Linguistic

3
Mentalese
The year 1984 has come and gone, and it is losing its connotation
of the totalitarian nightmare of George Orwell's 1949 novel.
But relief may be premature. In an appendix to Nineteen Eighty-four,
Orwell wrote of an even more ominous date. In 1984, the infidel
Winston Smith had to be converted with imprisonment, degradation,
drugs, and torture; by 2050, there would be no Winston Smiths. For
in that year the ultimate technology for thought control would be in
place: the language Newspeak.
The purpose of Newspeak was not only to provide a medium of
expression for the world-view and mental habits proper to the
devotees of Ingsoc [English Socialism], but to make all other modes
of thought impossible. It was intended that when Newspeak had
been adopted once and for all and Oldspeak forgotten, a heretical
thought—that is, a thought diverging from the principles of Ingsoc—should be literally unthinkable, at least so far as thought is
dependent on words. Its vocabulary was so constructed as to give
exact and often very subtle expression to every meaning that a Party
member could properly wish to express, while excluding all other
meanings and also the possibility of arriving at them by indirect
methods. This was done partly by the invention of new words, but
chiefly by eliminating undesirable words and by stripping such
words as remained of unorthodox meanings, and so far as possible
of all secondary meanings whatever. To give a single example. The
word free still existed in Newspeak, but it could only be used in
5 5
5 6 THE LANGUAGE INSTINCT
such statements as "This dog is free from lice" or "This field is free
from weeds." It could not be used in its old sense of "politically
free" or "intellectually free," since political and intellectual freedom
no longer existed even as concepts, and were therefore of necessity
nameless.
.. . A person growing up with Newspeak as his sole language
would no more know that equal had once had the secondary meaning
of "politically equal," or that free had once meant "intellectually
free," than, for instance, a person who had never heard of chess
would be aware of the secondary meanings attaching to queen and
rook. There would be many crimes and errors which it would be
beyond his power to commit, simply because they were nameless
and therefore unimaginable.
But there is a straw of hope for human freedom: Orwell's caveat "at
least so far as thought is dependent on words." Note his equivocation:
at the end of the first paragraph, a concept is unimaginable and
therefore nameless; at the end of the second, a concept is nameless
and therefore unimaginable. Is thought dependent on words? Do
people literally think in English, Cherokee, Kivunjo, or, by 2050,
Newspeak? Or are our thoughts couched in some silent medium of
the brain—a language of thought, or "mentalese"—and merely
clothed in words whenever we need to communicate them to a listener?
No question could be more central to understanding the language
instinct.
In much of our social and political discourse, people simply assume
that words determine thoughts. Inspired by Orwell's essay "Politics
and the English Language," pundits accuse governments of manipulating
our minds with euphemisms like pacification (bombing), revenue
enhancement (taxes), and nonretention (firing). Philosophers
argue that since animals lack language, they must also lack consciousness—Wittgenstein wrote, "A dog could not have the thought 'perhaps
it will rain tomorrow' "—and therefore they do not possess the
rights of conscious beings. Some feminists blame sexist thinking on
sexist language, like the use of he to refer to a generic person. Inevitably,
reform movements have sprung up. Many replacements for he
have been suggested over the years, including E, hesh, po, tey, co, jhe,
ve, xe, he'er, thon, and na. The most extreme of these movements is
General Semantics, begun in 1933 by the engineer Count Alfred
Mentalese 5 7
Korzybski and popularized in long-time best-sellers by his disciples
Stuart Chase and S. I. Hayakawa. (This is the same Hayakawa who
later achieved notoriety as the protest-defying college president and
snoozing U.S. senator.) General Semantics lays the blame for human
folly on insidious "semantic damage" to thought perpetrated by the
structure of language. Keeping a forty-year-old in prison for a theft
he committed as a teenager assumes that the forty-year-old John and
the eighteen-year-old John are "the same person," a cruel logical
error that would be avoided if we referred to them not as John but
as John 1972 and John 1994 , respectively. The verb to be is a particular
source of illogic, because it identifies individuals with abstractions, as
in Mary is a woman, and licenses evasions of responsibility, like
Ronald Reagan's famous nonconfession Mistakes were made. One
faction seeks to eradicate the verb altogether.
And supposedly there is a scientific basis for these assumptions:
the famous Sapir-Whorf hypothesis of linguistic determinism, stating
that people's thoughts are determined by the categories made available
by their language, and its weaker version, linguistic relativity,
stating that differences among languages cause differences in the
thoughts of their speakers. People who remember little else from their
college education can rattle off the factoids: the languages that carve
the spectrum into color words at different places, the fundamentally
different Hopi concept of time, the dozens of Eskimo words for snow.
The implication is heavy: the foundational categories of reality are
not "in" the world but are imposed by one's culture (and hence can
be challenged, perhaps accounting for the perennial appeal of the
hypothesis to undergraduate sensibilities).
But it is wrong, all wrong. The idea that thought is the same thing
as language is an example of what can be called a conventional
absurdity: a statement that goes against all common sense but that
everyone believes because they dimly recall having heard it somewhere
and because it is so pregnant with implications. (The "fact"
that we use only five percent of our brains, that lemmings commit
mass suicide, that the Boy Scout Manual annually outsells all other
books, and that we can be coerced into buying by subliminal messages
are other examples.) Think about it. We have all had the experience
of uttering or writing a sentence, then stopping and realizing that it
wasn't exactly what we meant to say. To have that feeling, there has
to be a "what we meant to say" that is different from what we said.
5 8 THE LANGUAGE INSTINCT
Sometimes it is not easy to find any words that properly convey a
thought. When we hear or read, we usually remember the gist, not
the exact words, so there has to be such a thing as a gist that is not
the same as a bunch of words. And if thoughts depended on words,
how could a new word ever be coined? How could a child learn a
word to begin with? How could translation from one language to
another be possible?
The discussions that assume that language determines thought
carry on only by a collective suspension of disbelief. A dog, Bertrand
Russell noted, may not be able to tell you that its parents were honest
though poor, but can anyone really conclude from this that the dog
is unconscious? (Out cold? A zombie?) A graduate student once
argued with me using the following deliciously backwards logic: language
must affect thought, because if it didn't, we would have no
reason to fight sexist usage (apparently, the fact that it is offensive is
not reason enough). As for government euphemism, it is contemptible
not because it is a form of mind control but because it is a form of
lying. (Orwell was quite clear about this in his masterpiece essay.)
