Atomic Language

 

In her book Proust and The Squid: The Story and Science of the Reading Brain, Maryanne Wolf writes about the power of an alphabet.  In particular she focuses on the ancient Greek alphabet and observes, "Young Greek pupils were given an almost perfect alphabet with almost perfect rules of grapheme-phoneme correspondence.  As a result, these pupils could gain fluency in literacy far sooner than their Sumerian, Akkadian, or Egyptian counterparts." (p. 68)

Put another way, there is incredible power in an alphabet, which allows for unending combinations, as opposed to a pictographic language in which whole ideas are represented by images.  Even today, you can communicate with greater sophistication, greater depth, and greater novelty with a 26-letter alphabet than you can with a hundred emojis.

The Roman poet Lucretius noted this as well in his work De Rerum Natura, or On the Nature of Things, the first century B.C. didactic poem that explored the world of atoms.  In Book 2 we find the following.

quin etiam refert nostris in versibus ipsis
cum quibus et quali sint ordine quaeque locata;
namque eadem caelum mare terras flumina solem     1015
significant, eadem fruges arbusta animantis;
si non omnia sunt, at multo maxima pars est
consimilis; verum positura discrepitant res.  (DRN 2.1013-1018)

Why, it even matters in our very own verses
With what and in what order the elements have been placed;
For the same letters indicate the sky, the sea, the lands, the rivers

The sun, and the same indicate grains, trees, and living things.

If not entirely, they are for the very most part very

Similar, but they distinguish things by their position.

Lucretius was pointing out the atomic nature of an alphabetic language, for just as atoms combine in endless arrangements to create new things, so the letters of a language function in a similar way.  If we combine three English letters we get "tap," if we combine them in a different order we get "apt," and if we rearrange them yet again we get "pat."

When I taught classes called Critical Thinking and Theory of Knowledge, my students would often discuss an episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation called "Darmok."  In that episode, Captain Picard interacts with a being whose people only speak in allegories that reference their own mytho-historical past.  One question that inevitably came up was how such a race could have engineered the space ships that they used.  It seemed that their allegory-based language was ill-suited to the kind of scientific specificity that could only be expressed through an infinitely flexible, alphabetic language.

Yes, we language teachers teach people how to speak and write in other languages and how to understand the written and spoken word.  Yet it is worth the pause every once in a while to marvel at the beauty, the power, and even the limitations of human languages, for with words we speak ideas into existence.

Making a Teacher Cry

Any number of things can make me cry while teaching, although I try to hide it the best I can.  More often than not, it is the depth of insight from one of my students that so unsettles me.  It is rather like snapping one's head to look at brilliant work of art or to hear a bit of sublime music while walking through the humdrum of the day, lost in a sea of less important details.  This time it happened during the last period of the day.

It was my A.P. Latin class, and before you make assumptions about my students or our school, you should know that ours is a large, midwestern, public high school with an enrollment between three and four thousand students.  This particular class is evenly split between boys and girls and is ethnically diverse.  As you read the rest of this story, I don't want you to assume it is set in an ivory tower.

Class started with us talking about accents, what connotations are associated with them and whether those same connotations exist for all people.  Do the flowing vowel sounds of Italian or the sharp consonants of German produce the same effects in you as they do in me?  Do they conjure the same feelings in other non-Italian- or non-German-speaking people as they do in many English speakers?

We are still in all-virtual instruction, and one of the benefits of Zoom is the private chat function.  Not a day passes when at least one student in nearly every class messages me privately a question or comment that I can then address with the whole class without revealing that student's name.  It is a help like no other for quiet students and those who like to process more deeply before they speak.

In this particular A.P. Latin class during the last period of the day, one of my students texted the following in response to our discussion about accents.  "The best way to tell the beauty of an accent is if it enthralls you, even if you don't understand a word."  This time I did a horrible job of hiding my tears.  When I shared the comment aloud, others in class commented that we had a true wordsmith or even a Shakespeare among us.  

Just as I had no time to ponder the depth of that comment or the beauty of its expression in the moment, I will leave you no time to do so, but will move on to what happened next.  As you read, let these powerful moments build up and wash over you.  Quick warning, however.  This next part gets a bit deep, but hang in there.

From there, we dove into our text, starting at Aeneid I.561.  As we read the line "Tum breviter Dido vultum demissa profatur," I had to stop to share with them something that had occurred earlier in the day during Latin III.  That class had been reading Sallust's Bellum Catilinae and were at the part where Catiline, the infamous conspirator of the late first century B.C., prepared to address the senate demisso voltu.  Even people without Latin can pick out the two similar phrases, vultum demissa in Vergil and demisso voltu in Sallust.  I pointed that both expressions contain the same words and mean the same thing, "with a downcast expression," but that they used different grammatical structures.  Vergil opted for a purely adjectival function of the participle demissa and an accusative form of vultum expressing respect.  She was literally downcast with respect to her face.  Sallust, on the other hand, had put both words in the ablative case, using an incredibly common construction known as the ablative absolute.

One of my students asked what, if anything, was being conveyed by Vergil's grammatical choice, and I pointed out that it was in clear imitation of Greek, for Greek likes to use the accusative of respect.  My student pressed on to ask why he would do that, and this led us to a brief discussion of the King James translation of the Bible.  One of the notable features of that translation, itself drawing heavily on previous English versions, was its casting into English certain Hebraisms.  For example, where English might more readily say, "God's son," the King James translators used "son of God," for the pattern "X of Y" is common in Hebrew.  In a similar way, I explained, Vergil clearly imitated Homer without slavishly aping him, and this connected his new epic with the Homeric works from a millennium prior.

Still without time to pause, I had to end that session with my Latin IV students and switch over to a breakout room in Zoom where my Latin V students deciding what they wanted to study next.  Latin V at our school provides a rare opportunity for students to explore topics of interest, and as we were starting a new quarter, it was time to see where they wanted to go.  One student began by saying she had been reading recently about rhetorical and logical fallacies.  I nearly stumbled going to the board to write her ideas and asked if she were reading such things for a class.  She said she was not, but had been inspired by other classes to look into the topics.  She thought she might want to pursue something with logic, rhetoric, or philosophy in her next Latin V project.  Another said she wanted to revisit some medieval studies we had pursued in Latin III, and another talked of pursuing medical topics, including mental health issues and quality of life for women in ancient Rome.

Now you can pause to consider what you have just read.  These are utterly extraordinary, ordinary students.  They are perfectly ordinary in that they, like the rest of their peers, follow fashion trends and enjoy popular entertainment.  They care about their friends and about what people think of them.  They are simultaneously excited and apprehensive about college, and they love to goof around.  Yet they are extraordinary in the depth of their curiosity and willingness to pursue it.  Because they are ordinary, however, I would argue that what makes them extraordinary could well be experienced by many more their age.  Depth, breadth, curiosity, eloquence...these are not the things of the rare few, but are the gems common to the human treasury, and when my students hold them up to the light, the sparkle quite often brings a tear to my eyes.

This Is That

Years ago I had the opportunity of taking Douglas Hofstadter to dinner before he gave the inaugural lecture in an annual series a colleague and I had developed at our high school.  This Pulitzer-winning author who works in cognitive science, philosophy, computer science, and seemingly everything else, spoke on what may have seemed a strange topic for him.  His talk was titled "Is Modern Poetry Complete Rubbish?," and in it he took issue with poets who write in such confused ways and on such esoteric topics that no one reads their work.  In fact, he found the poetry of "Surrey With a Fringe on Top" to be of more value than much contemporary work, which he considered little more than prose with a ragged right margin.  Even in discussing other more heady topics, he had a particular abhorrence for jargon.  In that he reminded me of the character Margrethe Bohr, who in Daniel Frayn's play Copenhagen persistently asked her husband, Niels, and Werner Heisenberg to put their theories in plain language.

Samuel Rocha knows that plain-language explanations are at the heart of good education and good philosophy.  He writes, "Description is on grand display in the art of kindergarten teaching.  A great kindergarten teacher can describe things to young children in simple, vivid, lively, and clear -- but perfectly ordinary -- ways.  If philosophers could be half as descriptive as an excellent kindergarten teacher, they would become far better philosophers.  At the very least, people might understand them better."  (A Primer for Philosophy & Education, p. 20)

To be sure, there are times when a fifty-cent word is simply the best word for the job, and no dime store variant will do.  Wordsmiths also like tossing around certain words because they are fun to say or we just like the ring of them.  I remember getting quite excited about the words "anfractuous" and "penthemimeral caesura," and it is likely I included them just now because I still take a nerdy glee in them.  The bottom line, though, is that we like jargon because it makes us sound intelligent, which is perfectly understandable, but not really well suited to education.  Unfortunately, because the profession of education has always been held in little esteem, and the situation is only more grave today, those involved in it look to anything to raise the esteem of their profession and themselves.  This often leads us to the embrace of jargon, and even in our attempts to be clear, we more often than not end up trying to eschew obfuscation.

Yet we must remember what we are about, and Rocha points the way.  "This is what philosophy and education set out to do:  to show things as they are, as best they can.  No more and no less."  (p. 20)  Put another way, ours is the business of saying, "This is that."

Such work forms the core of what I do as a Latin teacher.  We 21st century English speakers are studying in the United States an inflected language and its literature from a culture over two millennia and half a world away.  When we try to understand why different noun declensions produce different forms for the same cases, I bring out the analogy of auto manufacturers.  Chevy, Ford, and Dodge all make cars, trucks, and minivans.  All cars do the same basic things, all trucks have the same basic features, and all minivans are essentially the same, but they look different depending on the company that made them.  In the same way, a direct object from one Latin declension ends with -am, but one from another declension ends with -um.  They are both direct objects, but they look different.  This is that.  The same kind of explanation goes on through all our years of study, whether I am comparing a scene from Caesar's war exploits with the movie Boyz 'n' the Hood or the rights of the Catilinarian conspirators with Americans caught in acts of treason.  This is that.

I still enjoy the good, nerdy, fifty-cent word, but I tend to enjoy it more by myself or with certain colleagues and friends.  When it comes to teaching, I am always looking for the simpler and clearer way of saying something.  This is not dumbing anything down.  It is just communicating.  As students and their culture change, this can be an ever-shifting endeavor.  Indeed, Rocha observes, "This restless philosophical and educational project is always a work of art, striving for harmony, attunement, and balance."  (p. 20)  Then again, such striving is part of the great enjoyment of it all.  As poet and professor Timothy Steele titled one of his books, "All the Fun's in How You Say a Thing."