Moro Andrea - I speak, therefore I am: seventeen thoughts about language

I SPEAK, THEREFORE I AM

ANDREA MORO

Translated from the Italian by Ian Roberts

COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY PRESS NEW YORK

Break what break will! My mind abideth strong

To know the roots, how low soeer they be,

Which grew to Oedipus.

There is my lineage true, which none shall wrest

From me; who then am I to fear this quest?

Sophocles, Oedipus the King, ll. 1076ff.

CONTENTS

Choice, Then Order, Then Chance, Finally Only Light

As any photographer knows, it takes hundreds, even thousands, of tries just to get one shot thats right. Thats if everything goes well; sometimes, through dissatisfaction with a shot or an exposure that just cant capture that special moment, you just throw everything out. And then when the right photos have been chosen and put together in an album, you realize that the order in which theyre placed makes a difference: a group of people sitting around a table followed by an empty mountain road means something different from an empty mountain road followed by a group of people sitting around a table. Maybe we cant quite say what it is, but we know theres a difference. Also, sometimes the best photo is the one taken by accident: all those carefully prepared, carefully worked-out efforts that were supposed to be masterpieces get thrown out, while just that one, taken by chance, may happen to capture that particular light or fix on that particular movement that alone make us relive a whole story.

Choice, then order, then chance: making a good photo album is really like doing science, because doing science, or doing it well, involvesand has to involveall aspects of life. Science that tells us nothing about ourselves is useless, like a badly put-together photo album. And if we study language scientifically, it is impossible that we wont learn something about ourselves (unless we try not to), because language, like theorems and symphonies, exists only in us; outside of us, there are objects, motion, and light. Constellations and symphonies are there because we are there, looking and listening. And so it is for sentences; when we study sentences, we find ourselves, in a way, in the same situation as someone who studies light. We dont actually see light, we only see its effects on objects. We know it exists because it is partly reflected by the things it encounters, thereby making visible what would otherwise be invisible. In this way nothing, illuminated by another nothing, becomes, for us, something. Words and sentences work in the same way: they have no content of their own, but if they encounter someone who listens they become something. We are part of the data.

In the beginning it might seem obvious to find Him, but in fact it isnt. Because, unexpectedly, God the Creator is a God who listens. The paradox is that language, our distinguishing characteristic above all other creatures, is in the first book of the Old Testament a gift that confirms beyond any doubt our freedom and our creativity. The consequences of this are made clear. We read that God created us in His image, but no one has ever seen the face of God. So what does it mean to say that we are created in His image? This is where language comes in. Perhaps our resemblance to God can be perceived in realizing we are able to give names to things. That is, the Creator has made us in His image because He recognizes our creations; although they are made only of air and thought, they are nonetheless creations: names. And not just any names: these are the names we give to His other creations. In the Jewish tradition, the God who created Man is the same God who stops and listens to Man naming things.

This is a kind of embryonic linguisticsnames, not sentencesmaybe atomic linguistics, but linguistics nonetheless. This is because thinking of and giving a name are not trivial acts. Names, in fact, are not just conventional labels: except in a few exceptional cases, nothing tells is that a given sound is right for a given name. This is obvious if we compare different languages, but, even leaving sounds aside, names are not just freely given conventional labels. For example, look at your hand. You instinctively recognize a natural object that can be broken down into parts: palm, fingers, knuckles, nails; we also give special names to the different fingers, funny names, childish names, noble or scientific names. In every language there are names for the pieces of what we see as making up a hand. But there are no tattoos marking the borders of these pieces: the combination of the fingertip and the distal phalange of a finger is an object in the real world too. Also, it is a coherent object, in the sense that it is not made of discontinuous pieces, just like the ring finger in relation to the whole hand. The difference is that in the second case theres a special name for the object, and in the first case there isnt.

Fortunately, we dont feel a need to give names to all the combinations of pieces of the world; sometimes its convenient to invent names for certain things, but not for every possible combination of things. This is lucky, because the set of pieces of the world borders on uncountably infinite, and it would not be easy for a child to find themselves confronted with a percept of a wall made up of infinite subwalls, all of which have to be given a name. This would separate us forever from the city, because it would separate us from language, from what makes us human beings. What we need instead is a catalogue, capacious and partly elastic, but not infinite: in other words, a dictionary.

It would be good to catch our breath here, but we cant: talk of God and names leads inevitably to the endless tangle raised by the problem of His name. In the Jewish tradition, this is the