-
Spoons.
-
Cardboard boxes.
-
Toddler-size electric trains.
-
Holiday ornaments.
-
Bounce houses.
-
Blankets.
-
Baskets.
-
Carpets.
-
Tray tables.
-
Smartphones.
-
Pianos.
-
Robes.
-
Photographs.
-
What do all of these things
have in common,
-
aside from the fact they're photos
that I took in the last three months,
-
and therefore, own the copyright to?
-
(Laughter)
-
They're all inventions
-
that were created
with the benefit of language.
-
None of these things
would have existed without language.
-
Imagine creating any one of those things
-
or, like, building
an entire building like this,
-
without being able to use language
-
or without benefiting from any knowledge
that was got by the use of language.
-
Basically, language
is the most important thing
-
in the entire world.
-
All of our civilization rests upon it.
-
And those who devote
their lives to studying it --
-
both how language emerged,
how human languages differ,
-
how they differ from
animal communication systems --
-
are linguists.
-
Formal linguistics is a relatively
young field, more or less.
-
And it's uncovered a lot
of really important stuff.
-
Like, for example, that human
communication systems
-
differ crucially from animal
communication systems,
-
that all languages are equally expressive,
-
even if they do it in different ways.
-
And yet, despite this,
-
there are a lot of people
who just love to pop off about language
-
like they have an equal
understanding of it as a linguist,
-
because, of course, they speak a language.
-
And if you speak a language,
that means you have just as much right
-
to talk about its function
as anybody else.
-
Imagine if you were talking to a surgeon,
-
and you say, "Listen, buddy.
-
I've had a heart for, like, 40 years now.
-
I think I know a thing or two
about aortic valve replacements.
-
I think my opinion
is just as valid as yours."
-
And yet, that's exactly what happens.
-
This is Neil deGrasse Tyson,
saying that in the film "Arrival,"
-
he would have brought a cryptographer --
-
somebody who can unscramble a message
in a language they already know --
-
rather than a linguist,
-
to communicate with the aliens,
-
because what would a linguist --
-
why would that be useful
in talking to somebody
-
speaking a language we don't even know?
-
Though, of course, the "Arrival" film
is not off the hook.
-
I mean, come on --
listen, film. Hey, buddy:
-
there are aliens that come down
to our planet in gigantic ships,
-
and they want to do nothing
except for communicate with us,
-
and you hire one linguist?
-
(Laughter)
-
What's the US government
on a budget or something?
-
(Laughter)
-
A lot of these things can be
chalked up to misunderstandings,
-
both about what language is
and about the formal study of language,
-
about linguistics.
-
And I think there's something that
underlies a lot of these misunderstandings
-
that can be summed up
by this delightful article in "Forbes,"
-
about why high school students
shouldn't learn foreign languages.
-
I'm going to pull out
some quotes from this,
-
and I want you to see
if you can figure out
-
what underlies some
of these opinions and ideas.
-
"Americans rarely read the classics,
even in translation."
-
So in other words, why bother
learning a foreign language
-
when they're not even going to read
the classic in the original anyway?
-
What's the point?
-
"Studying foreign languages in school
is a waste of time,
-
compared to other things
that you could be doing in school."
-
"Europe has a lot of language groups
clustered in a relatively small space."
-
So for Americans, ah, what's the point
of learning another language?
-
You're not really going to get
a lot of bang for your buck out of that.
-
This is my favorite,
-
"A student in Birmingham
would have to travel
-
about a thousand miles
to get to the Mexican border,
-
and even then, there would be enough
people who speak English to get around."
-
In other words, if you can
kind of wave your arms around,
-
and you can get to where you're going,
-
then there's really no point
in learning another language anyway.
-
What underlies a lot of these attitudes
is the conceptual metaphor,
-
language is a tool.
-
And there's something that rings
very true about this metaphor.
-
Language is kind of a tool
-
in that, if you know the local language,
you can do more than if you didn't.
-
But the implication is that
language is only a tool,
-
and this is absolutely false.
-
If language was a tool,
it would honestly be a pretty poor tool.
-
And we would have abandoned it long ago
for something that was a lot better.
-
Think about just any sentence.
-
Here's a sentence that I'm sure I've said
in my life: "Yesterday I saw Kyn."
-
I have a friend named Kyn.
-
And when I say this sentence,
"Yesterday I saw Kyn,"
-
do you think it's really the case
-
that everything in my mind
is now implanted in your mind
-
via this sentence?
-
Hardly, because there's a lot
of other stuff going on.
-
Like, when I say "yesterday,"
-
I might think what the weather
was like yesterday because I was there.
