Colorless Green Ideas

"A noun causes a verb causes another noun. (Add adjectives to taste.)"

~Lerer, "Gertrude Stein: The Structure of Language"

"When you make a thing, it is so complicated making it that it is bound to be ugly, but those that come after you they don't have to worry about making it and they can make it pretty"

~Gertrude Stein, The Autobiography

          Statistically speaking, language is a miracle.  Out of the infinite combinations of words and letters and sounds comes some form of sense that is intelligible.  We can try to speak gibberish, but as long as syntactic structure is retained, we will make some kind of sense.  An odd, Carrol-ian, Stein-ian, sense, but we can never divorce words from their structure or meaning.  In poetry, "colorless green ideas" can "sleep furiously," and the brain does not revolt, even though we know that "colorless" and "green" negate each other, and "furiously" is not an adverb one would usually use to modify "sleep."  Even words that are made up can be put into sentences and still make sense: you can read "Jabberwocky" and know that "mimsy" is an adjective and "borogove" is a noun, despite the fact that their semantic meaning is perfectly opaque.  This idea of an internal grammar fascinates me, and only increases my wonder at the human brain and its most marvelous and mutable invention: language.

          This is particularly interesting to me after taking a linguistics class last semester.  Learning how language structure works, and how inherent it is to everything we say or write, and how different languages use these structure patterns differently, opened my eyes to how truly inventive the human race can be.  The fact that we can use things as wildly variable as Chinese characters to the Roman alphabet to get across the same meanings is amazing.  Equally amazing, though, is how fast language can develop.  Lerer mentions in "Gertrude Stein: The Structure of Language" that a two-year-old learns a new word every two hours.  I remember reading a newspaper article years ago that cited a study positing that children's supposed grammatical errors when learning to talk (ex: double negatives) are actually testing out different possible language patterns in order to find the right one.  

          The one story that has hit me the hardest, though, is Lerer's description of the students at the school for the deaf in Nicaragua.  These students were able to create a language from nothing: they didn't even have the sounds that most people with spoken language are able to experiment with.  Instead, they were able to codify a set of gestures that had meaning to them, and create their own sign language.  Successive generations were able to take the language to a higher level of complexity, to add verb agreement and distinct parts of speech.  A groundwork having been provided, they were able to create their own grammar structure.  There is some controversy about whether this sign language arose entirely independently, but it is still a beautiful example of the triumph of the human desire to communicate.

          From here on out, I will try to ask "did that make sense" less often, and "what does that mean to you" more often.  I'll try out some of my own linguistic experiments, and see where they lead me.  I might create the next "quiz" or "chortle," or stumble on some equally cogent phrase for something never before seen. From new words to new worlds isn't that terribly large of a jump, especially for Homo mendax, man the storyteller.