A Student of Chomsky’s.

I recommended an Ann Patchett story last year, and since then my wife and I have read her novel Commonwealth, which I wholeheartedly recommend, and we’re now on her earlier State of Wonder, which we’re enjoying but are still somewhat perplexed by. It’s about Dr. Marina Singh, who ventures into a remote part of the Amazon jungle to find out what happened to her colleague and friend while visiting a tribe called the Lakashi. I thought this passage was worth posting here:

The Lakashi women were singing now. […] “Do you know what they’re saying?” Marina asked.

Nancy shook her head. “I catch a word every now and then, or I think I do. We had a linguist with us for a while. He had been a student of Noam Chomsky’s. He said the language wasn’t particularly difficult or even interesting, that all the languages in this region of the Amazon came from a single grammatical base with variations in vocabulary which meant at one point the tribes must have been connected and then split apart. It made me wish we had a language that was a little bit more obscure so we might have kept him. He made us some charts with phonetics so we can put together some basic phrases.”

I can’t for the life of me tell whether Patchett has any knowledge of the subject. On the one hand, “the language wasn’t particularly difficult or even interesting” and the “single grammatical base” could be a sly dig at Chomskyan indifference to linguistic variation and the claim that all grammars are basically the same, but “in this region of the Amazon” and “variations in vocabulary which meant at one point the tribes must have been connected” ruin the effect and suggest an interest in local differences and history that isn’t exactly a hallmark of MIT linguistics, although of course a student of Chomsky’s could perfectly well have such an interest. On the whole, I’m guessing Patchett just used Chomsky because he’s the most famous linguist around, but it was a startling thing to encounter in a novel.

Comments

  1. If the plot summary for that book on Wikipedia is anything to go by, Patchett writes a whole lot about things she doesn’t really know anything about. I’m not saying more, since I don’t wish to spoil things for anyone reading and potentially enjoying State of Wonder, but the summary makes the novel sound like an over-the-top thriller.

  2. David Eddyshaw says

    He said the language wasn’t particularly difficult or even interesting

    It’s clear where this is going. The “linguist” is going to be revealed as an impostor, undoubtedly connected with the sinister disappearance itself. His invocation of Chomsky is a transparent ruse to cover his lack of any actual relevant linguistic skills: it would be a plausible enough excuse to throw dust in the eyes of non-specialists. Patchett has cleverly put words in Nancy’s mouth which clearly reveal that she’s heard just enough about Chomsky to be taken in by this, but lacks any actual knowledge of linguistics. She should probably be wary of attempting to use those “basic phrases”; a hovercraft full of eels would be the least to worry about.

  3. January First-of-May says

    that all the languages in this region of the Amazon came from a single grammatical base with variations in vocabulary

    That’s just a Sprachbund; not at all unexpected. (Or, possibly, particularly devoted Chomskyanism, but “this region” suggests the Sprachbund explanation.)

    In fact, I highly suspect that “were connected and then split apart” would actually be more likely to result in lots of shared vocabulary but variations in grammar (as seen in subfamilies like Slavic or Germanic). I can see a Chomskyanist missing that, though.

  4. “He said the language wasn’t particularly difficult or even interesting” etc.: I find it hard to think of any linguist, even a 1970s Chomskyite, talking that cavalierly about learning a language. Even then they knew that Dutch and German didn’t have the same syntax (and they would surely be considered close dialects in an Amazonian context) and were worth not ignoring. This kind of talk seems as archaic as talking about “primitive languages”. If any supposed straw Comskyite really thought there was no need to learn a language other than one’s own, what would he be doing in the Amazon in the first place?

  5. I think it’s almost certainly just name-dropping.

    However, I’ll freely admit to a strong bias. I read her breakthrough novel, Bel Canto, when it first came out, and hated it with such a purple passion that I’ve declined to read even a single word she’s published since, including magazine articles.

    The novel was loosely suggested by (“based on” would be too strong a word) the Túpac Amuru hostage crisis in Lima in 1996. However, it was clear from almost the first pages that the author had never been to Peru and had done only minimal research. Linguistic howlers recurred throughout the novel (whose hero, inconveniently, is supposed to be a linguist fluent in about a dozen languages) but the one that’s stuck in my memory all these years later is that Patchett repeatedly referred to the Peruvian delicacy of guinea pig by the Castilian “cobaya” rather than the Peruvian “cuy” (found on almost every menu if you happen to have been to Peru…) If you’re going to include italicized foreign words in your novel at all, FFS get them right.