For example, "revenue enhancement" has a much broader meaning
than "taxes," and listeners naturally assume that if a politician had
meant "taxes" he would have said "taxes." Once a euphemism is
pointed out, people are not so brainwashed that they have trouble
understanding the deception. The National Council of Teachers of
English annually lampoons government doublespeak in a widely reproduced
press release, and calling attention to euphemism is a popular
form of humor, like the speech from the irate pet store customer
in Monty Python's Flying Circus:
This parrot is no more. It has ceased to be. It's expired and gone
to meet its maker. This is a late parrot. It's a stiff. Bereft of life, it
rests in peace. If you hadn't nailed it to the perch, it would be
pushing up the daisies. It's rung down the curtain and joined the
choir invisible. This is an ex-parrot.
As we shall see in this chapter, there is no scientific evidence that
languages dramatically shape their speakers' ways of thinking. But I
want to do more than review the unintentionally comical history of
attempts to prove that they do. The idea that language shapes thinking
seemed plausible when scientists were in the dark about how thinking
Mentalese 5 9
works or even how to study it. Now that cognitive scientists know
how to think about thinking, there is less of a temptation to equate
it with language just because words are more palpable than thoughts.
By understanding why linguistic determinism is wrong, we will be in
a better position to understand how language itself works when we
turn to it in the next chapters.
The linguistic determinism hypothesis is closely linked to the names
Edward Sapir and Benjamin Lee Whorf. Sapir, a brilliant linguist,
was a student of the anthropologist Franz Boas. Boas and his students
(who also include Ruth Benedict and Margaret Mead) were important
intellectual figures in this century, because they argued that nonindustrial
peoples were not primitive savages but had systems of language,
knowledge, and culture as complex and valid in their world view as
our own. In his study of Native American languages Sapir noted that
speakers of different languages have to pay attention to different
aspects of reality simply to put words together into grammatical
sentences. For example, when English speakers decide whether or
not to put -ed onto the end of a verb, they must pay attention to
tense, the relative time of occurrence of the event they are referring
to and the moment of speaking. Wintu speakers need not bother with
tense, but when they decide which suffix to put on their verbs, they
must pay attention to whether the knowledge they are conveying was
learned through direct observation or by hearsay.
Sapir's interesting observation was soon taken much farther. Whorf
was an inspector for the Hartford Fire Insurance Company and an
amateur scholar of Native American languages, which led him to take
courses from Sapir at Yale. In a much-quoted passage, he wrote:
We dissect nature along lines laid down by our native languages.
The categories and types that we isolate from the world of phenomena
we do not find there because they stare every observer in the
face; on the contrary, the world is presented in a kaleidoscopic flux
of impressions which has to be organized by our minds—and this
means largely by the linguistic systems in our minds. We cut nature
up, organize it into concepts, and ascribe significances as we do,
largely because we are parties to an agreement to organize it in this
way—an agreement that holds throughout our speech community
6 0 THE LANGUAGE INSTINCT
and is codified in the patterns of our language. The agreement is,
of course, an implicit and unstated one, but its terms are absolutely
obligatory; we cannot talk at all except by subscribing to the organization
and classification of data which the agreement decrees.
What led Whorf to this radical position? He wrote that the idea
first occurred to him in his work as a fire prevention engineer when
he was struck by how language led workers to misconstrue dangerous
situations. For example, one worker caused a serious explosion by
tossing a cigarette into an "empty" drum that in fact was full of
gasoline vapor. Another lit a blowtorch near a "pool of water" that
was really a basin of decomposing tannery waste, which, far from
being "watery," was releasing inflammable gases. Whorf's studies of
American languages strengthened his conviction. For example, in
Apache, It is a dripping spring must be expressed "As water, or
springs, whiteness moves downward." "How utterly unlike our way
of thinking!" he wrote.
But the more you examine Whorf's arguments, the less sense they
make. Take the story about the worker and the "empty" drum. The
seeds of disaster supposedly lay in the semantics of empty, which,
Whorf claimed, means both "without its usual contents" and "null
and void, empty, inert." The hapless worker, his conception of reality
molded by his linguistic categories, did not distinguish between the
"drained" and "inert" senses, hence, flick . . . boom! But wait. Gasoline
vapor is invisible. A drum with nothing but vapor in it looks just
like a drum with nothing in it at all. Surely this walking catastrophe
was fooled by his eyes, not by the English language.
The example of whiteness moving downward is supposed to show
that the Apache mind does not cut up events into distinct objects and
actions. Whorf presented many such examples from Native American
languages. The Apache equivalent of The boat is grounded on the
beach is "It is on the beach pointwise as an event of canoe motion."
He invites people to a feast becomes "He, or somebody, goes for
eaters of cooked food." He cleans a gun with a ramrod is translated
as "He directs a hollow moving dry spot by movement of tool." All
this, to be sure, is utterly unlike our way of talking. But do we know
that it is utterly unlike our way of thinking?
As soon as Whorf's articles appeared, the psycholinguists Eric
Lenneberg and Roger Brown pointed out two non sequiturs in his
Mentalese 6 1
argument. First, Whorf did not actually study any Apaches; it is not
clear that he ever met one. His assertions about Apache psychology
are based entirely on Apache grammar—making his argument circular.
Apaches speak differently, so they must think differently. How
do we know that they think differently? Just listen to the way they
speak!
Second, Whorf rendered the sentences as clumsy, word-for-word
translations, designed to make the literal meanings seem as odd as
possible. But looking at the actual glosses that Whorf provided, I
could, with equal grammatical justification, render the first sentence
as the mundane "Clear stuff—water—is falling." Turning the tables,
I could take the English sentence "He walks" and render it "As
solitary masculinity, leggedness proceeds." Brown illustrates how
strange the German mind must be, according to Whorf's logic, by
reproducing Mark Twain's own translation of a speech he delivered
in flawless German to the Vienna Press Club:
I am indeed the truest friend of the German language—and not
only now, but from long since—yes, before twenty years already. . . .
I would only some changes effect. I would only the language
method—the luxurious, elaborate construction compress, the eternal
parenthesis suppress, do away with, annihilate; the introduction
of more than thirteen subjects in one sentence forbid; the verb so
far to the front pull that one it without a telescope discover can.
With one word, my gentlemen, I would your beloved language
simplify so that, my gentlemen, when you her for prayer need, One
her yonder-up understands.
.. . I might gladly the separable verb also a little bit reform. I
might none do let what Schiller did: he has the whole history of the
Thirty Years' War between the two members of a separate verb inpushed.
