Babel's Dawn

The Rise of Untranslatability

The Rosetta Stone. When and why did translation become so difficult?

The January issue of Neophilogus includes an essay on the problem of translating Dante’s Divine Comedy into Arabic (abstract here). As you might expect, the challenge of translating a classic of medieval Christian orthodoxy into the language of the Koran is especially great. Setting aside the fact that Dante consigned Mohammed to hell’s eighth circle, the theological and literary differences between Catholic and Islamic civilizations are so extensive that it is impossible to get all of Dante’s Italian subtleties into the Arabic. I doubt that any of my readers are surprised by that news.

Meanwhile, these days I’m reading Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina, a classic novel that I have read a few times before. This time I’m using the (fairly) new translation by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky, a husband-and-wife team who have set the literary world agog with their stylish translations of the Russian canon. Of course I can’t help wondering whether I’m enjoying Tolstoy or the translators when I come across a witty passage like, “Each had something demeaning and derisive to say about the unfortunate Mme Maltischev, and the conversation began to crackle merrily, like a blazing bonfire.” [p. 134]

“Began to crackle” really lets the reader perceive the way malicious gossip can enliven talk [the original, Constance Garnett, translation just says “crackled”], while “blazing bonfire” gives a strong sense of delightful destruction [Garnet: “a burning faggot-stack”].

Such thoughts eventually turned me toward my blog and I wondered how long it took for speech to become imperfectly translatable. How long was it before the story of Babel and the world’s confusion of tongues would have made sense to people?

Symbol Usage Date Pushed Back

A report in today's Nature (Oct. 18, summarized here and reported here in the Washington Post) describes a 164,000 year old site found in South Africa. At that time Africa is reported to have been mostly desert, so the site—a cave near the coast—and evidence of shellfish consumption in the cave suggests that early Homo sapiens found a new source of food in the water.

From the standpoint of this blog, the key discovery is the presence of red ochre, suggesting symbolic and ritualistic decorations at a much earlier date than has been previously known. Archaeologists have argued that, because the use of symbols is so 'recent,' there must have been a "big bang" in which language and other symbolic interactions were invented. It has been common to read passing mention in the popular press of language being about 70 thousand years old, and scholars often noted that the evidence of symbolic activity was only half as old as the Homo sapiens species, suggesting something dramatic had happened midway through our species' career. This blog has always been skeptical of that theory, and the new finding near Pinnacle Point, South Africa adds to the cause for doubt. Along with the shellfish consumption, the Nature report pushes evidence of symbol usage much closer to the birth of the species.

TwoTypes of Words

Words, words, words. Hamlet (2,2: 195)

Along with all the sophisticated issues that are part of speech origins, it is good to remember every once in a while that the primary fact was and is the rise of words. From one angle, they seem empty as a dead man’s glove. “Words, words, words,” sighs Hamlet as he laments hollowness itself. But move your head a notch and words look almost miraculous — sounds, voluntarily shaped, that signify. How did two people, or, on this blog, protopeople, ever come up with such a thing? A couple of recent articles, however, suggest that a word, or at least sharing words, is not so miraculous after all.

Moving Beyond the Interesting

So which of these things is the parlu?

Several new articles explore the question of where words come from. The basic association between sound and sense is the most obvious one and it explains why many mammals can learn to recognize their name and respond appropriately to certain ones. “Com’on boy,” you say to your dog, and you dog comes to you. We take the feat for granted, but it is no small thing to control an animal by means of speech and gesture alone. And when behaviorism ruled the psychology departments, association was considered the only way words could be learned. Even theorists now grant that the idea was as naïve as a middle-schooler in Kokomo, but what else in going on? How about some mind-reading?

Socrates the Unwise

I see that Marc Hauser and a number of his colleagues have published an essay in the current (Feb. 2007) issue of Mind and Language (abstract here) repeating the idea he promoted in his book Moral Minds (reviewed here) that we have innate moral principles which we cannot explain coherently in words. It is the kind of conclusion that is almost inevitable if you think that the essence of language is found in writing, but not at all persuasive if you think of language as speech.

Communication Types

By my count yesterday’s post brings to three the number of different types of communication that are peculiar to humans: meaningful, emotional, and now, how shall we call it?, maybe ceremonial.

Teenage Troglodytes

Most of the popular-press references to speech origins seem to date language’s birth anywhere from 40 to 70 thousand years ago. Considering all the adaptations required to permit speech, this claim seems ridiculous, but it is based on indirect evidence that must mean something. Archaeological work shows that “symbolic” activity suddenly appears in the record from about that time. New work pushes it back to about 100 thousand years and that date is likely to retreat further, but only a bit further. We would all be astonished if something artistic from, say, half a million years ago turned up. What do we do with the contradiction between the archaeological evidence and the biological/evolutionary evidence?

Conference: Symbolic Thinking Began 2 Million Years Ago

Symbolic thinking arose two million years ago because of a need to anticipate events, Peter Gardenfors, a cognitive psychologist told a seminar at the Cradle of Language conference in Stellenbosch, South Africa. Gardenfors, working with a student, Mathias Osvath, says symbolic thinking is an adaptation to a special ecological niche rather than to social pressures.

That niche was the Oldowan culture, named after the Olduvai Gorge on the eastern edge of the Serengeti Plains of Tanzania.

Conference: Apes Can Point

Pointing is much older than the human line of descent, according to two sessions held today (Nov. 8) at the Cradle of Language Conference in Stellenbosch, South Africa. For decades many scholars have theorized that pointing is specific to the human line and reflects a necessary adaptation of the brain for language; however, in recent years contrary evidence has mounted.

David Leavens and William Hopkins presented a paper on “The Origins of Pointing” (abstract here) that argued any ape will indicate an object by pointing if:

Conference: Dating Ourselves

When in the course of human evolution did hominids become like ourselves? Archaeologist Nicholas Conard asked this question before a plenary session of the conference on the Cradle of Language in Stellenbosch, South Africa. The question is important to this blog because an answer would provide a bottom range for its focus. Once behaviorally modern humans appear, this blog’s concern is finished. As an absolute most-recent date, Conard suggests it was certainly established by 40 thousand years ago and possibly 80 thousand. These dates are long after the biological evolution of Homo sapiens, but Conard states that “The main characteristic Homo is that our cultural development can and does vary independent of our biological morpholotgy.” (Abstract here)