  6. And, incidentally, as much as I think the Generative enterprise was and is a fool’s errand, Chomsky’s early students — McCawley, Ross, Partee, Lakoff — are and were no fools, and I’m sure not this kind of callous caricature (and certainly not his colleague Hale, either).

  7. John Cowan says

    “Every word she writes is a lie, including ‘and’ and ‘but’.” — Mary McCarthy about Lillian Helman. She later misquoted herself, replacing but with the.

  8. I agree with Y. It’s hard to imagine any linguist, Chomskyan or otherwise, venturing into the remote Amazon for fieldwork and then giving up because the language is just too boring.

    I’ve read a few Patchetts over the years (A State of Wonder, Bel Canto, The Magician’s Assistant) but ultimately decided I’m not a fan. Somehow for all the imaginative plots and vivid descriptions I never get the sense that her characters experience real hardship or conflict — there’s a lack of emotional stakes to her writing, as if she’s just playing with unusual situations for their own sake; she does that quite well, but it leaves me cold.

  9. David Eddyshaw says

    @JC:

    Harsh: Ann Patchett may simply be one of the great majority who are as unaware of linguistics as they are of quantum mechanics, with the difference that they don’t know how little they know about linguistics, and have no idea how much there is to know.

    The WP summary rather suggests a novel using an undercharacterised exotic society as mere background props to a plot which is really all about Western preoccupations*, but no work deserves to be judged by a WP summary. I shall await Hat’s verdict.

    *Not invariably disastrous to the integrity of a work, even: Heart of Darkness falls pretty squarely into this category, for one.

  10. TR: … just playing with unusual situations for their own sake…

    Oh, I loathe that kind of novel.

  11. John Cowan says

    they don’t know how little they know about linguistics

    Historians aren’t constantly confronted with people who carry on self-confidently about the rule against adultery in the sixth amendment to the Declamation of Independence, as written by Benjamin Hamilton. Computer scientists aren’t always having to correct people who make bold assertions about the value of Objectivist Programming, as examplified in the HCNL entities stored in Relaxational Databases. […] Most people are much more ignorant about language than they are about [other subjects], but they reckon that because they can talk and read and write, their opinions about talking and reading and writing are as well informed as anybody’s. And since I have DNA, I’m entitled to carry on at length about genetics without bothering to learn anything about it. Not. —Mark Liberman

  12. marie-lucie says

    TR: “Somehow for all the imaginative plots and vivid descriptions I never get the sense that her characters experience real hardship or conflict — there’s a lack of emotional stakes to her writing, as if she’s just playing with unusual situations for their own sake; she does that quite well, but it leaves me cold.”

    I have never read Ann Patchett and don’t intend to do so after reading these comments, but your description reminded me of why I (a fan of detective novels) stopped reading Agatha Christie some years ago. Very clever, but the characters leave me totally cold. Except for Poirot, I can’t think of any that I can remember as human beings.

  13. m.-l.: That’s one reason why Raymond Chandler had so little respect for that genre of detective novel.
    In defense of Patchett, I read her essay in the NYer, from the previous post theat Hat links to, and it’s quite good, though vaguely unpleasant.

  14. all the languages in this region of the Amazon came from a single grammatical base

    common or garden shprakhbund or not, this seems like a perfectly plausible reason for specifically a chomskyite* (not merely a student from the house of noam) to leave a research site. once he’s reached that conclusion, there’s no fodder there for someone who feeds on highly abstracted (transformational-)grammatical gematria; you’re not gonna impress the sage of kendall square with conclusions about a closely-related language cluster.

    (for the record, i have enjoyed some patchett, though perhaps not as much as i do most chandler. and now a typo [or maybe thinko] that i corrected has me imagining the world in which p[r]atchett) is a single author.)

    * pejorative suffix intentional. (hellman fans know what i mean; fans of mccarthy [either one, they’re interchangable in this context] may not.)

  15. Stu Clayton says

    one of the great majority who are as unaware of linguistics as they are of quantum mechanics, with the difference that they don’t know how little they know about linguistics, and have no idea how much there is to know.

    David Eddyshaw: I will use that in my epitaph, if you don’t mind. But with a slight modification in acknowledgement of the ease with which knowledge can be located in the ‘net:

    # he did not know how little he knew about linguistics, yet had a good idea how much there is to know #

  16. David Eddyshaw says

    you’re not gonna impress the sage of kendall square with conclusions about a closely-related language cluster.