That has even Germany itself aroused, and one has Schiller
the permission refused the History of the Hundred Years' War to
compose—God be it thanked! After all these reforms established
be will, will the German language the noblest and the prettiest on
the world be.
Among Whorf's "kaleidoscopic flux of impressions," color is surely
the most eye-catching. He noted that we see objects in different
hues, depending on the wavelengths of the light they reflect, but that
62 THE LANGUAGE INSTINCT
physicists tell us that wavelength is a continuous dimension with
nothing delineating red, yellow, green, blue, and so on. Languages
differ in their inventory of color words: Latin lacks generic "gray"
and "brown"; Navajo collapses blue and green into one word; Russian
has distinct words for dark blue and sky blue; Shona speakers use
one word for the yellower greens and the greener yellows, and a
different one for the bluer greens and the nonpurplish blues. You
can fill in the rest of the argument. It is language that puts the frets
in the spectrum; Julius Caesar would not know shale from Shinola.
But although physicists see no basis for color boundaries, physiologists
do. Eyes do not register wavelength the way a thermometer
registers temperature. They contain three kinds of cones, each with
a different pigment, and the cones are wired to neurons in a way
that makes the neurons respond best to red patches against a green
background or vice versa, blue against yellow, black against white.
No matter how influential language might be, it would seem preposterous
to a physiologist that it could reach down into the retina and
rewire the ganglion cells.
Indeed, humans the world over (and babies and monkeys, for that
matter) color their perceptual worlds using the same palette, and this
constrains the vocabularies they develop. Although languages may
disagree about the wrappers in the sixty-four crayon box—the burnt
umbers, the turquoises, the fuchsias—they agree much more on the
wrappers in the eight-crayon box—the fire-engine reds, grass greens,
lemon yellows. Speakers of different languages unanimously pick
these shades as the best examples of their color words, as long as the
language has a color word in that general part of the spectrum. And
where languages do differ in their color words, they differ predictably,
not according to the idiosyncratic tastes of some word-coiner. Languages
are organized a bit like the Crayola product line, the fancier
ones adding colors to the more basic ones. If a language has only two
color words, they are for black and white (usually encompassing dark
and light, respectively). If it has three, they are for black, white, and
red; if four, black, white, red, and either yellow or green. Five adds
in both yellow and green; six, blue; seven, brown; more than seven,
purple, pink, orange, or gray. But the clinching experiment was carried
out in the New Guinea highlands with the Grand Valley Dani,
a people speaking one of the black-and-white languages. The psychologist
Eleanor Rosch found that the Dani were quicker at learning a
Mentalese 6 3
new color category that was based on fire-engine red than a category
based on an off-red. The way we see colors determines how we learn
words for them, not vice versa.
The fundamentally different Hopi concept of time is one of the
more startling claims about how minds can vary. Whorf wrote that
the Hopi language contains "no words, grammatical forms, constructions,
or expressions that refer directly to what we call 'time,' or to
past, or future, or to enduring or lasting." He suggested, too, that
the Hopi had "no general notion or intuition of TIME as a smooth
flowing continuum in which everything in the universe proceeds at
an equal rate, out of a future, through a present, into a past." According
to Whorf, they did not conceptualize events as being like
points, or lengths of time like days as countable things. Rather, they
seemed to focus on change and process itself, and on psychological
distinctions between presently known, mythical, and conjecturally
distant. The Hopi also had little interest in "exact sequences, dating,
calendars, chronology."
What, then, are we to make of the following sentence translated
from Hopi?
Then indeed, the following day, quite early in the morning at the
hour when people pray to the sun, around that time then he woke
up the girl again.
Perhaps the Hopi are not as oblivious to time as Whorf made them
out to be. In his extensive study of the Hopi, the anthropologist
Ekkehart Malotki, who reported this sentence, also showed that Hopi
speech contains tense, metaphors for time, units of time (including
days, numbers of days, parts of the day, yesterday and tomorrow,
days of the week, weeks, months, lunar phases, seasons, and the year),
ways to quantify units of time, and words like "ancient," "quick,"
"long time," and "finished." Their culture keeps records with sophisticated
methods of dating, including a horizon-based sun calendar,
exact ceremonial day sequences, knotted calendar strings, notched
calendar sticks, and several devices for timekeeping using the principle
of the sundial. No one is really sure how Whorf came up with his
outlandish claims, but his limited, badly analyzed sample of Hopi
speech and his long-time leanings toward mysticism must have contributed.
6 4 THE LANGUAGE INSTINCT
Speaking of anthropological canards, no discussion of language
and thought would be complete without the Great Eskimo Vocabulary
Hoax. Contrary to popular belief, the Eskimos do not have more
words for snow than do speakers of English. They do not have four
hundred words for snow, as it has been claimed in print, or two
hundred, or one hundred, or forty-eight, or even nine. One dictionary
puts the figure at two. Counting generously, experts can come up
with about a dozen, but by such standards English would not be far
behind, with snow, sleet, slush, blizzard, avalanche, hail, hardpack,
powder, flurry, dusting, and a coinage of Boston's WBZ-TV meteorologist
Bruce Schwoegler, snizzling.
Where did the myth come from? Not from anyone who has actually
studied the Yupik and Inuit-Inupiaq families of polysynthetic languages
spoken from Siberia to Greenland. The anthropologist Laura
Martin has documented how the story grew like an urban legend,
exaggerated with each retelling. In 1911 Boas casually mentioned that
Eskimos used four unrelated word roots for snow. Whorf embellished
the count to seven and implied that there were more. His article
was widely reprinted, then cited in textbooks and popular books
on language, which led to successively inflated estimates in other
textbooks, articles, and newspaper columns of Amazing Facts.
