Our Words, Our Worlds: Loving Language & Its Limits

God brought every animal of the field and of the air to Adam to give them a name.
So Adam named all the animals.

I feel myself falling into words, into the names of things, like old memories.

My parents once bought me a children’s atlas of the world, and I hid with it in my room and methodically made a list of every bay and cape on Earth with a name that excited me.

Cape of Good Hope.

Destruction Bay.

Botany Bay.

Cap Éternité‎.

It took me hours. I’m still not sure why I did it, but that list felt powerful. I held it, re-read it, stored it away for safekeeping.

I know that words are the most powerful things we have ever created.

Adam named all the animals.

Language is deeply human, and humankind unwaveringly linguistic. 

We live in an intricate global ecosystem of languages adapting and evolving and intermixing all around us, and so rarely are we sufficiently astounded by its intricacy.

But linguistic ecosystems, like any ecosystem, depend on diversity, and like so much of today’s living world, languages are dying faster than we can save them.

Thinking about language makes my head hurt and my heart flutter. And, always, questions surround me and answers evade:

Why, in those ancient myths, was Adam’s first task at the beginning of the world to name all the animals?

Why should it matter if globalization causes a mass extinction of languages?

With language so embedded into our understanding of the world, how can we even begin to see all the ways in which words shape our lives? 

And finally: how do we responsibly wield language as both a powerful technology and a sacred form of art?

You might be hoping that I’ll present clear opinions on those questions here. Unfortunately, I know language better as a form of play, as a canvas for metaphor, as a medium of story, rather than as a trustworthy messenger of fact. Such linguistic playtime is what I have to offer.

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Adam named all the animals, and I am in love with the names of things every day.

I spot a Canada jay in the trees and recall that she is also called moosebird, whiskey jack, gray jay, and camp robber - names that remember a relationship between this bird and the peoples who knew her. Or I search the night sky for Polaris, Vega, and Betelgeuse, and feel awed that my ancestors once gave names even to the stars.

We name things that we love, we name things to record that they matter to us.

But there is also the tale of the Tower of Babel:

The whole Earth had one language and the same words, and they said, “let us build ourselves a city, and a tower with its top in the heavens, and make a name for ourselves.”

And God said, “they are all one people, and they have all one language, and this is only the beginning of what they will do.” 

So God mixed up their languages and scattered them abroad.

English is my mother's second language. Her first was a dialect of Canadian French that certainly isn't taught in any textbook.

She’s forgotten much of that dialect, but when I was a toddler, she'd practice with me the pieces she still knew: we'd tell each other bonne nuit and je t'aime and sing all the words of Frère Jacques together.

And so I began to learn that language was not just one thing. Languages were like secret ciphers, and each one coded the world differently. 

There was English, which to me, then, seemed clear and obvious and made sense of most of the world.

And then there was French, this other thing, that even today sounds to my ears like a mother, like lullabies, like my pink childhood bedsheets and being rocked in someone's lap.

I was learning:

The name of the thing is not the thing itself.

The map is not the territory. 

But the maps are each gloriously and uniquely beautiful.

So God mixed up their languages.

There are 7000 languages used by humans today, every one a living artifact of thousands of years of cultural evolution.

And every one fragile enough to be eradicated in a single generation.

There was a time when I thought a universal human language could remedy so many global  problems.

Think of all we could accomplish together! No more misunderstanding! All knowledge available to every person!

Now I imagine how dreadful that would be. The peril of a widespread shared language is the illusion it fosters: that our words for the world are the world. Eliminating the thorny problems of translation makes it so easy to forget how complex and mysterious and alive the world is, in ways we will never understand. 

This is only the beginning of what they will do.

When my own inability to understand the world (and my life in it) begins to eat at me, I beg myself to remember what the poet Rilke wrote: 

Try to love the questions themselves,
like locked rooms,
and like books written in a very foreign tongue. 

Perhaps our human future depends on this question: Can we learn to love unsolved mystery?

Wie Bücher, die in einer sehr fremden Sprache geschrieben sind. 

Like books written in a very foreign tongue.

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We need a diverse language landscape, just as we need forests and wetlands and prairies full of strange and wonderful creatures. 

