Is That a Fish in Your Ear - By Bellos, David Page 0,6

their huts, and walked away. He tracks them through the jungle, catches up with them, and repeats his procedure, believing it to be the right way to establish communication with these “precontact” people. But the result is the same. They leave. And so it goes on, week after terrible week, until the ethnographer grasps that the Anadalams do not want to engage in communication with him, or with anybody else. That is indeed their privilege. A people may choose autarchy in place of contact. Who are we to say that is wrong?

However, in Perec’s telling of this story, the Anadalams exemplify not only pride and self-sufficiency but also linguistic and cultural entropy. They possess a few metal tools they are no longer capable of fabricating themselves, suggesting they are dropouts from a more developed civilization. Their language also appears to have had a large part of its vocabulary cut away:

One consequence of this … was that the same word came to refer to an ever-increasing number of objects. Thus the Malay word for “hunting,” Pekee, meant indifferently to hunt, to walk, to carry, spear, gazelle, antelope, peccary, my’am—a type of very hot spice used in meat dishes—as well as forest, tomorrow, dawn, etc. Similarly, sinuya, a word which Appenzzell put alongside the Malay usi, “banana,” and nuya, “coconut,” meant to eat, meal, soup, gourd, spatula, plait, evening, house, pot, fire, silex (the Anadalams made fire by rubbing two flints), fibula, comb, hair, hoja’ (a hair-dye made from coconut milk mixed with various soils and plants), etc.

The reader can of course jump straight from this description of lexical entropy to the almost moral conviction that isolation is bad, for it leads (as the story shows) to the impoverishment and death of a language and the culture it supports, and ultimately to the extinction of a whole people. But Perec catches such sentimentality on the hop:

Of all the characteristics of the Anadalams, these linguistic habits are the best known, because Appenzzell described them in detail in a long letter to the Swedish philologist Hambo Taskerson … He pointed out in an aside that these characteristics could perfectly well apply to a Western carpenter using tools with precise names—gauge, tonguing plane, moulding plane, jointer, mortise, jack plane, rabbet, etc.—but asking his apprentice to pass them to him by saying just “Gimme the thingummy.”10

Perec’s tight-lipped carpenter may serve as a warning for people who too loudly lament the loss of language proficiency among (for example) today’s teenagers and students. The carpenter’s skill as a carpenter is unaffected by the form of words he uses to go about his trade, because there is no relationship of cause and effect between linguistic entropy and cultural riches of most other kinds. The loss of a vocabulary, or its replacement by a less refined one, has no generalized impact on what people can do.

It would similarly be unwise to think that isolation causes languages to wither and die. Indeed, isolation may be the most fertile ground for the diversification and enrichment of forms of speech—the innumerable distinctive jargons created by clannish teenagers in every culture provide a good example of that.

Indeed, there are many richly rewarding activities we perform in contact with others, including others who speak different languages, that don’t need any words at all.

My father once took a trip to Portugal. On unpacking his suitcase he realized he had forgotten to bring his bedroom slippers. He went out, found a shoe shop, selected the footwear he was lacking, got the assistant to find the right size (39E), paid for his purchase, checked the change, expressed his thanks and gestured farewell, and went back to his hotel—all without uttering a word in any language. Every user of a human language must have had or been close to having a language-free intercultural communication of a similar kind. We do use language to communicate, and the language that we use certainly has some bearing on what, with whom, and how we communicate. But that’s only part of the picture. It would be as artificial to limit our grasp of communication to written or even spoken language as it would be to restrict a study of human nutrition to the menus of restaurants in the Michelin Guide.

THREE

Why Do We Call It “Translation”?

Like speech and communication, words and things don’t fill exactly the same space. But there’s worse to come. Not all words have a meaningful relationship to things at all.

C.K. Ogden, the famously eccentric co-author of The Meaning of Meaning,