The linguist Geoffrey Pullum, who popularized Martin's article in
his essay "The Great Eskimo Vocabulary Hoax," speculates about
why the story got so out of control: "The alleged lexical extravagance
of the Eskimos comports so well with the many other facets of their
polysynthetic perversity: rubbing noses; lending their wives to strangers;
eating raw seal blubber; throwing Grandma out to be eaten by
polar bears." It is an ironic twist. Linguistic relativity came out of the
Boas school, as part of a campaign to show that nonliterate cultures
were as complex and sophisticated as European ones. But the supposedly
mind-broadening anecdotes owe their appeal to a patronizing
willingness to treat other cultures' psychologies as weird and exotic
compared to our own. As Pullum notes,
Among the many depressing things about this credulous transmission
and elaboration of a false claim is that even if there were a large
number of roots for different snow types in some Arctic language,
this would not, objectively, be intellectually interesting; it would be a
most mundane and unremarkable fact. Horsebreeders have various
Mentalese 6 5
names for breeds, sizes, and ages of horses; botanists have names
for leaf shapes; interior decorators have names for shades of mauve;
printers have many different names for fonts (Carlson, Garamond,
Helvetica, Times Roman, and so on), naturally enough. . . . Would
anyone think of writing about printers the same kind of slop we
find written about Eskimos in bad linguistics textbooks? Take [the
following] random textbook . . ., with its earnest assertion "It is
quite obvious that in the culture of the Eskimos . . . snow is of
great enough importance to split up the conceptual sphere that
corresponds to one word and one thought in English into several
distinct classes . . ." Imagine reading: "It is quite obvious that in
the culture of printers . . . fonts are of great enough importance to
split up the conceptual sphere that corresponds to one word and
one thought among non-printers into several distinct classes . . ."
Utterly boring, even if true. Only the link to those legendary, promiscuous,
blubber-gnawing hunters of the ice-packs could permit
something this trite to be presented to us for contemplation.
If the anthropological anecdotes are bunk, what about controlled
studies? The thirty-five years of research from the psychology laboratory
is distinguished by how little it has shown. Most of the experiments
have tested banal "weak" versions of the Whorfian hypothesis,
namely that words can have some effect on memory or categorization.
Some of these experiments have actually worked, but that is hardly
surprising. In a typical experiment, subjects have to commit paint
chips to memory and are tested with a multiple-choice procedure. In
some of these studies, the subjects show slightly better memory for
colors that have readily available names in their language. But even
colors without names are remembered fairly well, so the experiment
does not show that the colors are remembered by verbal labels alone.
All it shows is that subjects remembered the chips in two forms, a
nonverbal visual image and a verbal label, presumably because two
kinds of memory, each one fallible, are better than one. In another
type of experiment subjects have to say which two out of three color
chips go together; they often put the ones together that have the same
name in their language. Again, no surprise. I can imagine the subjects
thinking to themselves, "Now how on earth does this guy expect me
to pick two chips to put together? He didn't give me any hints, and
they're all pretty similar. Well, I'd probably call those two 'green' and
6 6 THE LANGUAGE INSTINCT
that one 'blue,' and that seems as good a reason to put them together
as any." In these experiments, language is, technically speaking, influencing
a form of thought in some way, but so what? It is hardly
an example of incommensurable world views, or of concepts that are
nameless and therefore unimaginable, or of dissecting nature along
lines laid down by our native languages according to terms that are
absolutely obligatory.
The only really dramatic finding comes from the linguist and now
Swarthmore College president Alfred Bloom in his book The Linguistic
Shaping of Thought. English grammar, says Bloom, provides its
speakers with the subjunctive construction: If John were to go to the
hospital, he would meet Mary. The subjunctive is used to express
"counterfactual" situations, events that are known to be false but
entertained as hypotheticals. (Anyone familiar with Yiddish knows
a better example, the ultimate riposte to someone reasoning from
improbable premises: Az di bobe volt gehat beytsim volt zi geven
mayn zeyde, "If my grandmother had balls, she'd be my grandfather.")
Chinese, in contrast, lacks a subjunctive and any other simple grammatical
construction that directly expresses a counterfactual. The
thought must be expressed circuitously, something like "If John is
going to the hospital . . . but he is not going to the hospital . . . but
if he is going, he meets Mary."
Bloom wrote stories containing sequences of implications from
a counterfactual premise and gave them to Chinese and American
students. For example, one story said, in outline, "Bier was an eighteenth-century European philosopher. There was some contact between
the West arid China at that time, but very few works of Chinese
philosophy had been translated. Bier could not read Chinese, but if
he had been able to read Chinese, he would have discovered B; what
would have most influenced him would have been C; once influenced
by that Chinese perspective, Bier would then have done D," and so
on. The subjects were then asked to check off whether B, C, and D
actually occurred. The American students gave the correct answer,
no, ninety-eight percent of the time; the Chinese students gave the
correct answer only seven percent of the time! Bloom concluded
that the Chinese language renders its speakers unable to entertain
hypothetical false worlds without great mental effort. (As far as I
know, no one has tested the converse prediction on speakers of
Yiddish.)
Mentalese 6 7
The cognitive psychologists Terry Au, Yohtaro Takano, and Lisa
Liu were not exactly enchanted by these tales of the concreteness
of the Oriental mind. Each one identified serious flaws in Bloom's
experiments. One problem was that his stories were written in stilted
Chinese. Another was that some of the science stories turned out,
upon careful rereading, to be genuinely ambiguous. Chinese college
students tend to have more science training than American students,
and thus they were better at detecting the ambiguities that Bloom
himself missed. When these flaws were fixed, the differences vanished.
People can be forgiven for overrating language. Words make noise,
or sit on a page, for all to hear and see. Thoughts are trapped inside
the head of the thinker. To know what someone else is thinking, or
to talk to each other about the nature of thinking, we have to use—
what else, words! It is no wonder that many commentators have
trouble even conceiving of thought without words—or is it that they
just don't have the language to talk about it?
As a cognitive scientist I can afford to be smug about common
sense being true (thought is different from language) and linguistic
determinism being a conventional absurdity. For two sets of tools
now make it easier to think clearly about the whole problem. One is
a body of experimental studies that break the word barrier and assess
many kinds of nonverbal thought. The other is a theory of how
thinking might work that formulates the questions in a satisfyingly
precise way.
We have already seen an example of thinking without language:
Mr. Ford, the fully intelligent aphasic discussed in Chapter 2. (One
could, however, argue that his thinking abilities had been constructed
before his stroke on the scaffolding of the language he then possessed.)
We have also met deaf children who lack a language and
soon invent one. Even more pertinent are the deaf adults occasionally
discovered who lack any form of language whatsoever—no sign language,
no writing, no lip reading, no speech. In her recent book A
Man Without Words, Susan Schaller tells the story of Ildefonso, a
twenty-seven-year-old illegal immigrant from a small Mexican village
whom she met while working as a sign language interpreter in Los
Angeles. Ildefonso's animated eyes conveyed an unmistakable intelligence
and curiosity, and Schaller became his volunteer teacher and
6 8 THE LANGUAGE INSTINCT
companion. He soon showed her that he had a full grasp of number:
he learned to do addition on paper in three minutes and had little
trouble understanding the base-ten logic behind two-digit numbers.
