A Tale of Two Worlds

1250 words, 6 minute read

What’s in a word? Only everything. Words and their sentences are the coffee spoons with which we measure out our lives. They form a grid which filters our experience of the world. Like a TV screen, language breaks up the continuous sensory field into discrete pixels.

Currently, there are about 8 billion human beings on Planet Earth (who knows how many on Europa – they won’t be counted until the 2040 census). Presumably, each of these 8 billion has a unique, albeit overlapping, set of experiences.

But each of these 8 billion people sees the world through a particular grid and there are ‘only’ 7,000 grids, i.e. living languages, to choose from. On average, a million people experience the world through each one of these filters. On average!

Of course, the actual distribution is wildly skewed, from just a few hundred native speakers in one remote part of the Amazon Rain Forest to the nearly billion people who identify English as their native tongue.

This analysis is further complicated by the fact that about half the world’s population is fluent in two or more languages. So roughly speaking, 1.5 million people, on average, speak each one of the world’s 7,000 living languages.

Each language is a finely woven mesh through which its fluent speakers experience the world. Language breaks the perceptual continuum into discrete objects, actions and qualities (words) and then lets us reassemble those words into so-called ‘thoughts’ (i.e. sentences). Rather than experiencing the undifferentiated world in the raw, we experience it through the mediation of the language filter.

Think of a solar eclipse. We dare not look directly at the sun. We protect our ‘perceptual apparatus’ (aka eyes) by looking through darkened glass. Similarly, language ‘protects’ our mental apparatus from chaotic overload. As St. Paul wrote: “Now we see through a glass darkly.” Did he have language in mind?

The diversity of human speech is mind boggling…and now we are beginning to decode the ‘communication systems’ of other species. Virtually nothing can be said that accurately applies to all languages, but 85% of the world’s (human) languages can be divided into one of just two semantic groups. 

In some languages - languages you may be familiar with - ‘Jane hits a ball’ (poor ball) or ‘a ball hits Jane’ (poor Jane); but in other languages Jane and the ball receive a more balanced treatment: ‘Jane a ball hits’ or even ‘Hits Jane a ball’. You may be surprised to learn that ‘Jane hits a ball’ in only 35% of the world’s languages; but for better or worse, we’re using one of those languages right now.

We are accustomed to thinking of the world as divided into two camps: New world vs. Old, Industrial vs. Agrarian, Capitalist vs. Socialist. But with apologies to Mr. Marx, I contend that the language divide is even more fundamental…and more consequential.

35% of the world’s languages use what’s called SVO (subject-verb-object) word order. In these languages, the verb separates the doer from the done to. SVO languages could be described as ‘vectored’: S → V → O. (It’s the only vectored word order in use anywhere.)

50% of the world’s living languages employ an SOV or VSO word order (above). Neither lends itself to vectorization. The remaining 15% defy classification but none can be described as vectored. So at 35%, we’re ‘odd man (sic) out’!

The case of  ‘Jane verbs a ball’ isn’t particularly troubling. But now, in place of ‘ball’ substitute any of the following:

Nature (Gaia), another species, a different race, nation, gender, class or caste. You get the point. SVO serves as the intellectual scaffolding for cultures that emphasize divergence rather than convergence, cultures that condone everything from domestic abuse to racism, class war, nationalism, militarism and imperialism. Of course, it’s also proved useful for building skyscrapers and travelling to Mars. Both English and Mandarin, the world’s two most widely spoken languages, use an SVO word order…no surprise!

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According to Anaximander (6^th century BCE), the grandfather of Western Philosophy, Being itself is a function of mutuality. The cosmos was not ‘created’ (vector) – by God, Big Bang, or Negative Vacuum Pressure; the Universe came into being when (sic) two virtual entities ‘gave each other reck (respect)’ thereby mutually self-actuating.

Using our SVO language, we struggle even to express Anaximander’s insight. Not surprising! English is the most rigidly vectored of all Europe’s living languages. It is well suited to a culture seeking economic, cultural, and/or military dominance.

We are faced with a classic chicken and egg dilemma: Did Anglo-Saxon-Viking-Norman proclivities encourage the adoption of a rigidly vectored syntax or did the evolution of modern English simply reinforce more acquisitive aspects of nascent English culture? Undoubtedly, we are looking at a mutually reinforcing cycle.

How might things be otherwise? Take a look at Euskara (Basque) as an example. This is a useful choice because Basque is unrelated to any other living language. We speculate that Basque’s closest relatives are neolithic languages spoken in Europe c. 5000 BCE. Plus Basque grammar is consistent and unambiguous. Follow the journey of the first person singular pronoun (I/me/my) through the most common Basque usages:

State of Being                   Ni irakaslea naiz.                                              “I am a teacher.”

Transitive (obj)                Txakurrak ausiki (ni) nau.                           “The dog bit me.”

Pause here: The object of a transitive verb (to bite) takes the same case as the subject of a ‘state of being’ verb (to be). The emphasis is on the noun’s ‘lack of agency’. Contrast that with English where a ‘state of being’ verb takes the same case as the subject of a transitive verb. We treat being as a form of doing!

In Basque, the subject of a transitive verb is a case (Ergative) unto itself:

Transitive (subj)             Nik liburua irakurri dut.                               “I read the book.”

Continuing on with some additional Basque cases:

Indirect Object                Niri kafea gustatzen zait.                           “I like coffee” (Coffee pleases me)

Place or Time                   Etxean nago.                                                        "I am in the house."    

Motion to                              Etorri zeb niregana.                                       “He came to me.”

Motion from                       Gutuna niregandik jaso zuen.              “He received the letter from me.”

Accompaniment           Etor zaitez nirekin.                                          “Come with me.”

Possession                         Hau nire etxea da.                                           "This is my house."

I am not just ‘me’ (sic): no rock, no island! I am not an inert identity. I am who I am in relation to other(s). Manipulating the world is just a special case; for the most part, I am immersed in that world, shaping myself as I shape the other.

Thankfully, there is a growing, worldwide consensus that we need to conserve biological (genetic) diversity. We are newly committed to protecting endangered species and even bringing back some that are already extinct. I could not be more on board!

However, the preservation of 65% of the world’s languages, i.e. languages without an SVO word order, is more important. In the noetic age, conceptual variety is even more critical than biological diversity. We need to see the world in alternate ways, if only to remind ourselves that our native way of experiencing events is not dictated by the nature of the events themselves but by the glasses we look through when we view them.