    Oh, I don’t know. The better sort of Chomskyist nowadays seems to have progressed beyond simply ignoring most of the subject matter of linguistics to demonstrating how any given datum can be shoehorned into the One True Framework. Quite exotic languages are allowed, so long as you can find island phenomena and a few subjacency constraints for the greater glory of the Way. Even fieldwork may have its place: prior work is often vitiated by naive (“pretheoretical”) assumptions about how languages might work, and must be corrected in the light of the Great Template.

  17. Ann Patchett may simply be one of the great majority who are as unaware of linguistics as they are of quantum mechanics, with the difference that they don’t know how little they know about linguistics, and have no idea how much there is to know.

    A linguist that is. For we do not know shit about linguistics.

    “Quantum mechanics” is a theory. “Linguistics” refers to any information we can find about a phenomenon.

    Most people are much more ignorant about language than they are about [other subjects], but they reckon that because they can talk and read and write, their opinions about talking and reading and writing are as well informed as anybody’

    I exactly beleive that a Kusaai speaker is a much more knowlegeable than a Kusaai linguist.

  18. Sorry for using Kusaai for “generic speakers”:) It is just because DE quotes from it extensively, which I enjoy.

    That’s just a Sprachbund; not at all unexpected.
    I won’t resist the temptaion and will quote in full the answer abotu the Vaupés region of Amazonia that DE gave to me a few months ago. Here:

    Apparently the linguistic exogamy of the Vaupés doesn’t lead to quite the polyglot paradise you might think, as children tend to marry speakers of their own mother’s language. The convention is that your “own” language is the one that your father speaks, which is therefore exactly not your “mother tongue.” You address people in their own language and they reply in yours. So two languages is the minimum, but you don’t necessary end up with six languages. Most often, you end up speaking to your spouse in the same language that you use to speak to your mother.

    The languages have in fact mostly converged considerably, but only along dimensions that the speakers aren’t consciously clearly aware of, like phonology, syntax and semantics (and even morphology, to some extent.) Per contra there is a strong tabu against mixing vocabulary, which people are aware of. Like everyone else (except linguists), they conceptualise languages as “bags of words.”

  19. can’t for the life of me tell whether Patchett has any knowledge of the subject.

    I felt the same, but I always feel this why someone speaks about Chomsky*. No, not when his grammar as such is discussed, but when people discuss his UG. I have no slighest idea if they understand what they are speaking about or not. When reading the excerpt I was afraid (I thought about that) that even now everyone will behave as if this all is normal, and I won’t learn if I am the only one who does not understand if anyone understands antyhing here. I was releaved to find a comment mirroring my own feelings.
    —-
    Usually such descriptions are absurd. This one can be interpreted in several meaningful ways. She must know somethign about the subject.

    —-
    Someone who knows very well what kind of an object (a lanaguage) he is looking for and for what purpose (a thesis) can indeed find an object that does not match his criteria (subjectively) uninteresting. And this could have happened with someone applying differnet objects to the same theory to test it. Even to disprove. Chomsky’s student makes sense (rozele actually already said that)

    “not […] even interesting” is a different sort of oddness. It is odd that he would say that in a novel.
    Even for fictional science. Especially so. A real, flesh and blood linguist? He can say any random thing in any given moment.
    And the women could have misunderstood him.
    But in a novel? The canon makes us expect that the claim is not random, not from a random moment and not a random guy. He would Represent a linguist. Thus it is our lens that makes it odd.

    Have you met an abracabrologist telling that this particular hyper-temporal anomaly is not interesting in any way? Scientist is a person who finds stuff interesting. Very interesting. Or at least it is the canon I am familiar with.

  20. David Eddyshaw says

    I exactly beleive that a Kusaai speaker is a much more knowlegeable than a Kusaai linguist.

    It depends what you mean by “knowledgeable.” In the sense of “can produce perfect Kusaal at will, and understand it without difficulty”, no question. But in the sense “can explain why some things are grammatical but others are not”, not so much, just as with native speakers of any language who lack linguistic training.

    Happily, the sets “Kusaal native speaker” and “Kusaasi academic linguist” are not disjoint. Hasiyatu Abubakari and Anthony Agoswin Musa spring to mind immediately; the latter has published a full-scale grammar of Agolle Kusaal, which is well worth looking at (although I think I can fairly claim that mine is cheaper.)