In an epiphany reminiscent of the story of Helen Keller, Ildefonso
grasped the principle of naming when Schaller tried to teach him the
sign for "cat." A dam burst, and he demanded to be shown the signs
for all the objects he was familiar with. Soon he was able to convey
to Schaller parts of his life story: how as a child he had begged his
desperately poor parents to send him to school, the kinds of crops
he had picked in different states, his evasions of immigration authorities.
He led Schaller to other languageless adults in forgotten corners
of society. Despite their isolation from the verbal world, they displayed
many abstract forms of thinking, like rebuilding broken locks,
handling money, playing card games, and entertaining each other
with long pantomimed narratives.
Our knowledge of the mental life of Ildefonso and other languageless
adults must remain impressionistic for ethical reasons: when
they surface, the first priority is to teach them language, not to study
how they manage without it. But there are other languageless beings
who have been studied experimentally, and volumes have been written
about how they reason about space, time, objects, number, rate,
causality, and categories. Let me recount three ingenious examples.
One involves babies, who cannot think in words because they have
not yet learned any. One involves monkeys, who cannot think in
words because they are incapable of learning them. The third involves
human adults, who, whether or not they think in words, claim their
best thinking is done without them.
The developmental psychologist Karen Wynn has recently shown
that five-month-old babies can do a simple form of mental arithmetic.
She used a technique common in infant perception research. Show a
baby a bunch of objects long enough, and the baby gets bored and
looks away; change the scene, and if the baby notices the difference,
he or she will regain interest. The methodology has shown that babies
as young as five days old are sensitive to number. In one experiment,
an experimenter bores a baby with an object, then occludes the object
with an opaque screen. When the screen is removed, if the same
object is present, the babies look for a little while, then get bored
again. But if, through invisible subterfuge, two or three objects have
ended up there, the surprised babies stare longer.
Mentalese 6 9
In Wynn's experiment, the babies were shown a rubber Mickey
Mouse doll on a stage until their little eyes wandered. Then a screen
came up, and a prancing hand visibly reached out from behind a
curtain and placed a second Mickey Mouse behind the screen. When
the screen was removed, if there were two Mickey Mouses visible
(something the babies had never actually seen), the babies looked for
only a few moments. But if there was only one doll, the babies were
captivated—even though this was exactly the scene that had bored
them before the screen was put in place. Wynn also tested a second
group of babies, and this time, after the screen came up to obscure
a pair of dolls, a hand visibly reached behind the screen and removed
one of them. If the screen fell to reveal a single Mickey, the babies
looked briefly; if it revealed the old scene with two, the babies had
more trouble tearing themselves away. The babies must have been
keeping track of how many dolls were behind the screen, updating
their counts as dolls were added or subtracted. If the number inexplicably
departed from what they expected, they scrutinized the scene,
as if searching for some explanation.
Vervet monkeys live in stable groups of adult males and females
and their offspring. The primatologists Dorothy Cheney and Robert
Seyfarth have noticed that extended families form alliances like the
Montagues and Capulets. In a typical interaction they observed in
Kenya, one juvenile monkey wrestled another to the ground screaming.
Twenty minutes later the victim's sister approached the perpetrator's
sister and without provocation bit her on the tail. For the
retaliator to have identified the proper target, she would have had to
solve the following analogy problem: A (victim) is to B (myself) as C
(perpetrator) is to X, using the correct relationship "sister of (or
perhaps merely "relative of ; there were not enough vervets in the
park for Cheney and Seyfarth to tell).
But do monkeys really know how their groupmates are related to
each other, and, more impressively, do they realize that different pairs
of individuals like brothers and sisters can be related in the same
way? Cheney and Seyfarth hid a loudspeaker behind a bush and
played tapes of a two-year-old monkey screaming. The females in the
area reacted by looking at the mother of the infant who had been
recorded—showing that they not only recognized the infant by its
scream but recalled who its mother was. Similar abilities have been
shown in the longtailed macaques that Verena Dasser coaxed into a
7 0 THE LANGUAGE INSTINCT
laboratory adjoining a large outdoor enclosure. Three slides were
projected: a mother at the center, one of her offspring on one side,
and an unrelated juvenile of the same age and sex on the other. Each
screen had a button under it. After the monkey had been trained to
press a button under the offspring slide, it was tested on pictures of
other mothers in the group, each one flanked by a picture of that
mother's offspring and a picture of another juvenile. More than ninety
percent of the time the monkey picked the offspring. In another test,
the monkey was shown two slides, each showing a pair of monkeys,
and was trained to press a button beneath the slide showing a particular
mother and her juvenile daughter. When presented with slides of
new monkeys in the group, the subject monkey always picked the
mother-and-offspring pair, whether the offspring was male, female,
infant, juvenile, or adult. Moreover, the monkeys appeared to be
relying not only on physical resemblance between a given pair of
monkeys, or on the sheer number of hours they had previously spent
together, as the basis for recognizing they were kin, but on something
more subtle in the history of their interaction. Cheney and Seyfarth,
who work hard at keeping track of who is related to whom in what
way in the groups of animals they study, note that monkeys would
make excellent primatologists.
Many creative people insist that in their most inspired moments
they think not in words but in mental images. Samuel Taylor Coleridge
wrote that visual images of scenes and words once appeared
involuntarily before him in a dreamlike state (perhaps opium-induced).
He managed to copy the first forty lines onto paper, resulting
in the poem we know as "Kubla Khan," before a knock on the door
shattered the images and obliterated forever what would have been
the rest of the poem. Many contemporary novelists, like Joan Didion,
report that their acts of creation begin not with any notion of a
character or a plot but with vivid mental pictures that dictate their
choice of words. The modern sculptor James Surls plans his projects
lying on a couch listening to music; he manipulates the sculptures in
his mind's eye, he says, putting an arm on, taking an arm off, watching
the images roll and tumble.
