Life After X

For those who have read a few posts here, you may recall my interest in languages, both ancient and modern. I do not claim to be a polyglot in the slightest. I am decent with some languages, not so much with others. Some I speak and for other languages, I primarily focus on learning for reading comprehension. I came across a phrase recently which applies to my masochism for learning languages. I think it applies to any skill worth learning. “You’re not doing it wrong, you’re just at the part where most people quit.” Languages, whether spoken, musical, mathematical, etc, are incredibly difficult for nearly all of us. The feeling of success comes in waves. Whatever you are learning, if you love it, I hope you remember this phrase.

But motivation is not the focus of this post. Rather, my work with South Asian languages sparked what, for me, is a deep philosophical and psychological question. What do we prioritize in our lives? The subject of the sentence (ourselves)? The thing we are doing (the verb)? The thing we are doing the activity upon (the direct object)?

Disclaimer: I am not a linguist. I’ve had to learn quite a bit of linguistics to work with other languages. As always, take what you want from this post, and leave the rest. Or take none at all. Either way, I hope you feel better off for having read it.

When we create most sentences, we use verbs that fall into two categories. Intransitive verbs (the action stays with us) and transitive verbs (the action of the verb gets transmitted to something, what we would usually call the direct object). The classic example you’ll see in English textbooks is “I threw the ball.” I = the subject (in the nominative case, though we don’t really have cases/case markers in English); threw = past tense of the verb “to throw”; and the ball, the thing the verb is acting upon. We sent an action into play and something received that action. Transitivity.

Just working with this simple sentence (note it is in the past tense, that will be important in a moment), we can focus on three things. I did something. That something is embodied by a verb. Phrased differently, the verb is imbued with an activity. Throwing. That activity was then passed onto something else, the ball. There’s almost a physics to it (pun aside, the ball has to do with energy). This isn’t an intransitive sentence such as “I slept.” That one is fairly straightforward. I did the action. But for transitive, we’re encountering a broader world. We’ve created a larger universe because we didn’t just throw. We threw some-thing. The thing is as deserving of attention as the subject is, in this case, “I.”

South Asian languages, again focusing only on the past tense, utilize a linguistic term called ergativity for transitive, past tense sentences. “I threw the ball,” has three components, namely the subject, the verb, and the noun with a definite article (the). Urdu, however, will add a fourth element and, for fun, give us a twist at the end with the verb. Urdu, like many other Indo-European languages, places the verb at the end of the sentence (see German, Farsi, etc.). Starting at the beginning, we’ll see I but then it is followed by an ergative marker, we can just use some placeholder variable, “X.” X tells the reader or the listener, “you’re about to encounter something transitive and it happened in the past.” X has no real grammatical content, in my opinion at least. It’s not conjugated and it always appears as just X, no modifications. It truly is a marker. We might consider it a stoplight or a gate, such metaphors will suffice. For me, having studied the language for so long, it says, “don’t pay much attention to me,” the real action is about to come.

Next we get to life after X, the content of the sentence. In the case of our simple sentence, we would see “the ball.” Urdu has no articles, so we would just see the word “ball.” Checking in on our list so far we have the subject, I, the ergative marker X, and ball. The last part as I alluded to is the verb. The twist, however, is that the verb isn’t conjugated to the subject (I). It’s conjugated to the noun, “ball.” In Urdu (as in most languages), nouns have genders. Fortunately, Urdu only has two, masculine and feminine. So, in keeping with our sentence, the verb will be conjugated in the singular (there is only one ball in this exercise), and the noun is feminine. Thus, the verb is conjugated to singular feminine whether or not “I” am a man or woman, one or many. We could have thrown the ball and the verb will still be singular feminine. The ball does not change and the verb is destined to follow its lead.

But for the English speaker/learner, this is very surprising. “I” threw the ball. I did the activity. I-ness and verb-ness go hand-in-hand. The ball is really just the intermediator between me and what I did. But this is not how South Asian languages “think.”

Note, I am not referring to how people think, only the language. I am not making a deterministic argument that languages reflect how people see the world (that may be the case, and I may believe that to some degree, but that’s not the point being made here). Rather, the point is, languages have their own logic. Recalling Wittgenstein, we may call them “games,” in the truest sense. There are pieces of the board, the words, and agreed upon rules. Deviation from the rules “sounds wrong.” Conforming to the rules “sounds right.” We may even say it makes one sound intelligent, and then we get into a whole other world of socio-political ramifications.

It is worth recalling both the early and later Wittgenstein, the philosopher of both the Tractatus and the Philosophical Investigations. In the former, Wittgenstein essentially contends philosophy is linguistically constrained, with the famous phrase: “Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent.” The Wittgenstein of the later years, with a remarkable level of humility and introspection, argued against his earlier work. The focus shifted from understanding the deep structure of language to saying the real point for philosophers is how the language is used. For Plato, there is a perfect Chair somewhere. For Wittgenstein, debating the metaphysics of chair-ness is to build a terminological prison. He later contends that we have words, we use them situationally, and we should study them within the logic of that context. Hence, Wittgenstein presents us with the notion of “language games.” We learn what a chair is through usage of the word chair, not by hypothesizing universal chair-ness in the Platonic realm. The same is true for consciousness, time, meaning, self, etc.

When we introspect, we try to understand why we did things. These “things,” however, are contextual. How we might have done them differently and what effects they had on us, on others, on our environment. What do we focus our attention on, however? Ourselves? The thing we did (the verb)? Or the thing that received the action (the ball)? Is one component more important than others? If so, why? What are we to make of “I helped someone,” or “I hurt someone,” or “someone helped me,” or “someone hurt me”? Subject, object, verb. Which one receives the marker? Which one gets the conjugation? If I said that X tells me when reading or hearing Urdu to kind of place less on what came before X and to focus on what comes after, I’ve made a choice. Someone [...], X, “ok now I’m going to hear what happened.” The sentence continues, I hear the verb at the end and I know the object it’s conjugating. But where do we, as people, when reflecting about ourselves, the world, and our place in it, position the X?

The sheer beauty of a sentence is that every word works in harmony with each other. Every component gets its due and the meaning is created by them all working in harmony. We see the same phenomenon in music and mathematics, for they are all languages. It's only when we read it, hear it, or think it, that we imbue certain parts of the sentence with different weights. One day, it might be "I" that gets the emphasis, the next day "he," and yet some other time "hurt" gets the heaviness.

As with most posts here, this article isn't about language though I hope you found that part interesting (and for any linguists reading this, yes we can discuss absolutive, perfective, etc. in another forum). Lacunae is about humanity and all the heaviness and hope that comes with it. We created language. We made it make sense to ourselves and it became recursive. Yet psychologically, we struggle to harmonize all the meaning we have embedded in our words. The reward, however, comes in the struggle. As with language learning, so with learning to live in harmony with our past. It takes practice. We aren't doing it wrong, we're just at the point where most people quit.

If we endeavor to make things right within ourselves and outside ourselves, we (the subject), the activity (the verb), and the thing we act upon (the object), all deserve their fair share of our being. As Wittgenstein underscored, language is a tool. We can use it to shroud ourselves in deeper mysteries. Or, I hope, we can use it to find some sense of liberation.