Books: A Confusion of Tongues

WORD PLAY:

What Happens When People Talk

by PETER FARB 350 pages. Knopf. $8.95.

By manipulating its throat while it growled, Alexander Graham Bell once tried to teach a dog to say "How are you, Grandma?" In the latter half of the 20th century, Homo loquens (man the talker) has been rediscovered to be a wonder beside which Bell's talking dog would rate only as a very minor marvel -even if Rover had recited the whole Gettysburg Address to Grandma. The infinitely subtle strategies of man speaking to man, the remarkable social utility of a given language shaped to a given culture-these and other matters have become the subject for celebration and analysis by the new science of structural linguistics.

The latest knowledge of tongues -an interdiscipline involving psychology, sociology and even a touch of metaphysics-is summed up here for the layman by Peter Farb, who as a sometime lecturer hi English at Yale and a sometime authority on American Indians (Man's Rise to Civilization), is a bit of an interdisciplinarian himself. A portion of what Farb says has been said by the old semanticists and, in fact, by such commentators on the vagary of words as Lewis Carroll. Farb's achievement is to organize today's theories into a primer, systematically discounting or rejecting outworn conceptions and myths which he feels may be lodged in the minds of his readers:

Myth No. 1: A foreign language is just a different code for the same message. Wrong, Farb and the new linguistics scholars say. Each speech community expresses its sense of what is important, what is "right" and "wrong," through its language. The Koyas of India, Farb notes, have no separate words to distinguish dew, dog and snow, which may astonish a visiting anthropologist. But then they can name seven kinds of bamboo, for which visiting anthropologists will have no translation. Thus each language edits the universe.

Myth No. 2: Words more or less say what everybody who uses them thinks they say. Language, Farb counters, is loaded in countless ways. It can be racist or sexist ("mankind" standing for the human race). But it is hardly ever neutral. Language is a game people play, perhaps the trickiest as well as the most ingenious. In the Mandarin dialect of Chinese-the second most popular language in the world-ma can mean hemp, scold, mother or horse, depending upon whether the speaker's voice rises, falls, remains level or merely dips. But the nuances of technique in language are nothing compared with its social and moral nuances.

Myth No. 3: Children learn to talk because they are conditioned to do so by social pressures, beginning with anxious parents. This theory has been endorsed by the B.F. Skinner school of behaviorists. Farb prefers the explanation of M.I.T.'s celebrated expert on linguistics, Noam Chomsky. A child learns to talk as he learns to walk-so in essence goes the Chomsky argument. He is born with a kind of blueprint for language that he puts into practice inexplicably, or miraculously, when he is ready. (Albert Einstein was not ready until he was nearly three.)