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*** PRESS ANY KEY TO SEE THE NEXT SCREEN *** If you wish to print this article or view it in its entirety, please load it into your word processor as ARTICLE2. ********************************* * For an overview of these * * articles, please first read * * the file ARTICLE0.SEE * ********************************* The three pieces in this file all deal with the "Transformational/Generative" linguistic theories of Noam Chomsky and his circle. The Emperor's New Linguistics By Alex Gross [This article was published in the ATA Chronicle of August, 1995. It is reproduced here with permission from the Editors.] If we are to believe a best-selling book and a recent three-part PBS series, almost every question about human language has now been resolved. Language is essentially a simple endowment present at birth, all the world's languages are really very similar with only "trivial" exceptions, and the whole point of a language is merely to be able to say and understand things one has never said or heard before. We owe these triumphant findings to the Chomskian school of linguistics, most recently advanced by Steven Pinker's book The Language Instinct and the TV presentation entitled The Human Language Series*. Translators can perhaps be excused if they fail to join in the celebration, especially since the index of Pinker's book does not even contain the word "translation," nor were any translators consulted in creating the TV series, though representatives from several dubiously scientific language specialties certainly were. But these two recent treatments may nonetheless have their positive side. Where before Chomskian doctrines lay relatively hidden in abstruse treatises, pedantic classroom assertions, and cabalistic sentence diagrams, now at last they have been revealed to all in relatively direct language, so that their shallowness and banality can no longer be ignored. As most translators have learned from continued struggles to provide a real equivalent between two idioms, the differences between the world's languages are definitely not "trivial," even if one accepts this word in the broader sense encouraged by Chomsky of differentiating human languages from communications between animals or "intelligent machines" (to the extent that any final knowledge is available about either category). Nor is it enough for a language to merely create new sentences--it can be argued that two other equally important and closely related goals of a language are to convey some sort of meaning to others and/or at least to gratify one's own sense of understanding (even where one fails to understand). If differences between languages truly were trivial, and if merely generating new sentences were the principal point of language, machine translation in its ultimate form of Fully Automatic High Quality Translation (FAHQT) would have long ago been attained, which is clearly not the case. The period when Chomsky and his followers first began their work coincided with the heyday of sacrosanct mainframe ideology: it was simply assumed that computers could solve any problem. We now know better, and the continued propagandizing of such theories is simply an embarrassment left over from the past. In a sense Chomsky himself has now come down from his pedestal and stands naked among us. Perhaps these popularizing polemics are most objectionable in their attempt to bury earlier linguistic theories of possibly greater merit. This effort reaches a new low in academic name- calling in Pinker's attack on Benjamin Lee Whorf, whose major thesis was nothing more shocking than the notion, commonly noted by translators and laymen alike, that language and "reality" tend to become interdependent, co- creating, and co-correcting elements of our world views. Perhaps the real problem is that Whorf never received a formal degree in Linguistics, even though his findings strongly influenced Edward Sapir and many others allegedly his academic superiors. Indeed, until recently his views were known as the Sapir- Whorf Hypothesis. Equally striking is Pinker's attempt to deemphasize the concept of "deep structure" as a major component of Chomskian dogma. In the past this notion supposedly accounted for the many different ways of expressing similar ideas in different languages (or even in the same language)--underlying all of them lay the safety net of "deep structure." Critics were quick to point out that no one has ever set eyes on this entity, much less found any reason for believing in its existence, and it is not surprising that this concept has now been abandoned. In a recent article, I also outlined some of Pinker's errors with regard to Chinese in his attempt to make this language conform to the Chomskian model. But the author still remains steadfastly faithful to "Universal Grammar," another Chomskian icon aptly abbreviated as "UG." We are supposed to believe that "UG" truly explains how all the world's languages are really saying the same thing in different ways. The problem with Universal Grammar is that it is not really a modern, scientific idea at all but a medievalist notion based on faith and superstition. As George Steiner points out in After Babel: "To the twelfth-century relativism of Pierre Hélie, with his belief that the disaster at Babel had generated as many kinds of irreconcilable grammars as there are languages, Roger Bacon opposed his famous axiom of unity: `Grammatica una et eadem est secundum substantiam in omnibus linguis, licet accidentaliter varietur.' [Grammar is one and the same following substance in all languages, allowing for incidental variations.] Without a grammatica universalis, there could be no hope of discourse among men, nor any rational science of language." Thus, Chomskian notions may have fallen into the same logic trap as these medieval ones, which furthermore go back even further to Aristotle himself: "As writing, so also is speech not the same for all races of men. But the mental affections themselves, of which these words are primarily signs, are the same for the whole of mankind....With these points, however, I have dealt in my treatise concerning the soul..."--On Interpretation, I (Peri Hermeneias, translated by Harold P. Cooke) In other words, this so-called "modern" science of linguistics may be about as well founded as the ideas of the Churchmen who opposed Galileo. The first of the three one-hour tapes in The Human Language Series, subtitled "Discovering the Human Language: Colorless Green Ideas," presents the basic tenets of these theories and promotes Chomsky's assertion that "the language faculty is a subsystem of the human brain." The second tape, entitled Playing the Language Game, continues this argument by showing how children learn language and further advances the claims that "all of language is innate" and "language is an organ of the mind." The third tape, entitled The Human Language Evolves, examines the challenging notion that language may be a part of evolution but then runs off in a number of other directions without following up on any of them. At various points in the series, work by linguistic anthropologists and other scholars is presented as though it were a natural follow-up on Chomskian positions, when in fact these approaches antedate this outlook. It would of course be quite comforting if it could be proven that all human languages are basically alike, and that all human beings are ultimately saying the same thing. But it is also possible that many differences separate our languages and cultures, and that people are frequently saying quite different things, even when they are using the same words and even when they are speaking the same language. The latter notion, while slightly unsettling, tends to explain more about human relations than the former, even before a second language enters the picture. Apologists for the Chomskian approach may insist that many subtleties have been overlooked in these comments. But the primary texts underlying this school of linguistics are so pretentious and prolix that it is truly hard to determine what these subtleties may be. Surely linguists--of all people--should cultivate as simple and direct a style as possible. When they fail to do so, one is justified in identifying their failure as further proof that something is amiss in their theories. Translators--perhaps above all others--customarily show great respect for technical terminologies of all sorts. But they also tend to detect intuitively those terminologies composed of arbitrary jargon, where far less may be present than meets the eye. Two images spring to mind in explaining the different perspectives of translators and linguists. In the first, translators can perhaps best be seen as front-line soldiers in an ongoing series of language wars: caught in the trenches, they regularly and routinely fight day-to-day, hand-to-hand skirmishes with the minutiae of language. Linguists, however, have little hands-on experience of this sort and rarely seek to gain any: they perhaps most resemble rear-guard armchair generals. And the examples of linguistic encounters they cite have little connection with those taking place on the battlefield. Another comparison is suggested by astronomer Carl Sagan's dismissal of alleged UFO reports. If UFOs truly exist, challenges Sagan, why is it that astronomers never seem to discover any? After all, astronomers are constantly watching the sky and scanning it with all manner of subtle detection devices. They are moreover professional sky-watchers. Yet the only ones who spot saucers are almost invariably amateurs, who rarely ever glance skyward and have little beyond ignorant superstition to help them interpret what they see. Springing from this comparison, those supporting medieval linguistic theories could just possibly emerge as the amateurs, while the true professionals with their eye on scientific data could be none other than translators. Some truly great theorists have of course been active in the field of linguistics--not only Whorf and Sapir but Saussure, Hjelmslev, Uldall, Bloomfield, and Mounin, among others. But it is hard to escape the conclusion that the Chomskian view adds up to a kind of Dr. Feel-Good view of language: don't worry, it's not really very complex, and we have it all under control. Perhaps this is the kind of linguistic theory that Americans deserve, or at least those Americans who would rather not learn--or even know much about--foreign languages. In the same way that Lysenko's theories of biology protected Soviet citizens from any idea that could pollute Communism, perhaps these linguistic doctrines protect Americans from knowing very much about language. It is also hard to escape the conclusion that today's standards in Linguistics may be extremely low. I hope to present some ideas for raising these standards in a future article. As Georges Mounin pointed out long ago, there can be no valid theory of linguistics that does not also provide a workable theory of translation, something the Chomskians quite clearly fail to do. Per Dohler has suggested that perhaps translators have something to learn from linguists--but it is equally possible that linguists have a fair amount to learn from translators. *Steven Pinker: The Language Instinct: How the Mind Creates Language, Harper Perennial, New York, 1995, paperback $14.00. The Human Language Series, directed by Gene Searchinger (three parts, 55 minutes each, closed captioned) Equinox Films/Ways of Knowing. This series can be purchased by educational institutions at the price of $545 for the complete set or $200 for each tape. For more information call (800) 343-5540. This article may be reproduced for individuals and for educational purposes. It may not be used for any commercial (i.e., money-making) purpose