I don’t need to know anything about an organism to know that its species plays an ancient and vital role in its native habitat. Likewise, I don’t need to be able to communicate in every language to know that each language facilitates an irreplaceable way of being human. 

Languages evolve just as living creatures do – convergently and divergently.  Paying attention to the evolutionary patterns of both species and languages teaches us about the possibilities and limitations of what humankind can do.

Convergent evolution: Whales and bats both know how to echolocate. How else should they inhabit the dark? 

When many languages share a feature, it tells us just how pervasive, relevant, or practical that concept must be. For example, most languages have more precise words to describe warm-toned colors than cooler-toned ones. Speakers of many languages can easily distinguish between “yellow” and “orange,” yet lump many different wavelengths into the color “blue.” That makes sense: in a lot of situations, things with warm colors might be important to pay attention to, such as blood, meat, fruit, or fire. In addition, things farther away from us take on cooler hues due to the way light travels, so a warm-hued object is likely a more urgent matter. Understanding these types of common features of languages helps us better understand our own origins.

Divergent evolution: In my backyard, a cardinal cracks open a seed while a robin yanks a worm from the ground; the two birds live right next to each other, yet have adapted to completely different niches in the food web.

When languages diverge from one another, we learn how many ways of knowing are possible.

For instance, you probably use “right” and “left” to indicate relative direction, but if you had been born speaking the Yupno language of Papua New Guinea, you would use “uphill” and “downhill” instead, even when referring to objects on an even surface. Papua New Guinea’s mountainous interior will remain preserved in the structure of its inhabitants’ language, even if those speakers move to other parts of the world. Languages are incredible tools for recording the environment in which a culture evolved. 

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Our words, our names for things, are intoxicatingly marvelous. Just this week, I’ve been enchanted and puzzled by the origins of the words “maverick,” “guy,” “sycophant,” and “Duluth,” each word containing a universe of stories inside itself.

But it is so easy to forget that language does not, cannot, be the world. 

The map is not the territory.

Language is deeply human, but we are capable of so much more than language.

“I thought as I sat there, ‘Be still and know that I am God,’ and knew that without stillness, there can be no knowing.” — Sigurd Olson, The Singing Wilderness

I so quickly fill my head with second-hand ideas: books; search engines; podcasts. At every turn, language distills a direct experience of the world into pre-digested sound bites, transmitting to me in a moment what took my ancestors an impossibly long time to discover for themselves. 

Language-based learning makes an incredible amount of understanding possible, and it is tempting to believe that this can replace our first-hand experience of building relationships with the living world. 

It cannot. 

When was the last time you sat still and knew another person, another creature, a place, or your own body, without the mediation of words?

How shall we reconcile the deep and sacred well of language with the terrifying speed at which it allows us to simplify and commodify the deep and sacred world?

Without stillness, there can be no knowing.

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One last thing: a note on myth.

As I was re-reading the first draft of this piece, I was surprised to notice how instinctually I was using Judeo-Christian mythology to anchor my understanding of humanity and language. This writing certainly isn’t intended to proselytize; In fact, I wasn’t even sure I felt “qualified” to write about these culturally important stories. 

And yet, these are the myths that have been handed to me as a heritage. How else should I understand my ideas about humankind and our need to storytell? These stories were taught to me as a child; they grew their own living forms inside my mouth and my mind and my blood. 

My understanding and interpretation of them is as legitimate as any. 

As is your understanding of the myths that were given to you.

I realize that many religious traditions would consider that statement heretical. 

I think they entirely misunderstand how a story becomes sacred, how stories live and evolve and develop meaning through the confused, forgetful, imperfect individuals who carry them, not despite those individuals.

I know I will never quite grasp the mystery of language, will never clearly see how it both shapes and conforms to the land and society in which I live. I will probably give words far too much power in my life, and simultaneously never learn to fully make use of their incredible ability to bring about change and understanding.

Can I learn to love the mystery? Can I joyfully and reverently, as Mary Oliver describes, “play at the edges of knowing”? Can I remember that language is not everything, is not even the first thing, but is the thing that allows me to acknowledge and share all else that I love?

In the beginning was the Word, writes John the Apostle, and while I love the music of those words, I'm not so sure about what they imply. 

In the beginning, I suspect, there just was. And then we named the beginning, and everything changed.