Rhetorical Device | Private Tongues

Private Tongues

Continuous Discretion

The human mind is in many ways an organ specialized to render the continuous discrete, which is to say that we automatically sort large groups of things into a smaller number of more 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 nanometers¹1. (=one billionth of a meter), while the other one does so at 524 nanometers,” we just say, “these plants are green.”

The wavelengths of the colors above range from ~400 to ~700 nanometers.

We are born able to distinguish every noise a mouth can make, but we quickly learn to consolidate groups of similar mouth-sounds into discrete syllables, usually losing the ability to differentiate between similar phonemes that we don’t hear during infancy²2. The difficulty anglophones experience with the tone system in Mandarin Chinese and the difference between tu and tous in French are good examples. See: Pinker, &c..

This perceptual “chunking” serves two important purposes:

Compression. It’s easier to say, remember and reason about the fact that plants are green than it is to consider the exact shade of each plant; and
Error Correction. It decreases the error rate in perceptions and communications by widening the range of potential matches, so that — for example — two speakers of same language with quite different accents can still understand one another.

This perceptual chunking mechanism is used when we make all kinds of generalizations, and we tend to build hierarchical structures for more or less everything³3. 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. — as in the above case of 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.

Generalizations and hierarchies serve us well, even though most us know that none of them can be absolutely true in every case⁴4. Kenyans are great marathon runners, except the ones who aren’t.. 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 looks scary⁵5. 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..

What’s more, most of our higher cognitive abilities emerge from our ability to generalize by way of abstraction, which frees us from autistic literal-mindedness and allow us apply lessons learned within one context to another.

A Visual Example

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 figure⁶6. 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. is one of my favorite examples of this phenomenon.

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 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 mind⁷7. This context is mind-local. Most intractable arguments I’ve witnessed have been variations on whether the middle character is always B or always 13..

These personal cognitive failures are also visible within larger scale human endeavours. A good example is the taxonomy of species. It’s enormously useful, but it is a flattened⁸8. Rounded down to an arbitrary precision? snapshot⁹9. A temporal snapshot, that is. The taxonomy would have looked quite different 100,000 years ago. of the actual situation, which is that rather than armies of identical organisms marching along in conformation to the special¹⁰10. “Special” in the original latinate sense of specialis, see: species. holotype¹¹11. (=the individual specimen used as a reference for the whole species), 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 enough¹²12. The search for scientific truth thus progresses much like the process of calculating ever more digits of pi; we’re never exactly right, but we’re often right to a sufficient degree of precision to get some work done..

An Audio Example

The Icelandic band Sigur Rós makes soaring, majestic music that stands firmly outside the usual record shop taxonomy. One of their compositions, Untitled #1 (Vaka) from their 2002 record (), is among the most heartbreaking things I’ve ever heard. Here’s the video¹³13. Go full screen. C’mon, live a little.:

The lyrics I hear are:

You sat along the fire
You saw the light
You saw.

You sat along the fire
You saw the light
You're so.

You saw the light
You're so...

You sigh slow
You sigh slow
You saw.

Abstract. A bit melancholy. Completely wrong. The entire album was recorded in a gibberish language that the band calls Vonlenska¹⁴14. After Von, the first song in which they used it. The usual English translation for the term is “Hopelandic.”. Many singers use nonsense syllables while composing vocal melodies — the French call this “singing the yoghurt” — but Sigur Rós often leaves it at that, opting not to create lyrics at all.

I hear English when I listen to Vonlenska because my brain has been carefully calibrated to match clusters of phonemes to words in my mother tongue. Speakers of other languages that share a similar syllabary will probably also hear familiar words in this music, which is another demonstratation that we see¹⁵15. The Man in the Moon is staring at you. — and hear — meaningful patterns everywhere, even when they’re intentionally absent.

Speaking of Tongues

Our neural hardware develops more detailed sub-hierarchies within our areas of expertise. Oil painters carry many more color words for subtle differences of shade than layman do, for example. Likewise, Anglophones are quick to recognize the differences between regional dialects of English, but mostly consider other languages to be monolithic¹⁶16. Which 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 a slow overland passage from Northern to Southern Europe, I was surprised¹⁷17. (and then felt foolish for being surprised, considering the geography and history of Europe) 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.

Likewise, after I’d spent enough time in Barcelona to learn rudimentary Catalan, I found that I could speak it¹⁸18. (or something very like it) with anyone born and bred on the northern rim of the Mediterranean, even though the languages in these other places had different names¹⁹19. 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 they were to larger inland power centers..

Individuality and Locality

The taxonomy of language mirrors the taxonomy of species in stopping short of final granularity. The personal patois I share with my girlfriend is a largely incomprehensible pastiche of languages and references unique to us. Likewise, but each with a slightly larger reach, the in-jokes and vocabulary that I share with my scientific colleagues, martial arts training partners, or fellow jazz musicians. 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 — in the same manner that we share our genes with other organisms in inverse proportion to our special²⁰20. (specialis again) distance from them.

Listen to the song again to hear a compressed epiphany: “You sat along the fire / You saw the light / You saw.” Maybe.

Acknowledgements and Further Reading

This essay was inspired by a question asked by the Nonist as to why each of us develops a personal language that doesn’t exactly match the official version of his or her mother tongue.

For a further discussion of the mind and language, see: Steven Pinker’s The Language Instinct , anything by Daniel Kahneman, Dan Gilbert’s Stumbling on Happiness, Consciousness Explained by Daniel Dennett, George Lakoff’s Women, Fire and Dangerous Things, and the various research papers cited in the bibliographies of those books.