  21. Just in case: “Kusaai” was a typo:) I do not know what -aai ending it got mixed up with in my mind (braai? кусай? Kawaii? I think kawaii) but it was a typo.

  22. January First-of-May says

    I do not know what -aai ending it got mixed up with in my mind

    I assumed it was a case of mental confusion of small L and capital i, and/or a mixup of “Kusaal” and “Kusaasi”.

    Kawaii (and Hawaii, if you don’t spell out the glottal stop) end(s) in -aii, not in -aai. Legitimate -aai endings are common in South Africa, IIRC, but offhand I can’t think of a specific example.

     
    EDIT:

    Have you met an abracabrologist telling that this particular hyper-temporal anomaly is not interesting in any way?

    I think it’s possible, though it would require some specific setups. “Oh, that’s just a perfectly normal hyper-temporal anomaly. Happens sometimes. If you see as many of them as I do you’d get used to them too.” IIRC it’s relatively common with aurorae.

    I’m not sure if it’s possible with languages though; they’re too distinct, and/or there are too few of them.

  23. Oh, that’s just a language. Have you ever heard one before? Judging by your reaction I assume you have not. When I heard my first langauge I felt the same.

    It was in Amazonia.

    P.S … and I was 1 moment.

  24. in South Africa, IIRC, but offhand I can’t think of a specific example. – That is why I first thought about braai. But it was not Afrikaans.

    end(s) in -aii, not in -aai. – My fingers do such things.

    —-
    Russian reduced unstressed vowels are contrasted to semi-long stressed ones. Transliterating кусай as kusaai makes sense, I would do that if I were typing Russian in Arabic script. كُساي

    kusaai “bite!”
    kusaal “he [habitually/repeatedly] bit, he was biting”

  25. David Eddyshaw says

    Radchaai.

    It is a natural confusion, as neither Kusaal nor Radchaai distinguish sex grammatically.

  26. single grammatical base with variations in vocabulary

    P.S. but it took a while for me to understand why not “English”. Apparently, for me “to distinguish sex grammatically” means:
    kusaal “he [habitually/repeatedly] bit, he was biting”

  27. Are you thinking of the island of Kaua‘i? Or Kawai pianos?

  28. John Cowan says

    Oh, that’s just a perfectly normal hyper-temporal anomaly.

    But oh, beamish nephew, beware of the day
    If your hyper-temporal anomaly be a chronosynclastic infundibulum! For then
    You will softly and silently vanish away
    And never be heard from again!

  29. Are you thinking of the island of Kaua‘i? Or Kawai pianos?

    It’s this, most likely:

    https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/kawaii

  30. This may not have anything to do with the original story. But there are some peoples who believe that you should not speak the name of a person after they die. This extends to any words in their language that sound similar to the name of the person. So they pick a new sound for those words that they are forbidden to say.

    Thus over time their entire vocabulary flips over to completely new forms, entirely replacing the previous words. But presumably their grammar remains much the same.

    The cultures that have these features, as far as I know, are in places like Papua New Guinea, not South America. I remember reading some accounts of modern European linguists going into some regions equipped with the research of explorers from the 19th century, and finding themselves totally at sea.

  31. David Eddyshaw says

    Traditional Eskimo culture was like that. Personal names are typically ordinary nouns. When someone dies, their name cannot be spoken until a child is born; a child receives the name of the last person in the community who died. Sex is irrelevant: “Woman” may end up as a man’s personal name, for example.

    During the intervening period, circumlocutions have to be used in place of the forbidden noun. The nature of the languages, with their huge capacity for derivation, lends itself well to this. Unsurprisingly, these substitutes often end up replacing the original word: in Central Alaskan Yup’ik, for example, the original pan-Eskimo word for “dog” has been ousted by a form meaning “puller” (a natural enough expression for a dog in that culture.) Again unsurprisingly, this results in a high rate of lexical turnover, at least with nouns, and a vocabulary in which a large number of words are transparently derived from a relatively small number of roots. (Whorf called this “oligosynthesis”, presumably just to confuse everyone.)

  32. John Emerson says

    In traditional China the personal names of the deceased were tabooed to their near inferiors, but the emperor was the near superior of everyone. This has resulted in the replacement of the word “bang” for “state” by the word “guo”, as in “zhongguo” = “China”, because the first Han emperor was named Liu Bang. (Liu Bang was born a commoner, and later emperors might use very rare or even artificially-constructed words to name their heirs).