Physical scientists are even more adamant that their thinking is
geometrical, not verbal. Michael Faraday, the originator of our modern
conception of electric and magnetic fields, had no training in
Mentalese 7 1
mathematics but arrived at his insights by visualizing lines of force as
narrow tubes curving through space. James Clerk Maxwell formalized
the concepts of electromagnetic fields in a set of mathematical equations
and is considered the prime example of an abstract theoretician,
but he set down the equations only after mentally playing with elaborate
imaginary models of sheets and fluids. Nikola Tesla's idea for the
electrical motor and generator, Friedrich Kekule's discovery of the
benzene ring that kicked off modern organic chemistry, Ernest Lawrence's
conception of the cyclotron, James Watson and Francis
Crick's discovery of the DNA double helix—all came to them in
images. The most famous self-described visual thinker is Albert Einstein,
who arrived at some of his insights by imagining himself riding
a beam of light and looking back at a clock, or dropping a coin while
standing in a plummeting elevator. He wrote:
The psychical entities which seem to serve as elements in thought
are certain signs and more or less clear images which can be "voluntarily"
reproduced and combined. . . . This combinatory play seems
to be the essential feature in productive thought—before there is
any connection with logical construction in words or other kinds of
signs which can be communicated to others. The above-mentioned
elements are, in my case, of visual and some muscular type. Conventional
words or other signs have to be sought for laboriously only in
a secondary state, when the mentioned associative play is sufficiently
established and can be reproduced at will.
Another creative scientist, the cognitive psychologist Roger Shepard,
had his own moment of sudden visual inspiration, and it led to
a classic laboratory demonstration of mental imagery in mere mortals.
Early one morning, suspended between sleep and awakening in a
state of lucid consciousness, Shepard experienced "a spontaneous
kinetic image of three-dimensional structures majestically turning in
space." Within moments and before fully awakening, Shepard had a
clear idea for the design of an experiment. A simple variant of his
idea was later carried out with his then-student Lynn Cooper. Cooper
and Shepard flashed thousands of slides, each showing a single letter
of the alphabet, to their long-suffering student volunteers. Sometimes
7 2 THE LANGUAGE INSTINCT
the letter was upright, but sometimes it was tilted or mirror-reversed
or both. As an example, here are the sixteen versions of the letter F:
The subjects were asked to press one button if the letter was normal
(that is, like one of the letters in the top row of the diagram), another
if it was a mirror image (like one of the letters in the bottom row).
To do the task, the subjects had to compare the letter in the slide
against some memory record of what the normal version of the letter
looks like right-side up. Obviously, the right-side-up slide (0 degrees)
is the quickest, because it matches the letter in memory exactly, but
for the other orientations, some mental transformation to the upright
is necessary first. Many subjects reported that they, like the famous
sculptors and scientists, "mentally rotated" an image of the letter to
the upright. By looking at the reaction times, Shepard and Cooper
showed that this introspection was accurate. The upright letters
were fastest, followed by the 45 degree letters, the 90 degree letters,
and the 135 degree letters, with the 180 degree (upside-down)
letters the slowest. In other words, the farther the subjects had to
mentally rotate the letter, the longer they took. From the data, Cooper
and Shepard estimated that letters revolve in the mind at a rate of
56 RPM.
Note that if the subjects had been manipulating something resembling
verbal descriptions of the letters, such as "an upright spine with
one horizontal segment that extends rightwards from the top and
another horizontal segment that extends rightwards from the middle,"
the results would have been very different. Among all the topsyturvy
letters, the upside-down versions (180 degrees) should be fastest:
one simply switches all the "top"s to "bottom"s and vice versa,
and the "left"s to "right"s and vice versa, and one has a new description
of the shape as it would appear right-side up, suitable for matching
against memory. Sideways letters (90 degrees) should be slower,
0 +45 +90 +135 180 -135 -90 -45
Mentalese 7 3
because "top" gets changed either to "right" or to "left," depending
on whether it lies clockwise (+ 90 degrees) or counterclockwise (— 90
degrees) from the upright. Diagonal letters (45 and 135 degrees)
should be slowest, because every word in the description has to be
replaced: "top" has to be replaced with either "top right" or "top
left," and so on. So the order of difficulty should be 0, 180, 90, 45,
135, not the majestic rotation of 0, 45, 90, 135, 180 that Cooper and
Shepard saw in the data. Many other experiments have corroborated
the idea that visual thinking uses not language but a mental graphics
system, with operations that rotate, scan, zoom, pan, displace, and
fill in patterns of contours.
What sense, then, can we make of the suggestion that images,
numbers, kinship relations, or logic can be represented in the brain
without being couched in words? In the first half of this century,
philosophers had an answer: none. Reifying thoughts as things in
the head was a logical error, they said. A picture or family tree or
number in the head would require a little man, a homunculus, to
look at it. And what would be inside his head—even smaller pictures,
with an even smaller man looking at them? But the argument
was unsound. It took Alan Turing, the brilliant British mathematician
and philosopher, to make the idea of a mental representation scientifically
respectable. Turing described a hypothetical machine that
could be said to engage in reasoning. In fact this simple device, named
a Turing Machine in his honor, is powerful enough to solve any
problem that any computer, past, present, or future, can solve. And
it clearly uses an internal symbolic representation—a kind of mentalese—without requiring a little man or any occult processes. By
looking at how a Turing machine works, we can get a grasp of what
it would mean for a human mind to think in mentalese as opposed
to English.
In essence, to reason is to deduce new pieces of knowledge from
old ones. A simple example is the old chestnut from introductory
logic: if you know that Socrates is a man and that all men are mortal,
you can figure out that Socrates is mortal. But how could a hunk
of matter like a brain accomplish this feat? The first key idea is a
representation: a physical object whose parts and arrangement corre
7 4 THE LANGUAGE INSTINCT
spond piece for piece to some set of ideas or facts. For example, the
pattern of ink on this page
Socrates isa man
is a representation of the idea that Socrates is a man. The shape of
one group of ink marks, Socrates, is a symbol that stands for the
concept of Socrates. The shape of another set of ink marks, isa,
stands for the concept of being an instance of, and the shape of the
third, man, stands for the concept of man. Now, it is crucial to keep
one thing in mind. I have put these ink marks in the shape of English
words as a courtesy to you, the reader, so that you can keep them
straight as we work through the example. But all that really matters
is that they have different shapes. I could have used a star of David,
a smiley face, and the Mercedes-Benz logo, as long as I used them
consistently.
Similarly, the fact that the Socrates ink marks are to the left of
the isa ink marks on the page, and the man ink marks are to the
right, stands for the idea that Socrates is a man. If I change any
part of the representation, like replacing isa with isasonofa, or
flipping the positions of Socrates and man, we would have a
representation of a different idea. Again, the left-to-right English
order is just a mnemonic device for your convenience. I could have
done it right-to-left or up-and-down, as long as I used that order
consistently.
Keeping these conventions in mind, now imagine that the page has
a second set of ink marks, representing the proposition that every
man is mortal:
Mentalese 7 5
Socrates isa man
Every man ismortal
To get reasoning to happen, we now need a processor. A processor
is not a little man (so one needn't worry about an infinite regress of
homunculi inside homunculi) but something much stupider: a gadget
with a fixed number of reflexes. A processor can react to different
pieces of a representation and do something in response, including
altering the representation or making new ones. For example, imagine
a machine that can move around on a printed page. It has a cutout
in the shape of the letter sequence isa, and a light sensor that can
tell when the cutout is superimposed on a set of ink marks in the
exact shape of the cutout. The sensor is hooked up to a little pocket
copier, which can duplicate any set of ink marks, either by printing
identical ink marks somewhere else on the page or by burning them
into a new cutout.
Now imagine that this sensor-copier-creeper machine is wired up
with four reflexes. First, it rolls down the page, and whenever it
detects some isa ink marks, it moves to the left, and copies the ink
marks it finds there onto the bottom left corner of the page. Let loose
on our page, it would create the following:
Socrates isa man
Every man ismortal
Socrates
7 6 THE LANGUAGE INSTINCT
Its second reflex, also in response to finding an isa , is to get itself
to the right of that i s a and copy any ink marks it finds there into
the holes of a new cutout. In our case, this forces the processor to
make a cutout in the shape of man. Its third reflex is to scan down
the page checking for ink marks shaped like Every, and if it finds
some, seeing if the ink marks to the right align with its new cutout.
In our example, it finds one: the man in the middle of the second
line. Its fourth reflex, upon finding such a match, is to move to the
right and copy the ink marks it finds there onto the bottom center of
the page. In our example, those are the ink marks ismortal . If you
are following me, you'll see that our page now looks like this:
Socrates isa man
Every man ismortal
Socrates ismortal
A primitive kind of reasoning has taken place. Crucially, although
the gadget and the page it sits on collectively display a kind of intelligence,
there is nothing in either of them that is itself intelligent.
Gadget and page are just a bunch of ink marks, cutouts, photocells,
lasers, and wires. What makes the whole device smart is the exact
correspondence between the logician's rule "If X is a Y and all Y's
are Z, then X is Z" and the way the device scans, moves, and prints.
Logically speaking, "X is a Y" means that what is true of Y is also
true of X, and mechanically speaking, X isa Y causes what is printed
next to the Y to be also printed next to the X. The machine, blindly
following the laws of physics, just responds to the shape of the ink
marks isa (without understanding what it means to us) and copies
other ink marks in a way that ends up mimicking the operation of
the logical rule. What makes it "intelligent" is that the sequence of
sensing and moving and copying results in its printing a representation
of a conclusion that is true if and only if the page contains representa
Mentalese 7 7
tions of premises that are true. If one gives the device as much paper
as it needs, Turing showed, the machine can do anything that any
computer can do—and perhaps, he conjectured, anything that any
physically embodied mind can do.
Now, this example uses ink marks on paper as its representation
and a copying-creeping-sensing machine as its processor. But the
representation can be in any physical medium at all, as long as the
patterns are used consistently. In the brain, there might be three
groups of neurons, one used to represent the individual that the
proposition is about (Socrates, Aristotle, Rod Stewart, and so on),
one to represent the logical relationship in the proposition (is a, is
not, is like, and so on), and one to represent the class or type that
the individual is being categorized as (men, dogs, chickens, and so
on). Each concept would correspond to the firing of a particular
neuron; for example, in the first group of neurons, the fifth neuron
might fire to represent Socrates and the seventeenth might fire to
represent Aristotle; in the third group, the eighth neuron might fire
to represent men, the twelfth neuron might fire to represent dogs.
The processor might be a network of other neurons feeding into these
groups, connected together in such a way that it reproduces the firing
pattern in one group of neurons in some other group (for example,
if the eighth neuron is firing in group 3, the processor network would
turn on the eighth neuron in some fourth group, elsewhere in the
brain). Or the whole thing could be done in silicon chips. But in all
three cases the principles are the same. The way the elements in the
processor are wired up would cause them to sense and copy pieces
of a representation, and to produce new representations, in a way
that mimics the rules of reasoning. With many thousands of representations
and a set of somewhat more sophisticated processors (perhaps
different kinds of representations and processors for different kinds
of thinking), you might have a genuinely intelligent brain or computer.
Add an eye that can detect certain contours in the world and turn on
representations that symbolize them, and muscles that can act on the
world whenever certain representations symbolizing goals are turned
on, and you have a behaving organism (or add a TV camera and set
of levers and wheels, and you have a robot).
This, in a nutshell, is the theory of thinking called "the physical
symbol system hypothesis" or the "computational" or "representa
7 8 THE LANGUAGE INSTINCT
tional" theory of mind. It is as fundamental to cognitive science as the
cell doctrine is to biology and plate tectonics is to geology. Cognitive
psychologists and neuroscientists are trying to figure out what kinds
of representations and processors the brain has. But there are ground
rules that must be followed at all times: no little men inside, and no
peeking. The representations that one posits in the mind have to be
arrangements of symbols, and the processor has to be a device with
a fixed set of reflexes, period. The combination, acting all by itself,
has to produce the intelligent conclusions. The theorist is forbidden
to peer inside and "read" the symbols, "make sense" of them, and
poke around to nudge the device in smart directions like some deus
ex machina.
Now we are in a position to pose the Whorfian question in a precise
way. Remember that a representation does not have to look like
English or any other language; it just has to use symbols to represent
concepts, and arrangements of symbols to represent the logical relations
among them, according to some consistent scheme. But though
internal representations in an English speaker's mind don't have to
look like English, they could, in principle, look like English—or
like whatever language the person happens to speak. So here is the
question: Do they in fact? For example, if we know that Socrates is
a man, is it because we have neural patterns that correspond one-toone
to the English words Socrates, is, a, and man, and groups of
neurons in the brain that correspond to the subject of an English
sentence, the verb, and the object, laid out in that order? Or do we
use some other code for representing concepts and their relations in
our heads, a language of thought or mentalese that is not the same
as any of the world's languages? We can answer this question by
seeing whether English sentences embody the information that a
processor would need to perform valid sequences of reasoning—
without requiring any fully intelligent homunculus inside doing the
"understanding."
The answer is a clear no. English (or any other language people
speak) is hopelessly unsuited to serve as our internal medium of
computation. Consider some of the problems.
