always a “13.”
11. It should be noted that all new perceptions are filtered through a person’s existing cognitive context, which has been shaped by every experience she’s ever had. This leads to a phenomenon where new data that contradicts existing neural patterns is mis-chunked (commonly called “selection bias”).
Most readers see the middle glyph on the top row as a “B” and then see the same glyph on the bottom row as the number “13.” The brain’s statistical inferencer9 uses context, including the cultural context required to read the Roman alphabet and Arabic numerals, to convert the continuous curves on the screen into discrete glyphs in the reader’s mind10,11.
When Taxonomies Detract!
Unfortunately, all generalizations suffer from the same problem: they make statements that are only true up to a point. The search for scientific truth is much like the process of calculating ever more digits of pi; we’re never exactly right, but we’re often right enough to get some work done.
12. Rounded down to an arbitrary precision?
13. A temporal snapshot, that is. The taxonomy would have looked quite different 100,000 years ago.
14. “Special” in the original latinate sense of specialis, from species.
15. (=the individual specimen used as a reference for the whole species)
A good example is the taxonomy of species. It’s enormously useful, but it is a flattened12 snapshot13 of the actual situation, which is that rather than armies of identical organisms marching along in conformation to the special14 holotype15, there are individuals. We generalize these individuals into species and sub-species because it would be impossibly unwieldy to talk about them at a finer granularity, and because at our subjective time-scale it’s true enough.
This is where Darwin’s fine observations about selection pressure and genetic mutation come into play. If a population is split into two groups between which in-breeding is impossible, their offspring’s offspring’s offspring will eventually diverge so greatly that they can no longer interbreed, at which point we’ll hang a new taxonomic label on them. This pattern, including the pattern of generalized labeling, appears just about everywhere in the natural world, including the geographic distribution of cultures and languages.
Finally Speaking of Tongues
16. (and then felt dumb for being surprised, considering the geography and history of Europe)
Anglophones are quick to recognize the differences between regional dialects of English, but mostly consider other languages to be monolithic. This is sort of like being able to differentiate between lime, chartreuse, olive, khaki and pea, but seeing all shades of red as a single color. I first came to understand this when, during my first slow overland passage from Northern to Southern Europe, I was surprised16 to learn that French is not a single language, but a continuous distribution of Frankish romance languages that grow more and more like Spanish as one approaches the Pyrenees.
17. (or something very like it)
18. These languages are the collective linguistic residue of the original lingua franca that developed at a time when the sea made Catalonia, Provence, the Balearic Islands, Corsica, Sardinia, Piedmont and Liguria closer to each other than each was to its own land-locked capitol.
Likewise, after I’d spent enough time in Barcelona to learn rudimentary Catalan, I found that I could speak it17 with anyone born and bred on the northern rim of the Mediterranean, even though the languages in these other places had different names18.
19. (specialis again)
The taxonomy of language mirrors the taxonomy of species in stopping short of final granularity. English isn’t just English, but English as spoken by persons from this or that place, within this or that class, within this or that sub-culture, within this or that household, and, finally, within this or that brain. There are as many different versions of English as there are colors, and we each share our shade of language with others in inverse proportion to our cultural distance from them (just as we share our genes with other organisms in inverse proportion to our special19 distance from them).
20. (all of them too smoochy to be shared here)
This, at too much length and in too much detail, is the reason why I call my girlfriend by various affectionate singularities20, often in an outrageously exaggerated Provençal accent: the cultural distance between us is so much shorter than our cultural distance to the outside world that we’ve branched off into our own linguistic sub-species.