    Personal names were only used on the gravest occasions, and everyone had one or several nicknames for use in various contexts.

  33. David Marjanović says

    And now that names are fixed from birth, lots of people end up with words like “little” in their name their whole lives.

    Liu Bang

    L’État, c’est lui.

  34. John Cowan says

    I think you mean “L’État, c’est Liú”.

  35. Ha!

  36. David Marjanović says

    🙂

  37. Well, we’ve finished State of Wonder and were disappointed (unbelievable setup, unconvincing characters), but we’re giving The Magician’s Assistant a try anyway, and so far it’s better.

  38. nbmandel says

    I’m late to this, but, based solely on the passage quoted, I concluded that we were to understand the former visitor, the linguist, as more or less a faker, and the present speaker as someone perhaps too easily taken in by a fast line in quasi-expertise. In that reading “Student of Chomsky’s” was just his way of claiming authority by dropping the name of the one linguist People Have Heard Of. It reminded me of nothing so much as “his great-grandfather was Equipoise” in GUYS AND DOLLS. I don’t know if that reading is sustainable in context, though.

  39. David Eddyshaw says

    That was pretty much my own impression; sadly, the linguistic ignorance which I chivalrously attributed to the fictional character seems in fact to belong to her creator.

  40. OK, these are takeoffs on an xkcd cartoon which I think is sophomoric, and so are they, but here:

    Types of Syntax Paper.
    Types of Semantics Paper.
    Types of Linguistics Paper.

  41. Bathrobe says

    Ha, loved the first two. (The last one wasn’t so scintillating).

  42. Roughly agreed, though I admit I do get the occasional hankering for some properly handcrafted Proto-Western Baltic 2nd person plural past subjunctives.

  43. Some of the comments are good: “Creoles are from contact with French and pidgins are from contact with every other language.” I know what they are talking about.

  44. I don’t know about the linguistics ones, but I have read examples of all the paper types from xkcd. (Note that Randall doesn’t claim the list is exhaustive, and there are three more in the alt-text.)

  45. I like Matthew Scarborough’s IE version.

  46. David Marjanović says

    And the replies to it!

    “Understanding the joke here is the only practical use I’ve made of the Russian I’ve been learning in lockdown.”

    “The „50 Seiten“ one needs two lines of text, with the rest of the page filled with footnotes.”

    “Setting it in Brill is that little extra bit that just raises this to a whole nother level.”
    Author’s reply:
    “i appreciate someone noticed the typography”

  47. I’d have liked “or” instead of “oder” even better.

  48. “Moroccan Arabic Has No Vowels: Still not sure why.” Good stuff.

  49. David Eddyshaw says

    I think I’ve actually read some of these papers …

  50. The person who created that has an excellent blog on Libyan matters, including language. They go in great detail into the very inadequate record of linguistic documentation in the country, something Lameen has also talked about. Incidentally, they mention Tomasso Sarnelli (1890–1972), “an Italian opthalmologist-turned-linguist” who did pioneering work on Libyan Berber. Who’da thought?

  51. David Eddyshaw says

    I remember the Africanist Tony Naden saying that he thought it might be helpful to have some sort of symbol to distinguish in bibliographies between grammatical works based on materials gathered from speakers in their natural environment and those based on interviewing speakers in the comfort of your own university at home.

    There are quite a lot of the latter type in African linguistics. The most egregious example I know of is the dreadful Fongbe grammar in the Mouton series, where the authors have zero interest in the culture of the speakers and the grammar was all too clearly written purely as a means to the end of bolstering their (erroneous) theories of the genesis of the Atlantic creoles. Naturally, they would have felt that actual fieldwork was quite superfluous.

    Mind you, one can forgive researchers in South Sudan languages (for example) for not actually spending much time there. And long-distance work can be excellent in some hands (e.g. Bloomfield on Tagalog. Because Bloomfield.)

    I actually met a Berber-speaking Libyan last year.

  52. I think I’ve actually read some of these papers …
    Yes, I have an impression that I have seen some of the very same papers that he has in mind.

    But I love reading those. There is a large body of publications by Arabic-speaking university students (who either become linguists later or not). Those can be simplistic or very good quality, but they are mostly descriptive. And I value descriptive work above anything else:-)

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