The first is ambiguity. These headlines actually appeared in newspapers:
Mentalese 7 9
Child's Stool Great for Use in Garden
Stud Tires Out
Stiff Opposition Expected to Casketless Funeral Plan
Drunk Gets Nine Months in Violin Case
Iraqi Head Seeks Arms
Queen Mary Having Bottom Scraped
Columnist Gets Urologist in Trouble with His Peers
Each headline contains a word that is ambiguous. But surely the
thought underlying the word is not ambiguous; the writers of the
headlines surely knew which of the two senses of the words stool,
stud, and stiff they themselves had in mind. And if there can be two
thoughts corresponding to one word, thoughts can't be words.
The second problem with English is its lack of logical explicitness.
Consider the following example, devised by the computer scientist
Drew McDermott:
Ralph is an elephant.
Elephants live in Africa.
Elephants have tusks.
Our inference-making device, with some minor modifications to handle
the English grammar of the sentences, would deduce "Ralph lives
in Africa" and "Ralph has tusks." This sounds fine but isn't. Intelligent
you, the reader, knows that the Africa that Ralph lives in is the
same Africa that all the other elephants live in, but that Ralph's tusks
are his own. But the symbol-copier-creeper-sensor that is supposed
to be a model of you doesn't know that, because the distinction is
nowhere to be found in any of the statements. If you object that this
is just common sense, you would be right—but it's common sense
that we're trying to account for, and English sentences do not embody
the information that a processor needs to carry out common sense.
A third problem is called "co-reference." Say you start talking
about an individual by referring to him as the tall blond man with
one black shoe. The second time you refer to him in the conversation
you are likely to call him the man; the third time, just him. But the
three expressions do not refer to three people or even to three ways
of thinking about a single person; the second and third are just ways
8 0 THE LANGUAGE INSTINCT
of saving breath. Something in the brain must treat them as the same
thing; English isn't doing it.
A fourth, related problem comes from those aspects of language
that can only be interpreted in the context of a conversation or text—
what linguists call "deixis." Consider articles like a and the. What is
the difference between killed a policeman and killed the policeman?
Only that in the second sentence, it is assumed that some specific
policeman was mentioned earlier or is salient in the context. Thus in
isolation the two phrases are synonymous, but in the following contexts
(the first from an actual newspaper article) their meanings are
completely different:
A policeman's 14-year-old son, apparently enraged after
being disciplined for a bad grade, opened fire from his
house, killing a policeman and wounding three people
before he was shot dead.
A policeman's 14-year-old son, apparently enraged after
being disciplined for a bad grade, opened fire from his
house, killing the policeman and wounding three people
before he was shot dead.
Outside of a particular conversation or text, then, the words a and
the are quite meaningless. They have no place in one's permanent
mental database. Other conversation-specific words like here, there,
this, that, now, then, I, me, my, her, we, and you pose the same
problems, as the following old joke illustrates:
First guy: I didn't sleep with my wife before we were married, did
you?
Second guy: I don't know. What was her maiden name?
A fifth problem is synonymy. The sentences
Sam sprayed paint onto the wall.
Sam sprayed the wall with paint.
Paint was sprayed onto the wall by Sam.
The wall was sprayed with paint by Sam.
Mentalese 8 1
refer to the same event and therefore license many of the same inferences.
For example, in all four cases, one may conclude that the wall
has paint on it. But they are four distinct arrangements of words. You
know that they mean the same thing, but no simple processor, crawling
over them as marks, would know that. Something else that is not
one of those arrangements of words must be representing the single
event that you know is common to all four. For example, the event
might be represented as something like
(Sam spray paint i ) cause (paint i go to (on wall))
—which, assuming we don't take the English words seriously, is not
too far from one of the leading proposals about what mentalese looks
like.
These examples (and there are many more) illustrate a single important
point. The representations underlying thinking, on the one
hand, and the sentences in a language, on the other, are in many ways
at cross-purposes. Any particular thought in our head embraces a
vast amount of information. But when it comes to communicating a
thought to someone else, attention spans are short and mouths are
slow. To get information into a listener's head in a reasonable amount
of time, a speaker can encode only a fraction of the message into
words and must count on the listener to fill in the rest. But inside a
single bead, the demands are different. Air time is not a limited
resource: different parts of the brain are connected to one another
directly with thick cables that can transfer huge amounts of information
quickly. Nothing can be left to the imagination, though, because
the internal representations are the imagination.
We end up with the following picture. People do not think in
English or Chinese or Apache; they think in a language of thought.
This language of thought probably looks a bit like all these languages;
presumably it has symbols for concepts, and arrangements of symbols
that correspond to who did what to whom, as in the paint-spraying
representation shown above. But compared with any given language,
mentalese must be richer in some ways and simpler in others. It
must be richer, for example, in that several concept symbols must
correspond to a given English word like stool or stud. There must
be extra paraphernalia that differentiate logically distinct kinds of
concepts, like Ralph's tusks versus tusks in general, and that link
8 2 THE LANGUAGE INSTINCT
different symbols that refer to the same thing, like the tall blond man
with one black shoe and the man. On the other hand, mentalese must
be simpler than spoken languages; conversation-specific words and
constructions (like a and the) are absent, and information about
pronouncing words, or even ordering them, is unnecessary. Now, it
could be that English speakers think in some kind of simplified and
annotated quasi-English, with the design I have just described, and
that Apache speakers think in a simplified and annotated quasi-
Apache. But to get these languages of thought to subserve reasoning
properly, they would have to look much more like each other than
either one does to its spoken counterpart, and it is likely that they
are the same: a universal mentalese.
Knowing a language, then, is knowing how to translate mentalese
into strings of words and vice versa. People without a language would
still have mentalese, and babies and many nonhuman animals presumably
have simpler dialects. Indeed, if babies did not have a mentalese
to translate to and from English, it is not clear how learning English
could take place, or even what learning English would mean.
So where does all this leave Newspeak? Here are my predictions
for the year 2050. First, since mental life goes on independently of
particular languages, concepts of freedom and equality will be thinkable
even if they are nameless. Second, since there are far more
concepts than there are words, and listeners must always charitably
fill in what the speaker leaves unsaid, existing words will quickly gain
new senses, perhaps even regain their original senses. Third, since
children are not content to reproduce any old input from adults but
create a complex grammar that can go beyond it, they would creolize
Newspeak into a natural language, possibly in a single generation.
The twenty-first-century toddler may be Winston Smith's revenge.