without written permission from the author. The following piece is the review of Steven Pinker's book "The Language Instinct," referred to in the previous article. The Chinese Character for "Big Bird" By Alex Gross [This article was published in the April, 1995 ATA Chronicle and is reproduced here with per- mission from the Editors.] Would-be language experts like to talk about Chinese, whether they know any or not. Steven Pinker, the latest Chomskian apologist, is no exception. His recent best-seller The Language Instinct contains five assertions about the Chinese language and its speakers. Unfortunately, all of them are incorrect. Chinese is a language that few Westerners ever learn well enough to make meaningful generalizations about. We all know that four years of college French or German make no one an expert in either language, much less a translator. But three or four years of college Chinese barely bring students to the level of being able to use a Chinese-English dictionary. It takes at least another two years before one can approach the riches of a Chinese-Chinese dictionary, the equivalent of a Larousse or a Brockhaus (which even beginning students of French or German can consult). Chinese characters are of course the reason--there is nothing comparable in Western languages. It is therefore no surprise that Pinker mistakenly concludes that this "writing system has served the Chinese well, despite the inherent disadvantage that readers are at a loss when they face a new or rare word." (1) This statement is entirely incorrect. No "disadvantage" is necessarily present, it is certainly not "inherent," and readers of Chinese are on the whole far less at a loss with new or rare words than readers of alphabet-based languages. Take the following English sentence as an example: Cassowaries were a problem that year. This sentence can make no sense at all to readers unless they know exactly what a "cassowary" is (or have picked up the Malay word it comes from). I do not know the Chinese word for "cassowary," nor do I need to know it. But I do know that I would immediately have a far better understanding of this sentence in Chinese than in English. That is because the Chinese word for cassowary, whatever it may be, is certain to contain either the radical niao for "long-tailed bird" or the radical zhui for "short-tailed bird." Which is what cassowary means: a big ostrich-like bird, whether its tail is visualized as long or short. Many comparable examples could be found and are typical of Chinese. Elsewhere Pinker relies on the faulty assumption that Chinese is "an isolating language" simply so he can celebrate his discovery that it can also "create multipart words such as compounds and derivatives." (2) Here again he shows his ignorance, for despite the quaint prejudice that Chinese is monosyllabic, in actual fact it does little other than create multi-syllabic compounds. He also falls into the trap that Chinese essentially encodes "morphemes" (units of meaning) in its "logograms" (characters). (3) But in point of fact Chinese often also encodes monosyllabic sounds, though not as efficiently as its students might wish. This dual approach- -attempting to convey both meaning and sound-- leads to the paradox familiar to all advanced students and even some native speakers: in Chinese it is possible to know how to pronounce a character without understanding what it means. Alternately, one may know what a character means without having a clue about its pronunciation. Finally, one may have some idea of a character's overall domain without knowing either its sound or its precise meaning. This is a truly unique experience for most linguists. Such are the lesser mountain ranges one must surmount before one can remotely approach the summit of translation. Pinker makes further errors in explaining the function of Chinese tones (4) and in asserting that "Chinese college students tend to have more scientific training than American students." (5) This last claim opens such a mammoth can of cross-cultural worms that it is best passed over at present. But readers are entitled to wonder, given the author's poor score on Chinese, how much truth there can be in the rest of his book or in the Chomskian doctrines defended here and in a recent three-hour PBS series. Perhaps this can be dealt with in a further article. (1) Steven Pinker: The Language Instinct, Harper Perennial, 1994, p 191. (2) Ibid., p. 239. (3) Ibid., p. 189. (4) Ibid., p. 164. (5) Ibid., p. 67. This piece may be reproduced for individuals and for educational purposes. It may not be used for any commercial (i.e., money-making) purpose without written permission from the author. This following text contains two replies to criticisms of the pieces on Chomskian linguistics. Those familiar with this field may be aware that attacks on these theories can meet with fierce resistance from their advocates, sometimes bordering on religious intolerance. Due to copyright problems, the criticisms themselves are not reproduced here, but their tenor and contents should be to some extent clear from the nature of the replies. Reply to first critique: To the Editor: Through either oversight or misplaced self- censorship, the title of my piece on Chomskian linguistics was omitted. It was called "The Emperor's New Linguistics," and its deletion turned my description of a naked gentleman into near nonsense. Jon Johanning's arguments are easily dealt with. If he is so deeply impressed with this "MIT linguistic scientist," why is he not equally impressed with the theories of W.V.O. Quine, another MIT savant whose views significantly differ from Chomsky's? He is also premature in rejoicing that he found no misstatements about Japanese in Pinker's book-- one need scarcely be an expert in this language to realize that the author's statements were far too superficial for any such mistakes to occur. Through