keskiviikko 1. marraskuuta 2017

Antoine Destutt de Tracy: Elements of ideology, Second part, Grammar (1803)

Although second part of Destutt de Tracy’s grand work is supposedly about grammar, it is more a book about language in general. Thus, it contains, among other things, an account of the genesis of language. Destutt de Tracy thinks that human beings come with a natural language, consisting of cries, signs and tactile impulses. One might find here a delightful admission that a language need not be aural, but could be something like a sign language or Braille writing. Yet, Destutt de Tracy does not really develop the implications of this idea and considers only speech as a fixed and conventionalised modification of the original language of action

In a quite believable manner Destutt de Tracy considers the original speech to consist of individual expressions indicating whole sentences, somewhat like a child could cry “Milk”, when she wanted to drink milk. The development of language means then a sort of analysis of parts implicit in these original interjections. First, Destutt de Tracy says, language users differentiated a subject from verb, making subject-verb the general form of all language. Here, subject indicates an existing thing and verb signifies its mode of existence (e.g. “Bob runs” says that a thing indicated by the name Bob exists runningly). With the invention of the general and neutral verb “being”, it is possible to abstract attributes or adjectives, which are otherwise like verbs, but lack the idea of existence. Further developments include the introduction of more complex noun and verb forms through the use of prepositions and the capacity to subjunct sentence to other sentences with the general conjunction “que” (that) and later with other, derivative conjunctions.

One can see from this short summary of Destutt de Tracy’s account of grammar that he is engaging in a sort of attempt at universal grammar in the fashion of Chomsky. As with Chomsky, the problems in Destutt de Tracy’s account are evident when one looks beyond the restricted number of languages he considers. One can e.g. argue that subject-verb is not the general form of all sentences (indeed, there are languages, in which subject is not required at all and one might insist that in sentences like “It rains” there is no real subject) and that verbs do not always convey the idea of existence (like when one is discussing fictional things).

It is not just the generation of grammar in speech Destutt de Tracy considers, but also the generation of written signs representing speech. It had been a pet idea of 18th century thinkers like Leibniz that a system of ideogrammatic symbols, like Egyptian hieroglyphs or Chinese characters, which represented complete ideas, would be a perfection of written language, since it would allow turning language into a direct calculation. By the beginning of 19th century, this idea had lost its charm, since ideograms were so obviously difficult to work with. Destutt de Tracy considered them to have a stunting effect to a culture of a nation - ideograms formed a sort of second language, which required years of learning and the use of which was thus restricted to a certain class.

Destutt de Tracy was thus convinced that phonogrammatic symbols, like regular alphabets, which represented sounds of speech, were more suitable for development of sciences. Still, he did not believe that alphabets would have developed out of hieroglyphs - so certain he was that a culture with ideogrammatic writing could invent anything. Instead, he regarded alphabets as an alternative line of development. While hieroglyphs were invented for the purpose of expressing ideas, Destutt de Tracy insisted, alphabets were invented for the sake of music, which required signs by which to indicate different sounds in singing. Although a rather beautiful idea, it is most certainly quite false, since e.g. Hebrew alphabets were a direct development out of Egyptian hieroglyphs.

Just like Destutt de Tracy appeared to dream of a universal grammar, he was also keen on finding a universal alphabet, which would be able to represent all kinds of sounds used in human languages. It doesn’t require much consideration to notice how utterly unmanageable as a practical writing tool such a universal phonetic system would be. Indeed, when one looks at phonology of a single language, one sees how utterly confusing it might even be - a single language doesn’t use all possible sounds humans can produce, and in fact, some sounds are alternatives, which to a language user sound just like arbitrary variations of the same sound (phoneme, in technical terms).

Destutt de Tracy actually isn’t so bold as to suggest that all languages in the world should start to use a phonetically perfect alphabet, because he knows that such innovations would not be easily accepted by the majority of language users. Indeed, even a more modest attempt to turn the writing of a given language into phonologically perfect terms, in which one phoneme were represented by a single letter, might be quite difficult to achieve. In fact, what Destutt de Tracy suggests is to use this phonetic writing as a tool for language learning - if words were written with such phonetic signs, one could instantly know how to pronounce a word of foreign language. Of course, even this is a bit too idealistic notion - even phonetic signs don’t teach you to actually pronounce the required sounds, let alone make speaking a language completely natural.

On the whole, Destutt de Tracy is critical of any idea to artificially construct a more perfect language, in which one could just calculate what connections of ideas are true - another pet idea of Leibniz. Destutt de Tracy admits that such a language can exist in a limited setting, such as algebra, but it could never form a complete and living language. Even if one would be able to overcome the resistance of the common people, one would still face a great obstacle. The very structure of thinking varies widely from one person to another and there is no guarantee that two different persons would have even remotely similar ideas of the same things. Thus, in building a perfect language, one would not have any single system of ideas to represent. Indeed, the best one could do in aiding thinking was to cultivate a science of good thinking or logic - the topic of the next part of the series.

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