-
And if I'm remembering,
-
I'll probably remember there was something
I forgot to mail, which I did.
-
This was a preplanned joke,
but I really did forget to mail something.
-
And so that means
I'm going to have to do it Monday,
-
because that's when
I'm going to get back home.
-
And of course, when I think of Monday,
-
I'll think of "Manic Monday"
by the Bangles. It's a good song.
-
And when I say the word "saw,"
I think of this phrase:
-
"'I see!' said the blind man
as he picked up his hammer and saw."
-
I always do.
-
Anytime I hear the word "saw" or say it,
I always think of that,
-
because my grandfather
always used to say it,
-
so it makes me think of my grandfather.
-
And we're back to "Manic Monday"
again, for some reason.
-
And with Kyn, when I'm saying
something like, "Yesterday I saw Kyn,"
-
I'll think of the circumstances
under which I saw him.
-
And this happened to be that day.
Here he is with my cat.
-
And of course, if I'm thinking of Kyn,
-
I'll think he's going to
Long Beach State right now,
-
and I'll remember that
my good friend John and my mother
-
both graduated from Long Beach State,
-
my cousin Katie is going to
Long Beach State right now.
-
And it's "Manic Monday" again.
-
But this is just a fraction
of what's going on in your head
-
at any given time while you are speaking.
-
And all we have to represent
the entire mess
-
that is going on in our head, is this.
-
I mean, that's all we got.
-
(Laughter)
-
Is it any wonder
that our system is so poor?
-
So imagine, if I can give you an analogy,
-
imagine if you wanted to know
what is it like to eat a cake,
-
if instead of just eating the cake,
-
you instead had to ingest
the ingredients of a cake,
-
one by one,
-
along with instructions
-
about how these ingredients
can be combined to form a cake.
-
You had to eat the instructions, too.
-
(Laughter)
-
If that was how we had to experience cake,
-
we would never eat cake.
-
And yet, language is
the only way -- the only way --
-
that we can figure out
what is going on here, in our minds.
-
This is our interiority,
-
the thing that makes us human,
-
the thing that makes us different
from other animals,
-
is all inside here somewhere,
-
and all we have to do to represent it
is our own languages.
-
A language is our best way of showing
what's going on in our head.
-
Imagine if I wanted to ask
a big question, like:
-
"What is the nature of human
thought and emotion?"
-
What you'd want to do
-
is you'd want to examine
as many different languages
-
as possible.
-
One isn't just going to do it.
-
To give you an example,
-
here's a picture I took of little Roman,
-
that I took with a 12-megapixel camera.
-
Now, here's that same picture
with a lot fewer pixels.
-
Obviously, neither
of these pictures is a real cat.
-
But one gives you a lot better sense
of what a cat is than the other.
-
Language is not merely a tool.
-
It is our legacy,
-
it's our way of conveying
what it means to be human.
-
And of course, by "our" legacy,
I mean all humans everywhere.
-
And losing even one language
makes that picture a lot less clear.
-
So as a job for the past 10 years
-
and also as recreation, just for fun,
-
I create languages.
-
These are called "conlangs,"
-
short for "constructed languages."
-
Now, presenting these facts back to back,
-
that we're losing languages on our planet
-
and that I create brand-new languages,
-
you might think that there's
some nonsuperficial connection
-
between these two.
-
In fact, a lot of people have drawn a line
between those dots.
-
This is a guy who got
all bent out of shape
-
that there was a conlang
in James Cameron's "Avatar."
-
He says,
-
"But in the three years
it took James Cameron
-
to get Avatar to the screen,
a language died."
-
Probably a lot more than that, actually.
-
"Na'vi, alas, won't fill the hole
where it used to be ..."
-
A truly profound and poignant statement --
-
if you don't think about it at all.
-
(Laughter)
-
But when I was here at Cal,
-
I completed two majors.
-
One of them was linguistics,
but the other one was English.
-
And of course, the English major,
the study of English,
-
is not actually the study
of the English language, as we know,
-
it's the study of literature.
-
Literature is just a wonderful thing,
-
because basically, literature,
more broadly, is kind of like art;
-
it falls under the rubric of art.
-
And what we do with literature,
-
authors create new,
entire beings and histories.
-
And it's interesting to us to see
-
what kind of depth and emotion
and just unique spirit
-
authors can invest
into these fictional beings.
-
So much so, that, I mean --
take a look at this.
-
There's an entire series of books
-
that are written
about fictional characters.
-
Like, the entire book is just about one
fictional, fake human being.
-
There's an entire book
on George F. Babbitt
-
from Sinclair Lewis's "Babbitt,"
-
and I guarantee you,
that book is longer than "Babbitt,"
-
which is a short book.
-
Does anybody even remember that one?
-
It's pretty good, I actually think
it's better than "Main Street."
-
That's my hot take.
-
So we've never questioned the fact
that literature is interesting.
-
But despite the fact,
-
not even linguists are actually interested
in what created languages can tell us
-
about the depth of the human spirit
just as an artistic endeavor.
-
I'll give you a nice little example here.
-
There was an article written about me
-
in the California alumni
magazine a while back.
-
And when they wrote this article,
-
they wanted to get somebody
from the opposing side,
-
which, in hindsight,
seems like a weird thing to do.
-
You're just talking about a person,
-
and you want to get somebody
from the opposing side of that person.
-
(Laughter)
-
Essentially, this is just
a puff piece, but whatever.
-
So, they happened to get
-
one of the most brilliant
linguists of our time,
-
George Lakoff, who's a linguist
here at Berkeley.
-
And his work has basically forever changed
the fields of linguistics
-
and cognitive science.
-
And when asked about my work
and about language creation in general,
-
he said, "But there's a lot of things
to be done in the study of language.
-
You should spend the time
on something real."
-
Yeah.
-
"Something real."
Does this remind you of anything?
-
To use the very framework
that he himself invented,
-
let me refer back
to this conceptual metaphor:
-
language is a tool.
-
And he appears to be laboring
under this conceptual metaphor;
-
that is, language is useful
when it can be used for communication.
-
Language is useless
when it can't be used for communication.
-
It might make you wonder:
What do we do with dead languages?
-
But anyway.
-
So, because of this idea,
-
it might seem like
the very height of absurdity
-
to have a Duolingo course
on the High Valyrian language
-
that I created for HBO's
"Game of Thrones."
-
You might wonder what, exactly,
are 740,000 people learning?
-
(Laughter)
-
Well, let's take a look at it.
-
What are they learning?
-
What could they possibly be learning?
-
Well, bearing in mind that
the other language for this --
-
it's for people that speak English --
-
English speakers are learning quite a bit.
-
Here's a sentence that they will probably
never use for communication
-
in their entire lives:
-
"Vala ābre urnes."
-
"The man sees the woman."
-
The little middle line is the gloss,
-
so it's word for word,
that's what it says.
-
And they're actually learning
some very fascinating things,
-
especially if they're English speakers.
-
They're learning that a verb can come
at the very end of a sentence.
-
Doesn't really do that in English
when you have two arguments.
-
They're learning that sometimes
-
a language doesn't have an equivalent
for the word "the" -- it's totally absent.
-
That's something language can do.
-
They're learning that a long vowel
can actually be longer in duration,
-
as opposed to different in quality,
-
which is what our long vowels do;
they're actually the same length.
-
They're learning that
there are these little inflections.
-
Hmm? Hmm?
-
There are inflections called "cases"
on the end of nouns --
-
(Laughter)
-
that tell you who does what
to whom in a sentence.
-
Even if you leave the order
of the words the same
-
and switch the endings,
-
it changes who does what to whom.
-
What they're learning is that languages
do things, the same things, differently.
-
And that learning languages can be fun.
-
What they're learning is respect
for Language: capital "L" Language.
-
And given the fact that 88 percent
of Americans only speak English at home,
-
I don't think that's
necessarily a bad thing.
-
You know why languages die on our planet?
-
It's not because government imposes
one language on a smaller group,
-
or because an entire group
of speakers is wiped out.
-
That certainly has happened in the past,
and it's happening now,
-
but it's not the main reason.
-
The main reason is that
a child is born to a family
-
that speaks a language that
is not widely spoken in their community,
-
and that child doesn't learn it.
-
Why?
-
Because that language is not valued
in their community.
-
Because the language isn't useful.
-
Because the child can't go and get a job
if they speak that language.
-
Because if language is just a tool,
-
then learning their native language
-
is about as useful
as learning High Valyrian,
-
so why bother?
-
Now ...
-
Maybe language study isn't going to lead
to a lot more linguistic fluency.
-
But maybe that's not such a big deal.
-
Maybe if more people
are studying more languages,
-
it will lead to more linguistic tolerance
-
and less linguistic imperialism.
-
Maybe if we actually respect
language for what it is --
-
literally, the greatest invention
in the history of humankind --
-
then in the future,
-
we can celebrate endangered languages
as living languages,
-
as opposed to museum pieces.
-
(High Valyrian) Kirimvose.
Thank you.
-
(Applause)