Guy Deutscher - Through the Language Glass, Why the World Looks Different in Other Languages

Finally, there is one area of language whose relation to the complexity of society may after all correspond to the considered opinion of the man in the street: this is the complexity of sentences and, in particular, the reliance on subordinate clauses. Subordination is a syntactic process that is often touted (by syntacticians, at least) as the jewel in the crown of language, and the best example for the ingenuity of its design: the ability to subsume a whole clause within another. With subordination, we can produce expressions of increasing complexity that nevertheless remain coherent and comprehensible:

I must have told you about that seal

I must have told you about that seal [which was eyeing a fish]

I must have told you about that seal [which was eyeing a fish [that kept jumping in and out of the icy water] ]

And there is no need to stop there, because in theory the mechanisms of subordination allow the sentence to go on and on for as long as there is breath to spare:

I must have told you about that quarrelsome seal [which was eyeing a disenchanted but rather attractive fish [that kept jumping in and out of the icy water [without paying the least attention to the heated debate [being conducted by a phlegmatic walrus and two young oysters [who had recently been tipped off by a whale with connections in high places [that the government was about to introduce speed limits on swimming in the reef area [due to the overcrowding [caused by the recent influx of new tuna immigrants from the Indian Ocean [where temperatures rose so much last year [that…]]]]]]]]]]

Subordination makes it possible to convey elaborate information in a compact way, by weaving different assertions on multiple levels into one intricate whole while keeping each of these levels under control. The paragraph above, for instance, has just one simple sentence at its primary level: “I must have already told you about that seal.” But from there downward, more and more information is interlaced using different types of subordinate clause.

There are no reliable reports about any language that lacks subordination altogether. [5]But although all known languages use some subordination, languages vary greatly in the range of subordinate clauses they have at their disposal and in the extent to which they rely on them.

For instance, if you have nothing better to do with your time than pore over ancient texts, you will soon notice that the narrative style of ancient languages such as Hittite, Akkadian, or biblical Hebrew often seems soporifically repetitive. The reason is that the mechanisms of subordination were less developed in these languages, so the coherence of their narrative relied to a much greater extent on a simple type of “and… and…” concatenation, in which the clauses merely followed the temporal order of events. Here, for instance, is a short Hittite text, a report by King Murshili II, who reigned in the fourteenth century BC from his imperial capital of Hattusha, in what is today central Turkey. Murshili is describing in dramatic tones how he came to be afflicted by a severe illness that impaired his ability to speak (a stroke?). But to modern ears the vivid substance of the report contrasts starkly with the monotonous staccato of the style:

This is what Murshili, the Great King, said:

Kunnuwa nanna un I drove (in a chariot) to Kunnu

nu arši arši udaš and a thunderstorm came

namma Tar unnaš atuga tet iškit then the Storm-God kept thundering terribly

nu n un and I feared

nu-mu-kan memiaš išši anda tepawešta and the speech in my mouth became small

nu-mu-kan memiaš tepu kuitki šar iyattat and the speech came up a little bit

nu-kan aši memian ar apat paškuw nun and I forgot this matter completely

ma an-ma u r wittuš appanda p ir but afterwards the years came and went

nu-mu wit aši memiaš teš aniškiuw n tiyat and this matter came to appear repeatedly in my dreams

nu-mu-kan zaz ia anda keššar šiunaš araš and God’s hand seized me in my dreams

aišš-a-mu-kan tapuša pait then my mouth went sideways

nu … and…

Today, we would tend to use various subordinate clauses and thus would not need to follow the order of events so punctiliously. For example, we might say: “There was once a terrible thunderstorm when I was driving to Kunnu. I was so terrified of the Storm-God’s thundering that I lost my speech, and my voice came up only a little. For a while, I forgot about the matter completely, but as the years went by, this episode began to appear in my dreams, and while dreaming, I was struck by God’s hand and my mouth would go sideways.”

Here is another example, this time from Akkadian, the language of the Babylonians and Assyrians of ancient Mesopotamia. This document, written sometime before 2000 BC, reports the result of a legal proceeding. We are told that a certain Ubarum proved before the inspectors that he had told a Mr. Iribum to take the field of Kuli, and that he (Ubarum) didn’t know that Iribum, on his own initiative, had instead taken the field of someone else, Bazi. But while this is the gist of what the document says, the Akkadian text doesn’t put it quite like that. What it actually says is:

ana Iribum Ubarum eqel Kuli š lu’am iqbi Ubarum told Iribum to take Kuli’s field

š libbiššuma he (Iribum) on his own initiative

eqel Bazi ušt li took the field of Bazi

Ubarum ula de Ubarum didn’t know

mahar laputtî uk nšu he proved (this against) him in front of the inspectors

The difference between the Akkadian formulation and the way we would naturally describe the situation in English lies mainly in our pervasive use of constructions such as “he didn’t know that […]” or “he proved that […].” This particular type of subordinate clause is called “finite complement,” but although the name is rather a mouthful, the construction itself is the bread and butter of English prose. In both written and spoken registers, we can take practically any sentence (let’s say “Iribum took the field”) and, without altering anything in the sentence itself, make it a subordinate part of another sentence:

He didn’t know that [Iribum took the field]

And since it is so easy to set up this hierarchical relation once, we can do it again:

Ubarum proved that [he didn’t know that [Iribum took the field]]

And again:

The tablet explained that [Ubarum proved that [he didn’t know that [Iribum took the field]]]

And again:

The epigrapher discovered that [the tablet explained that [Ubarum proved that [he didn’t know that [Iribum took the field]]]]

The Akkadian report does not use such finite complements. In fact, most of its clauses are not hierarchically ordered but simply juxtaposed according to the temporal order of the events. This is not a coincidence of just one text. While we may take finite complements for granted today, this construction was missing in the oldest attested stages of Akkadian (and of Hittite). And there are living languages that do not have this construction even today.

Not that linguistic textbooks will divulge this information, mind you. In fact, some will ardently profess the opposite. Take that flagship of linguistic education, the Introduction to Language by Fromkin and Rodman that I mentioned earlier, and its twelve articles of faith that constitute “what we know about language.” The second affirmation, as you will recall, is that all languages are equally complex. A little further below, affirmation eleven asserts: