My love affair with linguistics

Lately I've found I get a lot of blank stares when I tell people that I'm teaching myself linguistics. It seems that the field still has this image of being some painfully obscure intellectual exercise with no real practical use, together with the likes of philosophy, sociology and that special subject of assholes too clever for their own clogs, social epistemology.

Looking back, I find it a bit odd, too. I graduated a physicist, worked in corporate finance, now here I am, trying to swallow whole Zoltan Kovecses' (I love this guy's name!) Language, Mind and Culture. So I figured I might as well explain how I came to develop this fascination for language.

For a start, I myself am not actually multilingual. In fact, if you were to count only the languages I can read, write and speak fluently, I'm pretty much monolingual. I do have tiny smatterings of Malay, Mandarin, Cantonese, Japanese, Portuguese, French, German, Spanish and, bugger knows why, the first verses of the Soviet National Anthem and Katyusha. Apart from that, tres, muito, tottemo, sangat, very monolingual.

But that isn't the point of my studying linguistics. A lot of people are under the impression that studying linguistics is about consuming lotsa languages. Nononono, it isn't. At least not the linguistics I'm into. My interest is the relationship between the mind and language, or cognitive linguistics, and it was sparked by readings into Zen.

Zen is really, really weird in that the harder you try to describe it in words, the further off you'll be from it. So I won't try very hard. Basically, it came down to the recurrence of a certain theme in Zen, which I found embodied very well in a phrase by the 6th Patriarch of Zen in China, Huineng. Those of you familiar with the Jap species of Zen will know him as Eno. The phrase is this:

"When I point at the moon, do you look at my finger or do you look at the moon?"

Short, snappy and laden with meaning. In these words are encompassed the hearts of the fields of semiotics and linguistics. But how? How is it that our minds make the connection, from these words, to visualizing the finger and the moon in our heads, to understanding them to be a metaphor for language and signs?

Language is not just a tool to communicate. We grow up with it. Our minds form strong links between words and concepts. We all start out with more or less the same brain, but over time, our minds will settle into the shapes that make us uniquely us. As humans, we live by the meme and are dependent on memes for our survival. Through language (itself a meme) we transmit our memes, both to our offspring and to those around us. Every facet of our lives is determined by our interactions with those around us, and we do that primarily through language.

So it strikes me as strange that we should take language for granted. We are so quick to latch onto the words of people with power and influence without closely analysing what is it they're really saying. "Indiscriminate killing of innocent civilians" becomes "collateral damage". "People who may threaten our hegemony" become "terrorists". "People who disagree with me" are "evil". More experienced hands in playing the games of power are very adept at this kind of insidious word game. Where I come from, politicians are terribly ham-fisted, and it shows.

Words and repetition have an awful power to them over the unwary. With carefully chosen words, one group of people can make demons and animals out of another, and it won't be long after that before man can commit great inhumanity on man simply because one views the other as "less than human".

200 thousand in Darfur since 2004, ~1 million in Rwanda in 1994, >100 thousand in West Papua since 1963, 1.7 million in Cambodia from 1975 to 1979, one third of the population of Equatorial Guinea from 1968 to 1979, 1 to 3 million in Bangladesh in 1971... just to name a few, all way past WWII, mind you. Unarmed men, women and children, each one a life just like you and me. Why? Because the hand holding the machete, the finger on the trigger, the man giving the orders was convinced they were "less than human".

All because so very, very few people can see past the words and into the minds that produced the words.

And that's why I'm studying linguistics.

Ippon!

I was doing some reading into Zen and I came across this gem in one of Dr Suzuki's books, written by a certain Bukkoku Kokushi:

No target's erected,

No bow is drawn,

And the arrow leaves the string;

It may not hit,

But it does not miss!

[Translated by Dr Suzuki]

I've been reading into Zen for quite a few years now and, having practiced Kendo, am somewhat acquainted with Zen's relationship with the real world. As I understand it, the poem above refers to a very specific moment in the mind. It can occur anywhere, and it isn't restricted to archery. Even those without any acquaintance with Zen or Buddhist teachings can experience it.

My personal experiences with that moment have always been very fleeting, transient moments. Moments of sublime perfection, like those very, very rare moments I put one over my sensei. From the Zen point of view there is no point in speaking of it, but a scientist in me would like to try, partly to satisfy my own curiousity, partly for my friends reading this who haven't a clue what I'm on about.

One moment that stands out in particular in my memory was during my first engagement against my sensei. I was still ungraded, and hence had no armour. It was an exercise in technique, where I and my fellow novice kendokas would hurl ourselves at a fully armoured sensei, using whatever techniques we could master to break through his guard and score. Of course, he was entitled to hit back, relatively gently as we were unarmoured.

Only those who have engaged another in single combat can understand the tricks one's mind plays with time and space here. From the moment we salute each other, the world slows down, the peripheral vision narrows and your whole universe shrinks and fades, leaving only you and your opponent. The past is a distant memory. The future is an infinity away. All there is you, your sword and your adversary.

The sensei was old, but by damn, he was fast. A blur and whack! A sharp pain shoots up my arm as he catches me on the wrist. I attack his wrist, but he deflects it easily and whack! He's struck me sharply on the head, and the world flashes white for the briefest of moments. I lunge repeatedly, and each time he deflects, sidesteps and is upon me. Before long my wrist is red and I'm nearly exhausted. I surprise him once by releasing my right hand as he went for it, then lunged for his throat with the sword in my left hand. He managed to deflect, but I took satisfaction in seeing his eyebrows raise in the gloom behind his helmet. I'm near my limit, but these engagements don't end until either the sensei says so or you simply can't stand anymore, so I lunge once more, locking swords. And then came my moment.

As we slowly moved apart, swords pressed closely into each other, I saw the gap. My sword was held on my left, like a spear, his was kept straight in front in him. I saw the tip of my sword point directly at the plate protecting his throat. That was the moment I lost myself. With no thought of attack or defense, my mind far away from my pain and fatigue, my world vanished, and I thrust with every fibre of my being towards my target, shouting "Tsuki!*" like it was the last word I'd ever say.

When the world came into focus again, the sensei was laughing his approval. It was a perfect strike, knocking him back 2 feet. By the end of the lesson I was dazed with elation, exhaustion and man, oh, man did my wrists hurt...

Not long after that training session, I would earn my armour and engage the sensei a few more times. He still beats the living tar out of me, and I've stopped for a while, but I still train, looking for those brief moments of perfection.

*For the uninitiated, in kendo, to score a hit, one must strike a valid target (head, hands, torso or throat), shout the name of the target and stamp one's foot at the same time. The concept is called "ki-ken-tai-ichi", which translates more or less as "Energy/Breath, Sword, Body as One". Tsuki is what to shout when going for the throat.