the centuries, pseudosciences like phrenology, ether-based physics, physiognomy, and even eugenics have enjoyed enormous popularity even among the learned. Freud himself believed in biorhythms, and cold fusion still has its proponents. People love to hear explanations, even when they do not understand them, and even when the explanations explain very little. If Johanning believes Chomskianism does not belong to these other failed sciences, his argument does not lie with me alone. Much of George Steiner's "After Babel" is a refutation of these theories, and I.A. Richards was also deeply skeptical. Or let Johanning pick up and read any ten pages at random of Randy Allen Harris' book "The Linguistics Wars," and he will quickly see how arbitrary, pretentious, and obscurantist this whole school of linguistics can truly be. As for his statement that "this subject is of no interest whatsoever to translators or interpreters," he speaks for himself. Chomskian doctrines, which emphasize the triviality of linguistic differences, do a real disservice to translators and interpreters and are, furthermore, demonstrably false or in some cases themselves "trivial." Through the millennia, observers from Cicero and Roger Bacon to Tytler and Unamuno have joined in asserting that many linguistic phenomena do not fit into any system of "universal grammar." Where Pinker's book appears glancingly persuasive, it is most often relying on earlier and better writing in the field, which Johanning does not appear to have read. Perhaps its gravest flaw lies in its flimsy last chapter, where the author ought to have been providing his deepest insights. Here he bases his summation on a quote by a fellow Chomskian (these experts usually talk only to each other), words he quite clearly regards as of major importance: "The thing is: I hate relativism. I hate relativism more than I hate anything else..." Perhaps some one should gently remind these great "linguistic scientists" that there is one thing worse than "relativism." It is called "absolutism," an area they do seem to know a great deal about. Alex Gross The above letter was published in the January, 1996 ATA Chronicle and is reproduced with permission from the Editors. Reply to second critique: This reply to two earlier critics centered on the Chinese piece alone (CHINLING.TXT), though some broader implications are also present. Both critics gratuitously assumed that the Chinese piece stood alone and betokened a limited acquaintance with Chomskian theories, when in fact it was only the first prong of the far more general attack contained in "The Emperor's New Linguistics." It was published in the August, 1995 Chronicle along with the more general piece and is reproduced here with permission from the Editors. To the Editor: If these two correspondents have now seen my most recent Chronicle piece, they should be aware that my skepticism about Chomskian linguistics is neither shallow nor sudden. I discussed this matter even more thoroughly in my contribution to "Computers in Translation: A Critical Approach" (Routledge, 1992). I believe that most translators would agree with me that these theories are incorrect, incomplete, and incompatible with any true understanding of language. In his informal survey, Per Dohler found that reactions of translators to linguistics in general range "between indifference and outright scorn" and that linguistics belongs to the "pseudosciences" or "fields that don't yet have their jargon under control." Certainly the Chomskians have contributed to such a perception. My article on Chinese contained 600 words and addressed five points. Yet one correspondent has employed 700 words to address a single one of these points: whether or not Chinese is an "isolating language." He also claims Professor Chao Yuen Ren as an ally of Chomskianism, but if he had more carefully examined page 3 of Prof. Chao's book--which I first encountered fourteen years ago--he would have found these words on that very same page: "no transformational or generative grammar has as yet been fully worked out for any language." That observation, printed in 1968, is still true today, and Professor Chao was quite correct in analyzing Chinese not in terms of Chomskian models but on the basis of "immediate constituents," or IC's, something my own professor has called "subsyntactic particles." This correspondent makes a crucial error in not distinguishing between spoken and written Chinese, as only the latter has a ghost of a chance of being called truly "isolating," though it too will fail such a test. Such a claim fails on mathematical grounds alone. Mandarin Chinese possesses a mere 400 spoken syllables. Multiply this by the four tones, and--allowing for the many missing sound-tone slots--you will still end up with fewer than 1200 distinct utterances. These are simply not enough to constitute a viable language devoid of ambiguity and do not even satisfy the minimum requirements of Shannon's Information Theory for differentiating message elements. While 1200 sounds might have served for stylized poetry or imperial proclamations in times past, they could not alone suffice to name the entities, processes, and descriptors for even a "limited" culture (and there are no "limited" cultures!). Such would have been the fate of Chinese if it had become a truly "isolating language." The only possible escape from this predicament is to join two or more characters and/or sound-tones together to form compounds, in which case you no longer have an "isolating language." Unless someone wants to pull in Cantonese, Fujianese, or some other form of Chinese, I sincerely hope this discussion is now ended. Alex Gross Copyright (c) 1995 by Alexander Gross. This piece may be reproduced for individuals and for educational purposes. It may not be used for any commercial (i.e., money-making) purpose without written permission from the author.